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Putting History Back into the Religious Wars: A Reply to Mack P. Holt
Author(s): Henry Heller
Source: French Historical Studies, Vol. 19, No. 3 (Spring, 1996), pp. 853-861
Published by: Duke University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/286649 .
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and the religious are separate realms has nothing in common with
Durkheim's social definition of religion.
It is true that of the three historians of the League criticized by
Holt Descimon is more sensitive to the importance of the ideologi-
cal dimensions of the movement than are Barnavi and Drouot. But
Descimon as well as Barnavi and Drouot assume that the corporate
character of the institutions of sixteenth-century France, including the
monarchy, were strongly marked if not completely defined by religion.
The social conflicts with which these historians are concerned were by
their very nature fought out for the most part in religious terms. To
assert that these three seizie'mistes,deeply immersed in the history of
sixteenth-century France, did not appreciate the significance of reli-
gion in this society is untenable. What Holt is complaining about is
that their understanding of religion is an essentially social one in the
sense of Durkheim. Yet, compared to Durkheim's extreme reduction
of religion to the social, their treatment of religion must be seen as re-
spectful and moderate. As to the legitimacy of their efforts to elicit the
social bases of these religious conflicts, there can be little doubt.
Weber more than any other of the classical sociologists of religion
appreciated the historical force of constituted religious ideologies. But
his analysis of European religion is part of a cross-cultural comparative
sociology of religion in which such ideologies do not exist indepen-
dently of their social matrix. On the contrary, Weber understood them
to be historically generated, shaped by social and economic circum-
stances and closely tied to certain specific carrier social groups. It is
especially in Weber that we find justification for a concern with the
social stratification of religious interest which has been such a preoccu-
pation of historians of sixteenth-century French religion. In Weber
Holt can find a rationale for reemphasizing the historical power of
religious ideology. But in Weberian terms this does not justify treat-
ing such ideologies as final causes. Rather, an appreciation of Weber
should spur us to better understand such ideologies in terms of their
institutional and social contexts.
Holt to all appearance belongs to that school which denies that
the task of the student of religion is to explain religion. In the final
analysis, this is nothing but old-fashioned theistic faith. Unfortunately,
it confuses the philosophical issue of the truth or falsity of religion with
attempts to study the psychological, social, and economic aspects of
religion. In its modern guise it has assumed the form of the so-called
interpretative school of religious studies led by Mircia Eliade, which
claims that the function of the student of religion is to interpret or
1 For an introduction to recent controversies surrounding the study of religion see Thomas
A. Idinopulos and Edward A. Yonan, eds. Religionand Reductionism:Essayson Eliade, Segal, and the
Challengeof the SocialSciencesfor the Studyof Religion(Leiden, 1994).
2 Robert A. Segal, Explainingand InterpretingReligion: Essayson theIssue(New York, 1992), 23.
cal insights into the nature of that experience in terms of the society
in which it has occurred.
Holt extols recent historical work which emphasizes the impor-
tance of the religious factor. Yet, it is notable that he studiously avoids
the recent book which takes the ideology of the Huguenots most seri-
ously, namely, William Bouwsma's John Calvin: A Sixteenth-Century Por-
trait.3In this work Bouwsma proposes to study the historical Calvin
from the perspective of a fresh examination of the reformer's own writ-
ings. In the course of a careful reading of the entire corpus of Calvin's
work, Bouwsma illuminates the religious thought of the great reformer
against the full background of sixteenth-century life and culture. It is
impossible to accuse Bouwsma of underestimating the historical impor-
tance of Calvin's ideas or of not appreciating their richness and com-
plexity. Indeed, Bouwsma'sanalytical achievement is in certain respects
an act of reverence. Yet, while cherishing Calvin'slegacy, Bouwsma does
not hesitate to explore some of the psychodynamic elements behind
Calvin's thinking, suggesting the parallel between Calvin's conception
of an omnipotent God and his overidentification with an authoritarian
father or his use of his powerful rational faculty as a defense mecha-
nism against his own ongoing anxiety about this relationship. Indeed,
the way in which Bouwsma is able to slip below Calvin's theologi-
cal rationalism and suggest the confrontation between father and son
which underlay it represents an extraordinary tourdeforce.
It is Holt's belief that the language of religion is somehow set apart
from the discourse of politics, economics, or war. But if this is the case,
it is not necessarily because it points to something higher or beyond
these matters but because it addresses a level which is more personal
and subjective. In fact, more often than not, religious language is filled
with a rhetoric of love, fear, and anxiety about objects which are all too
close to our deepest human subjectivity.That is one of the reasons for
religion's appeal. It is in part because it evokes unresolved and emotion-
ally charged infantile states of identification, separation, and longing
laden with ongoing conflict that religion refers to them through the
distancing language of theological transcendence. Indeed, Calvinism's
attractiveness lay in part in that it dealt with such psychologically con-
flictual matters through a reserved and cool language which helped to
fortify the sense of independence of its adherents. The psychological
resonances of the language of the League with its passionate rhetoric
of at times self-tortured attachment to the body of the Old Church,