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Understanding the Religious Personality

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 September 2014

William Cenkner
William Cenkner*
Affiliation:
The Catholic University of America
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Abstract

If greater intelligibility is to be achieved in the study of religious figures, the work of symbol in the life of individuals should be probed. Method grounded in sociological and psychological theory holds this possibility. Three considerations center this approach to understanding: (a) the religious figure is formed as he intersects with a symbol system, a process of creative resymbolization; (b) the religious figure is differentiated from others and understood within one of many distinct fields of experience, each field having significant psychological effects on spiritual development; (c) the understanding one achieves is contained by the questions brought to the datum. When more personalistic questions are raised of the religious figure within his symbol system, important differences in meaning result. Taken together, these meanings may approach integral understanding.

Type
Articles
Information
Horizons , Volume 5 , Issue 1 , Spring 1978 , pp. 1 - 16
Copyright
Copyright © The College Theology Society 1978

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References

1 Cf. Gonda, J., “The Guru,” Change and Continuity in Indian Religion (The Hague: Mouton & Co., 1965)Google Scholar; Heimann, Betty, “Religious Sociology,” Facets of Indian Thought (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1964)Google Scholar; White, Charles S. J., “Sāi Bābā Movement: Approaches to the Study of Indian Saints,” Journal of Asian Studies 31 (1972)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Churye, G. S., Indian Sadhus (Bombay: Popular Book Depot, 1953)Google Scholar; Miller, David M. and Wertz, Dorothy C., Hindu Monastic Life (Montreal: McGill-Queen's Press, 1976)Google Scholar.

2 Cf. Geertz, Clifford, Islam Observed, Religious Development in Morocco and Indonesia (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1968), pp. 23, 58Google Scholar.

3 Berger, Peter L., The Sacred Canopy, Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1969), pp. 3ffGoogle Scholar. Throughout this paper I am using the term socialization as understood by Berger in the first chapter of this work, “Religion and World-Construction.” Socialization includes the whole process of externalization, objectivation, and internalization: (a) the outpouring of physical and mental activity into the world; (b) the attainment by the products of this activity of a reality external to and other than themselves; (c) the reappropriation of this same reality, transforming it from structures of the objective world into structures of the subjective consciousness.

4 I am influenced by Mircea Eliade's conception of symbol here but for the sake of a comprehensive notion include Ian Barbour's understanding of myth, model and paradigm. Cf. Barbour, Ian G., Myths, Models and Paradigms, A Comparative Study in Science and Religion (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), pp. 7ffGoogle Scholar.

5 At this point I accept Ian Barbour's notion of models as my working definition of a symbol system: “They are organizing images used to order and interpret patterns of experience in human life.” Cf. Barbour, , Myths, Models and Paradigms, p. 7Google Scholar.

6 Contemporary thinkers such as Cassirer, Langer, Ricoeur, Gilkey, Fromm and Rahner have written widely on man as primal symbol and symbol-maker.

7 Davis, Charles, Christ and the World Religions (New York: Herder & Herder, 1971), p. 104Google Scholar.

8 Ibid., pp. 104ff.; cf. Cenkner, William, “The Convergence of Religions,” Cross Currents 22, 4.4 (1973), pp. 429–437Google Scholar.

9 Ibid., pp. 107–108. It is my estimation that Davis is speaking of Barbour's notion of model when he discusses a symbol system.

10 A similar process is identified by Mircea Eliade as hierophanization. Each hierophany is understood best within the framework of the symbolism it implies, and the symbol system which makes it up, for Eliade, must be seen in every fragment. Other than those objects or events which are immediately hierophanous, Eliade speaks of the mediate hierophany, which is effected by “sharing in or becoming part of a magico-religious system that is always a symbolic system or symbolism.” That which constitutes, for example, the symbolism of a sacred pearl is primarily the framework of symbols surrounding it. Hierophanization, for Eliade, is a particular language grasped by the believer because it expresses clearly and simultaneously the social history and the psychic condition of those involved in it and their relationships with both society and the mystery of the cosmos. Cf. Eliade, Mircea, Patterns in Comparative Religion (New York: Meridian Books, 1958), pp. 437–451Google Scholar. Hierophanization comes especially close to Peter Berger's third moment in the socialization process, namely, internalization. Contemporary thinkers would term this a symbolization process. Consequently, hierophanization, socialization, and symbolization are different ways of viewing and different modalities of the same human process.

11 Cf. Smith, Wilfred Cantwell, The Faith of Other Men (New York: New American Library, 1963), for a basic notion of a master symbolGoogle Scholar.

12 For an understanding of the Jain vow of nonkilling, cf. Dasgupta, Surendranath, A History of Indian Philosophy (Cambridge: The University Press, 1932), Vol. 1, p. 200Google Scholar; Brown, W. Norman, Man in the Universe, Some Cultural Continuities in India (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1966), p. 57Google Scholar.

13 Cenkner, William, “Gandhi's Ahimsa: The Transformation of an Ethical Value,” That They May Live, ed. Devine, George (New York: Alba House, 1971), pp. 265–281Google Scholar; also, “Gandhi and Creative Conflict,” Humanitas 10, 2 (1974), pp. 159–170Google Scholar.

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15 The notion of religious symbol I am espousing here is influenced by Robert Bellah's call for symbolic realism which takes seriously the area of experience and non-cognitive symbols. A historian of religions, I believe, could find Bellah's understanding of religious symbol compatible: “… Religion is seen as a system of symbols which is neither simply objective nor simply subjective but which links subject and object in a way that transfigures reality or even, in a sense, creates reality.” Bellah, Robert N., “Religion in the University: Changing Consciousness, Changing Structures,” in Welch, Claude (ed.), Religion in the Undergraduate Curriculum:An Analysis and Interpretation (Washington: Association of American Colleges, 1972), p. 14Google Scholar; also, Bellah, Robert N., “Christianity and Symbolic Realism,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 9, 2 (1970), pp. 89–99CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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18 Cf. Maslow, Abraham, Motivation and Personality, 2nd ed. (New York: Harpers, 1970)Google Scholar; also, Religions, Values, and Peak Experiences (New York: The Viking Press, 1970)Google Scholar.

19 McDermott, Robert A., “The Religion Game: Some Family Resemblances,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 28, 4 (1970)Google Scholar.

20 Non-attachment is an Indian conception (cf. McDermott, “The Religion Game”) but can be identified in the asceticisms of most world religions; it is a type of detachment, abstention in classical spiritualities which permits not only self-transcendency but the formation of a new personality. Non-attachment, from a psychological perspective, may be the most important factor conditioning an individual for personality transformation.

21 Cenkner, , “Gandhi's Ahimsa,” pp. 267–269Google Scholar.

22 Smith, The Faith of Other Men, chapters 2-5.

23 This is especially true of R. C. Zaehner and other scholars of the British school of comparative religions.

24 Cenkner, William, The Hindu Personality in Education: Tagore, Gandhi, Aurobindo (Delhi: Manohar Books, 1976), pp. 129–143Google Scholar.

25 Kitagawa, Joseph M., “The Making of a Historian of Religion,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 26, 3 (1968), p. 200Google Scholar.

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27 Helfer, James S., ed., On Method in the History of Religions (Wesleyan University Press, Betheft 8, 1968), pp. 1–7Google Scholar; the work of Robert D. Baird (footnote 29) also testifies to this.

28 Reification is discussed by Smith, Wilfred Cantwell, The Meaning and End of Religion (New York: Mentor Books, 1964)Google Scholar.

29 Baird, Robert D., “Interpretative Categories and the History of Religions,” in Helfer, James S. (ed.), On Method in the History of ReligionsGoogle Scholar; also Baird, Robert D., Category Formation and the History of Religions (The Hague: Mouton, 1971)Google Scholar.

30 Smith, The Meaning and End of Religion.

31 Field work has not been employed in the study of religions by students of religion on any large scale. The task basically elicits from believers the questions they formulate about the world around them as well as the answers they give to them. Cf. Saliba, John A., “The New Ethnography and the Study of Religion,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 13, 2 (1974)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

32 For an annotated bibliography on the recent work between religion and anthropology, cf. Saliba, John A., “Religion and the Anthropologists: 1960–1976,” Parts I and II, Anthropologica (Ottawa), No. 2, 1976, No. 2, 1977Google Scholar.

33 Saliba, , “The New Ethnography and the Study of Religion,” pp. 154–156Google Scholar; for a study of participant observation and the empathy skills required, cf., Katz, Robert L., Empathy. Its Nature and Uses (New York: Free Press, 1963), pp. 36–38, 136Google Scholar; also Redfield, Robert, The Primitive World and Its Transformations (Ithaca: Cornell University Press), pp. 81–85Google Scholar; also Stein, Edith, On the Problem of Empathy (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1964)Google Scholar.

34 Heimann, , Facets of Indian Thought, pp. 70ffGoogle Scholar.

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37 Whitson, Robley, The Coming Convergence of World Religions (New York: Newman, 1971)Google Scholar.

38 Raimundo Panikkar speaks of experiencing within other religions than one's own in the dialogue of religions; cf., Panikkar, Raimundo, “The Category of Growth in Comparative Religion: A Critical Self-Examination,” Harvard Theological Review, 66, 1 (1973), pp. 114–140Google Scholar.

39 This is a consistent principle in the educational theory of Philip Phenix; cf., Phenix, Philip H., “Religion in Public Education: Principles and Issues,” in Smith, Richard Upsher (ed.), Religion and the Public School Curriculum (New York: The Religious Education Association, 1972), pp. 11–24Google Scholar.

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