Discussions with Max about religion had an exciting effect on Else Jaffe. Religion for him was not simply a cultural phenomena, as it was for the ‘cultural Protestantism’ of his time, or a mere superstructure of society or an instrument for the stabilization of a social system, as it was for Durkheim – on the contrary, religion was often an eternal reproach against everyday structures. It came from the depths of the human being and had a similar power to erotic love: partly akin to, partly in struggle with it. In his writings on the sociology of religion, was he speaking simply of a phenomena he had observed from a distance, or of a power that he felt in himself? Weber’s own religiosity is the greatest puzzle in the whole area of Weber studies, up to now even more obscure than his sexuality. Here he was even shyer about revealing his inner being than he was in relation to his sexual life; perhaps he was also loath to focus on substrata of his thoughts and feelings, lest it interfere with his creative powers. After all, for many years he had to endure the torture watchfulness that prevented him from sleeping.
To one young participant in the discussions at Lauenstein Castle (July, 1917), who had evidently heard intimate confessions from him, Weber wrote: “To me the limit of “confessing” is where things involved that are ‘sacred”’; they should be spoken of only in a ‘good hour’ and in a circle of close friends. This implied that there really were areas of ‘the sacred’ within his inner being. If Weber took up the cudgels against value-judgments in science, he did so not because there were no values in his eyes, but because his values were too ‘sacred’ to be mixed up with science. As Marianne wrote of the lectures on science and politics as vocations, ‘final judgments sparkle . . .here and there, as lodestars through ‘open secrets’ – more in indirect than in direct communication, it is true – and for that very reason stimulate those who hear and read them to ask and search.’
He (Weber) ‘is suspected of being such an extremely “moral” person’, Weber wrote with exclamation marks in 1912 to Sombart, who was suspected of being the opposite. Asked what was so mysterious about Weber, the art historian Carl Neumann replied that in conversation with him one sensed a “’limitless moral energy’ ‘although he only gave out scraps about himself’- by which was probably meant ‘about the origin of his morality’. But the question is whether there actually was one origin. Weber was not the closed personality he seemed to be to others; his ‘polytheism of values’ corresponded to the fissures within himself. The values that gave life meaning for him did not all originate in the same spirit. But the fact that they were sacred to him, and that he timidly kept them hidden, indicated that they came from religious roots that were removed from the discussion.
Be this as it may, a lifelong fascination for religious phenomena is scarcely conceivable without some religious experience of one’s own, and not at all in a man who pursued science out of passion. At the age of eighteen, he was ‘already deeply immersed in theology’, although it was distracting him from his studies. No other of his major research focuses came so entirely from within himself. And, as Hennis has written: ‘There could in the history of social sciences have been very few Germans who retained such a fine sense of the meaning of religion.’ His detailed knowledge of religious issues and his capacity to empathize with religious states of mind became his main trump cards in comparison with other economists and political theorists. His thesis that the power of religion unleashed capitalism made him famous around the world. HE thought he understood better than most intellectuals what fear of hellfire and hopes of salvation meant for people in earlier times., and what effect they had on lifestyles and the general zest for life; he thought he could differentiate more precisely than others between various forms of asceticism and ecstasy, between genuine and feigned mysticism and charismatics- distinctions that are hard to derive from the sources alone unless one has also had personal experience of them.
The question of Weber’s religiosity is usually much too hastily dismissed with a reference to his claim, made to Ferdinand Tonnies, that he was ‘absolutely unmusical in religious matters’. Even there, however, one only has to read the whole sentence and the ones that follow it to recognize the ambiguity of the statement, which was addressed to a man notoriously contemptuous of all theology.
For I am absolutely ‘unmusical’ in religious matters and have neither the need nor the ability to erect any spiritual; structures of a religious kind within me – that is simply not on, or I decline to do it. But, on closer examination, I am neither anti-religious nor irreligious. In this respect too I feel a cripple, a mutilated person, whose inner destiny it is to have to admit this honestly.
‘Unmusical in religious matters’ was an allusion to Schleirermacher, who spoke of music as his ‘religion’. But this kind of religion was not Weber’s ‘thing’; what he felt as divine was not associated with the sonorous harmony of intoxicating organ music. Nor would it ever have occurred to him to construct an edifying theological system. The quotation does clearly reveal, though, how in both religion and eroticism he felt himself to be a ‘cripple’, who would like to do something of which he was actually incapable. A complete person had the capacity for religion as well as love; religious potency appeared as a natural disposition akin to sexual potency, with none of the bigotry that anti-clericalists used to ascribe to the devout.
So, when Weber became an erotic man, did he also not feel a new energy for religious experience? Two weeks after the letter quoted to Tonnes, on 2 March 1909, he returned to the ‘unmusical in religious matters’ and remarked, from the point of view of an outsider, that the ‘problems of the historical significance of mysticism’ were unfathomable. And Weber, who otherwise used to react allergically to the cult of ‘experience’, acknowledged: ‘There, only there, do I have the impression . . .that I must experience these mental states to understand their consequences. I have to confess this, although I myself an ‘unmusical’ in religion.’ Later he wrote about mysticism and felt competent to analyze the states of mind associated with it; he must have experienced them, if we take him at his word. And in that domain, as well as in erotic love, he no longer felt a ‘cripple’.
In ‘Science as a Vocation’, Weber speaks of the ‘religious organ’ of ‘a truly religiously musical’ man’. Already in many letters from his youth, there is a conviction that human beings have a natural predisposition to religion; and the same premise is discernible between the lines of his sociology of religion- where he mentions quite in passing the ineradicable demand for theodicy’ as if it were a well-known fact. Even in the economic context of the satisfaction of needs, he points to the ‘religious need’ that an be met in diverse ways: one basic need, therefore, behind the various phenomena of religion.
The young Weber thought that the de-mythologizing programme of liberal Bible critics was rather silly; their know-all attitude to the stories of Jesus diverted attention from the sources of religious energy. He taught (his brother) Alfred that religion made a mark even on people who wanted nothing to do with it; that we all behave ‘involuntarily’ in accordance with Christian doctrines. The starting point of his sociology of religion is the idea that religion impacts on the world where we least suspect it: in the genesis of modern capitalism. In sharp contrast to notions prevalent at the time, he always worked on the assumption that religion and rationality are not necessarily opposites, and that the history of religion- especially of Judaism and Christianity – is shot through with processes of rationalization and spell-breaking ( Entzauberung). As Hartmann Tyrell notes, Weber became ‘magnetically attracted to issues of religious-ethical rationality; the modern disenchantment of the world therefore des not necessarily entail secularization. At times Weber does give the impression that the power of religion is a thing of the past, but on the whole he gives reasons to expect that religious-like beliefs will in the future continue to cast their spell on many people, since modern man in particular hankers after salvation. Today it looks as if Weber’s vision in this respect was clearer than that of many other pioneering theorists of modernization.*
*see: https://johnshaplin.blogspot.com/2013/11/the-triumph-of-religion-by-jacques-lacan.html
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