Contemporary Spiritualities

Enchanted Worlds of Nature, Wellbeing and Mystery in Italy

Stefania Palmisano, Nicola Pannofino

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367029500
• eBook ISBN: 9780429671081
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Church

Contemporary alternative spirituality, as studied by sociologists, is usually seen as a recent phenomenon dating from the 1960s and 1970s. However, when viewed from a longer-term perspective this form of religious expression is actually seen to reintroduce concepts that recur throughout Western cultural history. This book argues, therefore, that spirituality in the 21st Century actually shares many of the same characteristics as Classical, Mediaeval, Renaissance and Modern spiritualities. It is neither entirely new, nor is it clearly alternative to more established religions.

The book is divided into two parts. The first sets out the context in which contemporary alternative spirituality has formed, charting its development as an academic term and a social phenomenon. The second part looks at how these two elements have developed in countries that are historically Catholic, focussing on specific examples in contemporary Italy: spiritualities based on the sacralisation of nature; those concerned with health and wellbeing; and those which are fascinated by mystery.Catholic majority countries are particularly interesting in this instance, as the Catholic Church has a unique cultural hegemony with which to compare alternative spiritual practices. It concludes that spirituality, if framed in a longer historical perspective, is a way of acting and seeing the world which was built, and continues to be built upon complex relations with various contradictory sources of authority, such as religion, magic thinking, secularism, rationalism, various spheres of lay culture.

This is a bold take on the spirituality milieu and as such will be of great interest to scholars of Religious Studies working on the sociology of religion, contemporary spirituality and the rise of the "spiritual but not religious".

Part I

1 Frenemies: spirituality and religion

1. Lazarus taxon: spirituality brought back to life

If today palaeontologists were to study what sociologists call “contemporary spirituality”, they would not have any doubts about classifying it as a Lazarus taxon, which is to say a presumably extinct species which has suddenly made a reappearance.¹ An analogous example is the takahē, a New Zealand bird which amazes naturalists – unable to fly but with brilliant colours, it was rediscovered in 1948 near Lake Te Anau on South Island, where 300 specimens still survive.

Spirituality’s strange historical itinerary has earned it a place among “Lazarus species”. The concept arose from theology but, after thriving for centuries, it gradually disappeared from the 1960s onwards so that it was considered extinct (Marty 1967; Huss 2014).² Surprisingly, however, it “re-arose” (what scientists term “the Lazarus effect”), albeit in a different habitat from its original one: in the 1990s it exploded onto the sociological scene to the extent that it was considered as a “new” interpretative category describing extra-religious relations with the sacred in the contemporary age (Wuthnow 1998; Roof 1999; Flory and Miller 2000; Fuller 2001; Heelas 2008). As evolution would have it (continuing the naturalistic metaphor), spirituality in its new disciplinary context has shifted from what it was in theology in that it doffs the Christian habit which had distinguished it. Some scholars (Schneiders 1989; Gottlieb 2013; Huss 2014) stress this difference by asserting that, in its new clothes, spirituality has lost its old meanings and adopted new ones which are paradoxically opposed to the former.

The indeterminateness which characterises the spirituality concept is partially explained by this passage from the theological interpretation in the traditional world to its sociological recovery today (Giordan 2006). Usually, the first operation carried out by sociologists when studying social reality is a reconstruction and critical analysis of common-sense definitions and conceptual categories produced by social actors in relation to the object which interests them. But when faced with the spirituality phenomenon, they meet a particular problem: the indeterminate character which the concept presents to the actors themselves. This point is confirmed by empirical investigation in both the US and Europe: some people define themselves as “religious and spiritual”; others as “spiritual rather than religious”; yet others “spiritual but not religious”; and there are those who, albeit atheist or indifferent, do not mind calling themselves “spiritual”; and, finally, those who take refuge from spirituality by declaring themselves “only religious”. What all of these declarations have in common is a lack of agreement about terminological connotations or – depending upon one’s perspective – the variety of meanings attributed to spirituality. So what does spirituality mean and what do we gain by defining it? Is there really any need for this concept in the study of religion? If the answer is yes, what is its relationship with the religion concept? And what are its relations with lay culture and the various spheres of social life? Indeterminacy reigns on both emic and etic levels. Despite the development, starting from the 1990s, of lively international research into the study of spirituality, the quarrel between the concept’s detractors and defenders has not yet been settled; its theoretical and epistemological status is still being heatedly debated.

In this chapter, inspired by the above questions, we aim to argue the scientific legitimacy of the concept of spirituality by demonstrating its heuristic usefulness. To this end, in the second and third sections, we shall retrace the voyage of spirituality from theology to sociology, that is to say, from Spiritualitas to “contemporary spiritualities”. In the fourth section, we shall analyse the criticisms of the concept’s detractors and its defenders’ answers. In the fifth section, we shall review the main theoretical positions arising from the debate, tracing their origins to three narrative ideal types. The sixth section advances our thesis about spirituality and presents the interpretative model which we shall use to study it. Finally, we shall point out some caveats about using the concept in the sociological field; which is to say, we shall explain why we consider it appropriate to approach it cautiously, albeit recommending its use.

2. Spirituality and its pivotal points: from theology to sociology

Since it is our intention to analyse the rediscovery of the term “spirituality” in sociology, we shall not reconstruct here in detail the history of the concept, but we shall look at the turning points in which its meaning (and associated theological conceptions) has changed.

Although phenomenology relative to spirituality can be found in many other religious traditions, scholars agree that the historical origins of the term can be traced back to the Christian world (Giordan 2006; Sheldrake 2013; Huss 2014; Berzano 2017).³ In early biblical usage, Spiritualitas referred to a moral sense of life guided by the Spirit of God as opposed to one that resists the influence of the Spirit (Principe 1983; McGinn 2004). In the New Testament, especially in St. Paul’s epistles, “spiritual” is opposed to “carnal” – not to “bodily” or “material” as is often wrongly understood (Sheldrake 2013, 6). From the fifth century A.D., this meaning became common in spirituality’s semantic field, dominating in mediaeval Christian theology. In the twelfth century, the spirit/flesh opposition soon became the spirituality vs. corporeity/materiality dichotomy (Roof 2003). Only in the seventeenth century did the French term spiritualité recover the original meaning of “spiritual life”, though now placing greater emphasis on the personal, intimate aspect of the man-God relationship. This interpretation was consolidated during the eighteenth century (McGinn 2004). In the nineteenth century, the term indicated the essence (as distinct from the matter) of (Christian) religion, which meaning was further extended in the years to come,⁴ so that by late in the century, spirituality’s semantic field – albeit still influenced by its biblical and mediaeval connotations – freed itself from Christian theology and ecclesiastical discourse to indicate the individualistic, subjective dimension of universal religion (ibid. 5). From the mid-twentieth century, the spirituality concept, just as it was abandoning the theological scene (Marty 1967), became increasingly interesting to the sociocultural arena, especially in the US, which was the crossroads of many styles of research into the sacred peripheral to religious traditional institutions.⁵

Although spirituality was still perceived as being related to religion (or even its synonym), the idea that it could stand on its own, free from religion’s moorings, began to gain ground; a conviction which grew in the late-twentieth century when new ideas, practices and cultural products (mostly connected with the New Age) were collocated in this category (Parsons 2018).⁶ At present, the spirituality term encompasses a wide variety of representations that draw on personal development, Oriental religions and philosophies, New Age, quantum physics, Western esotericism, Neo-Paganism, eco-spirituality and indigenous wisdom like Amerindianism and Druidism (Sutcliffe and Bowman 2000; Goldman 2012; Fedele and Knibbe 2013; Parsons 2018).

It is the success which spirituality has met in popular culture, in function of its detachment from religion, which explains its appearance in sociology (Singleton 2004).⁷ The turning point was 1989 when James Beckford, in his presidential address to the Association for the Sociology of Religion, described the emergence in society of “a nondoctrinal and unconventional spirituality which borrows only selectively from formal theologies” (1990, 8). His contribution spurred many colleagues to take an interest in “new spirituality”, although with many different approaches. If some were well-disposed, others openly rejected it, describing it as nothing more than a mere mishmash of heterogeneous, inconsistent ideas, beliefs and practices. Spiritual practitioners were represented as individualistic (“self-indulgent”, “lazy”, “self-absorbed”, “narcissistic”), engaged in approaching various traditions, styles and disciplines to design their own selection of meanings based on individual tastes and preferences, resistant to communitarian commitment and civic responsibility (Finke and Stark 1992; Bruce 2002; Voas and Bruce 2007). The most accepted definitions at the same time indicated and disparaged this creative approach: “DIY religion” (Baerveldt 1996); “Patchwork quilt” (Wuthnow 1998); “Pick-and-mix” (Hamilton 2000); “Spiritual supermarket” (Lyon 2000) and “Religious consumption à la carte” (Possamai 2003). The responses were not slow in coming: as Heelas (1996) and Houtman and Aupers (2007) have pointed out, spirituality’s heterogeneous, fragmented nature appears considerably reduced if one recognises the presence of a common denominator, which Heelas (1996, 2) calls lingua franca in his New Age study. He considers that it is the language of “self-spirituality” which crosses borders and gathers together the spiritual milieu’s most disparate proposals and practices, protecting New Age from being an eclectic jumble or basically inconsistent (Heelas 1996). Emphasis on the self reappears in many descriptions of spirituality which outline it as a means of understanding the self and interior awareness (Roof 1999); a journey of personal growth (Fuller 2001); and a vehicle for reawakening the self’s intuitive, nonrational side (Forman 2004). This aspect is further strengthened by the more recent expressions “self-spirituality”, “interior spirituality” and “subjective spirituality” (Heelas and Woodhead 2005; Houtman and Aupers 2007; Lynch 2007; Heelas 2008), which share the implication that a true, authentic, sacred nucleus remains hidden in the deepest folds of the self, uncontaminated by socialisation or value judgements prescribing what is good, true and/or meaningful. The role of the self in this type of research has been more recently explored among the “spiritual but not religious”, which is to say those who are not bound by specific religious traditions and who seek the sacred in an immanent way and a fluid, eclectic manner outside – albeit neither necessarily nor exclusively outside – those traditions (Mercadante 2014; Parsons 2018).

In approaching the spirituality concept, one should bear in mind that the religion/spirituality dichotomy cannot be found among the founding fathers of sociology, for whom institutional religion and spirituality were encompassed in the idea of religion itself. It was only in the 1990s, when the spirituality concept entered scientific debate, that a redefinition of “the religious” and a complementary restriction of the meaning of “religion” took place in tandem; the latter for all intents and purposes becoming a synonym of “institutional”, “hierarchical”, “formal” and “social” religion (Hill et al. 2000, 60). Thus, religion in sociological literature came to mean one pole of the continuum whose opposite extreme is spirituality. The latter was taken as the antireligion, thus becoming anti-institutional, inclusive (of elements common to all religions), pragmatic (aware of the corporeal and experiential dimensions), holistic (in its view of humankind and the universe), this-worldly and eclectic (combining beliefs and practices from varied traditions and meaning-seeking). But, as we shall soon see, in contemporary debate this distinction is far from being accepted or taken for granted.

3. Continuities and discontinuities: from Spiritualitas to contemporary spiritualities

In its itinerary from theology to sociology, the spirituality concept underwent a semantic shift. This shift – which can be seen in the passage from Spiritualitas to contemporary spiritualities – implies radical discontinuity, according to various authors (Schneiders 1989; Gottlieb 2013; Huss 2014). They believe that the concept has lost many of its original meanings connected with the Christian heritage a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures, photos and tables
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I
• Part II Italy: spirituality in the field
• Index