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Experiencing the Shepherd of Hermas
Angela Kim Harkins, Harry O. Maier, Angela Kim Harkins, Harry O. Maier
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eBook - ePub
Experiencing the Shepherd of Hermas
Angela Kim Harkins, Harry O. Maier, Angela Kim Harkins, Harry O. Maier
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About This Book
The Shepherd of Hermas is one of the oldest and most well-attested Christian works. Its popularity arguably exceeded that of the canonical Gospels. Many early Christian thinkers regarded the Shepherd as authoritative and cited it in their own writings, even though its status as Scripture was controversial. The far-reaching influence of the Shepherd during the first few centuries is attested in part by the many languages in which it was copied: Latin, Ethiopic, Coptic, Middle Persian, and Georgian. The early dating and wide dissemination of the Shepherd of Hermas offers us access to a period when canonical boundaries were elastic. This volume treats religious experience in the Shepherd, a topic that has received little scholarly attention. It complements a growing body of literature that explores the text from social-historical perspectives. Leading scholars approach it from a variety of interdisciplinary perspectives, including critical literary theory, anthropology, cognitive science, affect theory, gender studies, intersectionality, and text reception. In doing so, they pose fresh questions to one of the most widely read texts in the early church, offering new insights to scholars and students alike.
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II Visions and Experiences of the Divine
Psychotropic Elements in Hermas’s First Two Visions: Between Experience and Culture
Luca Arcari
University of Naples Federico II, Naples
Luca Arcari is Associate Professor of History of Christianity at the University of Naples Federico II. His research interests lie mainly in the field of Jewish and proto-Christian visionary texts. Prominent among his publications are the monographs, “Una donna avvolta nel sole…” (Apoc 12,1). Le raffigurazioni femminili nell’Apocalisse di Giovanni alla luce della letteratura apocalittica giudaica, (Edizioni Messaggero, 2008); Visioni del figlio dell’uomo nel Libro delle Parabole e nell’Apocalisse, ANT 19 (Morcelliana, 2012), and the editor of the work, Beyond Conflicts, STAC 103 (Mohr Siebeck, 2013). His most recent publication is the monograph Vedere Dio. Le apocalissi giudaiche e protocristiane (sec. IV a.C.-sec. II d.C.), Frecce 291 (Carocci, 2020).
Introduction to Neurohistory and Psychotropy
Daniel L. Smail’s work1 stands prominently in the complex approach known as ‘neurohistory,’ in which understandings of the embodied mind are brought into conversation with history.2 A key concept in Smail’s approach is the ‘neurochemical mechanism’ of the human brain, by which the human species has learned “how to assess our status and our standing in the group largely through chemical clues [—from pheromones and hormones to an addiction to gossip].”3 Humans have come to rely on these signals “as markers of our self-esteem and our sense of belonging.”4 Neurochemical mechanisms of human brains underlie and shape much human behavior in ways now recognized to be more important than language—and they do so in predictable ways: “Their existence means that [the] predispositions and behavioral patterns [of humans] have a universal biological substrate that simply cannot be ignored”5 by historians.
In Smail’s approach, culture emerges as a biological phenomenon. Founded on neurophysiology and emerging in the dress of neural networks and receptors, “culture can operate in a relatively mechanistic, quasi-biological fashion.”6 Culture, in other words, is made possible by the plasticity of human neurophysiology. With this new vision, historians are now in a position to finally dispense with the idea that biology gave way to culture with the advent of civilization. Nevertheless, civilization did not bring biology to an end, but rather has come to enable important elements of human biology. The historical changes in Paleolithic and Neolithic eras have created a new neurophysiological ecosystem, “a field of evolutionary adaptation in which the sorts of customs and habits that generate new neural configurations or alter brain-body states could evolve in unpredictable ways.”7
Particularly interesting examples of this are provided by the mechanisms which Smail calls psychotropic, i. e. human cultural practices that alter or affect brain-body chemistry. Whereas “moods, emotions, and predispositions inherited from the ancestral past… form a [panhuman] structural backdrop for many things we do and have done,”8 human emotional effects are never universals but are contextual to a given culture and/or society, as well as to single individuals. If, for example, fear is a human universal, the stimuli that elicit fear can be local. “Such contingent stimuli are interesting to the historian for how they violate, manipulate, or modulate panhuman proclivities. Such practices as sports, education, novel reading, pornography, recreational sex, gossip, military training, or religious rituals all reinforce or inhibit synapses and receptors and stimulate, beyond baseline levels, the production or reuptake of various neurochemicals.”9
Smail speaks of ‘brain-body system’ which is “a chemical sounding board that is highly responsive to inputs of all sorts, among them drugs,”10 but not only them. If the most common stimuli to such a system are drugs, they arise from everyday phenotypic experiences—that is, things that individuals do with their own bodies. Listening to pleasing music leads to higher dopamine levels in synapses; seeing a scenographic spectacle can produce oxytocin and serotonin; playing an active part in a public ceremony elevates levels of endorphins and enkephalins—a condition which can lead to a euphoric state not unlike that produced by opiates.
Smail also identifies a taxonomy of the psychotropic practices. He differentiates the use of psychotropics into two types: the first is autotropic practices, whereby the body chemistry of the self is influenced, and the second is teletropic practices, whereby the body chemistry of others is influenced. The first one influences the body chemistry of the self, such as the chemicals or foods people ingest for their mind-bending effects, typically by causing a cascading set of changes that ultimately generates higher levels of dopamine in synapses, albeit temporarily. Another category of autotropic mechanisms consists of the behaviors people practice that stimulate the production of their own chemical messengers, i. e. a vast array of leisure activities, including sports, music, novel- reading, movies, sex, and pornography, all affecting the body in similar ways. Teletropic practices include a category of psychotropy embracing the various devices used in human societies to create mood changes in other people—across space, as it were (hence, “tele”). The case of political dominance hierarchies offers an example of the evolution of psychotropic mechanisms that affect the body states of other people.
Like any taxonomy, Smail’s system is primarily classificatory. Beyond all of this, all psychotropic mechanisms are ensured by a direct interplay between ‘supply’ and ‘demand.’ Like a microeconomic model of price determination, Smail’s approach seems to postulate that dominant classes often provide teletropic practices, which are assumed by other people as autotropic elements; in so doing, people are conditioned to make choices in a very complex ‘psychotropic market.’
Psychotropy, Visionary Experiences and Visionary Texts in the Roman Empire
Religious practices of the Roman Imperial world provide a clear example from the history of religions of the employment of teletropic practices and their acceptance at the expense of other practices, as autotropic mechanisms by particular individuals. Based on the surviving material and literary evidence,11 we can conclude that cults and practices of the Roman Empire were specifically constructed to alter the body chemistry of people. Affiliation with early Christian groups, for example, included collective rituals and initiatory practices that made use of symbolic elements through which the lives of the adepts were deeply modified. Another element frequently associated with such an in-group dimension was the awareness characterized by the density of associations. Forms of public or private reading or meditation of authoritative scriptures and traditions favored concentration, including experiences reinterpreted as direct contact with the other world. Such experiences had significant cognitive effects and were at least in part responsible for the tendency of some individuals to think they were seeing ‘higher’ realities in an unmediated way.
A clear example of the connections between psychotropic (i. e. ritual) inputs and visionary outputs (i. e., first-person descriptions of the otherworld) is found in an account concerning a Montanist sister as it is reported in Tertullian’s De Anima. Tertullian states:
We have now among us a sister whose lot it has been to be favored with sundry gifts of revelation, which she experiences in the Spirit by ecstatic vision amidst the sacred rites of the Lord’s day in the church: she converses with angels, and sometimes even with the Lord; she both sees and hears mysterious communications; some people’s hearts she understands, and to them who are in need she distributes remedies. Whether it be in the reading of Scriptures, or in the chanting of psalms, or in the preaching of sermons, or in the offering up of prayers, in all these religious services matter and opportunity are afforded to her of seeing visions. It may possibly have happened to us, while this sister of ours was rapt in the Spirit, that we had discoursed in some ineffable way about the soul. After the peopl...