*Durkheim

I’ve been a part of a reading group that has taken on a major work by Milbank - I forget what it's called, and to be honest it's not even worth mentioning. But during these readings, Milbank is quick to engage in self-congratulatory masturbation while bashing the social sciences. He is a staunch defender of Catholic theology and thinks anything else is derivative of theology, or its plain bad theology, or it is horrendous because it falls under the category of "paganism." Here he seems to associate "paganism" with the narrative of everything was "chaos" in the beginning and therefore cannot possibly be desirable for an end goal of 'peace.' During these petty juvenile dismissals of other disciplines, he rants and bashes the sociology of religion as useless. One of those great thinkers that has been on Milbank's hit-list is Emile Durkheim, French sociologist of religion.

In first response to Milbank, Durkheim grants and acknowledges a few things that Milbank seems to be quite adamant about: “There is no religion that is not both a cosmology and a speculation about the divine. If philosophy and the sciences were born in rleigion, it is because religion itself began by serving as a science and philosophy.” And, “if religion gave birth to all that is essential in society, that is so because the idea of society is the soul of religion.”  

Emile Durkheim is one of those figures always referenced in the social scientific study of religion. His ‘Elementary Forms of Religious Life’ is a seminal work that set the tone and trajectory for future generations. Durkheim’s hypothesis is that religion is a social thing: “Religious representations are collective representations that express collective realities.” Along the way, Durkheim sets up some important questions to be addressed. The first question is an ontological one. Granted that even the basic understandings of reality are socially constructed, such as time and space, what is it about all religions that provides an ontological argument for human beings? Durkheim then sets up two categories for the investigation into religious phenomena: beliefs and rites. And more importantly, within the first category, a distinction between the sacred and the profane. He then makes an important distinction between religion and magic: the Church - something that has been much debated and semantically stretched. Bringing together these elements, Durkheim provides his famous definition of religion: “A religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden - beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them.”

Now Durkheim raises some other issues about beliefs, rites, the Church, magic, the place of shamanism, as well as concerns about a human nature that allows such creativities to manifest in religion through different cultures and social settings. As it is the case for any science, no one thinker has the last word. Science is fallible, amenable, and subject to conditions of reproducibility, verifiability, critique, and progressive advancements; negative correlations are also positive data. So to critique Durkheim is not the equivalent of critiquing the entire discipline nor does it mean that the entire discipline is still at the level of Durkheim. Perhaps it is Milbank and theologians of his category that must learn humility - go back and read their bible?