Rediscovering The Theological in Sociology Foundation and Possibilities

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Theory, Culture & Society
DOI: 10.1177/0263276403020001919
2003; 20; 19 Theory Culture Society
William J.F. Keenan
Rediscovering the Theological in Sociology: Foundation and Possibilities
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Rediscovering the Theological in
Sociology
Foundation and Possibilities
William J .F. Keenan
. . . illuminated by but a single star, the star of a dual discipline . . . (Franz
B. Steiner, in Adler and Farndon, 1999)
Stretching the Socio-cultural Imagination
T
HEOLOGY ANDsociology, notwithstanding surface alliances of the
sociologie religieuse sort (parish studies and the like), typically
assume opposing positions in the never-ending struggle to construct
the human subject (Gill, 1977; Martin et al., 1980; Swatos, 1987). As far
as the conventional sociological wisdomis concerned, Athens has nothing
to do with J erusalem. Sociology has so closely accompanied secularity
across the ery brook of modernity to the point where the sociological
mentality and imagination are deeply imbued (if not synonymous) with
secular humanism. Theology, by contrast, has never quite succeeded in
shaking off its elective afnities with pre- (even anti-)modernity. Certainly,
theology and sociology make uncomfortable bedfellows. However, can this
long-standing ostensibly negative association perhaps, indeed, the quin-
tessential and characterizing intellectual tension of the modern epoch be
turned into a postmodern strength? Might faith and reason nd some basis
of rapprochement congenial to the new times and conducive to the late
modern post-secular (Blond, 1998) quest for meaning? Is there a socio-
logical foundation for a post-secular sociology (Keenan, 2002)?
In competition for plausibility in this on-going process of interpella-
tion (Therborn, 1980: 789), sociology and theology enter the lists as total-
izing mentalities offering a choice of constructs of homo sapiensconstrued
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as, on the one side, made in Gods image and likeness and destined for
eternal life, and, on the other side, a reductionist secular humanist concep-
tion in which life for the naked ape is a single material possibility thing
(Marsden, 1992). If the pendulumswung in atheisms profane direction
throughout the modernist era when sociology was constituted, postmoder-
nity, it can be argued, inclines to a return of the sacred (Bell, 1977;
Hammond, 1985; Kavolis, 1988), despite, or because of, a global process
of commodication which threatens to squeeze the last vestiges of the tran-
scendent out of culture and society (Bibby, 1990). Shilling and Mellor
(2001: 18) speak of focusing on theories that seek to reconstruct sociology
on the basis of different foundations, some of which have been traditionally
interpreted as anti-sociological. The sacramentalist socio-theological
point of view, one among many possible spiritual perspectives, no doubt,
exemplied here in relation to the ideas of Paul Evdokimov, in particular,
responds to that renewal call with some singularity.
The aimhere is to take a sideways socio-theological look at the ques-
tions: Is contemporary socio-cultural theorizing inherently secularist in its
domain assumptions? Or, are there other theological-spiritual perspectives
embedded within the sociological tradition that might be called upon as
theoretical resources object adequate (Elias) to the problematic of post-
modernity, notably its perceived loss of meaning and foundations, its bound-
arylessness, and its eclecticism? Does the largely forgotten alternative
sociological theology of Paul Evdokimov
1
(190170), for example, provide
subterranean grounds of hope for transguring and transcending the
modernist sociological lament against secular materialist times? The
Evdokimovian iconographical perspective, broadly illuminated later in this
article in relation to education, the human body-self and planetary ecology,
in particular, yet widely applicable to further realms of late modern life, it
might be argued, provides a contrary sacramental sociological vision
beyond commodity culture. Or, to draw on another sense, as Berger and
Kellner (1981: 901) noted almost a generation ago: The acquisition of a
theological ear is then something more than a marginal skill for the inter-
pretative sociologist.
A Release of the Spirit
The intellectual provenance of sacramentalism is rich and complex, incor-
porating animism, panentheism(more diffusive than pantheism), Tantric
philosophy, Teilhard de Chardins entelechy and innumerable modes of
mystical thought lodged within the great world faiths (Bennett, 1996). For
present purposes, I propose to adopt the conception of a sacramental orien-
tation provided by Mary Douglas, which bears close comparison with the
fundamental sacramentalist big idea of Evdokimov: The whole material
world is held to be sacramental in the sense that material signs and channels
of grace are everywhere, always available (Douglas, 1970: 27). Can such a
spiritually grounded socio-theological take add theoretical value to the
sociological ambition to make critical sense of the elementary forms of the
20 Theory, Culture & Society 20(1)
moral and social life (Shilling and Mellor, 2001)? In particular, does a sacra-
mentalist perspective provide a radical (radix =root) intellectual alterna-
tive to set against the commodication of the new times? To see things
differently which is exactly what the sacramentalist view does relative to
the presiding materialisms of the age is, of course, the very point and
promise of theoretical paradigmatic shifts.
This article, then, is concerned primarily with unearthing some of the
buried religio-theological conceptual treasures within sociology and
cultural studies dened generally here as discourse about human socia-
bility, how we are all bound up with one another, albeit in different ways
(Bauman and May, 2001: 180). In the social world-building enterprise of
bounding, bordering and binding us one to another, religion (religare: to
bind), as all the major founding gures of sociological thought recognized,
traditionally played a signicant part. Something of that originating socio-
logical insight into the sacred foundations of human society may, indeed,
be poised for resurrection in the contemporary period as part of the socio-
logical contribution to the reective quest for foundations and meaning. To
reconsider the hermeneutical possibilities of a sacramentalist framework
may be no bad thing for social and cultural theoreticians in quest of chal-
lenging intellectual orientations to the reductionist materialisms of
commodied culture. As Newman, Tillich and Otto, among others, averred
(Horton and Finnegan, 1973; Tillich, 1959) and as Paul Evdokimov
avowed fromhis standpoint in Eastern Orthodoxy we moderns are not
necessarily forever cut off fromspiritual well-springs inherent within the
pre-logical mentality. The sense of mystical participation in the unitary
fullness of creation represents a mode of thought available as a layer of a
complexied reective intellectual cultural archaeology.
Bauman (1992: x) comments: Postmodernity . . . can be seen as a re-
enchantment of the world that modernity tries hard to dis-enchant. As I
hope to illustrate, Paul Evdokimovs willingness to borrow the robes and,
perhaps, the hymnody too; he was as much poetic as scientic in his socio-
logical gaze of religionists, as it were, provides a markedly different and,
arguably, particularly challenging approach to theorizing late modernity,
fromthat usually found in the social and cultural sciences. One might
suggest, indeed, that Evdokimovs neglected socio-theological voice
represents a decidedly strong version of sacred sociology (Shilling and
Mellor, 2001), which provides a radical sacramentalist departure fromthe
orthodox materialist sociological consensus. Reaching out beyond narrow
disciplinary boundaries and conventions may be key to rediscovering and
renewing the sacrality of the social bond, its sacramental grounds, as
Evdokimov perceived it. Having considered that sociology is called today
to be ancilla religionisjust as a thousand years ago philosophy was crowned
ancilla theologiae,
2
Stevens-Arrozo (1998: 234) suggests:
The road to this outreach is what I want to call syncretic sociology . . . a
willingness to match the empirical grounding of sociology with a sensitivity
to an understanding of belief that comes fromthe other disciplines.
Keenan Rediscovering the Theological 21
David Martin (1997), long a stalwart for a sociological imagination
resistant to colonization by muscular secularism(Martin, 1965, 1969) and
open in principle to the theological point of view (Martin, 1980), questions
the view that sociology and theology are inexorably at cross-purposes. While
socially grounded empirical generalizations often challenge theological
accounts of religious belief and experience, maintains Martin, they can
never falsify their ontological existence. Both, he argues (Martin, 1997: 23),
employ inherently metaphorical theoretical concepts to make sense of the
social world. For instance, each discipline comments on salvation and
illuminates the conditions dening who is saved or not, albeit sociology, at
least in its conjectural mode, provides refutable, falsiable statements
rather than Truths per se. Of course, sociology, child of modernity, couches
its conceptions of an ontologically privileged stratum in various secular
modern discourses Marxism, humanismand feminism, for instance. But
as these discourses themselves become open to spirituality liberation
theology, feminist theology, black theology, gay spirituality, new age spiri-
tuality and so forth sociology itself increasingly abuts on to conceptuali-
ties and sensitivities where there is likely to be seepage fromthe scientic
to the spiritual domains, particularly among those questing after more
synthetic-holistic or hybrid-fusion views of the human condition.
Recent sociological attention to the commonality of our frailty or onto-
logical vulnerability (Turner and Rojek, 2001: xi; see also Sjoberg and
Vaughan, 1993) opens up fresh discursive space for radical questioning about
sociology, its purpose and promise. At this point in what might be called the
renewal of the sociological imagination, all options, in principle, are avail-
able, all bets open, all boundaries porous. And, just as Marxism, feminism
and so forth, with their own contested borders of inclusion and exclusion,
are orientations available for dened and elected sociological purposes,
likewise socio-theological perspectives have their rich discursive histories,
ideological predilections and theoretical proclivities. What a sacramentalist,
Evdokimovian sociological framework emphasizes is the spiritual dimension
of social life and its redemptive possibilities; what it excludes is the secular
pessimists doleful conviction that we are always and everywhere, most
notably in the modern era, on the road to hell in a handcart.
As a tract set (perhaps Canute-like, though that remains to be seen)
somewhat against the secular modernist sociological times in their more
unreective guises, the socio-theological perspective explored here might
serve as a postmodern critical option in the struggle to reclaimground lost
to militant materialismthroughout the long march of modernity. In this
sense, the intention here is to reach out for a kind of third way between
the dogmatic ultras on both sides of the religionscience wars. In the
present conjuncture of the intellectual history of sociology, this means tilting
the emphasis towards the latent and occluded religious where this, em-
phatically, does not mean denominational or confessional dimensions
of theorizing human sociability. Adopting an open-minded, catholic con-
ception of the sociological enterprise, one simply refuses to concede that
sociology and cultural studies are irrevocably given over to a secular-athe-
istic denition of the human subject and constitution of society despite,
perhaps, the weight of professional opinion and disciplinary history other-
wise. The sacramentum mundi, I contend, is open to the sociological imagin-
ation, ambition and vocation.
Drawing from Subterranean Socio-theological Pools
Conceived as a contribution to enlightenment and emancipation, socio-
logical reection can be regarded as an autocritical, reexive praxis. In the
present context, the aimis to turn the critical searchlight inwards to soci-
ologys own secular domain assumptions. More positively, the aimis to seek
out sociological ways of seeing that might offer sociological practitioners,
and those interested in coming into the discipline as students, a more
extended range of perspectives on the human social and cultural condition
than is typically available in the marketplace of sociological ideas. David
Martin and Peter Berger are notable dissidents fromthe secular modern
orthodox ideological consensus and materialist reductions of conventional
sociology. In this heretical undertaking, they join forces with such other
lesser-known gures as Luigi Sturzo, Christopher Dawson and Paul Evdoki-
mov. Evdokimov features later in this article as a singularly visionary and,
in many ways, highly prophetic guide to the interface (or interfaith) chal-
lenges confronting sociology and theology in the late modern period.
However, his particularly strong socio-theological perspective needs to be
set in the context of what might be called the marginal socio-theological
tradition of socio-cultural theorization.
This present attempt to draw living sociological waters fromthe hidden
socio-theological wellsprings buried deep in the intellectual history of the
encounter between faith, reason and culture an engagement incorporat-
ing such luminaries as Troeltsch, Tillich, Niebuhr, T.S. Eliot, Lonergan, for
example (cf. Gallagher, 1999; Monteore, 1992) is a partial answer to the
question raised by Martin (1999: 17): Fromwhat kind of sources could a
Christian contribution come? However, the perspective here is actually
broader than Christianity in its denominational church-going sense and
there is no particular reason why it cannot be encompassed by socio-theolo-
gies generated within J udaism, Hinduism, Islam, and even Buddhism, for
example. All major world-faiths have much to say about ethics and society,
the social consequences of sin, and the benets of righteousness in daily
life and political affairs (Haynes, 1998; Smart, 1989). However, socio-
theology, dened briey here as a spiritual conception of the foundations
of human personality and social life, widens out to embrace a denition of
the human subject and society that transcends the institutional boundaries
of religious, particularly denominational, faiths per se. Thus, I agree fully
with Dandaneau (2001: 16 and 21) in his critique of myopic consciousness
where the forces working against the sociological imagination, in part,
emanate fromwithin sociology itself: The sociological imagination can be
realised in many forms.
In this regard, one is decidedly not questing after a confessional soci-
ology or any kind of descientization of the discipline. Rather, one is simply
seeking to enlarge the theoretical-cum-ideational circle in which the socio-
logical imagination can exercise itself freely and thus expand and diversify
the sociological conversation. Exploring the blurred borderlands between
sociology and theology, an aspect of the ongoing exchanges between science
and religion, contributes to a potential enhancement of the adventure of
social and cultural science ideas to which, hitherto, the spiritual dimen-
sions of human sociality have had, regrettably perhaps, too little exposure.
The belief here, then, is that opening up the sociological mind to a
fuller theological-spiritual conceptuality is an enlargement of disciplinary
horizons and an enrichment of the sociological mentality. Admittedly, there
are likely to be those methodological purists (Hammersley, 2000: 124f.)
within the discipline who view such an exercise in boundary-busting as
dangerous and risky, with the potential for regression to medievalism. How
does one operationalize a sacramentalist meta-theory? How does one gain
objectivity and retain detachment? What means of evidence-based testing
and critique are available to theological sociology? Such questions are the
stuff of in-house sociological debate and polemic and are not peculiar to
the present case. One might ask themstill of varieties of Marxist or feminist
or queer sociologies. The intent here, then, is simply to open up another
orientation within the republic of sociology overall.
The question is not one of conversion of the true secular sociological
unbeliever, the muscular social science atheist, as it were, to this or that
religious faith; rather, it is to make available an extension of perspectival
freedomfor those sociologists who care to consider the theological option
or are comfortable with a fuller theoretical range and ideational mix.
Inevitably, when one opens up new or old seams of thought, one has to
take into account unfamiliar forms of expression, unusual concepts, a quite
different language and sometimes-uncomfortable terminologies. The history
of accommodation by academic tribes and professional scientic communi-
ties to the invasion of terminological novelties which, in due season,
become standard established terms, has still to be written. What passes
away as eeting neologistical fads and what becomes embedded and frozen
in orthodox speech codes has much to do with extra-scientic factors, such
as the rise and fall of ideologies that impact on science workers and
academic life. Recent discussions of the historicity of the concepts
modernity and capitalism are interesting cases in point (Featherstone,
1995; Latour, 1994; Woodiwiss, 2001).
While other examples phenomenology, existentialism, structural
functionalism, critical realism, postmodernism also suggest themselves,
how Marxist concepts, terms and usages entered into the linguistic codes
and conceptual styles of social sciences, becoming for a time and in certain
contexts, normalized as a dominant discursive mode, and later, in recent
years, began to show signs of diminished salience and restricted currency,
is a case in point of a natural history of disciplinary communicative codes.
Exposure below to the, perhaps, foreign or retro discursive practices of
some relatively obscure makers of sociological theology or theological
sociology may induce a jolt of recognition among readers that our local
subject area boundaries of thought and language are porous, constructed
and changeful, as much as the map of knowledge itself remains ever in ux.
The suggestion here is that this latter spiritual orientation to depicting and
illuminating aspects of la condition humaine has, like the other frames of
reference noted, something of potential value to offer the open sociological
mind, even if, as is hardly surprising, this hybrid or fusion approach to
the perennial problematic of depicting, explicating and illuminating theor-
izing culture and society is unlikely to accommodate itself readily to every
sociological imagination.
In giving heightened and explicit attention here to a generally margin-
alized, minor socio-theological vocabulary, one hopes to add value to the
contemporary sociological and cultural studies lexicon. Moreover, just as
Marxists, phenomenologists, functionalists, etc. do not spend lots of time,
on every occasion of technical communication, poring over the meaning and
etymology of their elected terms on the reasonable assumption that a certain
amount of background and further enquiry can be expected of the
educated reader, I do not propose to embellish the present discussion with
the detailed deep culture provenance in theology, spirituality and ecclesi-
astical history of examples of sociological theology conceptuality. Never-
theless, sufcient contextual clarication of unusual terms is provided, as
well as further source references offered, to help readers familiarize them-
selves to some extent with the world into which the specialist vocabulary
of theological sociology draws us. Further reection on this relatively
unfamiliar academic speech code, together with critical feedback from
within the republic of scholars, should take forward the debate on the uses
and potential of the spiritualized reading of the human enterprise in world-
building (Berger and Luckmann, 1966) well beyond the sometimes banal
xations on difcult terms that can bedevil and retard the more prosaic
approaches to theoretical discourse.
3
Remembering and Resurrecting Sociological Seers
In a major critique of the alleged anti-religious animus embedded in the
mainstreamsociological tradition, Milbank (1990: 2245) nds the obscure
gure of Luigi Sturzo, author of The True Life: Sociology of the Supernatural
(1947), alone among his academic tribe, speaking out of the depths of soci-
ology for the innite and sublime dimensions of life. But Milbank is too
selective. Christopher Dawson (18891970) also walked the line between
the pagus and the city of God, to employ Milbanks Augustinian refer-
ences (1990: 321). Sturzos instinctive communion, not reective and
almost not willed, with higher entities (Sturzo, 1947: 77) and Dawsons
universal spiritual society (Dawson, 1975) are, perhaps, too obscurantist
and medieval for high moderns in search of sociological bearings. Policing
sociology fromthe watchtower of theology, Milbank completely overlooks
David Martins long-standing assault on the sociological bastions of secu-
larismfromthe standpoint of a sociology open to theological and spiritual
insight (Martin, 1965, 1969, 1980; Martin et al., 1997).
Given the postmodern proclivity to renew contact with repressed
contents of consciousness and culture and maybe we are dealing here with
a disciplinary localized aspect of this, albeit, one avers, its incidence is
certainly more widespread than the social and cultural sciences it seems
opportune to resurrect the insights of the migr Russian Orthodox theolo-
gian and sociologist, Paul Evdokimov (190170) whose enchanting icono-
graphic angle on culture and society provides, perhaps, the deepest and
furthest ranging socio-theological viewpoint on the elements of secular
modern materialism(Evdokimov, 1947, 1950, 1959, 1964, 1973). Remem-
bering, honouring, sociologys own theodidactoi (ones taught by God), to
coin a phrase, in this small way, may serve to awaken a sense that sociology,
too, is capable of redemptive cultural doxological activity, albeit the
implausible image of sociologists as a gens prophetica with an iconograph-
ical vocation (borrowing Evdokimovs own terms here) suggests there is
some theological distance to go on the road fromAthens to J erusalem. A
comment by Flanagan (1991: 3378), paceBourdieu, is apposite here:
[S]ociology . . . has a reexive quality difcult for outsiders to understand. It
cannot be said that this reexive quality has yet evolved in a spiritual direc-
tion. Yet, when sociology has its interests directed towards the spiritual and
theological, the insights revealed are perhaps as unexpected as they are
surprising. They come from an unexpected source, a discipline of the
outsider, schooled to perceive that which [is] undervalued at the edge of
society, its borderland, where much goes unsignied.
The redemptive turn of sociology, if some such can be theoretically
envisaged and countenanced perhaps as an aspect of or option within the
putative pluralistic postmodern cultural turn may not, of course, delimit
itself to such a Christianized socio-historical vision or aspiration. One can
imagine other variants of a genre of spiritualized socio-cultural analysis
contending against the materialist interpretations of history, society and
culture: Buddhist, Islamic, New Age, to name a few green shoots of which
may already be popping up above the academic soil in recent times, as in
the eco-sociology and easternization movements within the social and
cultural studies areas. Whatever forms it takes, it is likely to serve as a
provocation to more classically tuned sociological ears. As one commen-
tator (Coleman, 1999: 129) remarks of just one biblical tendency in the
theo-spiritual turn within late modern sociology: Might we not need a
strangesociology to do justice to the strange world of the Bible? On a more
general level, Flanagan (2001: 6) remarks:
Changes in approaches to understanding in the wider discipline of sociology
have implications for the study of religion and these increasingly admit theo-
logical considerations. Approaches to the study of religion that stress the
notion of distance and objectication now have to be counterbalanced by the
need for proximity and acceptance of what is subjective. These facilitate theo-
logical understanding of religion.
Such epistemological and methodological shifts (Hammersley, 2000;
May and Williams, 1998) that de-naturalize the objectivist paradigmand
expand the possibilities of a more reexive sociology in which, as Bellah
(1991: 257) states, the radical split between knowledge and commitment
that exists in our culture and in our discipline is not ultimately tenable,
help to render a theo-spiritual orientation in sociology less estranged from
the cognitive world of the subject than it has been hitherto. This, it should
be noted, does not mean that sociologists are likely to convert wholesale to
such a meta-theory but only that some might be encouraged to explore its
possibilities in their hermeneutical work. Within the contemporary soci-
ology of religion, the emerging new paradigm gives short shrift to tired old
reductionist models where religion is explained away in terms of anxiety,
fear, psychopathology, deprivation, evil intent, malign contagion, infantil-
ism, cognitive handicap and so on, a litany that those who have gone through
the portals and initiation rites of secular social sciences will be familiar with
(Bruce, 2000; Stark and Finke, 2000). This movement fromthe sociology
of irreligion and secularity to the sociology of religion and religiosity
(Hervieu-Lger, 2000; Lyon, 2000) opens up choices for students of society
and culture in which the theological option becomes, in some eyes, a
plausible hermeneutic.
However, traditionally, sociology has been a multi-perspectival disci-
pline fromwhose range and repertoire overtly spiritually resonant orien-
tations have been occluded, even suppressed, under the weight of overtly
and confessedly strongly materialist interpretations (Flanagan, 1991) of the
nature and constitution of society and the human subject. A rapprochement
between theology and sociology as envisaged within Evdokimovs hybrid
theo-sociology or socio-theology brings the sociological imagination to a
place a theoretical-conceptual space where sociological work becomes
liturgical, that is to say, a means of sustaining for those with eyes to see
an eschatological vision of human life and culture which too readily over
the modern era, in Evdokimovs (1950: 37) complaint, has degenerated into
sociological dust. He asks (1950: 37): Can the face of Christ still shine
in the face of his people, as an ancient liturgical prayer says? The whole
problemis there. In broader, non-denominational terms, whither the sacred
in contemporary life and times?
Beyond Ethical Prophecy and Techne
By inclination and reputation sociology provided a materialist orientation
to and interpretation of social reality and lived experience and thinks
within a secular humanist ontology, epistemology and ideology. Whenever
it has broken free of the straitjacket of positivism(Bernstein, 1983) or
rejected the allure of romantic conservatismwith its blessed rage for order
(Nisbet, 1967), sociology has tended to speak out with prophetic utterance
against the discontents of modernity. An ethical reformimpulse strains for
release in the discourse of sociology, be it within the utopian, apocalyptic
vision of Marxismor the revolution of gradualness (and, even, graduate-
ness) sponsored by less intoxicated Weberian spirits. Whenever its prac-
titioners break out of their more scientistic self-image, sociology abuts onto
the morals end of theology where lurks evangelical condemnation of the
world we have gained with the march of progress (Chadwick, 1975). Could
it be that the moral agenda and profoundly radical outlook of classical soci-
ology, conceived and constructed in and for other times and conditions, has
gone, by and large, the way of all mortal and mondial things and passed
over into the professional folk memory traces of the subject? And, in this
context, what ethico-spiritual ideas and perspectives might take their place?
Turner and Rojeks (2001: vii, 207) critique of decorative sociology and
the decorative turn is salutary here.
The questions here are complex and profound. One can but sketch the
lineaments of answers that will need much rening in the res of future
academic debate and exchange. That said, this article simply tries to raise
into view a theoretical resource within the traditions of socio-theological
discourse out of which potentially fruitful lines of enquiry and modes of
thought might emerge to progress the adventure of ideas in this challeng-
ing area. The world that sociology was initially invented to probe is passing,
however, and the patrimonial modernist inheritance of the heirs of Comte,
Marx, Spencer, Weber, Durkheimand Simmel ts uncomfortably, even
anachronistically, in the post-industrial era. The threads of hard science,
socialismand secularism, which became woven into the fabric of socio-
logical technein the context of the civilization driven by mine, mill and
factory, appear too solid for the work or play of making sense of the
society of the sign (Harris, 1996; Lash and Urry, 1994). Methods of engage-
ment with the worldwide web of quasi-group afliations, boundarylessness,
and the putative free-oating signication of high baroque modernity, a
ghostly sort of habitus, have yet to be convincingly conjured up (Hine,
2000).
Sociological discernment can operate at the spirituality end of
theology as well as its morality end. Intellectual resources exist within soci-
ology conducive to a lighter spiritual orientation to the world and its
contents natural, material, cultural and social. These can be drawn upon
as means of moving sociology on fromits negative critique towards a more
afrmative way of seeing the created order of things. This is not an endorse-
ment of resurgent religions that narrow the scope to commune (Barr, 1984;
Kepel, 1994), nor a poor swap of a spiritually dry sociology for a sociologi-
cally naive new ageism (Heelas, 1996b; Roszak, 1973).
By a more afrmative way of seeing the created order of things, I have
in mind a shift of sociological perception away fromthat almost reex mono-
physitic animus towards the world prevalent in secular criticism. When
sociology usurped the throne of theology as queen of the sciences, it retained
much of the Puritan contempt for matter and the esh, and generated a
profaned version of the story of creation which it reworked froma theology
much given, fromthe Reformation onwards, to a de-magicalized and disen-
chanted or de-sacramentalized ontological view of things. Sociology, in its
moral critique of modern industrial capitalist (and, later, state socialist)
material civilization, was a secular iteration of the Fall, the ancient theo-
logical myth of banishment fromoriginal creation (Fox, 1983). And soci-
ologists saw that the social world was not good . . .
In the pervasive hermeneutic of suspicion (Ricoeur, 1981) within
critical theory, for instance, one can almost hear the secular prophetic call
to repentance issuing forth fromthe sociological descendants of Amos and
J eremiah! For community is broken; the fruits of the earth mal-distributed;
all that is holy lies desecrated. The moral subtext of sociology is a litany of
the death of innocence, the extirpation of awe, the road to Armageddon. Its
saga is of a pilgrimage through this vale of tears. In this sociological story
of the modern industrial revolution and its manifestations, the tides of
Progess bring Apocalypse in their wake. More means worse. Development
becomes an occasion of structural sin. Given the heteronomy of human
purposes and the bounded nature of rationality as mitigating conditions of
the human condition, sociologists announce a mixed gospel of part-
condemnation, part-forgiveness: They know not what they do. It is moral
drama of the most tragic sort in which there exists no redemptive turn,
no ontologically privileged stratum (Martin, 1969) to lead us to the
Promised Land. Sociology, in its modern incarnation, is a salvation-free
zone. Gellner (1992: 76 and 81) wrote of his Enlightenment Secular Funda-
mentalism:
(This at one fell swoop eliminates the sacred fromthe world.) . . . This is the
vision. Note again, it desacralises, disestablishes, disenchants. . . . In other
words, no miracles, no divine interventions . . . no saviours, no sacred
churches or sacramental communities . . . all facts subject to symmetrical
laws which preclude the miraculous, the sacred occasion, the intrusion of the
Other into the Mundane.
Left fasting on the prickly desert fruits of secular pessimism(Bailey,
1988; Wilson, 1971), fromwhich sociological rocks might living waters gush
forth? Webers (1958) counsel at the end of The Protestant Ethic and the
Spirit of Capitalism was to avoid either one-sided materialismor equally
one-sided idealismin efforts to comprehend our plight as encaged moderns.
However, his even-handed exhortation has hardly been heeded even by
himself, arguably (Maclntyre, 1965; Stark, 1954). How do we move on
beyond Webers bleak and inuential view on the fate of the individual in
a modern world characterised by the piercing of collective meanings, the
loss of collective energies and the absence of shared morals (Shilling and
Mellor, 2001: 88)? What sociological alternatives are there to the diffuse
metaphysical pathos (Gouldner, 1955) that so frequently encages the
sociological cast of mind of the epigoni of this inuential prophet of doom
(Pampel, 2000: 85)?
From Commodication to Sacramentality
Can sociologists awaken to the hope-lled light that illuminates rules, roles
and relationships when perceived in the perspective of sacred history, that
larger eschatological vision of life informing the Evdokimovian socio-theo-
logical imagination? A big question, for sure, and, perhaps, an uncomfort-
able one for many sociologists unused to questions regarding the spiritual
import of their science and perhaps, understandably, somewhat unsure of
their footing when confronted by what might be called the ontological
dimension of their subject (anxieties that can take many different forms,
including dismissing the issues here outright as nothing to do with Athens).
However, what might be the gains of such a conversion fromone-sided
normative materialism to what might be called transgurational sociology?
One might suggest three fundamental reasons why the sociological perspec-
tive open to the theological dimensions of culture and experience might,
as an intellectual option, add value to our mapping and reading of the
human condition.
First, the spell of confessional materialist sociology with its enormous
hegemonic appeal and power in a materialist age would be broken. Second,
different sociological maps or readings, particularly those that would rela-
tivise the relativisers and give out signals of transcendence (Berger, 1970)
would have a chance to ourish and contribute to our sociological percep-
tion of eschatological dimensions of life. Third, such an iconographical
vision of the stuff of life, including culture and society, entertains the
prospect of a transformed consciousness vis-a-vis the world and its contents,
in which nothing is mere thing, disposable, exploitable and commodied,
and everything is theandric substance, epiphanic and sacramental (to
employ Evdokimovs evocative terms). The implications of such a transg-
urational socio-theological perspective for the sociological approach to
selected areas of cultural and social life such as, for instance, education,
art, ecology and work are avenues for future exploration and application
of the sacramentalist orientation. What price seeing the institutions and
processes of education and art in terms other than commodication, or the
environment as more than a consumer playground? One does not have to
stretch the sociological imagination too far back in time to perceive links
between the critique of capitalismand the spiritual valorization of work.
The traditional moral sense of sociology, it is true, runs counter to
the cultural logic of late capitalism (J ameson, 1991). Sklair (1991: 41)
wrote:
The culture ideology of consumerismproclaims, literally, that the meaning of
life is to be found in the things we possess. To consume, therefore, is to be
fully alive, and to remain fully alive we must consume. Even religion and
high culture gets caught up in the commodication process.
According to Berger (1970: 112), Puritan Protestantism, the theological
engine of modernity, contracted the sacramental apparatus of Catholicism
to a minimum, a cultural truncation of cosmology, leaving few active
antennae within the post-Calvinist . . . rather barren world (Zijderveld,
1986: 75), outside of asylums, monastic cloisters and antinomian sects, for
picking up rumours of angels. The auratic disappears, writes Heelas
(1996a: 5). Yet, with conventional critical sociological thought much given
to implicit manicheanism, which makes it difcult to see integral value in
forms of life seemingly consecrated to commodity values, a spiritual turn
in sociology (more profound than its cultural turn) might provide new
horizons fromwhich to view things (literally and metaphorically). Bocock
(1993: 119) hints at possibilities here:
The worlds religions could help in overcoming the ideology of consumerism,
and the socio-economic practices associated with consumption, before the
damage to the planet is too great to sustain civilised forms of living.
So, too, does Flanagans aspiration for a holy new game (Flanagan, 1996).
A sacramental view of life has sociological relevance for the deep
critique of consumer culture. Three examples fromthe eld of education
illustrate this point. Schools may be seen in commodication terms as niche
markets, but in sacramentalization terms as sacred space. Educational
management may be seen in commodication terms as learning resources
provision, but in sacramentalization terms as creation stewardship. Even
more fundamentally, perhaps, the under-performing pupil or low-achieving
student who jeopardizes school, college or university public league table
rankings and ratings, and thereby becomes in commodication terms a bad
investment and even a reject, retains the lure and language of Mammon
notwithstanding the status of child of God and image of God within the
sacramentalist view of life. Or, consider the following comment (Keenan,
2001: 191) on the problematic of the human body-self itself in the condition
of late modernity: How far the frontiers of cyberbody culture (Featherstone,
2000) can be pushed before the ancient question of the sanctity of the
human body ceases to have any meaning or referents remains to be
answered. Questions of reverence, not only for the human being but also
for the planet, of sacrality, ultimacy and transcendence have been brought
to the fore of public debate in contexts such as the conduct of war, sexual
slavery, abortion, euthanasia, genetic engineering, deforestation, global
pollution and so forth. The sacramentalist horizon, be it the Russian
Orthodox vision of Evdokimov, in particular, or the diffuse sacramentalism
(Rahner, 1974) of Catholicismgenerally, or some new age variant of an
ancient, even primitive and magical mentality (Douglas, 1970: 28) seems
less far way, whatever our personal thoughts on the matter, fromthe post-
modern mentality than it did frommodern intellects drained of the sacred
and the spiritual (J ameson, 1991: 67).
An enhanced spiritual foundationalismhas profound implications
more generally for the deep sociological critique of consumerismin such
areas as health care, the arts, sport, employment, criminal justice and else-
where in society where commodity materialist values threaten to engulf late
modern life and provide a diminished view of the human condition. Sacra-
mentalismas a way of seeing and therefore a potential way of respond-
ing ies in the face of the defeatist posture that there are no alternatives.
Building on W.I. Thomass insights into the denition of the situation, if
the ontological bottomline is perceived to be diffuse sacramentality, then
all sorts of practical social and moral consequences follow that render
materialist reductions of the human condition contestable, to say the least.
When Durkheimrefers to the religion of humanity or the cult of man, he
contrasts egoistic individualism with the intrinsic quality of human nature
(Durkheim, 1992: 112). He writes of the sacredness of the human person-
ality (sacred, even most sacred . . . sacrosanct quality) (Durkheim, 1952:
3334). He reminds the secular intellectual class of the following, some-
times uncomfortable, truth:
Nowhere [than in religion] are the rights of the individual afrmed with
greater energy, since the individual is placed in the ranks of sacrosanct
objects; nowhere is the individual more jealously protected fromencroach-
ments fromthe outside, whatever the source. (Durkheim, 1973: 46)
Towards an Evdokimovian Iconographical Picture
This contrast between two radically opposing conceptions of persons and
institutions suggests that there exist alternative denitions of the situation.
Such divergent materialist and spiritualized hermeneutics are sociologi-
cally signicant since they are consequential for agency. The sacramen-
tal construction of Things/things hardly gures at all in sociological
mapping of the world. The subject of sociology (person, group, institution
or society) is typically interpellated in purely materialist terms. No spiritual
accounting gets done. Change proposed, however radical, is a variation on
redistributivism, never a root and branch reorientation such as would be
entailed by a paradigm-switch fromsecular modern materialismto sacra-
mentalism, where an entirely different range of questions and answers
becomes possible as is implied by the sanctity of life problematic.
Given the desire, imagination and will, however, alternative trans-
formative and redemptive sociologies are possible. The powers of God,
angels, prayer, awe and love can be inscribed in the sociological script. For
over a generation, David Martin has kept up a relentless assault upon the
cultured despisers who would evacuate the social world of its magico-
mythic contents as the price or prize of traversing the great divide separ-
ating enlightened moderns from their benighted forebears. Almost
single-handedly, he has taught us to regard the counter-religious ideology
of secular humanismwith sociological scepticismin regard to its claims
about the character of the modern world and the constitution of the human
subject. Secularism, as a counter-religious ideology, de-sacramentalizes
the order of things. Secularity is reication writ large. Martin (1999) urges
recovery of ground lost to secularismand the cultivation of a wider litera-
ture that might serve to anchor a counter-secular revival within a more
inspirational streamof culture and consciousness.
Paul Evdokimov quested after a sociological register that would be
spiritually resonant, a conceptuality that might be religiously musical, and
a hermeneutic that could add creative transcendence to the sociological
repertoire: a tall order, by any standards, but a metanoia or conversion
indeed for a sociological language game deeply suffused with secular
materialism. Evdokimov not only spoke out against secularism, materialism
and positivismbut, more constructively, explored theological avenues deep
within J udeo-Christianity in search of anthropological and sociological
orientations sensitive to the sacramentality of human life and culture. His
trawl took himinto the wellsprings of theology at its spiritual end of things,
including the Church Fathers, Dionysius, Maximus the Confessor, J ohn
Damascene, the hesychastic movement, the Russian mystical theologians
of his native land (Lossky, Florensky, Berdiaev and so on), not to mention
the literary inspiration fromclose study of Gogol, Dostoevsky and others.
Fromthis wider literature, Evdokimov sought to construct what he called,
inter alia, theological sociology and a sociological theology.
Evdokimovs lexicon is, even to the neologism-acclimatized socio-
logical ear, anthropologically strange, to say the least. Its roots are in
Eastern Orthodox spirituality. His ambition was to draw on a theologically
grounded vocabulary to enhance and rene the sociological imagination
in an epiphanic direction. He believed that an infusion of a spiritual
language could be worked into our sociological conceptualization to the
betterment of our understanding of the Godward dimensions of being. For
Evdokimov, the social sciences had assumed the vocabulary and conceptu-
ality of the secular modern materialist world in which they were immersed
and, having done so, were only able to see it horizontally in its own terms.
In effect, sociology was trapped in a secular humanist conceptual net. So
conceived, sociology was incapable, within the paradigm(s) on offer, of tran-
scending the limitations of a materialist interpretation of history, society and
culture.
Entrapment within a materialist discourse severely limited what soci-
ology could say critically about the secular materialist order of things and,
moreover, unduly restricted its prescriptive thrust to reformist improvements
in the re-distribution of things: power and social status, economic goods and
services, legal rights and entitlements, and other such capital. Thus
conned within forms of industrial materialist civilization and their theo-
rizations, sociology was self-limited in what it could potentially contribute
to the understanding and renewal of human society and culture. Piecemeal
sociological studies of the inefciencies and injustices of advanced
societies, however scientically and morally worthy, never dug deep enough
into the heart of the matter, namely that the fundamental malaise of life in
unprecedentedly materialized civilizations was spiritual. Only by striking
into the sacramental subsoil of creation could the grounds for recovery and
renewal be unearthed.
The immediate challenge for Evdokimov was the need to ll the
spiritual lacuna in sociology itself in its language, conceptuality, self-
concept and sense of purpose. In Culture and Eschatology (Phan, 1985),
one of the very few works to provide a conspectus in English of Evdoki-
movs key ideas (and a glossary!), Phan gathers together the elements of
what he calls the Evdokimovian eschatological vision of culture and
society. Evdokimov is trying to lay the ground plan of what might be called
a spiritual perspective for sociology. Phan writes that Evdokimovs approach
is christological, pneumatological, liturgico-ecclesiological, cosmological
and ascetical (1985: 67). Evdokimov seeks to encourage students of human
culture to develop what he called an iconic vision, a view of things Things
in general and things in particular as theandric. By this he means that
there exists a sacred dimension to everything, bar nothing. God is literally
all in all. As put by Lynda Sexson in Ordinarily Sacred:
The sacred quality of our lives is fabricated fromthe metaphors we make.
We can discover or recognise the sacred within the secular, or the divine in
the ordinary. We might say that our religious dilemma is not a secularising
dilemma but a poetic one. (1982: 34)
All that lives, moves and has its being as part of creation is poten-
tially transformable and transgurable. This is the core of the theandric or
iconic or eucharistic or christic or sacramental view of life. It is a
perception of the iconicity (Boussiac et al., 1986) of things not excluded
fromsociology unless we want to have it so where nothing is mere thing
or just a commodity. Whereas for Durkheim(1915: 37) anythingcould in
principle be sacred, Evdokimov took the giant panentheistic step further
to the point where everything is sacred. In this radically non-dualist world-
picture, Evdokimov perceives, as he puts it in LArt de licne: thologie de
la beaut:
The universe is transformed into cosmic liturgy, into the temple of the divine
glory. This explains why everything is virtually sacred and why nothing is
profane, nothing is neutral because everything refers to God. (1970: 107)
Evdokimov refers to the world and all its contents as hierophanic,
receptacles of the sacred, particles of the beyond. The ikonsof the Eastern
orthodox tradition are pointers to this diffuse ontological sacramentality of
being. What a world away this language game and formof life is from
the prosaic world in which sociology and cultural studies generally live,
move and have their being. Evdokimov raises the question: Must it ever
ineluctably be thus?
Conclusion: A Sociological Priesthood?
The fundamental issue raised in this article concerns the limits of the socio-
logical project and the boundaries of the sociological imagination. Too
strong a boundary, too narrow the limits between sociology and not-soci-
ology, risks the cognitive ghettoization of the subject, its connement within
unduly narrow epistemic grooves. Such a self-imposed Puritan statute of
sociological limitations or purist isolationismhas some benets and attrac-
tions, of course, such as a sense of a dened place on the map of know-
ledge, an identiable canon, and, not least in importance, armour against
the slings and arrows of the anti-sociology brigade. We know who we/you
are, as it were.
However, do sociologists really thrive on too clear a self-identity, too
rma footing in the shifting sands of intellectual life and social experience?
Arguably, a more catholic, pluralistic, inclusive approach to the subject
epistemic generosity, as it were while risking the charge of Feyeraben-
dian anarchism(Oakley, 2000; Phillips, 1973) has the merit of exposing
sociological reexive practice to an expanding universe of ideas about the
human condition and a wider horizon of assumptions about what the social
world is really like than mark the articially cast conventions of sociology
(Flanagan, 2001: 16) and its customary conduits of disciplinary socializa-
tion. Such an approach helps to democratize further the discursive power,
the power of denition (Sevnen, 2001: 92), that pervades the subject as,
arguably, one of its strengths despite the sense of epistemological insecur-
ity such openness can bring souls more at home on rock-solid foundations,
if any such there be (Berman, 1983). For others, to be, as it were up in the
air is a preferred existential condition to being too stolidly planted on
barren spiritual soil.
In the end, perhaps, it is a question of what sociological world or
culture we want to live in, what epistemic habitus we consider appropri-
ate, worthwhile and otherwise good to inhabit. This is in part an individual
matter of ideological commitments and preferences as much as an insti-
tutional one of policing and legislating the rules of the sociological
language game. This article suggests that the border of the subject, that
thin, porous membrane that unites and separates sociology and sociologists
fromthe world(s) out there is unnished, indeterminate, fragile, and avail-
able for reconstruction and renewal (Turner and Rojek, 2001). These days,
sociologists open to the new times carry the burden and the blessing of
epistemic contingency and have very real dilemmas as to ways of seeing
the world and its contents. It would be a sorry state of affairs if, in the inter-
ests of a narrowly dened professionalismand technicism, the academic
tribe of sociologists were to engage in a curmudgeonly process of retrench-
ment before experimenting with the wider possibilities of their role to be,
in the words of Bauman and May (2001: 180) not content with the exclu-
sivity and completeness that comes with any one interpretation. One
shudders here in recollection of the night-battles that haunt the wars of
religion as intrinsicism, integralism and the Syllabus of Errors lead
invariably to inquisitions, excommunications and heresy-hounding in the
name of Truth.
Sociologists, in their sacerdotal vocation shades more of Comte (cf.
Wernick, 2000) than Weber! are at liberty to participate in liturgical life
through recognition of the theandric substance of their subject matter
which, in this iconic sociological perspective, becomes transgured into a
locus theologicus where dimensions of eternal life, supernatural life beyond
and within the material forms, may be glimpsed (Allchin, 1982; Milbank et
al., 1999). This indubitably requires the mystic leap that Weber famously
drew back from(Midgley, 1983; Robertson, 1975). Where it is not dismissed
as a sort of cognitive regression, the curse of creeping new age infantilism,
such a close sociological encounter with theology might be reckoned a
blessing, an opportunity for transguration, for seeing Things/things radi-
cally otherwise, as the process of commodication threatens to engulf the
global bazaar of postmodern culture and the despairing sense of endgame
looms in many quarters (Corcoran, 1989; Hawthorn, 1987; Vattimo, 1989).
It is the trope of our times, claims Bhabha (1994: 1) to locate the
question of culture in the realmof the beyond. When Durkheim(1915: 37)
afrmed that anything can be sacred and Evdokimov (1970: 194)
pronounced: The brilliance of the beyond touches everything which is of
this world and gives an eternal meaning to everything, they intimated as
much. For Weber (1948), the sociological vocation is to interpret the world
in the worlds own terms. The spiritual point of such a calling, when this is
congured in terms other than sensualism alone, however, may be to conse-
crate that world, to afrmthat not all is profaned, and to celebrate that socio-
spiritual fact. As put by Paul Tillich:
Everything secular is implicitly related to the holy. It can become the bearer
of the holy. Nothing is essentially and inescapably secular. Everything secular
is potentially sacred, open to consecration. (1951: 218)
Acknowledgements
I wish to record here my gratitude for the constructive comments of the anonymous
reviewers and for the editorial guidance of Vikki Bell and Mike Featherstone.
Notes
1. For biographical details of this Russian Orthodox thinker whose efforts to bridge
the gulf between his native Russian spiritual and literary traditions and the human
sciences led himinto exile, rst in Paris and then in the United States of America,
see Phan (1985) and Roussel (1999). Pavel (a.k.a. Paul) Nikolaievich Evdokimov
endeavoured to fashion a socio-theology of culture with the theological and
aesthetic materials of a vanishing world (the old Christendomof Russia and Byzan-
tium) in order to meet perceived problems of the spiritual dryness of a different
world of Western modernity. In this he foreshadows Solzhenitsyn (Solzhenitsyn,
1975). It is not without interest, perhaps, that in his homilies on the important role
of Eastern spirituality in the renewal of a sense of the sacred within overly
commodied materialist cultures, Pope J ohn Paul II, on more than one occasion,
has drawn on the theology of beauty of Evdokimov. See Catholic Information
Network (CIN) http://www.cin.org.
2. This notion of various disciplines serving as supportive foundations or under-
labourers for other putatively more important ones is reminiscent of the Comtean
hierarchy of the sciences.
3. David Martins recent complementary texts indicate a postitive way forward. See
Martin 2002a, 2002b.
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William J.F. Keenanis Head of Sociology, Department of Social Sciences,
NottinghamTrent University, England. He has published extensively on
diverse aspects of symbolic culture in, inter alia, Body & Society, British
J ournal of Sociology, Fashion Theory, Mortality and European J ournal of
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Revolution.

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