In the first semester of my PhD courses (2014), I and my fellow students had to take Foundation of Religious Studies: History and Theories, taught by Dr. Matthew Kosuta at the time. This subject was compulsory, and we had to write several short pieces. This essay was the final term paper, my best one in this class. Other pieces were much crappier than this, so I keep them for myself only. Yet, my writing style here was still underdevelped. Dr. Kosuta commented that I used too many quotations. It would have been better if I used more paraphrasing. I put this work here because I love Weber, one of the most innovative thinkers on religion, and I want to keep his references on this topic in one place.
After I went through some hundreds of pages of Max Weber’s labyrinthine writings, with helping clues from some secondary sources, to find out what his main idea about religion is all about, I was baffled for days. In the very first sentence of The Sociology of Religion (a section in Economy and Society), Weber starts with this:
To define ‘religion,’ to say what it is, is not possible at the start of a presentation such as this. Definition can be attempted, if at all, only at the conclusion of the study. The essence of religion is not even our concern, as we make it our task to study the conditions and effects of a particular type of social action.
As far as I know from my readings, Weber does not conclude or summarize anything, so I suppose I cannot find any clear definition elsewhere. In the passage, he mentions “a particular type of social action.” From this, at least we know that, to Weber, religion is a kind of social action. But many things are a kind of social action too. So, what religion really is still hopelessly vague here.
I think Weber intends to put it as such, because when we define something we more or less describe it by its essence, components, or function. Weber is not concerned with essence, as mentioned above, but he sees religion as a social action. This sounds like Durkheimian in the first glance, but in fact these two men relate social to religion in different ways. While Durkheim reduces religion to its social function and sees religion, the sacred, as the society itself, Weber does not. He sees religion as a one of social components that interacts with other parts, especially in the socioeconomic realm. The main theme of Weber is how ones’ socioeconomic status shapes their needs for religion and how religious leaders convince people to fulfill their needs.
Does this mean that religion performs socioeconomic function, as Marx puts it? Not quite so, because Marx sees religion as nothing but a tool using by the upper class to justify fortune and misfortune. Weber sees fortune and misfortune are not entirely explainable in economic terms. When humans want to know why everyone was born into different lots, religion can explain in its own terms why some were born rich some poor. It is likely that religion, for Weber, performs a kind of psychological function, but not as Freud puts it—a discharge of unconscious repression. I will discuss this point in detail later.
I think it is quite clear what Weber means by religion, but we cannot pick only a single aspect out and call it religion. So, to capture the whole meaning of religion and put it into definition is impossible. We can say that Weber’s approach is not reductionism (he does not reduce religion to anything else), or phenomenology (he is not concerned with the common aspect of all religions manifested by its phenomena).
However, to me, for one who studies his works, it is inevitable to reduce his thought in some way. In my case, for instance, I try to reduce Weber’s idea about religion into psychological function, and I see that Weber himself sees all religions come from the same motive. What is this motive? Bryan Turner suggests that “The problem of theodicy is central to Weber’s sociology of religion.” From this hint, I think we can track down Weber’s idea of religion from this single idea, theodicy.
On theodicy
The word ‘theodicy’ was introduced by a German philosopher and mathematician, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, in his book with that name published in 1710. ‘Theodicy’ comes from Greek theos (god) + dikē (justice). The whole word means “A vindication of God’s goodness and justice in the face of the existence of evil.” Alvin Plantinga, a contemporary American philosopher, puts it this way: When a theist answers the question “Whence evil?” or “Why does God permit evil?” he is giving a theodicy. In Politics as a Vocation, Weber writes about the idea as follows:
The age-old problem of theodicy consists of the very question of how it is that a power which is said to be at once omnipotent and kind could have created such an irrational world of undeserved suffering, unpunished injustice, and hopeless stupidity.
However, Weber does not use this original, theological sense, but he uses it sociologically by applying it to all religions. For Weber, it does not matter whether God exists or not. The key idea of theodicy here is justification—how can we justify fortune and misfortune? The feeling of justification comes from a psychological need to pacify our anxiety, and to see injustice in the real world more reasonable/tolerable. This sounds close to Marx, and I think it really does.
Weber also writes in The Sociology of Religion as follows:
The conflict between empirical reality and this conception of the world as a meaningful totality, which is based on the religious postulate, produces the strongest tensions in man’s inner life as well as in his external relationship to the world. To be sure, this problem is by no means dealt with by prophecy alone. Both priestly wisdom and secular philosophy, the intellectualist as well as the popular varieties, are somehow concerned with it. The ultimate question of all metaphysics has always been something like this: if the world as a whole and life in particular were to have a meaning, what might it be, and how would the world have to look in order to correspond to it?
Put it simpler, when the conflict between concept (or what is postulated by authorities) and what is really seen by us in real life occurs, how should we deal with this discrepancy? Thus theodicies and ethical systems come.
Weber admits that theodicy has various forms but all address the same problem, as he put it:
The resultant problem of theodicy is found in ancient Egyptian literature as well as in Job and in Aeschylus, but in very different forms. All Hindu religion was influenced by it in the distinctive way necessitated by, its fundamental presuppositions; even a meaningful world order that is impersonal and super-theistic must face the problem of the world’s imperfections. In one form or another, this problem belongs everywhere among the factors determining religious evolution and the need for salvation.
That is because behind the variety of beliefs always lies a stance towards something in the actual world which is experienced as specifically ‘senseless.’ Thus, the demand has been implied that the world order in its totality is, could, and should somehow be a meaningful ‘cosmos.’ For Weber, there are only three theodicies that give rationally satisfactory answers to the questioning for the basis of the incongruity between destiny and merit: the doctrine of karma, Zoroastrian dualism, and the predestination decree of the deus abscondidus. The doctrine of karma, sometimes called the transmigration of souls, is the common belief in Indian religions. Dualism holds that the powers of light and truth, purity and goodness always coexist and conflict with the powers of darkness and falsehood, impurity and evil. Predestination is a belief that God’s sovereign, that is completely inexplicable, voluntary, and antecedently established (a consequence of his omniscience) determination, has decreed not only human fate on earth but also human destiny after death. We can find this belief in monotheistic religions, especially Calvinism.
It is the theodicy of predestination used by John Calvin, Weber points out, that nurtures the spirit of capitalism in the West as he elaborately explains in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. It was Calvin who stressed the dark teaching of predestination, which held that God, and God alone, determines the eternal fate of all mankind, choosing some (‘the elected’) to reach Heaven and eternally condemning others (‘the reprobate’) to Hell. The Protestant, especially the Calvinist, are encouraged to work hard and live ascetically in order to achieve worldly wealth. Because that wealth is a sign of God’s election. By his words, Weber says: “The world exists to serve the glorification of God and for that purpose alone. The elected Christian is in the world only to increase this glory of God by fulfilling His commandments to the best of his ability”. It is clear that behind this Protestant ethic lies a systematically conceptualized tenet of a theodicy.
In The Sociology of Religion, Weber accepts that the most complete formal solution of the problem of theodicy is the special achievement of the Indian doctrine of karma, the so-called belief in the transmigration of souls. In this system, guilt and merit within this world are unfailingly compensated by fate in the successive lives of the soul, which may be reincarnated innumerable times in animal, human, or even divine forms. The belief in the transmigration of souls has certain links with widely diffused animistic views regarding the passage of the spirits of the dead into natural objects. It rationalizes these beliefs, and indeed the entire cosmos, by means of purely ethical principles.
The naturalistic ‘causality’ of our habits of thought is thus supplanted by a universal mechanism of retribution, for which no act that is ethically relevant can ever be lost. About Buddhism he writes as follows:
In ancient Buddhism, where this mechanistic notion of the eternal order of the world has been developed with the greatest consistency, even the soul is completely eliminated. What alone exists is the sum of individual good or evil actions, which are relevant for the mechanisms of karma and associated with the illusion of the ego.
That is to say, Weber sees doctrine of karma as a theodicy is the best one and Buddhism has greatest consistency in its doctrine. Weber also asserts in The Social Psychology of the World Religions that “The two highest conceptions of sublimated religious doctrines of salvation are ‘rebirth’ and ‘redemption’.” That means the highest forms of religion, for him, are those of the Indian and Christian.
Although Indian religions and Christianity are very different in many respects, the underlying motive, as Weber points it out, is the same. People seek for meaning in the world, regularity under the universal law. That is to say, theodicy and religion as a whole is a kind of rationalization, the term Weber frequently uses throughout his works. This word is ambiguous. In general use it means spurious reasons (a rationale) we give others, and sometimes ourselves, for our actions. To rationalize our action is to make it sound better than it really is. But Weber uses rationalization to characterize modernity. For him, rationalization or rationalism means the methodical attainment of a definitely given and practical end by means of an increasingly precise calculation of adequate means. And the bureaucracy is the height of formal rationality, which he defined in terms of the five elements of efficiency, predictability, calculability, control through substituting nonhuman technology for human judgment, and the irrationality of rationality. I will not go too far to these notions in his theory of socioeconomics. To me, the psychological meaning of rationalization—a rationale that makes our action acceptable—is implied in Weber’s account of theodicy or religion as a whole.
Theodicies are products of the intellectual
The next point I will elucidate is all systems of theodicy are created by a privileged class, the intellectual, because they are able to do so—to find the meaning of the world. In The Social Psychology of the World Religions, Weber writes: “This quest [for the meaningful cosmos], the core of genuine religious rationalism, has been born precisely by strata of intellectuals.” And in The Sociology of Religion, he asserts likewise: “The intellectual seeks in various ways, the casuistry of which extends into infinity, to endow his life with a pervasive meaning, and thus to find unity with himself, with his fellow men, and with the cosmos. It is the intellectual who conceives of the ‘world’ as a problem of meaning.” From these remarks, Weber sees religion, or particularly theodicy, is a product of rationalization by the intellectual.
In the case of Buddhism, Weber stresses that it is the product of the noble class. He writes in The Religion of India: “Like Jainism, but even clearly, Buddhism presents itself as a product of the time of urban development, of urban kingship and the city nobles.” Also in The Sociology of Religion he writes: “Buddhism clearly arose as the salvation doctrine of an intellectual stratum, originally recruited almost entirely from the privileged castes, especially the warrior caste, which proudly and aristocratically rejected the illusions of life, both here and hereafter.”
Weber thinks that ancient Buddhism is one of the worldviews of Kshatriya challenging the Brahman hegemony in spiritual matters, because Brahmanism is obviously a product of priestly class, the Brahmans. By this we can see that both Kshatriya and Brahman are regarded as the intellectual, the privileged classes that have power to establish any system of belief. As confirmed by Weber, “it appears rather certain that originally Buddhism, exactly like Jainism, first firmly adhered to the conviction that only one born in the Brahman or Kshatriya castes was qualified for full gnosis.”
There might be a conflict between classes, but not in Marxist sense, I think. Weber thinks a new religious movement comes from the prophet who challenges the priestly-bureaucratic system. Still, all religious leaders are the intellectual who are able to figure out why the world does not go in the way we expect. Another point worth noting here is Weber thinks Buddhism is a product of modernity (at that time), because it is founded by urban kingship and the city nobles. I think he wants to show that Buddhism is the higher form of rationalization than Brahmanism, or more modern.
However, in other place Weber writes: “A religion of salvation may very well have its origin within socially privileged groups. For the charisma of the prophet is not confined to membership in any particular class; and furthermore, it is normally associated with a certain minimum of intellectual cultivation.” This means the prophet may be not the intellectual originally. But the character of religion of such a prophet will be changed to intellectualism when it reaches the lay people, as Weber puts it, “salvation religion changes its character as soon as it has reached lay groups who are not particularly or professionally concerned with the cultivation of intellectualism, and certainly changes its character after it has reached into the disprivileged social strata to whom intellectualism is both economically and socially inaccessible.” I think he means that even though some religion is non-intellectual in origin, the religion that posits a savior like Christianity, for example, once people embrace it, it will transform to intellectualized religion.
How significant when religion comes from a particular kind of class? This reminds me to Marx again. It does not seem to resonate with Marx’s idea about conflict between classes as I mention above. But I think it is possible to be an exploitation or a manipulation by a particular group of people who have power of knowledge. I also think in the line of Michel Foucault—knowledge can be shaped by power. Though it may be not the case when we consider the prophet who establishes a new religion, because he may not intend to do so, it is the later development of religion into institution which Weber calls Routinization of Charisma that power can be a great influence.
Modernity makes theodicies less powerful
Weber also shows that the use of theodicies is not everlasting. An older form of rationalization will be lost its credibility and supplanted by the newer one, because sometimes the reasons given no longer work. Weber writes in The Social Psychology of the World Religions as follows:
The need for an ethical interpretation of the ‘meaning’ of the distribution of fortunes among men increased with the growing rationality of conceptions of the world. As the religious and ethical reflections upon the world were increasingly rationalized and primitive, and magical notions were eliminated, the theodicy of suffering encountered increasing difficulties. Individually ‘undeserved’ woe was all too frequent; not ‘good’ but ‘bad’ men succeeded.
This means sometimes, for instance, the doctrine of karma is incomprehensible in the real life: why the bad are successful but the good are not. There is a point worth noting here. Weber thinks religious and ethical thinking replace magical thinking by rationalization. This reminds me to E. B. Tylor and James G. Frazer who hold that the primitive form of religious thinking is not mature enough, it can evolve into a more sophisticated form.
The unpredictable bad effects from human actions, particularly in the large-scale, collective forms of action in which politics engages us, make rational calculations about the justifications of means by ends impossible. Weber calls this the “ethical irrationality of the world.” In another place he writes: “In so far as appearances show, the actual course of the world has been little concerned with this postulate of compensation. The ethically unmotivated inequality in the distribution of happiness and misery, for which a compensation has seemed conceivable, has remained irrational; and so has the brute fact that suffering exists.” And by his own observation, “a recent questionnaire submitted to thousands of German workers disclosed the fact that their rejection of the god-idea was motivated, not by scientific arguments, but by their difficulty in reconciling the idea of providence with the injustice and imperfection of the social order.” It is clear that theodicies no longer work as they should, and Weber recognizes this situation well.
Weber uses disenchantment to elucidate the point. He points out that once belief in magic was disenchanted by rationalized religious thought: “As intellectualism suppresses belief in magic, the world’s processes become disenchanted, lose their magical significance, and henceforth simply ‘are’ and ‘happen’ but no longer signify anything. And the next turn, belief in religions will be disenchanted by empirical knowledge or science. In Religious Rejections of the World and Their Directions, Weber writes as follows:
The tension between religion and intellectual knowledge definitely comes to the fore wherever rational, empirical knowledge has consistently worked through to the disenchantment of the world and its transformation into a causal mechanism. … Every increase of rationalism in empirical science increasingly pushes religion from the rational into the irrational realm; but only today does religion become the irrational or anti-rational supra-human power.
This means that religion, in the eyes of science, has less credibility and sometimes is counted as superstition—irrational belief.
For Weber, scientific progress is the most important fraction of the process of intellectualization. He explains further in Science as a Vocation, “it means that principally there are no mysterious incalculable forces that come into play, but rather that one can, in principle, master all things by calculation. This means that the world is disenchanted.” And this may be the best conclusion from Weber’s view:
The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the ‘disenchantment of the world.’”
That is to say, in Weber’s mind the world will go towards secularism. That means every aspect of our life can be disenchantingly rationalized by science, and religion will not be necessary anymore. Rationalization, once given by theodicy now has less power, will be replaced by a more reliable rationalization given by science. Again, this reminds me to Tylor and Frazer. They really have a very close idea like this.
Some scholar argues that Weber does not think that religion evolves over time along the line of progress from the ancient to the modern, or from the simple to the complex, as the fact shows that magic, religion and science can exist at the same time. It is true if we look at a snap of time. But if we consider the whole period in history, we will realize that belief in magic is really decreased over time, while explanatory power of science is increased continually, and even rapidly nowadays. Since religion is a complex phenomenon, I think it will not transform to science, but religion will adapt itself instead to be more compatible with science. So, I contend that we can find evolutionary pattern in Weber’s idea of rationalization.
Conclusion
Weber’s theory is really complicated. In his idea, we can find some elements of Tylor’s, Frazer’s, Marx’s, Durkheim’s, and Freud’s thought. That is because, I think, Weber does not reduce religion to simpler components or function. He holds that everything related to religion is significant. We must consider the whole tapestry of social phenomena, not just a few aspects, to understand what religion is and does. That is why his thought is complicated. It is because social matrix is indeed complicated.
The point I would like to conclude here is by no means Weber’s only main idea, but it can capture the whole idea presented in this article. Weber thinks human beings long for meaning. All activities we pursue are rooted in how meaningful we perceive ourselves and the world. For Weber, it is neither religion nor science that matters, it is meaning of life that matters. In his myriad accounts on religion, this is what it’s all about.
The best way to end this article comes from Clifford Geertz. He says he believes as Weber does that “man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun.” We all create our own meaning by projecting our need to the world. The underlying motive of all religious phenomena, as I read from Weber, is really a psychological one.
Notes