Weber: Religion

There are 5 World Religions:

1. Confuscianism

2.Hinduism

3.Buddhism

4.Christianity

5.Islam

Weber includes Judaism as a sixth religion because, though it does not have the large following the first 5 have, it is essential to the historical understanding of Christianity and Islam and of the “modern economic ethic of the Occident.”

(Occident = The Western World)

Promises of religion:

• Salvation for the masses - “cure for the soul”

• Security and happiness in the world beyond

• A Savior

Suffering is a common theme across religions.

“ in treating suffering as a symptom of odiousness in the eyes of the gods and as a sign of secret guilt, religion has psychologically met a very general need.”(271)

“Sin figured as the basic cause of all sorts of misfortunes.”(274)

• sin from a former life

• sin of ancestors (to the 3rd and 4th generation)

• the “wickedness of all creatures” (275)

*Rebirth and Redemption

• rituals and rationale varied by class- what you wished to be redeemed from depended on your view of the world

“Men are differently qualified in a religious way. " (287)

The separation of the “private sphere” from the “official” sphere is the same in the church “as is the separation of the worker from the means of production in economy” (295)

• in order to maintain its status, the church must be“democratic in the sense of making

the sacred values generally accessible.”

1. Charisma- belief in the supernatural quality of a specific person

2.Traditionalism- devotion to what has “actually, allegedly, presumably” always been

i.e. Patraiarchy

3. Routinization - live by the rules, submission not based on belief or devotion to a person

(296-98)

The Protestant Sects

and the Spirit of Capitalism

IV: The Economic Sphere:

1.In what ways does Weber state that religion affects other social institutions?

2.What are the main religious rejections that Weber states? What does he mean by asceticism and mysticism?

XIII: Religious Rejections of the World and Their Directions

Indian religiously is the cradle of those religious ethics which have abnegated the world, theoretically, practically and to the greatest extent, (p.323)

Monkhood (as well as the typical ascetic and contemplative manipulations) were not only first but also most consistently developed in India

I: Motives for the Rejection of the World: the Meaning of Their Rational Construction

The construction scheme-serves the purpose of offering an ideal typical means of orientation

Individual spheres of value presented as ideal types have a rational consistency rarely found in reality

• attempts to find out how far certain rational conclusions (which can be established theoretically, have been drawn in reality)

Religion

Weber believed that religion was central to the structure of society.

( “religiously determined systems of life-regulation which have known how to gather multitudes of confessors around them.”)

II: Typology of Asceticism and

Mysticism

VII: The Erotic Sphere

VIII: The Intellectual Sphere

The brotherly ethic of salvation religion is in profound tension with the greatest irrational force of life: sexual love

• the more sublimated sexuality is, and the more principled and relentlessly consistent the salvation ethic of brotherhood is, the sharper is the tension between sex and religion

A principled ethic of religious brotherhood perceives that inner, earthly salvation by mature love competes in the sharpest possible way with devotion to a supra-mundane God

• inner-worldly and rational asceticism (vocational asceticism) can accept only the rationally regulated marriage

Two contrasting abnegations of the world

1.Active Ascetics: God-willed action of the devout who are God's tools

• rationally active asceticism seeks to tame what is creatural and wicked through work in a worldly vocation (inner-worldly asceticism)

2. Contemplative possession of the holy found in mysticism

• the individual is not a tool, but rather a 'vessel'
• desire of other-worldly state; contemplative flight from the world

Mysticism: what matters for his salvation is only the grasping of the ultimate and completely irrational meaning through mystic experiences

Bases for Religious Authority:

The tension between brotherly religion and the world has been most obvious in the economic sphere

A rational economy is a functional organization oriented to money-prices which originate in the interest-struggles of men in the market

• money is the most abstract and 'impersonal' element that exists in human life
• ultimately no genuine religion of salvation has overcome the tension between their religiosity and a rational economy

The religions of salvation have had a tendency to depersonalize and objectify love in the unique sense of acosmism, (p.331)

• acosmism: denies the reality of the universe

The tension between religion and intellectual knowledge comes to the fore wherever rational, empirical knowledge has consistently worked through to the disenchantment of the world

• every increase of rationalism in empirical science increasing pushes religion from the rational into the irrational realm
• but only today does religion become the irrational or anti-rational supra-human power

The less magic or merely contemplative mysticism and the more pure doctrine a religion contains, the greater is its need of rational apologies

Religious redemption defends itself against the attack of the self-sufficient intellect, by raising the claim that religious knowledge moves in a different sphere

The intellect, like all culture values, has created an aristocracy based on the possession of rational culture and independent of all personal ethical qualities of man

• the aristocracy of intellect is hence an unbrotherly aristocracy
• worldly man has regarded the possession of culture as the highest good

Weber believes that “religious doctrines are adjusted to religious needs.”(270)

It is not enough to just be fortunate --

We need to believe that people get what they deserve, that we earned our good fortune and that others have earned their suffering.

*Religion gives three ideas to explain the “incongruity between destiny and merit:”

Status vs. Class situation (300-301)

• 1. Kharma - cause and effect; “God gives you what you deserve”

• 2. Dualism- you must do good things to keep evil at bay

• 3. Predestination - some people are predestined to be sinful and others are not

• status: the probability of certain social groups' receiving positive or negative social honor.
• class situation: the opportunities to gain sustenance and income...property of a certain kind, or acquired skills

When needs are not met by the local gods or the collective religion, Weber says that individuals turn to magicians or sorcerers for their personal needs

• usually healing from sickness(272)

VI: The Esthetic Sphere:

• This is how “superhuman beings” and prophets gain popularity

• “the prophet has not regularly been a descendant or a representative of the depressed classes.”(274)

Germans vs The United States

• Higher financial burden for being affiliated with a church in the United states

• Americans place a large amount of importance

on being affiliated with a church

• Germans would not pay large quantities of money to be affiliated with a church the way Americans do.

• Moral qualities of a person

are determined by how closely they

are affiliated with a church.

• "...if I saw a farmer or a businessman not belonging

to any church at all, I wouldn't trust him with fifty cents. Why pay me, if he doesn't believe in anything?" (303)

• Why?

• Businessmen especially

• Baptism and success of business

III: Direction of the Abnegation of the World

The development of intellectualism and the rationalism of life make art become a cosmos of more and more consciously grasped independent values which exist in their own right

Art comes to provide a salvation from the routines of everyday life, and begins to compete directly with salvation religion

• the refusal of modern man to assume responsibility for moral judgements tends to transform judgements of moral intent into judgements of taste

Guilds vs Sects

Guilds

• United members of

the same occupation

• "A sect, however, is a voluntary association

of only those who, according to the principle,

are religiously and morally qualified"

• Limits competition

and profit

Sects

• United members

through selection of

"ethically qualified fellow

believers"

• "Expulsion from one's sect for moral offenses

has meant, economically, loss of credit and, socially,

being declassed"

• Promoted striving for profit

and capitalism

• Now it means not only losing your social class,

but also your economic standing.

"“The member of the sect had to have qualities of a certain kind in order to enter the community circle. Being endowed with these qualities was important for the development of rational modern capitalism.”(320)

• "These associations were especially

the typical vehicles of social ascent into the

circle of the entrepreneurial middle class. They served to diffuse and to maintain the bourgeois capitalist business ethos among the broad strata of the middle class" (308)

• "Yet one must never overlook that without the universal diffusion of these qualities and principles of a methodical way of life, qualities and principles of a methodical way of life, qualities which were maintained through these religious communities, capitalism today, even in America, would not be what it is" (309)

IX: The Three Forms of Theodicy

Discussion Questions

• The only businessmen

that were honest and loyal

were religious

V: The Political Sphere

• Gods bless with money

those who please them.

In America

• Money = Power
• Money ≠ Social Honor
• Money = Social Prestige

• Therefore, if your business is successful,

you must be a man of God.

Formulated abstractly, the rational aim of redemption religion has been to secure for the saved a holy state, and thereby a habitude that assures salvation

• the tension has been greater the more religion has been sublimated from ritualism and towards 'religious absolutism'
• religious salvation: all religions that hold out deliverance from suffering to their adherents
• the further the rationalization and sublimation of external and internal possession of, things worldly has progressed, the stronger has the tension on the part of religion become

The more comprehensive, and inward the aim of salvation has been > the more it has been taken for granted that the faithful should stand closer to the savior, prophet, priest, and brother in the faith than to natural relations

• prophecy has created a new social community; therefore the relationships between the siblings and marriage have been devalued

Two elemental principles or the new community:

• 1. Dualism of in-group/out-group morality
• 2. For in-group morality, simply reciprocity
• "As you do unto me I shall do unto you," (p.329)

The religiously of congregation transferred this ancient economic ethic of neighborliness to the relations among brethen of the faith

• "I'll help you out today, since I may need you to help me out tomorrow"

The individual redemption ethics of the past which have rejected the world have applied their rejection of the world at very different points of this purely rational constructed scale

1. Dualism: maintains that always the power of light and truth, purity and goodness coexist and conflict with the powers of darkness and falsehood, impurity and evil

• useful and harmful spirits
• Zoroastrism: prophetic religiousness which realized this conception most consistently; 'clean' and 'unclean'
• popular, worldwide conception of heaven and hell

2. Predestination: man acknowledged incapacity to scrutinize the ways of God means that he renounces in a loveless clarity man's accessibility to any meaning of the world

3. Unites virtuoso-like self-redemption by man's own effort with the universal accessibility of salvation, the strictest rejection of the world with organic social ethics, and contemplation as the paramount path to salvation with an inner-worldly vocational ethic

• peculiar to the religiosity of Indian intellectuals

The consistent brotherly ethic of salvation religions has come into an equally sharp tension with the political orders of the world

• the problem arose when these barriers of locality, tribe and polity were shattered by universalistic religions

The problem arose in full strength only when this god was a god of 'love'

• the political man acts just as the economic man (without regard to the person)
• without hate, therefore without love

The problem of tension with the political order emerged for redemption religions out of the basic demand for brotherliness

In politics as in economics, the more rational the political order became, the sharper the problems of these tensions became