Notes about Sexuality and Religion

by Peter Brown. Journal of Early Christian Studies.
Johns Hopkins University Press. Volume 6, Number 3, Fall 1998

Pg 359
The occasion of this tea, my first contact with Mary Douglas, had been the preparation of a paper on sorcery in the later Roman empire, that was to be delivered in a meeting of the Association of Social Anthropologists on the theme of Witchcraft Confessions and Accusations, held to honor E. Evans-Pritchard.16 I had already become acquainted with Mary Douglas’ Purity and Danger, to which I had been introduced, significantly, by a fellow-medievalist-by Paul Hyams, a great connoisseur of medieval English law. In 1969, as I read the draft of the manuscript of her Natural Symbols, I realized-more sharply than I had done when preparing my article on sorcery-that I had entered an intellectual world that represented a total break with any past approach that I had known to the problem of the relations between religion and society.

Page 367
I was particularly concerned, in those tense years, that my explanation of the effectiveness of the holy man should be both sociologically and psychologically convincing. With that in mind, I attempted to elaborate, from scattered hints-for the field of psychology was notably lacking in figures of the synthetic brilliance of an Evans-Pritchard and a Mary Douglas – a homespun theory of psychological needs. I wished to explain why the figure of the holy man was “charged” with specific expectations, why his authority came to be held as “objective,” why his interventions
were tinged with a distinctive “crackle” of power, and why his very person was held to resolve the acute ambivalence of mercy and anger associated with the Christian God.

All of these questions assumed models of psychological interaction, indeed, the existence of strong psychological forces, that had been excluded in the more consequential, but more closed, syntheses of the social anthropologists. Yet what struck me at the time was the manner in which Kleinian psychoanalytic theory persistently converged on the small-group analysis practiced by anthropologists. It seemed to explain the dimension of strong affect that characterized the society which had invested the holy man with such dramatic qualities. For, unlike the more inward-looking Freudianism, for which I could find little use, Kleinian theory had the advantage that it stressed, above all, the dynamics of personal interaction. It was concerned with “object-relations.” It examined the manner in which an unconscious charge of idealization, projection, ambivalence peopled the world around the individual, and so the world of any small society, with
figures endowed with heavy overtones of power, goodness or evil.