Religious experiences are almost by definition saturated with emotion. Yet scholars have often shied away from a closer analysis of the role of emotions in religious life because they have been viewed as primarily physiological or wholly subjective and therefore not within the domain of history or the social sciences. The conference on “Feeling the Divine: Emotions in Religious Practice” convened to interrogate this issue by bringing some 30 anthropologists, cultural historians, and religious scholars together with historians of emotions at the Max Planck Institute (MPI) for Human Development in Berlin for three full days of presentations and discussions. Among the objectives of the meeting: to better understand how emotions are integrated and theorized in religious practice; to debate the status of the physiological correlates of emotion in relation to their semiotic vehicles; to discuss methodological and theoretical issues around a historicization of emotion and religious experience.
Religious practices often seek to cultivate certain emotional states. Rituals, images, music, and narratives are not only expressive of certain emotions but also used with the intention of evoking certain feelings. They also teach the appropriate “feeling rules” to practitioners of certain traditions. Emotional practices thus create and maintain religious identities and a sense of community. Religious emotions may also provide a form of expression for feelings that come from or go beyond the religious sphere. Finally, emotions in religious practice can be seen as providing evidence of the presence of the divine or supernatural. Emotions can therefore effectively support truth claims, leading to shifts in power relationships between practitioners and institutions. For this reason, believers and religious experts alike regularly scrutinize emotions to determine their significance. Many of the papers at the conference addressed the role of emotions in such direct encounters or interactions with the supernatural. Like trance states, dreams, visions, and auditions, emotions can be experienced as arising without conscious volition, thus lending themselves to the interpretation that they are of divine origin.

JOHN CORRIGAN (Florida State University) opened the conference with a provocative lecture on the study of religious experience, questioning the assumption that inquiry must always focus on the issue of meaning, such as that which has followed in the tradition of Clifford Geertz and Robert Orsi. Building on insights drawn from the work of Frits Staal, Corrigan asked whether the language of ritual might be only “sound” without any “cognitive payoff.” The mystical self-annihilation strived for in many diverse religious practices could then be viewed as the search for a “meaningless moment.”

WILLIAM A. CHRISTIAN, JR. opened a set of two panels on “Feelings and Ritual Practices” with a talk on the importance of a lifelike representation of saints in early modern Spain, evoking sympathetic or reactive emotions in devotees. DAVID MORGAN (Duke University) echoed similar themes at the end of the conference in his talk on the “look of sympathy,” which also discussed the power of images to engender feelings of sympathy as well as antipathy in viewers, thus acting as agents of inclusion and exclusion. DEIRDRE DE LA CRUZ (University of Michigan/Ann Arbor) described the “anatomy of the emotional outburst” in her analysis of the way a charismatic Catholic priest in the Philippines implements sermon techniques engaging participants’ feelings in preparing them for the ensuing presence of “Mama Mary.” AMY BARD (Harvard University) discussed the ritual mourning of Muharram in South Asia as a “training ground for feelings” with many layers of meaning for the participants which cannot be easily disentangled. The same can be said of the rituals associated with “sun-watching” among Moldavian Csangos presented by LEHEL PETI (Romanian Institute for Research on National Minorities, Cluj Napoca). The papers given by anthropologists SHERRY SMITH (McMaster University), KNUT GRAW (Catholic University of Leuven), and ANTHONY SHENODA (Harvard University) each explored the significance of emotions for the efficaciousness of ritual and oscillations between doubt and belief among present-day French-Canadian Catholics, Senegambian Muslims, and Egyptian Copts, respectively. Many of the talks discussed the significance of a hermeneutic of emotion for religious practitioners: conviction and commitment were as much a question of feeling as of reason. This hermeneutic could also apply to historical texts, as the papers by MARYA GREEN-MERCADO (University of Chicago) and KATRINA OLDS (University of San Francisco), both on early modern Spain, illustrated. Olds discussed the appeal among early modern authors that dealing with sacred texts sometimes required a “pious affection,” an emotional attachment to the holy that would “soften reason around the edges,” making it possible to understand the “core of truth” in spite of “minor flaws,” such as the fabrication of historical facts. Green-Mercado highlighted the emotionalized dimensions of apocalyptic prophecies circulating among Moriscos in the sixteenth century. The anthropologist ÉLISABETH CLAVERIE (EHESS, Paris) also discussed emotions associated with apocalyptic prophecy. The Marian apparitions of Medjugorje (Bosnia), which she contrasted with those of Lourdes (France) in the nineteenth century, created an “eschatological political system,” a set of apocalyptic semantics which could be easily instrumentalized for political purposes.

Two panels focused on the experience of emotions in “altered” or “visionary” states. GÁBOR KLANICZAY (Collegium Budapest/Central European University, Budapest) discussed the emotional effects of visions and their bodily manifestations, such as stigmata, in medieval Christian mystical traditions. Intense feelings of spiritual pain and struggle and the specific vocabulary used to describe them among educated women in seventeenth-century France was the subject of XENIA VON TIPPELSKIRCH’s (University of Bochum) presentation, which highlighted the historic specificity of emotional experience. JANINE RIVIÈRE (University of Toronto) and AMIRA MITTERMAIER (University of Toronto) discussed dreams in early modern England and present-day Egypt, respectively. Rivière explored the role of the bodily experience of fear and its contribution to the cultural forms of nightmares; Mittermaier asked how Freudian dream analysis is integrated into traditional Sufi dream interpretation and popular culture. JALANE SCHMIDT (University of Virginia) and ANN TAVES (University of California, Santa Barbara) highlighted the complicated methodological issues around studying the emotions of “channeled” entities, be they Cuban slave spirits in a Santería house-temple (Schmidt) or the mid-twentieth-century US-American medium Jane Roberts (Taves).
That emotions in religious practice are a highly contested issue within religious traditions was the subject of the talks given by NADEEM SHAH (MPI for Human Development, Berlin) and MONIQUE SCHEER (MPI for Human Development, Berlin). Both eighteenth-century Sufi reformers in Northern India (Shah) as well as nineteenth-century conservative Lutherans (Scheer) criticized the reliance on emotions to create encounters with God. These papers were a counterpoint to those which focused on the way that practitioners’ emotions are intimately bound up with the quest for religious belief, illustrated in papers from Eastern Christianity (in Egypt and the Ukraine) by anthropologists ANGIE HEO (Barnard College) and VLAD NAUMESCU (Central European University, Budapest), as well as in current Californian new-paradigm Evangelicalism. TANYA LUHRMANN (Stanford University) stressed in her talk that these Christians “struggle to believe” and therefore create religious practices for their everyday lives (putting out an extra coffee cup for God) as well as in church services which cultivate certain emotional responses to God.

The papers presented at the conference spanned a broad spectrum, geographically as well as historically, and presented material from many religious traditions, allowing for a lively discussion of overarching issues. There was considerable debate over what some referred to as “cultural determinism” and the role of the body in opposing it, the relation between emotion and ritual, and the instrumentalization of local concepts of feeling placed in opposition to those of cognition.

At the end of the conference, which was made possible by the generous support of the Center for the History of Emotions at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, the participants expressed their wish for continued dialogue. Given the complex structure of emotions themselves, which encompass physiological, psychological, and social compontents, they agreed the study of religious experience from the perspective of the emotions would be most fruitful when carried on across disciplines and national borders.

Conference overview:

Opening lecture: John Corrigan: Religion, Emotion, and the Meaningless Moment

Section: Feelings and ritual practices I

William A. Christian, Jr.: Emotions of images / emotions of devotees in early modern Spain

Deirdre de la Cruz: Bodily idioms. Weeping and tears in Filipino Christian experience

Amy Bard: Selective suffering and miraculous rewards. Invoking presence and absence in South Asian Shi`i Encounters with the holy

Lehel Peti: The ritual and emotional conditions of the Moldavian Csángó’s visions

Section: Apocalyptic feelings

Marya T. Green-Mercado: In the path of God. Morisco martyrdom in sixteenth-century Spain

Élisabeth Claverie: Producing eschatologic feelings. Mixing intimacy and politics at the Marian apparition sites of Lourdes and Medjugorje

Section: Emotions in “altered states”

Janine Rivière: Terror and fantasy. "Hag-riding" and experiences of the "nightmare" in pre-modern England

Amira Mittermaier: Desiring the divine. On dreams and visions in Egypt

Jalane Schmidt: Fear, concealment, vision and healing among Cuban slave spirits

Ann Taves: Emotions of channeled entities

Section: Body and soul

Gábor Klaniczay: Bodily effects of visions

Xenia von Tippelskirch: "Sécheresses intérieures."Aridness and anxiety among late 17th century French mystics

Section: Feelings and ritual practices II

Sherry Smith: Human suffering, pilgrimage and the role of emotions in religious healing

Knut Graw: Ritual praxis and its limits. Affectuality and the divinatory horizon in Senegal
and Gambia

Anthony Shenoda: Cultivating mystery. Coptic encounters with the divine

Section: Emotion and belief

Katrina Olds: 'Pious affection' and the holy. Assessing religious truth in early modern Spain

Angie Heo: Between suspicion and surprise. Horizons of expectation

Vlad Naumescu: The silence of the senses. Ritual and emotion in eastern Christianity

Tanya Luhrmann: Learning to feel and learning to hear in American evangelical Christianity

Section: Textual and visual discourses on emotions

Nadeem Shah: Critiques of emotional fervor among 18th-century Sufis of northern India

Monique Scheer: Religious enthusiasm and the bourgeois sensibility in 19th-century Germany

David Morgan: The look of sympathy