RELIGIOUS LEADERS: MAGICIAN, PRIEST, AND PROPHET

Religion for Weber is rooted in special experiences, what he calls “ecstatic states,” that put people beyond the realm of everyday activity and disclose to them another level of reality. Anyone may have such an experience on occasion, but those who can manage it on a regular basis are naturally regarded as having special talent in spirituality. They have “charisma” (a key term for Weber, as we have seen); they possess a gift that gives them a claim to the role of religious leader. In early societies, the magician was the person the tribe regarded as “permanently endowed with charisma.” When the need arose, people called on the magician to cure illness, to make the hunt succeed, or to assist the crops in their growth. Frazer, we may recall, spoke in a similar fashion, but Weber does not see magic as a form of primitive science, different from religion. Magicians, he says, do not rely only on impersonal principles of contact and imitation; they also engage the gods or spirits, something Frazer reserved only for religion. Nor is there a sequence in which religion emerges after magic fails. Magical interest in miracles and healings may be more common in earlier, simpler cultures, but it can appear at any time, even in complex, modern religious systems, because it offers things ordinary people need or want in everyday life.

Magic tends to be an occasional thing, focused on immediate concerns; normally people call on the magicians when the practical need arises. That is not the case with religious leaders who function as priests. In general, we find a religious priesthood where there is some kind of permanent system of worship at fixed times and places and associated with a definite religious community. If we encounter the same ritual routine performed in a certain temple daily at dawn or weekly at dusk, we normally find a specialized priesthood in charge. The priest, even in most primitive societies, is a permanent, paid official. We can think of him as having charisma, like the magician, but it is something derived from his office rather than from his personal magnetism. The priest’s “professional” status is defined by the rites he controls and by the religious community of ordinary people, the laity, he directs. In more complex societies, as we might expect, priests fit into Weber’s category of bureaucratic domination. They are “professionals” in religion; they have assigned duties and are arranged in ranks with differing

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levels of responsibility; they are conscious of their special status, dispensing religious guidance and benefits to clients; and above all, they prize social and religious order. In ancient India, for example, it was the community of priests that promoted Varuna and Mitra, the gods of cosmic law and order, against Rudra, the chaotic god of storms.

The notions of cosmic order and a universal ethic bring us to the third ideal-type: the prophet. Among those who become social leaders, says Weber, there is hardly a single type—statesman, artist, intellectual, or conqueror—more consequential to the course of civilizations than the commanding figure of the prophet. He is a person recognized as “a purely individual bearer of charisma.”¹⁴ The prophet may appear at any time in a culture, acting on a powerful sense of mission, to proclaim for all a comprehensive “religious doctrine or divine commandment.” A prophet is not a magician, centered on securing everyday practical benefits—foretelling the future, curing illness, changing the weather. He may have some magical appeal, but the center of his life is his mission: He has been specially called by either the voice of God or a vision of Truth to proclaim a life-altering message. He would find it absurd to be paid for his labors. His calling sustains him, and he is content if need be to live in poverty, accepting only what people voluntarily give him to subsist. A prophet is also unlike a priest. His authority is not derived from his religious office. It anchors itself in the revolutionary power of his personality and his message. It is clear that most of the great world religions trace their origin to a transforming prophetic figure whose charismatic life and compelling message revolutionized the world of his day.

Historically, prophets have been of two main types. The “exemplary prophet”—the wise man who teaches by his own powerful example—has predominated in the Far East. In India, Gautama the Buddha belongs to this type, as do the teachers Lao-tzu and Confucius in China. Each offers a path of wisdom and truth meant for all, even if only some have the full capacity

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Prophets, of course, are exceptional people—capable of living an entire life at the highest level of personal commitment. The prophet’s followers, being normal human beings, are less likely to possess such total dedication. So in any religious community, if it is to sustain itself over time, the charisma of the founder must somehow be kept alive by successors. The ideal-type Weber frames for this critically important process is, as noted, the “routinization” of charisma—the transformation of the prophet’s inspirational gift into something permanent, something fixed in the bureaucracy of an institution.¹⁵ After the death of Jesus, for example, it fell to the twelve apostles, then to the Church fathers, and later to the priests and bishops of the Catholic Church to make his charisma routine by molding it into institutional systems, by giving it fixed forms that would make it last. In this way, the priestly bureaucracy, by nature opposed to the unpredictable inspirations of prophecy, can become the prophet’s best ally after his death. Only a conservative bureaucratic system— aimed at maintaining the prophet’s truth (now that it has won a following)— can frame his message into a system of teaching and administration that will be able to guide an ever-enlarging community, or “congregation” (Weber’s preferred term for this ideal-type), of followers through the ages. This structural support comes at a price, of course, for bureaucracies tend to smother the fires of the spirit. Reformers with charisma of another kind will on occasion need to challenge priestly authority and restore the original vigor of the prophet’s message. Episodes of tension are thus to be expected, for the vitality of the original message is always put at risk by the dead hand of bureaucratic officialdom.

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SOCIAL CLASSES AND GROUPS

In speaking of the religious congregation, Weber calls attention to the key role of the laity—ordinary people who hold no offices but form the vast majority of participants in any religious community. Charisma, in prophetic or any other form, does not exist unless a community of laypeople comes to recognize and reinforce it. So an appreciation of their role is essential. It is important to grasp not only the place of social classes and groups in religious communities but especially the role they play in responding to the demands of the great prophetic religions. Weber’s dissent from Marx in this connection is significant. For Marx, one issue, the division of classes into rich and poor, determines all others; for Weber, things again are considerably more complex. Social groupings are formed not just by economic separation according to class but also by such things as location (rural or urban), vocation (craftsman, farmer, or warrior), and, notably, social respect or honor (status group). As we saw earlier, one element of bureaucracy as an idealtype is the claim of respect made by those who belong to it: They are “professionals.” In Weber’s analyses, intellectuals, or “literati,” who earn honor for their impressive learning or cultivation often acquire distinctive status as a bureaucracy in the same manner as the elders in a tribal society.

Depending on the place and time, each of these varied social groups has a distinctive part to play in the religious enterprise, and social science can discern certain typical patterns of action. Rural peasants, for example, live close to nature and depend on the weather. Almost always, therefore, they are drawn toward magical practices, looking for help in day-to-day life and labor. Even where a great prophet has established an ethical type of congregational religion, peasants find themselves subtly drawn back toward magic and miracles. Despite Confucius’ promotion of prophetic ethical religion, magic has for centuries mattered most to the simple farmers of China. Despite the moral precepts of the Sermon on the Mount, the Christian Church’s relics, the icons, and miracles of the saints have long been the main interest of Europe’s rural classes: peasants, serfs, and day laborers. Rarely do they give undivided loyalty to a prophetic faith; more often, they mix it with magic.¹⁶

As it happens, the privileged classes, protective of their advantages, have also shown resistance to prophetic religion, though from other motives. Their sense of honor and prestige is easily affronted by the demand that they change the course of their lives or ask forgiveness from a priest or some other social inferior. Similarly, bureaucratic elites do not always welcome the prophet or his message; they are disposed to find it irrational unless, as among China’s Confucian mandarins, it can serve the useful purpose of taming the masses. Even so, prophetic religion does sometimes show the power of breaking through

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such resistance. Especially among warrior nobles and knights, who must summon the courage to face death, prophetic religion has been enlisted to give an ultimate meaning and purpose to warfare. This was especially the case with Islam, where the warrior class became the main bearer of the crusade mentality that has left its mark on most Muslim civilizations. The middle class, on the other hand, shows considerable diversity in its religious responses. The “commercial patriciate,” composed of wealthy upper-middle-class merchant families, normally shows little serious interest. But a different response appears farther down the social scale among the artisans and craftsmen of the cities, the heart of the populous lower middle classes. Among these industrious groups—separated enough from nature to be freed of interests in magic and motivated strongly by an ethical sense of fair reward for fair labor—prophetic religion has had its most powerful appeal. From its earliest centuries, Christianity was known as the religion of the cities, not the countryside.

The poor are drawn to savior cults in part by the hope of a future reward, righting life’s injustices either in the immediate present or in a future life. Another motive, not unlike the hope of reward, appears wherever there is a status group of elite intellectuals:

The intellectual seeks in various ways … to endow his life with pervasive mean-
ing. As intellectualism suppresses belief in magic, the world’s processes have

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Nearly everywhere among educated elites there is a deep yearning to find some true cosmic purpose to human existence in the world as we encounter it. In Asia most notably, “all the great religious doctrines … are creations of intellectuals,” and they tend to become the special possession only of intellectuals.¹⁸ The West strongly resisted elitism of this kind. Christianity, though it certainly has had an intellectual component, rejected the Gnostic teaching that true knowledge of God is the exclusive preserve of an intellectual elite. The urban craftsmen and tradesmen, who were the main bearers of Christian ideas and values in ancient Rome, declared their Gospel open to all classes, groups, races, and nations.

Whatever the interests of intellectuals as a group, all of the world’s prophetic religions must deal with one overriding intellectual problem—the mystery of evil or theodicy (in Greek, “justifying God”). They need to explain how any idea of ultimate goodness can fit together with a day-to-day world that is so deeply flawed and filled with suffering. With this challenging topic as the transition, Weber turns to examine religious belief and behavior. His discussion is, again, difficult and inaccessible in places, so we will follow just the main themes.

The responses that religions make to the problem of evil divide into three ideal-types. One formula proposes that the problem will be solved either within this world at some future time when justice at last will triumph (as held by early Judaism) or outside of this life in another realm or a future existence when all will be made right (as held in later Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and other faiths). Alternatively, one can say with the Book of Job and some of Islamic theology that God, or the universe, is simply inexplicable; our moral reasoning can never fathom ultimate questions. Or one can claim that there are two ultimate realities in the universe: either a good and an evil God, as the ancient Zoroastrians held, or a realm of spirit that is pure and eternal and a realm of material things that is subject to death and decay, as Hindu Brahmins have long maintained. Few religions offer these choices in the pure forms of these ideal-types. Most tend to mix different elements from each type in distinctive ways, and most (as we have noted) do so by offering as part of the solution a comprehensive program of human salvation, a formula

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One of the oldest avenues to salvation is ritualized action. Performing a ceremony or achieving a mental state, as in ancient Buddhist meditation, brings a person at that instant into enlightenment, or near to a god. Since these moods are momentary, the emphasis more often centers on various good works done over time. Credits are either tallied up at the end of life and weighed in the balance, as the prophet Zoroaster taught, or seen as expressions of an “ethical total personality.”¹⁹ Across almost all cultures, this pattern comes to clearest expression in certain exceptional people who practice what Weber calls “virtuoso sanctification”; they seek to be supreme artists of the moral life. In their differing ways, Buddhist and Christian monks, Pharisaic Jews, saints like St. Francis, Sufi mystics in Islam, and Puritans driven by the Protestant ethic all exhibit this trait. They claim an elevated status as spiritual athletes; disdaining “average morality,” they seek living perfection instead.

Among these perfectionists, says Weber, we need to make some further distinctions, for not all heroes are the same. The term “asceticism” best describes one type of perfectionist practice, while “mysticism” better fits the other. The kind of strenuous ethical activity practiced by most Catholic monks in the Western world illustrates ascetic perfectionism. They see themselves as “instruments of God,” actively engaged in a spiritual struggle that demands all of their strength to overcome weakness and resist temptation. Others, like the monks of earliest Buddhism, are just as perfectionist but adopt instead a passive, contemplative spiritual posture, and they are better described as practicing mysticism. They see themselves as vessels that receive spirituality rather than as instruments that actively achieve it. Their mission is not, like that of most Western monks, to embark on a program of spiritual striving but to contemplate, to achieve a quiet state of profound peace, enjoying within themselves the serenity that arrives as the soul absorbs Truth or becomes filled with the Divine.

There are, further, two settings in which each of these two forms of spiritual heroism can be pursued: either within the world of daily life or in isolation from it. Though possible in theory, passive spiritual perfection is difficult to achieve while actively living in the world, so the natural preference of the mystic is to reject the world and seek escape to a place of isolation, such as the forest retreat or the hermit’s cave that we find in the earliest forms of Buddhism.

There one can be alone and claim the joy of nothingness or swim in the oceanic peace of the divine being. Asceticism faces the same pair of options. It can either reject or embrace the everyday world as the scene of its activities. Most medieval Christian monasteries housed monks who worked in a place of isolation and saw themselves in ascetic terms, as spiritual heroes actively engaged in the service of God. They were not passive mystics in the manner of Buddhist monks who begged for their daily food. They cleared the forests, planted fields, and took the vow of St. Benedict that required them both to pray and to work— ora et labora—as they built their spiritual communities separated from the rest of society. The self-perfecting Calvinists who conducted their business in cities like London and Amsterdam were equally ascetic and spiritual. But in their Protestant ethic there was also a crucial difference. The arena for their heroic devotions was not the monastery; it was out in the workplace of the everyday world. Like the medieval monk, the Puritan merchant enlisted in a life of spiritual struggle and self-restraint, but it came to expression through an “inner-worldly asceticism,” a program of disciplined spiritual living that he applied within the realm of every day life and business. The social consequences of this behavior were momentous. In practical effect, the Calvinist Protestant sought nothing less than “to transform the world in accord with his ascetic ideals.”²⁰ We can recall here for the purpose of comparison Durkheim’s picture of the ascetic who by his example of self-denial serves as a model of how others too should give up selfish desires for the sake of the society’s harmony and stability. Weber’s spiritual hero is different: The worldly ascetic denies himself in the service of God, but the unintended effect of this act, in the case of Protestantism at least, is not to preserve the existing social order but to overturn it through a revolutionary change of attitudes toward both wealth and the labor that is expended to gain it.

For Weber, this distinction between asceticism and mysticism is of major cultural importance. It highlights a central difference between religions of the East and the West. Typically, the Oriental-Asian religious ideal is mystical contemplation, while the West throughout history has tended toward activist asceticism. Even where mystics do appear in the West, they lean still toward a stress on conduct—what people actually do with their lives. Weber offers a complex set of philosophical and historical reasons for this circumstance, stressing especially a fact we noted earlier: Western salvation religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) all affirm a transcendent all-powerful Creator God who is wholly separate from the world that he has made, including humanity, which is a part of it. God and his creatures cannot be merged. The mysticism of the East is different; it promises a pathway of spiritual ascent by which humanity can, in the end, either merge with the divine or know the joy of perfect escape from the world.

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Weber gives less attention to the belief that salvation is a gift (the other of the two formulas that religions apply to describe how salvation is secured), and we can spend less of our time on it as well. Some voices in the salvation religions have insisted on the claim that humans can do utterly nothing to win their own salvation. Ultimate peace comes only, and completely, from the outside. It can arrive as an unmerited gift, earned for us by a divine Savior such as the Buddhist bodhisattva or Christianity’s risen Christ. It can arrive as an act of “institutional grace,” such as the absolution given the sinner by the priest in the Catholic confessional. Or, as in religions that affirm a God, it may come as divine grace bestowed in response to a simple, heartfelt, and utterly personal faith of the type seen in early Islam and some Protestant sects, such as German Pietism. Or, again, it may come to certain people and not to others through a mysterious act of divine predestination, as in later Islam and the austere Calvinist predestinarian doctrine of “divine decrees” enacted “before the foundations of the earth.”