Yes. This is how I see what I study, pretty much:

[tree_and_leaf]

“Finally and most controversially, I believe that religious experience reveals the traces, however opaquely filtered, of a real and transcendent object. This is not to exclude the possibilities of self-deception and deliberate fraud, both common in medieval Christendom as in all societies where religion is a hegemonic force. Nor is it to deny what I have just asserted: the presence of innumerable and rarely translucent filter, both psychological and social, that serve to veil the transcendent object. In fact, my essays deal explicitly with these “filters” and not with what lies beyond them. I write as a historian and literary critic, not as a theologian. Nevertheless, I assert this conviction to clarify my theoretical stance and to overthrow the last bastion of reductionism, To leave a space for transcendence means to allow for the possibility that, when historical subjects assert religious belief or experience as the motive of their actions, they may at times be telling the truth. it also means to accept the irreducibility of the phenomena, and thereby to reject all totalizing explanations. The complexity of human experience, but especially of the divine, is such that no historical reconstruction can be more than partial and provisional. Where not trace of uncertainty remains, there bias and illusion hold triumphant sway.”

Newman, Barbara. 1995. From Virile Woman to womanChrist: Studies in medieval religion and literature. Philidelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 16-17.

I've been avoiding reading this for a while, because the title just about gave me hives (not the ideas, the typography), but it's very good, and the passage I've quoted above gave me a strong feeling of recognition. It's freeing to hear respected scholars talking like that (the only other historian I've heard insist on the validity of the religious experience is Dinzelbacher, who has never got that even geniune experience must be literised and therefore is legitimately subject to literary analysis, which is a very unhelpful attitude).

It also clarifies why I've been feeling fraustared with the course of my research: examinig the 'filters' feels increasingly like missing the point, interesting and valid and important though it is. Maybe I am in the wrong line of country, after all. Or rather: maybe I need to find a way from here to there?

Comments

[parrot-knight.livejournal.com]

There's a lot there. I suspect that scholars might deny the validity of motivation through religious belief or experience because such things are difficult to measure; and often they themselves will be people without profound religious belief themselves. Newman's 'totalizing explanations' can be comfortable for those who use them in their writing and those who read them; but they can be as much diversions from engaging with the people and ideas under consideration as they are means of discussing them and enlightening us.

[tree_and_leaf]

Totalizing explanations are always dangerous - though equally, they can sometimes be useful. You're right about the difficulty in measuring motivation - one can't, really, and I don't think Newman is arguing that we should try; rather that we should take that aspect of the text seriously.

To an extent,of course, Newman's reacting to an earlier generation of scholars' tendency to point at female religious writers/ subjects and dismiss them with something along the lines of 'sexually frustrated lunatic'; and a lot of the modern women's studies crowd seem to be so vehemently hostile to Christianity that they seem to be interested in everything about the text except what it's chiefly about.

(That's a little unfair, but not entirely.)

[parrot-knight.livejournal.com]

I think it's possible to accept 'telling the truth' on its own terms, however naively, up to a point; explaining the why and how of that truth is another step.

My supervisor asked me what I thought of 'women's history' once; he thought (IIRC) its labelling as such and the creation of lecturerships and chairs in it or 'women's studies' more generally - this would have been in about 1993 or 1994 - was building walls around useful work and potentially cutting that work off from the wider intellectual life it needed to nurture.

[emily-shore.livejournal.com]

"To leave a space for transcendence means to allow for the possibility that, when historical subjects assert religious belief or experience as the motive of their actions, they may at times be telling the truth. it also means to accept the irreducibility of the phenomena, and thereby to reject all totalizing explanations. The complexity of human experience, but especially of the divine, is such that no historical reconstruction can be more than partial and provisional. Where not trace of uncertainty remains, there bias and illusion hold triumphant sway.”

This is very interesting to me as a historian, and especially because I will be teaching a seminar and a tutorial on Victorian religion later in the term. What particularly draws me is the term "telling the truth," which I gather that the author uses to mean "asserting that they were motivated by the real experience of a transcendent object, in such cases where this assertion is correct." Whereas on the surface I would interpret the phrase to mean "sincerely believing that they were motivated by, and behaving as if they were motivated by," etcetera etcetera. As an agnostic I am unclear how you would tell whether historical subjects were "telling the truth" in the first sense, and wonder whether you would expect people's behavior to be different if this were so.

I sympathise with your difficulties and frustrations, although they are not ones that I have shared. On a very simple level, I try to assume that all of my historical subjects are sincere in their beliefs (while of course allowing for rhetoric, bias, etc.) But I would be very interested to hear your thoughts on why, or how, we ought to go further than this.

[tree_and_leaf]

As an agnostic I am unclear how you would tell whether historical subjects were "telling the truth" in the first sense, and wonder whether you would expect people's behavior to be different if this were so.

That's the snag: I think you generally can't. Of course if you know enough about someone's life to know that they are habitual liars, or use their 'gifts' to manipulate people to their own personal gain, then you can be suspicious, but this isn't a situation that arises with regard to any mystic I can think of. (It's not just an agnostic problem, by the way: historically the church has been very cautious about accepting visions or revelations, and with good reason- but in most cases also reluctant to condemn them out of hand unless they teach something obviously unacceptable in terms of morals or doctrine)

But I would be very interested to hear your thoughts on why, or how, we ought to go further than this.

It's a matter of hats: the historian or literary scholar doesn't have to go much further (though I think it's important to add the rider that one shouldn't assume that the writer is irrational just because they have a different world-view to you†). It's different if you're doing theology - and as a private reader, it matters to me to ask, with that sort of text, 'is there really soemthing of God in here?' and to try to find it and make sense of it, even though the writers are often coming at things from such a different angle that it's difficult. But this is different to what I do for the thesis.

Newman is reacting, I think, partly against the olde school of criticism that interpreted every claim to religious experience as evidence of (probably sexual) neurosis, which allowed them to set the texts aside as beneath notice, and partly against the tendency of some of the womens' studies side of things to put everything in the texts down to a reation against oppression and as a deliberate strategy to salvage a voice in a male world. They don't mean to belittle the women or the texts by doing so, but I think it does over-simplify things and doesn't serve a full understanding of the texts.


† This ought to be obvious, but it doesn't always seem to be.

[grondfic.livejournal.com]

You might like to check up on a new genre/generation of academic Anthropologists who have recently started to assert their Paganism as a legitimate part of their academic research and written work.

There's also Ronald Hutton of course .....

[tree_and_leaf]

Intersting - I'm afraid anthropology is rather off my radar, which is shameful...

[harriet-wimsey.livejournal.com]

Oh, yes! Thanks for that.