Educating People of Faith: Exploring the History of Jewish and Christian Communities

By John H. Van Engen

A much-needed addition to the emerging literature on the formative power of religious practices, Educating People of Faith creates a vivid portrait of the lived practices that shaped the faith of Jews and Christians in synagogues and churches from antiquity up to the seventeenth century.

This significant book is the work of Jewish, Roman Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant scholars who wished to discover and describe how Jews and Christians through history have been formed in religious ways of thinking and acting. Rather than focusing solely on either intellectual or social life, the authors all use the concept of "practices" as they attend to the embodied, contextual character of religious formation. Their studies of religious figures, community life, and traditional practices such as preaching, sacraments, and catechesis are colorful, detailed, and revealing. The authors are also careful to cover the nature of religious education across all social levels, from the textual formation of highly literate rabbis and monks engaged in Scripture study to the local formation of illiterate medieval Christians for whom the veneration of saints' shrines, street performances of religious dramas, and public preaching by wandering preachers were profoundly formative.

Educating People of Faith will benefit scholars and teachers desiring a fuller perspective on how lived practices have historically formed people in religious faith. It will also be useful to practical theologians and pastors who wish to make the resources of the past available to practitioners in the present.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Release date: Feb 13, 2004
• ISBN: 9781467431583

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

Formative Religious Practices in Premodern European Life

John Van Engen

This is a book about Jewish and Christian beliefs and practices in premodern Europe. Comprised of fifteen historical essays, each written by a professional historian with general readers in mind, the book aims to present studies rigorous in historical method, stimulating for future research, useful to those who live out of these traditions (and those who do not), yet broadly accessible. Each essay asks about a complex of beliefs and practices in a distinct community and era before the year 1600. Each also asks, implicitly or explicitly, how historical work may be done, whether there is indeed a usable past, whether, to put it simply, we the living have access to the lived religion of past ages. This may appear to set up an impossibly strained triangulation: present-day questions, historic sources, methodological queries. But precisely that three-way tension has often generated the most stimulating historical writing. The questions that lie behind this volume were first formulated as part of the Valparaiso Project on the Education and Formation of People in Faith, headed by Dr. Dorothy Bass, a historian of religion in America, the project itself underwritten by the Religion Division of the Lilly Endowment under the leadership of Dr. Craig Dykstra. The essays were written independently, though commonly discussed. They propose no one-for-one correspondences between past and present, indeed are careful to respect historical distance and difference. Still, they point toward analogies and materials worthy of deeper consideration by scholars and practitioners alike.

Religion, like politics, is a constant in human affairs. A century ago thinkers in Europe and America might have denied that, or at least queried it, and many would still today. Human society, they might observe, is a constant, and with it politics, economy, gender relations, and much else. But religion is not. Its practice will give way as humans find other means to understand their world, shape communities and identities, make ethical choices, deal with the unknown. The coping mechanism of a prescientific, premodern era, as many came to construe it, religious practice was bound to fade, and did fade. Max Weber put it best a century ago. With modernity comes an ever expanding rationalization of the world, hence a disenchantment, all its enveloping magic, his German word intimates, escaping into thin air. And yet in the twenty-first century and in observable reality, religion has not faded. Enchantment, if you like, is still at work all around, even in materialist societies like the United States. In enlightened and post-enlightened lands, new and old forms of religious seeking persist, or flourish anew, some as heterogeneous older practices cultivated in a new age mode. In former Soviet lands Christianity, Judaism, and Islam outlasted three generations of overt suppression, as Taoist cults and Buddhist practices did a half-century of government hostility in China. Even among Weber’s academic heirs in the humane disciplines (history, literature, sociology), religious subjects enjoy a degree of interest these days that might have astounded scholars two or three generations ago. More noticeably still, over the last generation groups called fundamentalist have grown in power and numbers worldwide. For historians, essayists, and journalists, not to say politicians, it is now the fundamentalists, not the secularists, who seem to set the agenda. Not altogether tongue in cheek, we might try reversing Weber: enchanters, not disenchanters, are making the future.

This, you object, is hardly the real story of religion in our day, not the fundamentalists, not even those practicing religion. In many places (and perhaps especially in those most familiar to professional historians) the feel of everyday life remains broadly a-religious, and practice continues to decline worldwide. People drift out of practice fully as much as enthusiasts find their way into new or renewed practices. To be clear: my point is not that all people are religious, or that religious practice is inherently intelligible apart from interpretation, though people this past century have often treated secularizing tendencies as self-evident and inevitable. My point is to highlight a presence too easily dismissed as foreign to modern life and as thus no longer worthy of independent status or reflection. We slip all too easily into accounts of religious practice that represent it as largely the expression of something else — outdated science or sublimated sex, social resentment or political power, therapeutic need. In effect this tends to perpetuate, perhaps unwittingly, earlier polemics that were once employed, perhaps legitimately, to create breathing space for spheres of life suffocating in a world suffused with the religious. But explaining away religion, in the media or in learned discourse, denies meaningful breathing space to religion itself and leaves vast areas of human existence uninterpreted. We do better to recognize religious expressions as a significant and persistent dimension of human experience and history, in the words of Talal Asad, a distinctive space of human practice and belief which cannot be reduced to any other.¹

More, and directly to the purposes of this volume, religious practices and beliefs have exercised formative powers in shaping human lives, inwardly as well as outwardly, in the past as well as the present. Writers and practitioners once took those powers for granted: hence efforts by earlier regimes to regulate them, hence too the stories of people who spent their lives trying to shake off their persistent presence. Today we are quick to register religion in its effects: when practices or beliefs fold a person into a new community or lifestyle, when they put someone at odds with a family or group, when they take hold to elicit a new sense of self or to provoke flash points in public policy, no less when they fail to take hold (endless sociological talk, for instance, about the Boomer generation in America, and their children). But if we react only to observed or presumed effects, we overlook the complexities at work inwardly and outwardly, the nature of religious life itself in experience and performance, those tangled webs alluded to broadly by our title words formative practices. Trying to get at those connections, to give this grasp of religion in the past its due — that is the object of this book.

Belief and Practice: The Big Picture

Belief and practice interact complexly in human persons and groups, not singularly or simply. Any unilateral notion that belief generates practice, as theologians and church historians seemed once to imply and zealous proponents often still do, or that practice produces belief, as anthropologists and sociologists intimate and anxious religious leaders hope, will not do, even if both observations express real human truths. Aware that this problem has normative overtones, a group of systematic theologians has explored it in a volume on beliefs and practices in Christian life entitled Practicing Theology, locating their focus on practices in relation to contemporary currents within the academic field of theology.

As modernity gives way to postmodernity, the enduring question of the grounds for Christian believing has taken on fresh urgency. What Grounds What? Miroslav Volf asks in the final chapter of that book. As he notes, contemporary academic and popular culture tends to subordinate beliefs to practices to the point of completely functionalizing beliefs. At the same time, other academic and popular voices, claiming the mantle of tradition, resist this approach by insisting that the influence goes only in the other direction, from beliefs to practices, with practices being the mere enactments of beliefs. By offering what they call a more complex response, this group of theologians aimed to develop an approach that would strengthen the vitality of a living tradition capable of being fully engaged with history and culture without becoming their captive.²

How we interpret the complex interplay between beliefs and practices touches on very sensitive matters in our grasp of individuals within groups. These essays take up historic instances of Jews and Christians educated or formed in the faith life of their communities. In popular conceptions of what is at stake or how it works, contraries come quickly and easily to mind these days: total freedom of association and persuasion among free individuals or heavy-handed coercion, whether individual or group, covert or overt. It is accordingly very easy to misconstrue or misrepresent the past. We imagine enforcement by way of public laws or social controls, and note that when pressures lift, people drift away — observations that are partly true, if one-sided. Past peoples, it is widely assumed, might on occasion choose to believe and practice, but most often were made to believe and practice. All middle ground thereby disappears, all movement between belief and practice, all variations in practice, all the intricate negotiations within a person, also between personal aspirations and group expectations—certainly in our grasp of the past, also in our sense of the present.

A true entering into the life of a religious community, into its practices and beliefs and animating spirit, could rarely be coerced or taken for granted, and mostly was neither. These essays aim to recover some of that middle ground, to recognize enfolding structures without foreclosing the freedom of individuals. This is not easy. It is as much an art as a programmatic stance: how to speak of religion’s formative powers and meanings in ways true at once to individual experience and to the larger forces at work in the historic past. We historians have often attempted to do it by focusing on the great man or the big story. We are drawn magnetically to extraordinary figures, an articulate rabbi like Maimonides, an eloquent convert like Augustine, an outspoken reformer like Luther, and we have interpreted each (nearly always a him until recently) as standing in for a whole community’s movement into or out of beliefs and practices. By contrast we have tended to silence women or to render their experiences extraordinary by comparison, placing them outside or over against the community, as visionaries or prophets, often as figures apart, all too easily demonized in one or another way. If not great figures as our models, we propose instead grand abstractions, our means to render intelligible a complex of historic practices and human acts that must somehow take in countless individual choices and a spectrum of attitudes. So we speak of conversion as well as de-conversion, Christianization as well as secularization, persecution as well as tolerance. Throughout we have found it hard to write and think about ordinary Jews or Christians, how they adopted or made their own — entered into — practices animated by religious convictions, how they gained a sense of place as peoples of faith, how (and in what measure) they acted as agents in their own religious stories. Historians must, I think, imagine afresh all this becoming, look at its evidences with nuance and richness, if we are to deal fully and honestly with the past — and the present. Movement into religious participation, mysterious though it is, individual though it ultimately is, signals a reality, also a historic reality. It is a reality, true, not finally or fully reducible to a historical text, either in the experience or its interpretation. But it is the moving query that animates the fifteen historical essays that follow.

Religion in History

These essays pursue historical, not polemical or philosophical, ends. The history we write, inevitably, gets informed by present-day perspectives, the distance wrought by time, the knowledge of how things turned out, the sources that have come down to us (or not come down), and much else. For historians these factors raise more hard questions: whether the past is knowable in itself, whether all talk of the past is finally only about the present, whether by research and imagination we can truly reenter other times, cultures, or minds.³ Some have despaired of the past as a phantasm that is distant, illusory, or simply irrelevant. In extreme form this yields a stark choice: either the past is something truly other and therefore like a foreign country, or it is an extension of the historian’s imagination and therefore an alternative conception of the present. Historians of Jewish or Christian communities can appear specially vulnerable here, since many write or have written with an eye to present-day issues and as, to one or another degree, practitioners. But this tension is nothing new: thoughtful historians have always known and reflected upon it, coming to the past at times as something concretely out there, distinct and knowable, and at other times with supreme awareness that their interpretive acts in some measure help construct that past. Good historians have sensed both and have worked creatively with the tension. Here historians of the Jewish and Christian peoples may derive some advantage from acknowledging their own engagement, their search for discoverable practices or beliefs, for the real lives of real peoples and communities in religion — writing half-in and half-out, as a recent historian of Pentecostalism put it, to combine the cool eye of the critic with the warm heart of the believer.… I suspect that the posture of being half out and half in, though awkward, defines the fate of many religious historians.⁴

A grasp of religion in history, of recalling the past and living out of it into the future, has animated Jewish and Christian practice from the beginning, indeed was written into the heart of their sacred books. But what of today? After the Holocaust, can Jewish practitioners still think about or enter into, let alone appropriate, the beliefs and practices of those before them, even if they too knew persecution? Writers from Elie Wiesel to Gershom Scholem have movingly confronted this tortured reality. And in a post-Christian age, with the public cultures that authorized Christian practice receding or dismantled, do Christian believers have something to gain from the faith and practices of peoples who lived in a different world, in territories and times dominated by the church and churchmen? Writers from Reinhold Niebuhr to John Milbank have reflected upon this quandary. When so much has changed over time, when claims to the essentials have proved so divergent and transitory, when so much of the past seems strange, even reprehensible, and when we ourselves harbor so much consciousness of change, does not the past actually become the enemy of the future? That response, though glib, comes easily, even for ardent practitioners, and it is intelligible. But it does not satisfy, and it is not entirely honest. Some working sense of a past, individual and collective, self-conscious or semiconscious, is an integral part of the human condition and will not go away. Appeals to the past never cease, not for any of us, not in our personal lives, not in our social experience. They still shape political rhetoric, as they do legal decision-making and, these days, personal therapy.

This is no less true for religious pasts, collective and individual. In our day queries and claims about those pasts have arisen forcefully in ways that can only be called paradoxical. Those Jewish and Christian communities with arguably the longest ties to the past — groups or denominations that trace a varied history back over centuries, many at one time religious establishments, some still accounted the mainstream — have suffered decline. Though longtime heirs to rich traditions, they have had trouble retaining the loyalty of their young, attracting new members in significant numbers, and exercising the measure of influence in public culture they once enjoyed. Other groups, by contrast, relative newcomers in the eyes of historians but ardent claimants to ancient and authentic tradition in their own, have over the past generation attracted many followers, old and young. Within a public culture they profess partly or wholly to repudiate, these upstarts exercise a startling influence, at times revolutionary. Such new groups, charismatics a generation ago, now often fundamentalists or new conservatives (as they are labeled by historians and pundits and sometimes their own adherents), act on a worldwide scale and are by no means limited to Judaism or Christianity. They do so, moreover, with emphatic assertions about their present-day link to the past and the future (think of renewed Hindu claims to sites sacred to Hindus and Muslims alike).

Embedded in fundamentalist stances toward the present is a claim about the past that is crucial to their explosive power: a vociferous insistence that they (alone or uniquely) possess an authentic link to the past, now realized, embodied, recovered, worked out again, in their person or community. So too Wicca groups claimed to recover elements of a Celtic or pagan religious past, as New Age adherents, in an eclectic spirit, draw widely and randomly on past materials as integral to informing their present-day practice. All these groups aim somehow to tap a distant spring, to draw today’s religious charge and energy from a reappropriated past. And all, in some sense, short-circuit recent history. Reaching back to the past for paradigms and inspiration has venerable precedents in Jewish and Christian traditions as well, usually with the aim of reform or restoration, and there too these rubrics can be invoked too easily or superficially.

The paradoxical relationship of a wide range of religious groups to their past may lead people to suspect that history, in all its movement, may play tricks on them. To put it much too simplistically: Catholic liturgies become ever more low while Presbyterians or Methodists take on high church traditions; Catholics form Bible study groups while evangelicals move toward Orthodoxy; assimilated Jews find their way to radical Orthodoxy, or the reverse; and so on. Amidst such drift, seekers of all stripes see themselves as taking history firmly in hand. The mainline groups, Jewish or Christian, get perceived as treating history too passively, slotting each set of beliefs and practices back into its moment in time. They focus their energy on the present, or an advancing modern time and its pressing issues (gay sexuality, for instance), and allow the past to be the past. This appears to drain the passing down of its power, emptying it of any real charge. Even groups committed to the authority of long-term traditions, such as Roman Catholic Christians, bitterly contest the nature of this passing, whether to live in accord with the letter or the spirit of Vatican Council II (1960s), for instance, not to speak of Trent (1560s) or Lateran Council IV (1215).

All this has ironic results. Groups that reach back to fixate upon one or another version of past practice or belief, employing it at once to repudiate and to inform their present, appear to flourish, while those that leave the past in the past have trouble sustaining coherent community in the present. Circulating through all these movements are attitudes, implicit or explicit and often unexamined, that manifest a measure of despair in the face of history, which comes then to be treated merely as a giant grab bag: Christians turn to Native American rites or beliefs, Jews become Jews for Jesus. This is simply, you might say, the cultural and social condition labeled postmodern, that radically fragmented and ahistorical sense of the human today that conceives present life as a constant and self-conscious constructing of one’s self out of disparate pieces from both past and present, from distant cultures as well as near. All this is as true for fundamentalist as for New Age approaches to religious practice. Yet all these stances, even against their will, implicitly concede the presence of the past, also and emphatically past religion, as a reality to be dealt with, whether perceived as continuous or discontinuous, to be purged or emulated, improved upon or transcended, discarded or restored. Acknowledged as well, however implicitly, are those powers active in the making of practice and belief, whether collectively inherited or personally appropriated. However, few people these days reflect on the significance of these intersections of past and present, of formative powers and personal conviction. Fewer still reflect on the longer history of those intersections.

Notions of formative powers are hardly new, even if they have only recently gained more visibility. Many present-day stances seem to presume and to deny those powers all at once, as does, it seems to me, the thinker whose works have resonated so deeply with intellectuals in the last generation, Michel Foucault.⁵ He claimed for humans a radical sense of freedom to construct one’s own self while acknowledging, with despair and frustration, that larger historic forces go a long way toward conditioning and even limiting that self. He touched a nodal point for many by pointing to the powers latent in inheritance (genealogy) and in language (discourse) as generating those disciplining structures that frame the lives of shape-changing individuals. Others have attempted to integrate the historical more seamlessly: for instance, going back to 1933, Michael Oakeshott’s approach to historical experience.⁶ At the moment, theologians (to this historian) seem wary, reluctant to engage, in part because notions like tradition have become so politically and personally charged.⁷ The writers in this volume are historians. They engage the issues primarily by way of praxis rather than deliberate reflection. The intent is introductory and historical: to take a step back, to ask about access to lived religion in the past, how persons and communities came into practice and belief, from person to person, generation to generation. Is it possible for historians to discern how peoples long ago lived religiously from their past into their present, passed on or transmuted beliefs and practices central to their communities? Was this a manifestly historical process, or is it a retrospective illusion? And if they fostered formative practices, how deliberately, how effectively, how unconsciously?

Writing about Formative Religious Practices in History

Writing religious history goes very far back in European history. Writers recorded and recalled the past to shape their present, in telling the stories of monastic or rabbinic fathers and their sayings, of holy people and their miraculous deeds, of communities and their leaders. Renaissance humanists cultivated new paradigms derived from antiquity and worked with a heightened sense of historical distance, even of loss; but they too aimed at programmatic recovery, whether of antiquity or the early church. During the early modern period industrious collectors assembled enormous repositories of texts and materials, often to serve causes polemical or apologetic, but especially to build up layers of tradition on behalf of a faith community or a special practice or a religious order — often, it should be added, with a joyful zeal for discovery and recording. Endowed with remarkable humanist educations, with an astounding intelligence and curiosity, they could nonetheless barely imagine history without engagement, as a pure exercise in reconstructing the past. Whatever nuance, sophistication, or critique they might bring to bear, they mostly took larger community purposes for granted. Indeed, Enlightenment historians too, a Voltaire or a Gibbon, came to the past with a purpose: to bring light and reason, to illumine the antics of human foolishness, to showcase the perils of religious superstition.

To write about history as it really was, to see each epoch and community in its own right, as it existed unmediated in the eye of God: this was the goal of scientific historians in the mid–nineteenth century, a position now often labeled positivist, its most famous expositor the Berlin historian Leopold von Ranke. Professors were to work toward science and objectivity, to uncover laws or at least patterns, a verifiable reading of past texts and acts within their own meanings and contexts. Above all — this is sometimes forgotten now — they deliberately sought to lift their work above the muck of partisan polemic. So Ranke, a German Protestant, and later Erich Kaspar, a German Jew, wrote books about the Italian papacy that impressed contemporaries with their dispassionate learning and relative evenhandedness. The ideal they proposed has held among professionals for generations, and fundamentally still does, despite stinging critiques and the full realization that no historian entirely sheds his or her outlook — that Ranke himself, as recent scholars have insisted, remained a German and a Protestant with clear interpretive predilections. It is striking, even ironic, and perhaps deserving of more notice, that this more distanced, more objective view of history-writing claimed for itself, in Ranke’s words, the eye of God. Earlier historians had written for centuries in greater or lesser confidence of delivering a God’s-eye view of their Lutheran or Hasidic community and of making manifest God’s repugnance for their rivals.

Reaction to this new history was not long in coming. In 1874 Friedrich Nietzsche, a young professor of classical language and culture, poured out his scorn in the essay On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life. His point, worked out in a many-sided argument, was simple: the past carefully reconstructed by this new historical science (Wissenschaft) was useless, a past drained of life. Nietzsche worried mainly about antiquity, specifically a vital life force he perceived there (Dionysiac) that went missing in prosaic reconstructions. But as the son of a pastor and a determined critic of Christianity, Nietzsche understood, and occasionally noted, the potential impact of historical science upon Christian uses of the past as well. The truest followers of Jesus, in Nietzsche’s view, had always stood outside its worldly success and its accumulated powers and were not consumed, like his contemporaries, by the process of the Christian idea. Hence they, the truest, would go unnamed and unknown in any scientific historical reconstruction. Any purely historical look at Christian tradition would not yield its essence(Harnack’s goal a generation later) but only tend to dissolve and destroy. People proud of their new sense of history, their more accurate past, were generating a past of endless detail, of constant becoming, a past of no use whatsoever, except to produce a hopeless skeptical sense of endlessness. Should not life animate learning, he countered, rather than to have learning sap life? All this indigestible data only overwhelmed, filling people with irony and cynicism, leaving them with no drive to live or act. Indeed, this approach, he imagined more darkly, actually derived from, and served, the hateful animus of the Christian religion: sapping all things vital and new in the world, subverting this present life-world with an ironic sense of endless, ever shifting becoming, hence turning people toward a lifeless eternity. Christianity in its critical mode, its attack upon idols and infidels, had, after all, always tried to effect this — and now again, but in a more subtle and approved way, in the guise of modern historical science.⁸

We take up historical work a full century later. Despite much sophisticated reflection on the nature of the historical enterprise, these two stances remain broadly with us: efforts to lift history out of the polemical present, to grasp the past accurately and fully in its historical pastness; no less, efforts to discern in and claim from that past some life force, some understanding, for the present. We are today more at ease with acknowledging our motives and aims, not posturing with a false impersonality. But actual practice remains caught somewhere in the middle. And that is not all bad. Most, writers as well as readers, instinctively find it desirable to combine life with history, an intuitive entering-in with critical distance, present concern with past evidence. In practice that middle ground is a shifting and uncertain place; at its best, a terrain worthy of high respect, useful, even powerful — but not easily reduced to a slogan or a method.

For historians of religious communities there is a further twist, a most interesting insight, bringing at once a gain and a complication. During the last generation, and actually going back a century, scholars have discovered that religious phenomena are amazingly revealing of cultural and social life. Several outstanding scholars around the year 1900 perceived in human history deep and broad veins of religious culture and set out to exploit them on behalf of sociological, anthropological, and cultural understanding — thus turning the old religious story to new purposes. This work, impressive and important, turned the inherited insider’s story, with all it presumed and purposed, inside out. Religious pasts were called upon not primarily as narratives drawn up to consolidate a contested point or the claims of a community or the validity of a disputed practice, but to elucidate broad cultural and human themes, say, social or gender relations, or the cultivation of the self. Leading theologians, Troeltsch in particular, urged emphatically that scholars undertake a self-conscious and much needed historicizing of their religious traditions. For general historians, with methodological help from sociologists and anthropologists, this approach opened up vast resources in the European and American past, seemingly, or even largely, apart from any confessional predilections or agendas. This approach also effects a reversal, the religious materials subordinated to other historical priorities (rather than the other way round), and this has tended to produce, even to require, an instrumentalizing of religious phenomena. So, ironically, mainstreaming religious history can make it harder at times to see the religious phenomena in their own right as imbued with their own energies and dynamisms.

For both Weber and Troeltsch, who were colleagues at Heidelberg at the turn of the century, with the differing accents of a sociologist and a theologian, religion in history came down finally to cultural practices in time, belief generating patterns of human action made manifest in distinctive societies. A good example is Weber’s proposed link between a system of beliefs and practices peculiar to Calvinists and the coming of capitalist enterprise.⁹ Both Weber and Troeltsch saw life forces as real in religion and as acted out in, also as yielding, distinct cultures. They proposed to isolate these as a complex series of historical types and to grasp their evolving impact upon world history. Emile Durkheim, by comparison, working in France at the same time, saw the issue revolving rather around the rites that helped mold and shape a social unit: Religion is an eminently social thing. Religious representations are collective representations that express collective realities; the rites are a manner of acting which take rise in the midst of the assembled groups and which are destined to excite, maintain, or recreate certain mental states in those groups.¹⁰ He conceived of ritual practices as persistent in human life, if not unchanged, as transforming themselves rather than disappearing, as the highest expression of the collective consciousness.¹¹ There are ironies aplenty here. Weber and Troeltsch, Protestant in heritage, idealist in philosophical orientation, looked for religion culturally in ethical acts, in deeds. Durkheim, his father a rabbi, his orientation anthropological and beyond Europe, saw it most fully in the rites that fostered the consolidation of meanings and groups and thereby also distinguished a sacred from a profane world. All these thinkers (and the contemporaries around them) operated with a strong sense of history and of change, even if Weber tended to look for social-religious types in the past (around the world), Durkheim for religion first in its most primitive manifestations (Australia), and Troeltsch for the outworking of Christian belief in historical cultures (Europe).

These insights and approaches are now taken for granted, or refined, or disputed, but at any rate part of a larger common cultural inheritance, whatever their origins. Still, there is in them something deeply true to Jewish and Christian traditions, religion measured by its social and cultural deeds: By their fruits shall ye know them — including their bad fruit, we might add, driving a concomitant impulse for reform or renewal. But for historians, and also practitioners, religious culture as paradigmatic manifestations cannot make up the whole story. Historians ask how people in time acquired and acted upon religious practices or beliefs; they look beyond structural paradigms, whether cultural, sociological, religious, or indeed theological. For historians of formative religious practices, then, the aim is to see all the complex and concrete modes of human experience through which people came into forms of participation, how they shaped and reshaped inherited or invented paradigms for themselves and their needs, even while being shaped by them. If we choose to substitute abstractions or institutions or types for concrete and contingent situations, also on occasion because the evidence in all its human or social or cultural fullness simply has not come down to us, we must at least be aware that we are doing so. Insisting upon this historical dimension is not to reduce human practices to sheer contingency. A refusal to recognize historical contingency is one sort of blind spot, against which scholars have reacted for a long time. Another, however, is to see only contingency, to deny the presence and persistence of deeper patterns, or variations on patterns. Again there must be a middle way. Religious traditions have a life force, a presence, all their own, which is not to deny constant and real change, even from generation to generation. Such traditions entered into the forming of peoples and communities, shaped attitudes and convictions within and actions without, structured communal bonds as well as individual aims and orientations — enabled people, in short, to take on habits of the heart, to borrow an influential title of fifteen years ago. Still, they did so in time, and with multiple changes over time.¹² All this brings us to the elusive notion of formation.

Notions of Formation

The term formation is early modern and Roman Catholic in origin. It refers to the comprehensive preparation of religious men and women, in orders or in seminaries, for the life they will lead, this often begun at a very early age. Such formative practices are old, and not restricted to Christian monks and nuns — think of boys preparing for the rabbinate, or apprentices living in a master’s house to prepare themselves for a trade. During the centuries covered by this book, most such practices were local and piecemeal. After the Council of Trent Catholic reformers in the early seventeenth century gave them new and more deliberate attention, to counter charges that clergy were not living up to their way of life, also to rival a newly forming Protestant leadership. Until recently, even if little studied, the reality of formative religious practices was presumed (notably by Foucault, as part of his own upbringing),¹³ even their reaching down on occasion to broader levels of the populace. For all this the essential paradigm was monastic: acquiring over time, by practice and self-examination, by self-mortification and applied will, a disciplined way of life, internalizing its expectations, integrating its acts into one’s desires consciously and unconsciously — becoming thus at once sacrificed to this way of life and personally master of it, even able to stand above it. To see the general significance of this monastic paradigm required the eye of a modern anthropologist. Talal Asad construed monastic disciplinary practices as forming and re-forming the moral dispositions that constitute a human self, and thereby — his emphasis — forming within a will to obey. Obedience emerges, in dialectic with expectations and contrary demands, as a chosen virtue.¹⁴ Asad’s is a subtle and balanced account, if somewhat timeless and ahistorical, with evidence drawn mainly from Benedictine sources (where obedience is the key virtue). Franciscans, for instance, worried a great deal more about poverty as crucial to the forming of religious lives and practices, and indeed aroused large followings and provoked severe crises with several popes over the meaning of living out lives of poverty. Pierre Hadot, an important progenitor for Michel Foucault’s notion of a care of the self, argues that the foundations for an understanding of formative practices were laid by Stoic and Epicurean philosophers, Greek and Roman, with notions of philosophy as a way of life and especially of spiritual exercises.¹⁵

So why have medieval and modern historians largely missed the opportunity to take advantage of this formation paradigm? There are several reasons. Most historians of religious orders, until recently, were themselves religious, and took the formative disciplines for granted, as a second nature, not in need of deliberate historical reflection or investigation. Or they took them as practices peculiar to themselves, as that which set them apart as religious; or indeed, especially in the last generation, as practices they were anxious to cast off, as often brutal in their manifestations and effects. By contrast historians of religious peoples have tended to look for a lay stance decidedly opposed to this monastic disciplining, it being perceived as threatening to an indigenous lay culture; or indeed, if enforced by authorities lay or ecclesiastical, as the secular extension of social control. Historians of education, for their part, often have focused more on cognitive or narrowly pedagogical issues, less the whole person, this fuller shaping of the moral and affective faculties. As historians become ever more fascinated with the whole range of human experience, from the political to the emotive (not to say the sexual), they have also grown more alert to these formative practices in shaping human life. Their reality is certainly undeniable, also in the present. Think of the formative exercises undergone today by young physicians, lawyers, and professors in residency, prepartner law, and pretenure teaching, or the discipline undertaken by those wishing to become sport or entertainment stars. Not a few medieval and early modern people sought to emulate, as best they could and from a distance, saints or religious as the stars of their era (as some have put it), and consequently imposed some of these disciplines upon themselves (fasting, for instance), sometimes with startling, sometimes with disastrous, results. This dynamic is only now coming under the lens of historical investigation.

In medieval Christian history the models were mostly monastic. But such texts spoke not so much of formation as of institution (instituere), of instituting mores, the practices that made up a way of life. The significance of this term (instituere), antique and Christian, lies in its multilayered meaning, for it meant to instruct fully as much as to establish or to discipline. The introduction to Roman law mandated by Justinian in 534 and the new introduction to the Christian faith written by John Calvin in 1536 were both titled institutes, that is, manuals to inform the practice of, respectively, legal or godly affairs. Proper training took up the moral, the physical, and the mental all at once, with, obviously, varying emphases among groups and individuals. One early religious manual, eleventh century, later ascribed to Bernard of Clairvaux, aimed to have good customs (i.e., practices) increase with age, and described the task at hand as to cast off all sluggishness and by the grace of Christ "to correct one’s life, put in order (‘compose’) one’s mores, and improve one’s practices in all things. The driving assumption is that the outer and the inner" person hang together, that the spirit (animus) is revealed in the walk (incessum), that the disposition of mind (habitus mentis) is perceived in the position of the body (corporis statu).¹⁶ This text addressed the training of young men for life in a monastery. Such texts appear to have abounded in the twelfth century; most were for men, a few increasingly for women.¹⁷ A second term, disciplina, originally harbored much the same lexical ambiguity, pointing toward instruction (retained in our notion of academic disciplines) as much as conduct. Ancient and medieval education took for granted a physical regime, sometimes fairly harsh, as part of instruction: no master without his cane, no shaping of the mind apart from the body — the patterns found as well among boys learning in rabbinic or Muslim circles. This instituting, it must be added, though sometimes severe, did not aim in principle at pain, as we often imagine today, which is in part our continuing (and now mostly legendary) reaction to this older regime. Tenderness and concern were often manifest as well, along with a real determination to sharpen a person’s faculties, mental as well as moral, to hone habits of mind and spirit along with habits of speech and demeanor. At the center remained the created and free soul, finally answerable to God alone, which could (as Foucault emphasized) energize a spirit of liberty, even anarchy.

Practicing Religion?

In the historical profession today, and in this volume, practicing religion refers to those approaches that take seriously the integral place of concrete practices in forming a religious self or community. However deeply anchored in religious traditions over centuries, it took the insights and methods of anthropologists to render it historically meaningful, whether the focus fell upon the integrative social functions of religious rites, as with Mary Douglas and others in a Durkheimian mode, or upon integrative meaning systems, as with Clifford Geertz and his heirs. Anthropologists helped students of European Christianity and Judaism look back on their own religious cultures, as it were, from the outside; helped them de-familiarize their sense of an inherited culture, and so better act as observers rather than participants. Since a focus on practices draws attention to specific peoples in specific rites, it could also, at least potentially, help raise questions of social class and gender, of material and political power, in quite specific historical situations. This positive approach also subverted a long-standing critique of religious rites and practices, common among intellectuals, as mainly externalities, as the stuff of the simple. Largely unawares, historians were reiterating the stance of numerous medieval reformers and mystics who presented the interior life as properly passing through and beyond the routines of ordinary external practice. Sometimes unwittingly still today, with all the extraordinary attention given to reformers and mystics, historians can end up replicating such attitudes, discounting or even disparaging liturgical practices as merely customary or as mindless and meaningless.

Still, practicing religion, despite the richer grasp of the religious and social meanings of those practices effected by this approach over the last generation or two, has itself come in for severe critique. The anthropological eye cannot be taken naively as external and observant; it is itself caught up in the dynamic of observing. Further, all religious practices do not work the same, not outside Europe, also not inside Europe, and certainly not in different times and places. Rites and practices, quite simply but most importantly, are not self-interpreting. We must indeed ask whether it is historically appropriate, or even possible, to distinguish performance from meaning, outer from inner, body from spirit (and vice versa). This too, it turns out, was discussed with great profundity and subtlety by premodern Jews and Christians, keenly aware of the layers at work in the dynamic between performance and meaning, also between group meaning and individual understanding.

An important improvement — distancing religion from the normative and prescribed, yet not cutting off practice from meaning — may be found in the notion of lived religion. By this term historians mean the religion people lived and practiced, in all its fullness and variety, as distinguished from that leaders or books may have prescribed. In its actual application thus far, more in France where it originated than in America, this approach can risk replicating or reinforcing notional distinctions between an elite and a popular practice of religion. This duality, widely diffused since the 1970s,¹⁸ is, most now agree, too stark, misleadingly simplistic, if not entirely wrong. Lived religion at its best serves, helpfully, as a middling or mediating concept.¹⁹ Within a dominant or approved cultural expression of religion, even one backed with political or social power, there existed, especially in pretotalitarian times, a broad historical range of subgroups and distinctive combinations, lived out by all differing social groups, sometimes in surprising mixes of peoples.²⁰ Some, even many, may not have comported exactly or at all to the norms, and yet never intended or perceived themselves as dissenting or even aberrant. Whether a religious group or practice was dominant within society (a preoccupation of recent scholarship: the persecuting church), or found itself in a position apart, by choice or by force, is an important question, but not the only question, especially not for a broader understanding of formative practices. Societies without power simply do not exist, also religious societies, and yet power is not all there is to say about society, or about how people came to live their religion — which is not to ignore the coercive character of social and spiritual relations in premodern Europe.

Acquiring Faith?

This volume, and the project of which it is a part, asks about forming and educating peoples of faith. From one perspective it would seem to state what synagogues and churches have always been about, even if, at the moment, this approach has less resonance in the academy (and maybe among people generally). From another, in the light of so much twentieth-century experience and so much coercive use of religious power, it can be taken as referring to some form of ideological indoctrination. This has made it hard for recent historians to talk helpfully about the cognitive and educative dimensions of religious experience and of religious communities. The essays in this volume take belief and the forming of belief seriously as distinct factors in the making of Jewish and Christian communities.²¹ Earlier historians and polemicists took it largely for granted, and for centuries. They expounded belief over time as the defining characteristic of a community, its practices and organization as an expression and amplification of that community’s beliefs, even beliefs or a reshaping of beliefs as the major engine in historical change. And still today, when people reach for a study of their own religious tradition, this is usually what they expect to find or to read. A singular emphasis in one direction inevitably elicits its reverse: hence the view that it was not ideas or convictions but material realities or social pressures or political power or cultural predilections that shaped religious life and change.

Lest we all too dismissively assimilate acquiring faith to coercive ideology, it is good to remind ourselves of how deeply the educative approach is built into historic religious experience, the high premium Jewish and Christian communities have placed upon forming people in the Torah and the faith, a charge grasped as anchored in their sacred writings. So before Moses died, we read, he called the people together one last time to remind them of the day when God talked to you face to face on the mountain from the midst of fire (Deut. 5:4), and reiterated the essential provisions of their covenant. These he ordered people to keep in their hearts, to teach diligently to their children, to talk about as they sat in their houses or walked along the way, to bind upon them as a sign and to write upon the doorposts of their houses (Deut. 6:6-8). After the people had taken possession of the Promised Land and fallen on evil times, renewal came when King Josiah rediscovered the Torah and had it read aloud to all the assembled people great and small (2 Kings 23:1-3). And after the destruction and rebuilding of Jerusalem, Ezra had all the people, men and women to the age of understanding, gather for the reading of the Law (Neh. 8:2). And significantly, at the central annual feast, the Passover, recalling the exodus from Egypt, the youngest child is asked to reiterate the liberating events that led to covenant making.

Christians formed their communities around the person of Jesus, acknowledged as the Messiah (Christ), presented in their sacred texts as the image of the invisible God, in whom all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell (Col. 1:15, 19), the exemplar and source of grace and truth (John 1:17). One writer described himself as bearing witness to what he had seen with his eyes and touched with his hands (1 John 1:1). Jesus instituted a meal whereby his own death and rising could be recalled and appropriated each time believers gathered. Further, because Jesus was the Word in the flesh, he was to be imitated. Be perfect, he said, as the Father in heaven is perfect (Matt. 5:48). And those in whom the spirit of Jesus dwelt were themselves accounted worthy of imitation. Paul said the Thessalonians became imitators of himself and of the Lord, and thereby examples to all believers in Macedonia and Achaia (1 Thess. 1:6-7).

It might seem a little unusual to insert scriptural texts into a historical discussion. But the point is simple: forming belief and understanding together with practices, also critiquing and reshaping them over time and in time, all spring from the heart of these traditions. We may recognize how time-bound are religious manifestations, also the difficulties that come with trying to put belief at the center of a historical narrative. The form of a community does not arise simply from belief or inductively from historical investigation of beliefs and practices. Accounts that put belief at the center have often focused upon their normative instances (teachers, books, rulings, community paradigms), explicitly or implicitly, though they need not do so. What about all the resisters or even the indifferent? One of the more powerful narrative lines of the last generation (actually with deep roots) hinges, perhaps unawares, upon a reversal of an older faith-forming narrative, in effect conceding its centrality but casting it in a mostly negative role. Imposing thereby becomes, even unawares, the central driver in a story line fully as much as joining or evangelizing shaped earlier story lines (with both implicitly present in