Religion and spirituality

Giorgio Buccellati – July 2023

Religion: the cultural codification
Spirituality: the original apprehension
Hermeneutics
The absolute
Words and concepts
Research trends

Religion: the cultural codification

Religion is understood as the cultural system that aims to offer the individual and the community a set of mechanisms for coping with factors that are seemingly beyond human control. It is a major cultural edifice, known to us from the record found in texts and in the material culture of what is, for all intents and purposes, a broken tradition, i.e., one for which there are no living carriers. This record is richly documented and amply studied – this website aims to gather, however selectively, the very ample bibliographical evidence behind it.

Considered as a cultural construct, religion has an institutional dimension which articulates an ideology (such as in myth) and defines a practice (cult and ritual). Seen only in this light, religion appears as a superstructure that can easily become fossilized. But there is at the root a scaffolding built upon spirituality, and nourished by it.

Spirituality: the original apprehension

Spirituality is understood as the original sensitivity behind the institutionalization. It is seen essentially as a personal apprehension that is articulated in some perceptible form and is then shared with others, beyond the sphere of the individual.

While serving as an inspiration, i. e., as a trigger for formalization, spirituality remains, at its best, distinct from it. It must retain the original sensitivity which has been sensed and expressed, and then shared, and received as such. In other words, spirituality must remain alive if the scaffolding that is built upon it is to retain its purpose.

The notion of spirituality allows us therefore to look at religion as experience and not just as a set of distant cultural phenomena. And it is experience that ultimately matters to us, an experience that can be reappropriated in spite of, and yet in some ways because of, the very distance from our living tradition – following the ancient statement: “Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto” (Terence, Heauton Timoroumenos I:77).

I think, however, that a case can, and must, be made for recovering a deeper human value in the Mesopotamian polytheistic experience. As just indicated, this can happen through a serious hermeneutic effort, one that can retrieve and repropose to our experience the religious (i. e., spiritual) experience of the ancients.

Hermeneutics

In other words, spirituality can serve as a hermeneutic key. If we consider seriously its presence behind the cultural manifestations in which it takes shape, we can reach the deeper values that motivated those manifestations. Such comsideration implies, precisely, the systematic application of all that hermeneutics stands for.

Spirituality is thus not seen as something vague and unsuited for analysis, but rather as essentially accessible and documentable. The tools for arriving at this are those of hermeneutics: we can see a unifying and deeper principle behind the surface features we know from texts and material culture. There are patterns in the data that can be explained on the basis of such an underlying principle.

It is through this hermeneutic effort that we can reabsorb in our sensitivity the spiritual values that gave shape to Mesopotamian religion. As in every other case, hermeneutics is what helps us to heal the brokenness of such a tradition, so that we can look at the documentaiont not just with the cold eye or epoché of documentary analysis, but with a rekindling of experience.

The absolute

The notion of the absolute reflects one particular aspect of this way of looking at spirituality. This can be seen as a phenomenon which, while not the object of direct and documentable perception, affects deeply and deeply conditions all humans. It serves as a “clé de lecture,” a hermeneutic trigger that helps to put in the proper perspective the spiritual dimension that is ultimately at the root of religious experience.

It is not a vague concept, .

Conditioning by the Absolute {#conditioning}

A topic which is frequently found, for instance in the first writings of Luigi Giussani (1966, republished in 1994), on p. 20: «… that first fundamental sense of being that does not depend on me, while I depend on it, implacable presence that imposes itself upon me» (my emphasis).

Words and concepts

Neither in Mesopotamia nor in the Bible is there a word for “religion” or “spirituality.” Nor is there a word for politics. Or literature. Or art. Or grammar.

We may go further and say that they did not have the concepts expressed by these words. The simple fact is that they did not have a conceptualization of these phenomena.

This does mean that they were speaking ungrammatically. Or that they were not producing works of art or literature. Or that they were not engaging in politics, practicing religion, having a spiritual dfimension in their lives. They were obviously doing all of this, and we have a rich record to show it.

The conceptualization expressed by these terms reflects our understanding of their world. What is more, it is meant to serve, hermeneutically, to help us identify with the values that are deeply embedded in these areas of life. And to do so not fictionally, but in an argumentable way. Thus, just as we are confident that not only the morphology and syntax, but also the phonemics and phonetics of, let us say, Babylonian was then as we hear and understand it now; in the same way, we can be confident that we can construct an interpretive system of religion and spirituality that corresponds to original experience.

Research trends

It would seem that interest in Mesopotamian religion is not in the forefront of current research, and certainly the notion of spirituality, as proposed here, is altogether missing. This is in contrast with what is happening in other areas – e.g., in political history with regard to the rise of social complexity; in literature with regard to the study of emotions; in art history with regard to semiotics; in the study of language with linguistic analysis. And yet it is precisely at this level that spirituality can be seen as methodologically helpful: just as the notion of complexity helps in understanding the origin and growth of the state as we know it from the sources, so spirituality can help us understand the phenomena that deal with the Mesopotamian ideology and practice of religion.

Forefronting the absolute as a point of reference for both religion and spirituality is not a conditioning factor for inclusion of bibliographical items in our website.

It should however be stressed again, in this regard, that the website is by no means limited to items that share this point of view, which remains idiosyncratic and possibly controversial. The full variety of interests is represented in the website, but in the analysis given by our contributors one will find at times an assessment that takes these presuppositions as the starting point of their critique.