(Re-)modelling religious experience: some experiments with hymnic form in the imperial period

Abstract

Religious experience has been the topic of many different theoretical approaches.This paper starts from the premise that subjective individual experience is communicable only in terms of locally-available schemes, primarily linguistic, and thus ignores somatic signs such as ecstasy or frenzy.In the case of Greco-Roman Antiquity, this involves recourse to literary sources.The paper uses three Greek hymns of the imperial period, all of them experimental by comparison with "classical" models, to infer what we may call requisite rather than subjective experiences on the part of audiences.The hymns chosen are Mesomedes' Hymn to Isis (no.6 Regenauer), the Orphic hymn to the Nymphs (no.51 Ricciardelli) and the hymn to "Apollo" in PGrMag VI 30-38.The suggestion is that rhetorical analysis enables us to gain a mediated idea of the contrasting responses ideally evoked in the course of ritualized performance. Religious experienceUntil the 1980s, the dominant terms in which religious experience was discussed were subjectivist and attributivist/attributional.At any rate in the field of religious studies, this was largely due to the dual influence of Schleiermacher's evangelical Protestant intuitionism and William James' asymmetrical opposition between institutional and personal religion (cf.Proudfoot 1985, 9-40; 155-189); more recently, however, to social psychology (e.g.Hood 1995) and the various forms of phenomenology (Martin 2016, 526-528).1 Thanks to its simplicity, Rodney Stark's fourfold typology of religious experience, confirming, responsive, ecstatic and revelational, has been, and continues to be, influential (Stark 1965(Stark , cf. 1999)).Resistance arose from two sides, cultural anthropology and the linguistic turn.Already in 1961 Godfrey Lienhardt, a pupil of Evans-Pritchard at Oxford, entitled his account of Dinka religion Divinity and Experience, which among other things tackled the issue 1 For a highly critical account of the influence of phenomenology on religious studies, particularly Rudolf Otto, G. van der Leeuw, Wach and Eliade, see Murphy 2010.Rappaport 1999, 391-395 (on Ultimate Sacred Postulates) reads to me like an attempt to save this sort of evaluative intuitionism.

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