VIEWPOINT
BELIEVING IN BELIEF: GIBBON,
LATOUR AND THE SOCIAL HISTORY
OF RELIGION*
I
Social historians usually grapple with religion within a specific
historical and cultural context bounded by place and period: we
might study the spread of early Islam, the Reformation, radical
Christian sects in early America, the rise of charismatic
Christianity in postcolonial Africa, and so forth. We thus tend
not to concern ourselves with overarching questions of
definition, but to engage with the experiences of people and the
wider dynamics that prompt or constrain them, framed by a
somewhat accepted conceptual setting. Nonetheless, there have
been occasions on which historians have noted and indeed
contributed to a long-standing discussion within anthropology
and religious studies over the problem of defining ‘religion’; that
is, whether any transhistorical and transcultural phenomena can
be said to constitute a comparable core of ‘religion’ for all
societies, or whether ‘religion’ is always a conceptual frame
arising from a Western Christian perspective that brings with it
some unintended assumptions about its overall ambit and its
* This article began its life as an inaugural lecture at Cambridge delivered in
2018, and I benefited considerably from the reaction of various colleagues and
friends. In further revising the piece, I am deeply indebted to conversations (real
and virtual) with Andrew Preston, Ethan Shagan and Joseph Streeter. A revised version
was presented in Nuremberg in 2019, and I am very grateful to Anselm
Schubert for his discussion; it was also subject to extensive interrogation at the
History departmental seminar at Johns Hopkins University in 2021, and I am similarly
grateful to colleagues there for their various thoughts and comments, in particular
Jean Hebrard and Anne Lester.
Past and Present, no. 00 (2022) # The Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford University
Press on behalf of The Past and Present Society, Oxford. All rights reserved.
For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com
https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtac012
Past & Present, no. 260 (August 2023)   © The Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford
University Press on behalf of The Past and Present Society, Oxford. All rights reserved.
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BELIEVING IN BELIEF
inner dynamics.1
In an important and influential intervention,
the anthropologist Talal Asad, reflecting in part on the nature of
medieval Christianity, emphasized that one should not take
modern ‘privatized’ Western Christianity as the paradigmatic
example of what constitutes ‘religion’, and argued that one must
attend to how power, in a given historical-social context, is
innately intertwined with how religion (in a particular form)
is constructed and constituted.2
One of the most recent
engagements with this area, by a scholar of early Christianity,
similarly argues the case that religion as we now understand it, as
a private and interiorized experience, is a modern construct with
little analytical purchase for understanding the pre-modern
world.3 Yet the word itself proves hard to relinquish, so
embedded is it in our studies; we can scarify it with quotation
marks, ‘religion’, but may have to accept that it is a piece of
mental furniture we cannot do without, one we might at best
retain with a sense of provisionality, open to revision
and refinement.4
This article suggests that there is a component part of the
discussion around religion to which social historians could and
should pay greater attention (here, once again, catching up on
longer-standing discussion among our anthropologist
colleagues): the issue of what we mean by ‘belief’. It is a term
upon which we frequently rely, and indeed often qualify (‘her
fervent belief’, ‘lacking in any firm belief’, ‘a true believer’) as
part of our means of explaining particular events or behaviours;
1 In a very wide field, see, for example, Jonathan Z. Smith, ‘ “Religion” and
“Religious Studies”: No Difference at All’, Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal,
lxxi, 2–3 (1988); Derek R. Peterson and Darren Walhof (eds.), The Invention of
Religion: Rethinking Belief in Politics and History (New Brunswick, 2002). For a
key early engagement by a social historian, see Patrick Collinson, ‘Religion,
Society, and the Historian’, Journal of Religious History, xxiii, 2 (1999). For an
overview of the issues for historians, see Christine Caldwell Ames, ‘Medieval
Religious, Religions, Religion’, History Compass, x, 4 (2012).
2 Talal Asad, ‘Anthropological Conceptions of Religion: Reflections on
Geertz’, Man, new ser., xviii, 2 (1983), revised in Talal Asad, Genealogies of
Religion (Baltimore, 1993). It is important to note that Asad’s understanding of
power as a discursive field is fundamentally Foucauldian, and not reducible to
issues of hierarchy and domination.
3 Brent Nongbri, Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept (New
Haven, 2013).
4 Thus, see ibid., 154–9. See similarly, in an otherwise rather problematic
critique, Ivan Strenski, ‘Talal Asad’s “Religion” Trouble and a Way Out’, Method
and Theory in the Study of Religion, xxii, 2 (2010).
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and it is also another term which we tend not to question. At its
worst, this can lead the historian to treat belief either as simply
the successful propagation of a theological programme to a
group of followers or (its crudely materialist mirror state) as a
form of false consciousness, an unreflective, pathological
credulity, most often associated with ‘the masses’. Often it is also
treated as if it were a kind of binary state or quality, fixed in one
particular position for any given historical individual, either
present or absent within their character. For the most part we
simply take it for granted as one of the facets of human society
that helps us to craft a wider explanation for why people do
things and why stuff happens: a classic ‘black box’, known to us
simply in terms of inputs and outputs.5
However, as noted, the nature of belief is something with
which anthropologists and others have long grappled. While
scholarly reflection goes back at least to William James’s Varieties
of Religious Experience (1902), Rodney Needham’s Belief,
Language and Experience (1972) is a fundamental point of
reference for more recent discussion.6 Needham, engaging with
Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophical reflections on what it
means to say one ‘believes’ something, argued that ‘belief’ was
not a translatable concept across cultures, and that there was no
means by which an anthropologist could get beyond the
linguistic expression of apparent beliefs to any clear ‘inner
state’.7
It should be noted that Wittgenstein was specifically
interested not in what we will have to call, however
problematically, ‘religious belief’ but in how all kinds of ‘belief’
words operate more generally in the language games that he saw
5 The black-box metaphor has mainly been used in social studies of science,
but clearly has a wider applicability regarding how we construct our arguments
and analyses. For an influential early example, see Trevor J. Pinch and Wiebe E.
Bijker, ‘The Social Construction of Facts and Artefacts: or, How the Sociology of
Science and the Sociology of Technology Might Benefit Each Other’, Social
Studies of Science, xiv, 3 (1984).
6 William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature
(London, 1902), particularly lectures 3, 8, 9; Rodney Needham, Belief, Language
and Experience (Oxford, 1972).
7 Needham, Belief, Language and Experience; Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on
the Philosophy of Psychology, i, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright,
trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, ii, ed. G. H. von Wright and Heikki Nyman, trans.
C. G. Luckhardt and M. A. E. Aue (Oxford, 1980). Joseph Streeter has
convincingly argued that Needham systematically misunderstood and indeed
essentially reversed Wittgenstein’s position: Joseph Streeter, ‘Should We Worry
about Belief?’, Anthropological Theory, xx, 2 (2020).
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as constitutive of our experience of the world. Although
Needham’s starting point was the impossibility, when talking
with a Penan tribesperson, of formulating a comprehensible
phrase along the lines of ‘I believe in god’ or ‘a god’ (the deities
being so obviously present that it would be something like saying
‘I believe in that house’), across the course of his book he
similarly presents the issue as fundamentally about culture in
general, not specifically that which we might mark out as
‘religion’.8
His work has subsequently prompted a number of
anthropologists to advise abandoning the concept of belief, and
to refrain from ascribing ‘beliefs’, in the sense of interiorly held
governing conceptions, to their native informants, on the
grounds that ‘belief’ is another non-translatable Western
concept. Others have demurred, arguing that external actions
offer sufficient warrant for talking about ‘beliefs’, in the sense of
commonly held propositional tenets, without having to worry
about inaccessible ‘interior psychological states’.9
When focused more specifically on religion, subsequent
discussions have led some to draw a distinction — possibly
helpful at least heuristically — between ‘belief that’ and ‘belief
in’; that is, between recognition of and adherence to
propositional tenets of faith (‘belief that’) and what we might
provisionally gloss as a spiritual trust in or transformative
allegiance to something or someone (‘belief in’).10
Central to
these discussions is a desire not simply to assume that ‘belief’
implies (as is understood to be the case in modern Western
Christianity in particular) an interior cognitive state, but to
entertain the possibility of seeing belief as ‘a constituting activity
in the world’, innately connected to other aspects of material,
cultural and emotional existence.11
8 Both ‘religion’ and ‘belief’ can in each instance be assumed to retain scare
quotes throughout the article, but after this paragraph we will avoid cluttering the
pages by actually inserting them except where they are particularly needed
for clarity.
9 Martin Southwold, ‘Religious Belief’, Man, new ser., xiv, 4 (1979). For a
very nuanced discussion, which emphasizes the importance of not conceiving any
cultural system as static and the importance of considering the experience of
religious conversion, see Joel Robbins, ‘Continuity Thinking and the Problem of
Christian Culture: Belief, Time, and the Anthropology of Christianity’, Current
Anthropology, xlviii, 1 (2007).
10 Noted in Malcolm Ruel, ‘Christians as Believers’, in J. Davis (ed.), Religious
Organization and Religious Experience (London, 1982).
11 Asad, Genealogies of Religion, 47.
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It should be noted that some historians have previously asked
what the term ‘belief’ might mean in a previous age or culture.
For example, some decades ago both Jean Wirth and Jean-Claude
Schmitt suggested that in the European Middle Ages we might
see Christian authorities’ understanding of belief to be essentially
as a form of allegiance, homologically similar (or perhaps even
directly affiliated) with the strong social bonds understood to
pertain to ‘feudal’ relations between king and lords, or lords and
their subordinates. Thus, believers subjugate their will and
judgement to a higher power, and unbelievers (infideles in Latin)
are those who are unfaithful, breaking trust with God and their
superiors: all of this, it should be noted, in terms of how belief is
conceptualized by Christian authority.12 Around the same time,
the scholar of religious studies Wilfred Cantwell Smith, via rather
thinner and more problematic historical research, took a similar
but more expansive line, arguing that the propositional content of
religious belief was not important to pre-modern Christianity; if
taken to an extreme, a fairly bizarre proposition for anyone who
has actually studied such periods, but one which has spurred
further anthropological reflection.13
More recently and more productively, Ian Forrest has
considered both Christian conceptualizations of belief and the
social dynamics of trustworthiness in a model of social-historical
inquiry.14
Addressing a greater span of time and with
12 Jean Wirth, ‘La Naissance du concept de croyance (XIIe
–XVIIe
siecles)’,
Bibliotheque d’Humanisme et Renaissance, xlv, 1 (1983); Jean-Claude Schmitt, ‘Du
bon usage du “Credo” ’, in Faire croire: modalites de la diffusion et de la reception des
messages religieux du XIIe
au XVe
siecle (Rome, 1981). In his later work, Schmitt
clearly does not limit his analytical sense of belief to this framework, and indeed
presents a nuanced sense of belief as active, ongoing and potentially fragile, a
view which has influenced my own discussion here. See, for example, JeanClaude
Schmitt, Ghosts in the Middle Ages: The Living and the Dead in Medieval
Society, trans. Teresa Lavender Fagan (Chicago, 1998), 7: ‘Belief is a nevercompleted
activity, one that is precarious, always questioned, and inseparable
from recurrences of doubt’.
13 Wilfred Cantwell Smith, Belief and History (Charlottesville, 1977); Wilfred
Cantwell Smith, Faith and Belief (Princeton, 1979); discussed and elaborated in
Walter Van Herck, ‘Wilfred Cantwell Smith on the History of “Religion” and
“Belief”’, in Stijn Latre, Walter Van Herck and Guido Vanheeswijck (eds.),
Radical Secularization? An Inquiry into the Religious Roots of Secular Culture (New
York, 2015). See, however, trenchant comment by Streeter (‘Should We Worry
about Belief?’, 153 n. 12), pointing out that Smith’s position would make the
considerable Christian concern over heresy in late antiquity utterly inexplicable.
14 Ian Forrest, Trustworthy Men: How Inequality and Faith Made the Medieval
Church (Princeton, 2018), ch. 1.
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BELIEVING IN BELIEF
considerable elan and analytical nuance, Ethan Shagan has
proposed that the Reformation brought a fundamental shift in
the understanding and thus nature of belief in western Europe,
as Protestantism swept away, among other things, the medieval
concept of ‘implicit belief’ (the idea that the majority of lay
people believed well enough, impliciter, if they conformed
outwardly and could recite the Creed, Paternoster and Ave
Maria) and made belief into a particularly demanding and
interiorized act. The tensions contained therein, however, led to
a subsequent softening in later centuries, giving us eventually the
predominant modern sense of belief as what Shagan calls
‘sovereign judgement’.15 While the earlier attempts by Wirth
and Schmitt primarily focused their historical attention on how
belief has been discussed in the abstract by authority, Shagan is
interested in how we should see belief changing for ordinary
people, though his project still ultimately retains a focus on the
concept of belief (necessary, no doubt, for the pursuit of his longue
duree study and its wider implications), rather than pursuing a
sustained analysis of the nature of the acts, manifestations,
feelings, experiences of ordinary people that are understood to
constitute ‘belief’ (though these latter are probably what matter
most to social historians).
In what follows this article explores how, as a social historian
(and in my own case, a social historian of the Christian Middle
Ages), one might consider belief. It does so via specific examples
drawn from my research into Christianity in southern France
from the eleventh to the fourteenth century, and with reference
to two influential later authors, chosen because they help to
identify fundamental elements of debate, and because both at
points discuss their own personal experiences of Christian belief:
the eighteenth-century writer Edward Gibbon and the
contemporary French theorist Bruno Latour. Gibbon has
bequeathed to us a particular way of looking at religious
credulity as the opposite of Reason and thus as a threat to
civilization, a view which tends to recur in current debate. He
was not unique in his perspective on early Christianity, but the
narrative frame and accompanying ideas about religion he
passed on have been markedly influential, and thus he also
15 Ethan H. Shagan, The Birth of Modern Belief: Faith and Judgment from the
Middle Ages to the Enlightenment (Princeton, 2018).
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stands in for a wider intellectual inheritance in the West. Latour,
meanwhile, has become a key theorist in recent years for
archaeologists, social scientists and some historians: an
anthropologist and philosopher who has studied the
construction of scientific knowledge in the laboratory, describing
this as arising from a network of actors which included nonhuman
elements such as equipment and the organisms of
study.16
Across his work he has repeatedly argued that ‘we have
never been modern’ in the ways in which we imagine ourselves
to be: that the claims of modernity to have transcended earlier,
primitive forms of knowledge involve misrecognition of both
other cultures and contemporary Western society.17 In recent
years Latour has written provocatively about religion from the
perspective of his own Catholic faith, partly as an implicit
engagement with other anthropological argument, but largely as
a means of addressing the recurrent notion of conflict between
Science and Religion. Latour has repeatedly argued that we
‘moderns’ mistakenly ‘believe in belief’, believe in other people’s
credulity that is, as a simplistic account of faith as automatic,
unreflective and absolute; and he suggests that we need a better
understanding of what people do when they engage in religion,
or, as he puts it, when they give voice to ‘religious speech’.
II
We shall return to these conceptual issues below, but I want to
begin with a story from the central Middle Ages, one which
allows us to think about the nature of medieval Christianity and
the belief it involves. The story comes from the ‘Translatio et
miraculi Sancti Viviani’, an eleventh-century manuscript, albeit
one purporting to recount deeds performed over a hundred
years earlier. Haigmar, abbot of a monastery at Figeac in
southern France, had determined that what his foundation
needed for its glory and protection was some holy relics.
Consequently, when he was on a visit to the distant town of
Saintes, he had one of his men pretend to be possessed by a
demon and thus gain access to the shrine of the local saint,
16 Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through
Society (Milton Keynes, 1987); Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An
Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford, 2005).
17 Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter
(Cambridge, MA, 1993).
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BELIEVING IN BELIEF
Vivian, a bishop from the early centuries of the Church. Once
within the shrine, the abbot’s other men shouted out that the
town was under attack by Norman raiders, prompting the locals
to rush out to defend themselves. The men of Figeac then broke
into the unguarded tomb and stole the saint’s bones, carrying
them back east to their own lands. As they arrived home in their
diocese, the abbot sent messengers to tell the people of the
region to congregate, to witness this great translatio (the
‘translation’, or reburial, of holy bones). This prompted ‘an
infinite multitude of clergy and people, carrying candles and
crosses, to come to that place, and . . . with great rejoicing and
jubilant hymns the relics of the saints were borne by them
and made to be carried to the appointed locale’. As they thus
processed, a miracle occurred along the way: a little old lady who
had long been blind had her sight restored. The manuscript
records that once the bones had been deposited in the
monastery, further healing miracles took place; and, moreover,
that later, on important occasions, the relics were taken in
procession to other public places in a maiestas (a highly
decorated reliquary bust in the personified form of the saint),
where they sometimes performed additional wonders.18
This is not a tremendously unusual tale. Even the theft of the
saint’s bones is something we find paralleled in other narratives
of the same period.19
The worship of saints, their ability to
perform miracles (most of all, healing miracles) and their public
presence drawing great crowds of the faithful, are all familiar.
The notably personified reliquary busts are a particular feature
of southern French piety in this period, but, of course, shrines,
reliquaries and statues of saints are found throughout medieval
Christianity, saints being invoked both by individuals as
miraculous intercessors and by monastic and civic communities
as more constant protectors.20
18 ‘Translatio et miraculi Sancti Viviani Episcopi in coenobium Figiacense et
ejusdem ibidem miracula ex cod. Parisino lat. 2627’, Analecta Bollandiana, viii
(1889), 258–61.
19 Patrick J. Geary, Furta sacra: Thefts of Relics in the Central Middle Ages,
revised edn (Princeton, 1991). The incident described here is briefly mentioned
in chapter 4 (St Vivian designated by his alternative name of St Bibanus).
20 Within a vast literature, see, for example, Diana Webb, Patrons and Defenders:
The Saints in the Italian City-States (London, 1996); Robert Bartlett, Why Can the
Dead Do Such Great Things? Saints and Worshippers from the Martyrs to the
Reformation (Princeton, 2013), particularly chs. 7 and 9.
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The combination of saintly image, communal worship and a
collective investment in the miraculous could be seen as one of
the defining features of pre-Reformation Christianity. Gibbon,
writing about the Church in late antiquity, suggested that the
people of the time had an ‘unresisting softness of temper’ which
led ‘the most credulous. . . to enter into a society which asserted
an actual claim of miraculous powers. The primitive Christians
perpetually trod on mystic ground, and their minds were
exercised by the habits of believing the most extraordinary
events’.21 Here, we should note, Gibbon was not only
emphasizing the predominance of Christian doctrine (‘belief
that’) but asserting something about the mode of believing
(‘belief in’). From these beginnings, he claimed, the medieval
Church further amplified this ‘superstitious’ foundation of faith:
‘the fabric of superstition which [the bishops] had erected . . .
defied the feeble efforts of reason’ until later ages came to
challenge its truths in the name of reform.22
During the Middle
Ages, fed by the ‘savage fanaticism’ of the crusades, ‘The active
spirit of the Latins [that is, western European Christians] preyed
on the vitals of their reason and religion; and, if the ninth and
tenth centuries were the times of darkness, the thirteenth and
fourteenth were the age of absurdity and fable’.23
Gibbon was famously dismayed by medieval Christianity. An
early convert to, and then away from, Catholicism, he saw the
‘superstitious’ appeal of the faith as a fundamental element in
the Roman empire’s ‘fall’.24 He was by no means the only writer
of the eighteenth century to present us with a disapproving
account of the medieval past; but his particular vision of
credulous religion as antithetical to the forces of civilization,
rooted in an incapacity of Reason, has been notably effective in
shaping a modern notion of faith. ‘Religion is on the rise, as are
the numbers of believers in astrology and conspiracy theories,
and average IQ is falling’, all of this showing we are ‘on the cusp
of a new dark ages’; this from a contributor to the London Review
of Books in 2017, the implicit intellectual debt passing
21 Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ed.
J. B. Bury, 7 vols. (London, 1896–14), ii, 299.
22 Ibid., iii, 87.
23 Ibid., xi, 41.
24 For a nuanced account of Gibbon’s relation with religious belief, see B. W.
Young, ‘ “Scepticism in Excess”: Gibbon and Eighteenth-Century Christianity’,
Historical Journal, xli, 1 (1998).
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unnoticed.25
The point about this conception of religion is the
emphasis it places upon unquestioning, burgeoning credulity, a
strong example of ‘believing in belief’.
Nonetheless, some of the same features that appalled Gibbon
have been seen more positively by other modern commentators.
For them, the idea of a medieval ‘age of faith’ is both a comfort
and a reminder of what the modern world has lost: not a
foolishly superstitious age, but one open to a directness of
religious experience and shared culture that modernity cannot
sustain.26 Recent among this number, if somewhat allusive in his
medievalist references, is Bruno Latour. In a short and rather
extraordinary book he published in French in 2002, translated
subsequently as Rejoicing: or, The Torment of Religious Speech,
Latour grapples with what religious expression actually is,
concerned in particular to distinguish it in its very nature from
scientific language and practice (a field he has studied in
considerable detail).27
Inter alia, in his tormented attempts to
communicate a form of faith that does not have to fight with
science, he turns to the medieval: to ‘the little church of
Montcombroux, built in the year 1000’ where he tries to recite
the words of the Catholic Creed: ‘to recite the same words in the
silence of a country church as those words which, a thousand
years earlier, stirred the Bourbonnais peasants who had come to
protect their harvests during Rogation time’.28
In ‘ancient times’
(by which we can probably take him to mean both pagan
antiquity and the Middle Ages) Latour suggests that there was
no meaningful distinction between those who believed and those
who did not: ‘The presence of divinities was obvious in the air or
the soil. They formed the common fabric of people’s lives, the
primary material of all rituals, the indisputable reference point of
all existence, the ordinary fodder of all conversation’.29
25 Nick Richardson, ‘From a Distant Solar System’, London Review of Books,
xxxix, 24 (14 Dec. 2017).
26 For another recent example, see Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended
Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society (Cambridge, MA,
2012). Compare comments in Sarah Shortall, ‘Lost in Translation: Religion and
the Writing of History’, Modern Intellectual History, xiii, 1 (2016).
27 Bruno Latour, Jubiler: ou, Les Tourments de la parole religieuse (Paris, 2002),
trans. Julie Rose as Rejoicing: or, The Torments of Religious Speech
(Cambridge, 2013).
28 Latour, Rejoicing, trans. Rose, 11–12.
29 Ibid., 5.
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The initial point is to notice how much Latour shares with
Gibbon, albeit with the scale of values inverted, that in a simpler
age, less protected from the brute exigencies of existence, people
had a more direct and unmediated link to faith: that which was
for Gibbon a ‘softness of temper’ rendering them credulously
impressionable, but which for Latour is a sign of a shared
experience in the common fabric of life. In such an age of faith,
‘belief that’ and ‘belief in’ are seamlessly conjoined.
Thus two parallel modern investments in ‘the medieval’. But
let us at this moment return to the ‘Translatio et miraculi Sancti
Viviani’, and a further passage in the story which may
complicate our sense of medieval belief. It occurs at the point in
the narrative when the relics were processing with full pomp
through the countryside, on their way to Figeac. Two peasants, a
husband and wife, were working in the fields. The ‘little old
woman’ (muliercula), seeing the opulence of the people, hearing
the harmony of the music, said to her husband: ‘For a little
while, dearest one, cease from this labour, because a great
tumult of people singing praising songs is carrying the relics of
saints down that road; we ought to hurry to that, with all
devotion’. But the husband was unimpressed. ‘Get back quickly
to your work’, he said. ‘What you’re seeing is probably just the
bones of some dead person or other, gathered together to be
venerated by the stupid beliefs (opinio) of the people’.30
It is important to note, for those who have not previously
encountered examples of medieval scepticism and doubt, that this
peasant husband is by no means a solitary figure. He turns up in
this particular narrative because his unbelief is subsequently
punished by the saint he has insulted: he is afflicted by seizures
which shake him violently from ‘his teeth to his toenails’ (dentibus
ac ungulis laniando), until brought to the shrine to be cured, at
which point he repents. So he ends up as a believer. But he quite
30 ‘Translatio et miraculi Sancti Viviani’, 261: ‘Rustici enim cujusdam
muliercula ut tantam vidit populorum opulentiam tantamque harmoniae audivit
symphoniam, ad virum suum agriculturam exercentem festina cucurrit. Cui, jam
paene properando exanimata, intulit: “Cessa paululum, carissime, ab hoc labore,
quia ingens turba sanctarum reliquiarum monimenta per illum callem defert cum
laudum modulamine: ad quas etiam et nos properare oportet summa devotione”.
Cujus monita ille bestius indigne ferens, iturum sese non solum denegavit, sed
etiam convicia ingerendo sanctas reliquias irrisit: “Revertere, inquam, velociter ad
tua utilia; quoniam illud quod conspicis, fortasse ossa sunt alicujus mortui, quae
collecta in unum stulta venerator opinio populi” ’.
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clearly figures before that as one who does not believe: who, contra
Latour, sees that there is a choice to be made about whether
something is or is not present, and who apparently lacks the
‘softness of temper’, contra Gibbon, to be literally ‘impressed’ by
the beliefs of others. As Susan Reynolds pointed out some
decades ago, many saints’ lives and miracle collections include
such doubters and scoffers; and, as other historians, myself
included, have gone on to demonstrate from a variety of sources,
one can continue to multiply examples, finding not only those
who do not believe in saints, but those who do not believe in the
Eucharist, in hell, in the afterlife in general, in the Resurrection, in
God’s creation of the world, in the immortality of the soul.31
What, then, does the fact of medieval unbelievers do to our
received ideas about religion? My own project has not been to
search out medieval ‘atheists’ as heroic precursors to the later
champions of Reason. Christianity clearly mattered greatly in the
medieval period, and the challenge presented by people like this
disgruntled peasant was not one of a unified and self-conscious
discourse seeking to topple religion. There is no reason, in this
sense, to attempt to claim the Middle Ages as ‘modern’.32 What
(cont. on p. 13)
31 Susan Reynolds, ‘Social Mentalities and the Case of Medieval Scepticism’,
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser., i (1991). Within a growing field
of discussion one may note: A. Murray, ‘Piety and Impiety in Thirteenth-Century
Italy’, in G. J. Cuming and Derek Baker (eds.), Popular Belief and Practice, Studies in
Church History, 8 (Cambridge, 1972); Alexander Murray, ‘The Epicureans’, in
Piero Boitani and Anna Torti (eds.), Intellectuals and Writers in Fourteenth-Century
Europe (Cambridge, 1986); John Edwards, ‘Religious Faith and Doubt in Late
Medieval Spain: Soria, circa 1450–1500’, Past and Present, no. 120 (Aug. 1988);
John H. Arnold, Belief and Unbelief in Medieval Europe (London, 2005); John H.
Arnold, ‘The Materiality of Unbelief in Late Medieval England’, in Sophie Page
(ed.), The Unorthodox Imagination in Late Medieval Britain (Manchester, 2010);
Dorothea Weltecke, ‘Beyond Religion: On the Lack of Belief during the Central
and Late Middle Ages’, in Heike Bock, J€org Feuchter and Michi Knecht (eds.),
Religion and its Other: Secular and Sacral Concepts and Practices in Interaction
(Frankfurt, 2008); Dorothea Weltecke, ‘Der Narr spricht: es ist kein Gott’: Atheismus,
Unglauben und Glaubenszweifel vom 12. Jahrhundert bis zur Neuzeit (Frankfurt,
2010); Dorothea Weltecke, ‘Doubts and the Absence of Faith’, in John H. Arnold
(ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Christianity (Oxford, 2014); Frances
Andrews, Charlotte Methuen and Andrew Spicer (eds.), Doubting Christianity: The
Church and Doubt, Studies in Church History, 52 (Cambridge, 2016). Other recent
studies have addressed scepticism and doubt in regard to medieval philosophy and
intellectual culture: see, for example, Sabina Flanagan, Doubt in an Age of Faith:
Uncertainty in the Long Twelfth Century (Turnhout, 2008); Dallas D. Denery II,
Kantik Ghosh and Nicolette Zeeman (eds.), Uncertain Knowledge: Scepticism,
Relativism, and Doubt in the Middle Ages (Turnhout, 2014).
32 In this sense, while the presence of medieval unbelievers clearly gives the lie
to Lucien Febvre’s influential claim that unbelief was literally ‘unthinkable’ in the
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is interesting, though, is how the presence of unbelievers may
help us to think, as social historians, about what belief might be:
how it operates, what it does, the particular power that it
possesses, but understood also in terms of its clear fragility,
particularly where the challenge of adhering to a particular tenet
of faith (‘belief that’) may disrupt a wider sense of engagement
and affirmation (‘belief in’). And if we approach religious belief
as a range of possibilities and contexts — following Latour’s
injunction not to ‘believe in belief’ in the sense of assuming
credulity but actually to enquire into the phenomenon — we can
then see what this might do to our modern discussions
over religion.
Let us return for a moment to Gibbon. We have inherited
from him, and from other writers of a similar period, a grand
narrative of religion in which the Middle Ages function as the
unquestioning, unreasoning age of faith. Empirically, as noted,
this does not stand up. But it is worth considering further how
Gibbon understood religious belief to have come about in this
period. Influenced by the reflections of David Hume in
particular, Gibbon thought that ‘primitive’ peoples produced
religious beliefs out of an atavistic need to negotiate with the
frightening aspects of the natural world.33
Because darkness,
thunder, fire and so forth were threatening, they needed to be
propitiated, by which process they became gods, with objects
made into fetishes that could be duly worshipped. This
‘primitive’ superstition lived on in Christianity, harnessed by the
priestly class. Early Christians ‘felt, or they fancied, that on every
side they were incessantly assaulted by dæmons, comforted by
visions, instructed by prophecy, and surprisingly delivered from
danger, sickness, and from death itself, by the supplications of
the church’.34
Religion is a comfort which arises from a want of
Reason and knowledge. (Of course, some version of this account
(n. 32 cont.)
pre-modern past, it does not dismantle a more subtle sense of Febvre’s argument,
namely that unbelief did not cohere into an alternative discourse that could
influence intellectual thought in the period (a position echoed more recently by
Weltecke): Lucien Febvre, Le Probleme de l’incroyance au XVIe
siecle: la religion de
Rabelais (Paris, 1947). On this, see David Wootton, ‘Lucien Febvre and the
Problem of Unbelief in the Early Modern Period’, Journal of Modern History, lx,
4 (1988).
33 David Hume, The Natural History of Religion (1757); Gibbon, Decline and
Fall of the Roman Empire, ii.
34 Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ii, 299.
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continues today in the work of the so-called New Atheists such
as Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett.)
This is precisely where Latour comes in. He is both a researcher
into science who understands its power and importance (even as
he views it anthropologically as a knowledge built from networks
of interaction), and a practising Catholic who sees value in his
own faith. In trying to accommodate both science and religion, he
explicitly rejects the route taken by the late Stephen Jay Gould,
who argued that the two address different fields, different
magisteria.35 Latour argues instead that one must think about
science and religion as being two fundamentally different modes
of speech. Science, he argues, is about the transfer of information,
about bringing that which is distant up close for examination. The
mistaken ‘belief in belief’ (belief in credulity) rests upon assuming
that religion is doing the same thing, but badly: that, as for the
frightened primitive Christians (as in Gibbon’s view of the early
Church), religion falsely promises a reassuring knowledge of a
distant reality (that a storm is an angry god, for example, but who
can be propitiated by sacrifice) and promises a reassuring
knowledge of a false reality: an afterlife. But, Latour argues, this is
not really what religion does: religious speech is not about
bringing close that which is distant, but instead seeks to make
fully present that which is already near and immanent, namely
care for others and for oneself.
To distinguish these different kinds of speech he gives the
example of a couple, the woman asking the man, ‘Do you love
me?’ and the man responding, ‘Yes, you know I do, I told you so
last year, and here is a tape-recording of that event to prove it’.
This is speech as a conduit of information, of bringing what is
temporally distant into the present; but we may recognize that
such a response probably does not ‘work’ in the way the man
had hoped it might.36
Latour notes that ‘What lovers call their
love, that love capable of lasting and growing deeper, always
materializes for them in the fragility of a risky speech act that
forces them to keep on raising the stakes’.37
35 Stephen Jay Gould, ‘Non-Overlapping Magisteria’, Natural History, cvi,
1 (1997).
36 Latour, Rejoicing, trans. Rose, 25 and passim.
37 Ibid., 51. A useful gloss on Latour’s argument regarding belief is given in
Adam S. Miller, Speculative Grace: Bruno Latour and Object-Oriented Theology
(New York, 2013), 123–6.
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Now, it should be noted that Latour is engaged in a sort of
reformist project.38 He is able to ditch any problematic
ideological legacies of his Catholicism — any aspects of ‘belief
that’ — by insisting on a current and future focus.39 It is not
clear how much propositional content remains in Latour’s
theology, and in fact from my unaligned atheist perspective, his
version of Catholicism looks curiously close to evangelical
Pentecostalism, centred very much on a personal connection to
the Holy Spirit. In short, his project here is far distant from a
historian’s inquiry. Indeed, fundamental to his argument is the
reinvigoration of religious speech in the present moment, framed
by a sense that in modernity such speech acts have lost the ease
of past times. ‘I’m well aware that no form of collective life exists
any longer, or any commonly accepted language game that
would allow us to magnify sufficiently the experience of love . . .
The way along which the faithful multitudes once passed
has become . . . invisible’.40
We are back here, in Latour’s
imagination, with those who flocked to see the relics of St Vivian
carried triumphantly to Figeac: with those who witnessed
miracles and wonders. And in that deeply nostalgic medievalism,
we may note that Bruno Latour has always been modern.
So, while I am in part critiquing Latour, not least for his
recurrent turn to a traditional and unreflective view of Christian
history, I am also interested in some of the analytical tools which
he proffers in his attempt to revivify his religion. First is his
insistence that we need to realize that within religion (as in fact
within his account of science) things that are constructed
(produced by humans interacting with each other and
interacting with non-human elements) are nonetheless real. That
38 Thus, for example, Latour, Rejoicing, trans. Rose, 118: ‘This form of
[religious] utterance is difficult in itself but only to the extent that it must always
be revived to begin its work of designating, purifying, resurrecting and redressing
its interlocutors once again’. The broader reformist aspects of his work, directed
towards transforming life within the Anthropocene, are more apparent in Bruno
Latour, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns, trans.
Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA, 2013), and its accompanying website,
<http://modesofexistence.org> (accessed 15 Feb. 2022). See also comments on
the slightly cult-like reception of his work in Charles Turner, ‘On the Modern
Cult of the Factish Gods: About Bruno Latour, On the Modern Cult of the Factish
Gods’, European Journal of Sociology, liii, 3 (2012), 427.
39 This critique is made very eloquently in Anke Bernau, ‘Bruno Latour and
the Loving Assumptions of [REL]’, Romanic Review, cxi, 1 (2020).
40 Latour, Rejoicing, trans. Rose, 126.
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things are ‘made’ by cultural interaction and activity does not
mean they are insubstantial; they still work, they still do things.
This is a point he makes eloquently and persuasively in a
discussion of religious fetishes: that they are made by people for
their acts of worship does not render them insubstantial, unreal,
somehow fake. Rather, the very involvement and investment of
the makers in their objects of devotion is a part of their faith.41
As a means of understanding the role of something like the
reliquary statues in southern France in the central Middle Ages,
this is a potentially useful insight.
The second tool is his description of religious belief as that
which ‘materializes . . . in the fragility of a risky speech act’. By
‘speech act’ Latour is gesturing to an inheritance in linguistic
and philosophical thought begun by J. L. Austin in the 1950s.
Austin argued that some kinds of verbal statement are not about
communicating information, and cannot usefully be judged ‘true
or false’, but are instead constitutive of an action; in the right
circumstances they are ‘performative’ in that they do the thing
that they say (for example, ‘I name this ship the QE2’ or ‘I do
solemnly swear to . . .’).42 For Latour, religious speech is also
thus ‘performative’: it does, or rather attempts to do, the thing
which it says.
Latour is not by any means the first person to suggest that we
might see aspects of religion as performative. Some version of
the idea of belief enacted through expression has been floated in
anthropologically informed religious studies in the last few
decades, a few explicitly drawing on Austin’s theory of
performativity.43 However, most of these analyses have focused
(cont. on p. 17)
41 Bruno Latour, On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods (Durham, NC, 2010).
Both this book and Rejoicing are briefly reprised in Latour, An Inquiry into Modes
of Existence, chs. 6, 11. It should be noted that various anthropologists have
looked somewhat askance at his account of the encounter between Portuguese
‘whites’ and coastal Guinea ‘blacks’ that frames this discussion of the fetish: see,
for example, Turner, ‘On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods’, 426–7.
42 J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Oxford, 1962).
43 For example, Peter G. Stromberg, Language and Self-Transformation: A Study
of the Christian Conversion Narrative (Cambridge, 1993); Bosco B. Bae, ‘Believing
Selves and Cognitive Dissonance: Connecting Individual and Society via
“Belief” ’, Religions, vii, 7 (2016); Abby Day and Gordon Lynch, ‘Introduction:
Belief as Cultural Performance’, Journal of Contemporary Religion, xxviii, 2 (2013);
Francesca E. S. Montemaggi, ‘Belief, Trust, and Relationality: A Simmelian
Approach for the Study of Faith’, Religion, xlvii, 2 (2017); Lynne Taylor, ‘Our
Doing Becomes Us: Performativity, Spiritual Practices and Becoming Christian’,
Practical Theology, xii (2019). Arnold, Belief and Unbelief in Medieval Europe, 231,
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on what one might see as the particular cases of either
conversion or spiritual healing: religious events, which in some
sense sit alongside the very long-standing discussion of
transformative ritual, and where the analysis is predicated on the
basic assumption that they ‘work’ for their participants. What is
particularly useful and insightful in Latour is his emphasis upon
the ‘fragility’ of religious speech acts. If we want to understand
belief not as default credulity, a hegemonic template or even
something like brainwashing, but as something which, as a
broader consideration of any period would suggest, sometimes
prompts some people to action (whether physical action or
speech or bearing witness to a certain identity), we are strongly
assisted by the sense of a speech act which makes a bid for a
successful performance but which might fail. We can see how this
puts something at stake; we have seen it both succeed and fail in
the story of the peasant couple observing St Vivian’s relics. The
point being twofold: that we are reminded not to believe in
credulity — not to assume that ‘belief’ is a permanent,
unvarying, zombie-like state that all believers occupy — and we
are given a sense of where its power lies: in the possibility of
failure, in the effort required to sustain something which reaches
beyond the present moment (whether understood as individual
and interiorized, or as more collective and publicly enacted).44
And from this perspective we can return, and with the tools of
social history, to consider an important element of J. L. Austin’s
original analysis, namely that the context of the performative
(n. 43 cont.)
briefly suggests (but without further exploration) that ‘belief was performative, in
the linguistic as much as the theatrical sense: that the words and deeds involved
in faith were not signs “of” belief that resided elsewhere but were the very
citation and production of belief itself’.
44 The dynamic of ‘putting something at stake’ might be seen as having a
structural similarity to the ‘ruptures’ which Michel de Certeau posited as a
central component of Christian spirituality. De Certeau evokes what one might
call the constantly surprising absent presence of Christ, the gap between spiritual
experience and the specific language available to the believer, and above all the
sense of yearning for or reaching towards something ‘Other’: Michel de Certeau,
La Faiblesse de croire (Paris, 1987), particularly 39–46. Compare Forrest,
Trustworthy Men, 16–17. However, de Certeau’s framing of these issues is
inflected by his particular interest in mysticism and in psychoanalytic theory, and
his notion of ‘rupture’ is imagined ultimately as something which reaches beyond
the given orthodoxy of a particular period: see Bernard McGinn, ‘The Future of
Past Spiritual Traditions’, Spiritus, xv, 1 (2015), particularly 3–4. What I am
aiming to evoke is something which also embraces more quotidian and obedient
experiences.
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speech act has a bearing on its success or failure. Austin’s
contexts were primarily linguistic and essentially understood
contemporaneously with the speech act itself; as historians, we
may want to consider what broader antecedent resources and
demands may also affect context.45 In that sense, we may have a
way of thinking about belief as something other than a simple
‘on’ or ‘off’ binary, and of thinking truly historically about belief
as something which may be understood to be changing as the
contexts that permit such belief change.
III
To explore this a little less abstractly, let us turn again to
southern France in the central Middle Ages, to the landscape
within which the reliquary of St Vivian was carried, and to the
people who might have come to worship, or who might, like the
peasant husband, have scoffed and turned away. Let us begin in
the period that produced that narrative and its collection of
miracles, the eleventh century. What speech acts of belief might
ordinary people have made in such a period? The evidence is
extremely limited: in documents from this time and place,
ordinary people almost only ever appear, like the peasant couple,
as characters in narratives produced by clerics, or as the
presumed recipients of instruction. Collections of miracle
stories, like those for St Vivian, provide a small range of
examples where the people themselves are represented as being
more active: we find, for example, peasants gathering at the
shrine of St Foy in Conques on the eve of her feast, singing her
praises in the vernacular; great crowds congregating at one of the
so-called Peace of God assemblies where a host of relics were
paraded; a peasant at the shrine of St Isarn, petitioning for
supernatural vengeance on a local official who had stolen his
cow; a knight called Ugo who came to the shrine of St Vivian to
pray, apparently without any particular petition but purely as an
act of worship.46
All involve at least some verbal acts directed
(cont. on p. 19)
45 For similar thoughts in what is still a very linguistic (and Latourian)
approach, see Franc¸ois Cooren, Action and Agency in Dialogue: Passion,
Incarnation and Ventriloquism (Amsterdam, 2010).
46 The Book of Sainte Foy, ed. and trans. Pamela Sheingorn (Philadelphia,
1995), 137–9 (2.12); Richard Landes, ‘Between Aristocracy and Heresy: Popular
Participation in the Limousin Peace of God’, in Thomas Head and Richard
Landes (eds.), The Peace of God: Social Violence and Religious Response in France
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towards a saint, and beyond the saint to God; but all also
involve — and perhaps rest as much upon — embodied actions,
the doing of belief: collective singing through a night’s vigil, the
prostration in supplication before a shrine, being part of a
collective group of worship or, in contrast, taking a quiet
moment alone before a statue of a saint. In each case, in
different ways people put themselves into an act of worship in
which they venture a hope, whether specific and close by (the
return of a cow) or much more general (eventual salvation).
Something is put at stake by the doing as well as the saying. And
the activities are often also about the reproduction of community
and identity (both individual and collective).
Latour’s particular framing of speech — his illustrative
metaphor of the couple talking to one another of their love, his
meditative reflections on saying the Creed to himself — offers
another sign that he has always been modern: it figures religion
as primarily private, individual and verbal. But if we are
interested in understanding how belief comes about in past
times, we need to widen our focus a bit. We could helpfully think
not only of speech acts, but of what we might term ‘belief acts’;
that is, to consider things done as well as things said, where the
doing is not a sign of belief that somehow exists elsewhere but is
constitutive in itself of belief. We can then consider belief not as
some purely separate and intellectually abstracted act of
cognition but as something embodied and situated in a
particular moment. And if, as historians, we can think about
belief as including embodied action, there is a further potential,
to connect belief to other key areas of recent academic
discussion in the field, notably the history of the senses and the
history of emotions. By treating belief as performative, in an
embodied as well as a linguistic sense, we can thus think about
the affective experience of belief. This may present a way to
pursue the more elusive aspects of ‘belief in’, beyond the
relatively more confirmatory aspects of ‘belief that’. That is, it is
probably permissible to assume, where evidence exists for the
cultural transmission of the relevant ideas, that, in the abstract,
many people would recognize and subscribe to specific tenets of
faith, to ‘belief that’ statements such as, for example, ‘The saints
(n. 46 cont.)
around the Year 1000 (Ithaca, 1992); Acta Sanctorum, Septembris VI (Antwerp,
1757), col. 742; ‘Translatio et miraculi Sancti Viviani’, 268–9.
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are the very special dead who can intercede with God for our
benefit’. But only when something specific then rests upon such
a tenet (something being put at stake always necessarily
occurring within a specific social situation such as, for example,
abandoning one’s agricultural labour and joining in a collective
act of worship) do ‘belief that’ and ‘belief in’ start to conjoin.47
Encounters with saints, while important to medieval
Christianity, were always extra-ordinary, the large-scale
assemblies and processions notably so. The more normal
(though by no means universal) experience in southern France
at this time of attendance at Sunday Mass in a local church
would have meant people hearing prayers and chants in Latin.
People may also have experienced some form of preaching in the
vernacular, though prior to the thirteenth century we do not
really have much evidence of that. But they would have been
involved in acts of belief: we could see the fact of attendance
itself as potentially such an act. In southern France, most
eleventh- and early twelfth-century local churches were very
dark, having only one or two slit windows, and really small, with
a nave that might measure only 5 metres wide and 10 metres
long.48 Even given that everyone was probably standing rather
than sitting, for a variety of communities it is unlikely that
everybody could actually fit inside such a church at one time;
and where they did, their sensory experience would be
dominated by proximity to fellow humans. Remembering our
scoffing peasant husband, and knowing that evidence from the
later Middle Ages clearly shows that non-attendance at church
was far from uncommon, it becomes evident that we are better
served by seeing a medieval lay person’s attendance at Mass in
this period as an active choice rather than a default
inevitability.49
47 One can again note both a similarity with and difference from de Certeau, in
his emphasis upon praxis and belief; in de Certeau’s case again, however, praxis is
seen as being something more profound whence a new experience of belief may
emerge: de Certeau, La Faiblesse de croire, 218–24; compare Graham Ward, ‘The
Weakness of Believing: A Dialogue with de Certeau’, Culture, Theory and Critique,
lii, 2–3 (2011), 242.
48 Genevi�eve Durand, ‘Les �Eglises rurales du premier ^age roman dans le
Rouergue m�eridional’, Arch�eologie du Midi M�edi�eval, vii (1989); Elisabeth ZadoraRio,
‘Arch�eologies des �eglises et des cimeti�eres ruraux en Languedoc: un point de
vue d’“Outre Loire” ’, Arch�eologie du Midi M�edi�eval, xxviii (2010).
49 For non-attendance in the medieval church, see Arnold, ‘Materiality of
Unbelief in Late Medieval England’, 83–4.
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The point can certainly be made if we turn to a particular
remote church, the hermitage of Saint-Guilhem-de-Combret,
which sits on the flanks of the Canigou mountains in the far
south-west of what is now France. There was a small community
of priests living there, about three hours’ walk from the nearest
village of Montferrer (which gained its own church in the twelfth
century). The choice to attend is thus clear. This church had a
wrought-iron bell that remarkably still survives, not quite
30 centimetres in height and width, simply made and probably
not tremendously resonant; responding to the ringing of this bell
was another active choice: another belief act, one might say.50
From this particular tiny church there also survives a twelfthcentury
manuscript of a Carolingian sacramentary, a liturgical
book which provided the priest with all the words, but not the
biblical readings, necessary for Mass, and for some other
sacramental rites. This manuscript offers further glimpses of the
acts and embodied experiences that attendance at Mass there
might have involved. It includes the blessing, in Latin, of the
candles that were essential both spiritually and practically, with
the priest directed to make the sign of the cross as he spoke the
key words ‘sanctificatum’ and ‘benedictum’, as well as
instructions indicating the point during the Mass when he
should light the candles, figuring them as a sacrifice to God.51
Quite amazingly, there is a further surviving twelfth-century
manuscript from the same small church, namely a mixtum (a
book which combined the missal, breviary and some other
liturgical materials), which reminds us that those attending Mass
would hear singing. The precise meaning of the sung passages
would not be easily understood by a congregation unversed in
Latin, but perhaps the ‘alleluia’, as it came around on repeated
occasions, would have caught the ear, and in so catching, would
invite an affective response: another potential belief act.52
50 The bell is described in more detail at <http://www.pop.culture.gouv.fr/
notice/palissy/PM66001362> (accessed 15 Feb. 2022).
51 Perpignan, Mediatheque Municipale, MS 4, fo. 2r
. The manuscript
(described as a missel) has been digitized by the library: <https://mediathequepatrimoine.perpignan.fr/view.php?titn=0339027&men=3&lg=FR>
(accessed 15
Feb. 2022).
52 Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale de France, MS Nouvelles Acquisitions Latine
557, for example, at fos. 6r
, 8v
. The manuscript has been digitized on the Gallica
website: <https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b10546776k/f1.image.r=nal%20557>
(accessed 15 Feb. 2022).
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If we move forward to a later part of the twelfth century, and
shift about 330 kilometres west, to the town of Morlaas, we
catch a further glimpse of the potential belief acts of the ordinary
laity in a testamentary document written by the local priest,
Bernard de Belsta, sometime between 1135 and 1140. In it he
describes how he built the church of St Andre with the help of
his neighbours. He was its first chaplain, and, nearing death, he
appears to have wanted to set out some of the important
customary aspects, such as he had been able to establish during
his incumbency, regarding the church’s financial relationship
with the nearby monastery of St Foy in Morlaas. Among other
things he noted that whatever people brought as oblations on the
day after Easter, ‘namely bread, coins, candles’, must be handed
over to the monks that same day, thus implicitly recognizing
their financial lordship; but in the process he spelled out that the
laity should give these things to the altar, at the prompting of the
priest, and that it was the priest or his representative who
actually received them from the congregation.53 Thus, there
seems to have been an implicit recognition that the parishioners
must be allowed to feel they were giving to the local church
itself, the church that they helped to found.
Bernard de Belsta could be seen as demonstrating here a
concern over how to ensure that the act of donation succeeded
as an act of belief; he wished, we might say, to maximize the
conditions of felicity for that performative act. ‘Conditions of
felicity’ is Latour’s phrase, borrowed from J. L. Austin’s original
account of how a performative utterance might succeed or fail,
and for both theorists these conditions were both linguistic (the
correct pronunciation within a recognized field of discourse) and
structural (the right person in the right place at the right time
speaking these words). I am further suggesting, as with the
parishioners’ Easter gifts, that these acts were not only verbal but
embodied, sensory and emotional as much as cognitive.
Bestowing a simple candle or coin for lamp oil upon such a
church should have felt like an act which reached beyond ‘duty’
53 ‘Cartulaire de Sainte Foi de Morlaas’, ed. L. Cadier, Bulletin de la Societe des
Sciences, Lettres et Arts de Pau, 2nd ser., xiii (1883–4), 344 (no. 35): ‘ut quicquid
insequenti die post Pascha, a fidelibus populis altari vel sepulcro, ammonitione
capellani, oblatum fuerit, scilicet panem, nummos, candelas, capellanus vel ejus
missus accipiat, et eadem die, fratres Sancte Fidis et familiam diligenter atque
festive procuret’.
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to something more fundamentally communal and meaningful;
could have brought with it the myriad theological associations of
bringing light into the darkness; and would surely sometimes
have encouraged a feeling of very active participation for the lay
donor, however humble, because of the obvious importance and
necessity of that light.54
IV
In stretching the idea of ‘the performative’ to belief acts, several
points can be made regarding the conditions of felicity. One is
that we might think not so much in terms of a binary success or
failure of belief, but of a range of potentials activated by a range
of possible conditions. In later medieval Europe, an underlying
base for such conditions was the ingrained practices and habits
which, even if initially taught to Christian children, were so
regularly enacted within communities that they might be seen as
a form of habitus, as Pierre Bourdieu theorized it: the bodily acts
(such as joining one’s hands in prayer, walking in procession)
and mental imagery (Christ as king, the cross) that were so
familiarly present that they largely ‘went without saying’.55
But
what I am trying to grapple with here, via the notion of
performativity, should be seen as something beyond that
habitual context: moments of specific engagement that, even if
only in a quite modest fashion, reached towards something
beyond the utterly quotidian. While the conditions of possibility
could thus be seen as emerging from habitus, it is more fruitful to
analyse moments when qualities are put in play which invite or
engender a more engaged response: whether through sensory
input (the elaboration of liturgy, visual adornment of churches, a
particular preaching performance) or through a degree of
consciously required agency (spontaneous almsgiving, a more
effortful journeying to a particular place of worship, active
engagement with individual prayer). ‘Belief’ understood in this
sense might be seen as not simply either present or absent, but
54 On the long-standing importance of lights in churches, see now Paul
Fouracre, Eternal Light and Earthly Concerns: Belief and the Shaping of Medieval
Society (Manchester, 2021).
55 Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice
(Cambridge, 1977). Bourdieu did not himself apply this to religion, which he
tended to see more in terms of a functionalist ideology: see Terry Rey, Bourdieu
on Religion: Imposing Faith and Legitimacy (London, 2007).
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felt to a degree of intensity, understood in regard to varied levels of
explicit propositional content, and related to other contexts and
occasions which themselves sat within a range of varied
conditional experiences. Being part of a large-scale ritual
procession or prostrating oneself alone before a statue of a saint
implied similar propositional tenets regarding supernatural
power (‘belief that’), but surely operated in rather differing
dynamics regarding the strength, intensity and implications of
the belief they engendered (‘belief in’).
Secondly, the conditions of felicity are also conditions of
possibility, differing according to the available resources,
prompts or demands that the potential believer might
experience. Thus, for example, in the sacramentary from SaintGuilhem-de-Combret
the priests would repeatedly encounter a
rather pleasing image of the crucifixion that it contains: a simple
depiction of Christ on the cross with Mary on one side and
(probably) St Peter, holding a book, on the other.56
But at the
time, such a visual experience would be rare for a lay audience as
they did not themselves have access to any liturgical books, and
the evidence suggests that such small churches did not yet have
much internal adornment. More likely for them would be
quotidian encounters with unadorned crosses, where Christ was
not directly represented: one within the church on the altar
during Mass, but also various stone or wooden wayside crosses,
which were a common feature of the wider landscape and which
acted as waymarks or boundary markers as well as a potential
focus for worship.57 Thus, while visual imagery could stir both
priest and people to reflect upon Christ’s sacrifice, the visual
materials they would come upon were, at the very least, framed
rather differently; and perhaps the cross imagery which people
most often encountered, while certainly enabling an act of belief,
did not prompt it quite so insistently as a more ornate, adorned
image might.
56 Perpignan, M�ediath�eque Municipale, MS 4, fo. 18v
.
57 Gabriel Le Bras, ‘Sur l’histoire des croix rurales’, in Gabriel Le Bras, �Etudes
de sociologie religieuse, 2 vols. (Paris, 1955–6), i; Achim Timmermann, Memory
and Redemption: Public Monuments and the Making of Late Medieval Landscape
(Turnhout, 2017). Timmermann suggests a more recurrent devotional potential
to wayside crosses than I am proposing here: see the discussion in John H.
Arnold, ‘Belief and the Senses for the Medieval Laity’, in �Eric Palazzo (ed.), Les
Cinq Sens au Moyen ^Age (Paris, 2016).
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The third and most important point is that if we are thinking
about the conditions of felicity and possibility as historians rather
than anthropologists, we will note change over time. This article
has focused thus far on the contexts of belief acts for the
ordinary laity in southern France in the eleventh and early
twelfth century. But change was coming to this region.58
Within
the twelfth century, there was an efflorescence of possibilities:
the reformed monasticism of the Cistercians, the building of
civic hospitals and leper houses, the arrival of the Hospitallers
and the Templars, all of which allowed, among other things,
more varied opportunities for donation, and for belief acts
focused propositionally more on the notion of apostolic poverty
than on that of sacral power. The twelfth century saw, across
Europe, a growing population, the building of new towns, an
acceleration of commerce and fungible wealth. One effect was a
wave of church building in the south, mostly maintaining the
same basic architectural style as those we have already met, but
on a somewhat larger scale, sometimes with side aisles, implying
the opportunity for housing the whole community at worship.
The combination of churches and orders facilitated further
elaboration: in 1159 we find a priest called Deodat negotiating
with the local Cistercian monastery at Silvanes, making an
agreement on behalf of his parishioners to surrender a portion of
the tithe, in return for which the monks agreed to supply the
church with three bells — bells which were almost certainly cast
rather than beaten, thus resonant, able to broadcast a more
complex voice and appeal into the locality.59 Bells were
increasingly used not only to summon people to church, but to
provide another prompt for a belief act to those laity who had
not attended: the major bells were to be rung during the Mass at
the moment of consecration of the Host, and from the late
twelfth century onwards we find texts calling upon lay people to
kneel and adore wherever they were at that moment: a new
condition of possibility and felicity for a belief act not
technologically possible in an earlier age.60 One could make a
58 The discussion here adumbrates a lengthier treatment: John H. Arnold, The
Making of Lay Religion in Southern France, c.1000–1350 (Oxford, forthcoming).
59 P.-A. Verlaguet (ed.), Cartulaire de l’abbaye de Silvanes (Rodez, 1910), 64
(no. 76).
60 See John H. Arnold and Caroline Goodson, ‘Resounding Community: The
History and Meaning of Medieval Church Bells’, Viator, xliii, 1 (2012), 121–4.
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similar point about the Cistercian church at Silvanes itself, and
others like it: for lay people in its locality, or those willing to
journey there, it offered a different, larger architectural form
which admitted more light and air, and with greater visual
adornment and greater liturgical elaboration, providing, among
other things, further contrast with the more limited and muted
local churches.
This greater range of contexts could be seen as largely
affording more opportunities for voluntary belief acts, for
choosing to participate by worship, donation, contemplation. But
as we enter the thirteenth century, in southern France we also
see the growth of belief as something demanded, the conditions of
felicity more clearly involving an element of power. From the
point of view of the Catholic Church, southern France in the
latter part of the twelfth century was a hotbed of heresy. For
their lay supporters, the attraction of the heretical sects of
Cathars and Waldensians was almost certainly in large part the
very public way in which they performed apostolic piety, and
their presence facilitated further occasions for worship and
donation, essentially in a continuum with the wider orthodox
landscape.61 The Church’s reaction was to launch a crusade
against the south, which ultimately culminated in the Capetian
kings gaining control of the region, and, after the cessation of the
crusade in 1229, to initiate repeated ‘inquisitions into heretical
wickedness’ that presented a large number of ordinary lay people
with an utterly new context in which they were to give voice to
their belief.
We shall return to inquisition in a moment, but let us note first
some of the other changed conditions of possibility that these
conflicts brought with them. One was yet more church building,
in the new style we now call Gothic, providing local churches
and other religious buildings with soaring vertical lines and large
windows, making much greater use of light: an architecture that,
in the case of Albi’s massive mid-thirteenth-century cathedral,
might be said to announce a conjunction of faith with power.62
As more light entered churches, so too, it seems, did more
61 Within a vast and rather troubled literature, see Christine Caldwell Ames,
Medieval Heresies: Christianity, Judaism, and Islam (Cambridge, 2015), ch. 3.
62 See comments in Jean-Louis Biget, ‘La Brique contre l’heresie: le gothique
toulousain’, Revue du Tarn, 3rd ser., clxxxix (2003).
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images and imagery, including ornamented and adorned crosses
and painted figures of saints. Another was southern French
bishops’ particular adaptation of wider religious reforms. At the
Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, the Catholic Church famously
enjoined annual individual confession upon all Christians
(something which should probably be seen as an extension of
‘best practice’ rather than a total innovation). In southern
France, this was amplified: confession was to be made three
times a year by all the laity, and their names were to be recorded
by their parish priest so that any who omitted this practice (and
thus were perhaps hiding heretical thoughts) could be
identified.63 Thus, a key belief act — the speaking forth of one’s
deeds in recognition of sins committed, and in the hope of
gaining penance and repentance — became literally regularized,
placed ‘under a rule’.
What then of inquisition? For a period in the 1240s, its reach
was extraordinarily broad: we have the surviving records of
interrogation or sentencing for over six thousand people from
the region, and we know that these records are only a portion of
the original archive. These first inquisitors were more interested
in asking about things done than things said, though
contemporary legal consultations indicate that some degree of
doing could be taken to indicate or indeed constitute believing.64
Many of these early interrogations were extremely brief and it
was not at all the case that every person questioned ended up
being punished. But it did mean that every person questioned
was confronted with a particular sense of ‘belief’ as a matter of
choice, allegiance and obedience. ‘Did you believe in the heretics
or their errors? Did you believe that they were good men and
that you could be saved in their hands?’ asked the inquisitors.
The variety of responses is further instructive regarding how we
might see belief. During interrogations in the late thirteenth
century, Pierre de Laurac confessed that he had believed in the
heretics from when he first saw them preaching ‘until the time of
his confession to Brother Pons de Poget’. Bona de Puy believed
that they were ‘true men and friends of God’ from the time
63 Council of Toulouse, 1229, canon 13, in Heresy and Inquisition in France,
1200–1300, ed. and trans. John H. Arnold and Peter Biller (Manchester, 2016),
194–5.
64 See John H. Arnold, Inquisition and Power: Catharism and the Confessing
Subject in Medieval Languedoc (Philadelphia, 2001), 39–45.
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when ‘she first heard their words and admonitions, until the time
when she was captured for heresy’. Fabrissa Vital believed ‘from
a year before the last grape harvest until the day of her citation
[by the inquisitor], because all of the aforesaid things [in her
confession] took place from that time’.65 One might take these
as statements of allegiance (‘I believed in the heretics until a
more powerful inquisitor told me to stop’) but they also appear
to be statements of possibility: ‘I believed in the heretics when I
could do those acts that constituted such belief; upon citation or
capture and submission, I could no longer perform such acts’,
and thus belief ends (although in some cases perhaps only
temporarily, as we remember those who ‘relapsed’ into heresy
and were subsequently burned).
In the early fourteenth century, the inquisition conducted by
Jacques Fournier, bishop of Pamiers (later to become Pope
Benedict XII), focused much more specifically upon belief in the
sense of ideas and thoughts, and people’s relationship to them:
‘belief that’ explicitly related to ‘belief in’.66 Here a careful
reading of witness records can provide considerable nuance
regarding the process of believing. To focus briefly on just one:
Pierre Maury, a lowly Pyrenean shepherd questioned by
Fournier in 1323, was closely connected to the small group of
Cathar ‘Good Men’ present in the Pyrenean villages of the
Sabarthes. Anyone familiar with Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s
famous microhistory Montaillou (based on the Fournier
registers) will recall the extent of Maury’s involvement: he knew
most of the heretics intimately, and his life was bound up with
theirs in a variety of ways.67 Maury’s deposition is one of the
lengthiest, providing extraordinary detail, and at its conclusion,
the inquisitor confronted the shepherd with sixty-two ‘articles’ of
heretical belief extracted from his evidence and the evidence of
others, to which he had to respond.
Asked whether he had heard the heretics say a certain thing,
and whether he had believed them, he presented lengthy and
detailed answers. On a number of topics, having provided an
65 Ibid., 162.
66 On Fournier, see Irene Bueno, Defining Heresy: Inquisition, Theology, and
Papal Policy in the Time of Jacques Fournier (Leiden, 2015); see particularly, on his
questioning regarding belief, 104–18.
67 Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou: village occitain, de 1294 a 1324
(Paris, 1975), particularly 118–32.
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example of the heretics expounding a certain belief, for example
that there were two gods, one good and one bad, he simply
confessed that he believed what they had said. One wonders in
such cases what import this had for him: did his ‘belief that’
imply ‘belief in’? (One notes that for Maury, as for most lay
adherents of the group, the theological notion of two gods had
no immediate practical implication or requirement.)68
But for
various questions, Maury presented more complex and nuanced
answers. Explaining, for example, that the Good Men held that
only they could say the Paternoster, because in their theology
God was only ‘the Father’ to those who had been purified by
their rituals, Maury noted that ‘he did not believe the heretics on
this point; on the contrary, he often said the Paternoster’. On the
matter of baptism, Maury said that the heretics had claimed that
everyone, including babies, was damned unless they had
received their blessing, and he ‘initially believed this, but after he
returned to [his village], he believed that all Christians, whatever
bad they had done, would be saved, whether they were heretics
or Catholics’. Had he heard from the heretics that one should
not worship the crucifix nor make the sign of the cross? He had
heard them say that signing the cross was a worthless gesture,
but he never believed this, and once, when he wished to drink
from a spring, he made the sign of the cross over it despite their
words. And perhaps most interestingly, in regard to the
Eucharist, which the heretics ridiculed on the grounds that, if
made present in every consecrated Host, Christ’s body would
have been eaten up by now even if it were as big as a mountain:
‘When he was with the heretics he believed [that Christ was not
present], but afterwards when he went to church and saw the
people greatly adoring the consecrated Host, he sometimes
believed that it was the body of Christ’.69
There is very much more that one could say about Pierre
Maury’s beliefs and his negotiation of faith, but let us for now
take this point: that what Latour would call ‘the conditions of
68 For a possible parallel, see reflections on the complexity of native people’s
relationship to the (supernatural) ‘beliefs’ they report, in David Graeber, ‘Radical
Alterity Is Just Another Way of Saying “Reality”: A Reply to Eduardo Viveiros de
Castro’, HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, v, 2 (2012), particularly 10–14,
27–31.
69 Le Registre d’inquisition de Jacques Fournier, �ev^eque de Pamiers (1318–1325),
ed. Jean Duvernoy, 3 vols. (Toulouse, 1965), iii, 218, 221–2, 224, 229, 234. The
entirety of his deposition covers 110–252.
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felicity’ are not fixed but variable. When with the heretics,
deriding the Eucharist, he believed in an absence; amid his
neighbours at the culmination of the Mass, he believed in a
presence. Both were belief acts, both were constituted in their
moment of possibility.
Let us return briefly to Edward Gibbon and thence to Bruno
Latour, both also giving account of their own attempts to
believe. Here is Gibbon’s account of his conversion, from his
autobiography:
To my present feelings it seems incredible that I should ever believe
that I believed in transubstantiation. But my conqueror [a fellow
Catholic student] oppressed me with the sacramental words Hoc est
corpus meum and dashed against each other the figurative halfmeanings
of the Protestant sects; every objection was resolved into
omnipotence; and after repeating, at St Mary’s [the university church],
the Athanasian Creed, I humbly acquiesced in the mystery of the
real presence.70
And now Latour, talking about his contemplation of Fra
Angelico’s mid-fifteenth-century fresco in San Marco of the four
Marys contemplating Christ’s empty tomb, with an angel
instructing them, a devout friar (possibly St Dominic) kneeling
at the edge of the frame, and Christ in majesty hovering above
and behind the main scene:
What’s going on in this utterly familiar illustration of a theme that’s
been revisited over and over again? A monk, in prayer . . . The painter
must have put him there so that his figure will help me make the
transition by implicating me in this curious story in which no
protagonist sees anything directly: neither the women, nor the angel,
nor even the monk — nor me as a result. Yet I’m the only one to see,
behind everyone else, the painted apparition of Christ. But that’s just
it, it’s only painted . . . What do I see? . . . it’s not back down there in
the past that the meaning must be sought, but now, for me, here.71
Both authors are relating moments of belief: of doing belief. Both
involve ‘conditions of felicity’: Gibbon’s intellectual encounter
and subsequent surrender, enacted through his recitation of the
Creed in the ritual space of the communal church in Oxford;
Latour’s slow contemplation and active interpretation of a
painting, fantasized as a connection back to that medieval past
in which the presence of God was ‘taken for granted’ but
70 Edward Gibbon, Autobiography, ed. Lord Sheffield (London, [1907]), 47–8.
71 Latour, Rejoicing, trans. Rose, 107. The image is reproduced online at
<https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Resurrection_of_Christ_and_Women_at_
the_Tomb_by_Fra_Angelico_(San_Marco_cell_8).jpg> (accessed 15 Feb. 2022).
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experienced in the modern mode of a habitue of the art gallery,
and fashioned into a belief act for Latour’s personal take on
Catholicism. Belief is present, but transitory, abandoned under a
later intellectual dispensation by Gibbon, lapsing under the
effort of holding onto the meaning he seeks ‘now, here’ in the
modern world for Latour.
The importance of context, and the sense of belief as
something being done repeatedly, but equally capable of being
undone, links together Latour, Gibbon and the fourteenthcentury
shepherd Pierre Maury. But at the same time, the
frames of their belief — the conditions within which they can or
must ‘believe’ — are very different. Gibbon makes an intellectual
choice in the context of debate, among other intellectual choices.
Latour’s rather solitary acts of belief — singular contemplation
of a picture, a rather lonely recitation of the Creed — are framed
by the sceptical modernity he cannot really disavow, even as he
reaches emotionally back towards a Middle Ages which, he
fantasizes, never had to deal with such a challenge. And Pierre
Maury, in that Middle Ages, experiences the various persuasive
tugs of neighbours, preachers, heretics and liturgical ritual, and
finally the uncompromising and categorizing questions of the
inquisitor and his written record, where belief is inked into
permanence and subsequent sentence.
V
To conclude: in expanding Latour’s account of belief, and
discussing belief acts, this article may have done no more than
place a known landscape under a fresh description, though
nonetheless a useful one in several ways. Where that ‘belief’
involves explicit propositional content, it may help us to see that
such tenets of faith are made manifest (are ‘believed’) in contexts
and actions that can also fail, as when seeing others flock to
worship a saint’s bones or when viewing the elevation of the
Host during Mass.72
That failure, we might say, is precisely the
condition of possibility for their success.
Moreover, it suggests that the contexts within which belief acts
take place are structural, but also sensory, emotional and
72 See similarly Garma’s response to Robbins: Carlos Garma, ‘Continuity
Thinking’, Current Anthropology, xlviii (2007), 21–2.
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affective.73
Indeed, it might be charged that I am largely
equating ‘belief’ with ‘affect’. I don’t mean to eradicate the
propositional element of belief — the ‘belief that’ element which
could be seen as cognitive rather than affective (although those
should not be seen as clearly dichotomous terms) — but to argue
that, for the social historian at least, it is when it spurs further
activity that the content comes to matter. ‘Believing’ in this sense
could be said not simply to be knowing or accepting a
proposition, but to be about something else then occurring.74
Thinking of this in terms of affect allows us perhaps a little more
analytical purchase on both individuals and communities.
Finally, the contexts within which belief acts take place also
vary, both across social context and across time. As Talal Asad
has long reminded us, beliefs operate within wider regimes of
(spiritual) truth and legitimizing power, and these are not static.
Moreover, the resources and materials by which belief acts can
be enacted vary by situation (status, wealth, gender) and, again,
vary over time. ‘Belief’ is in this sense a set of changing
possibilities, with a history. This sense of a history to belief
differs from Gibbon’s developmental account of progress, and
from Latour’s sentimental nostalgia for a lost past, and perhaps
can give us a more useful way of understanding how religious
belief operates, or operated, both then and now, within medieval
Catholicism and perhaps within other faiths. It seems to me, as a
modern left-wing atheist intellectual interested in thinking about
religion, society and politics, that it is helpful not to assume that
religion operates as a programme of propositional content that
believers simply embrace because of their ‘softness of temper’.
Here, I am with Latour in his rejection of ‘believing in belief’. To
73 On the importance of seeing what I am calling ‘belief acts’ as embodied, see
Thomas J. Csordas, ‘Somatic Modes of Attention’, Cultural Anthropology, viii, 2
(1993); Thomas J. Csordas, ‘Asymptote of the Ineffable: Embodiment, Alterity,
and the Theory of Religion’, Current Anthropology, xlv, 2 (2004). Drawing on
Csordas, the point about emotion is emphasized also by Jon P. Mitchell and Hildi
J. Mitchell, ‘For Belief: Embodiment and Immanence in Catholicism and
Mormonism’, Social Analysis, lii, 1 (2008).
74 For a potential parallel, note the discussion of African Christians who move
between different denominations, in each case asserting the importance of
‘believing’ (in the sense of committing to, and putting oneself into) each act of
belief — in this case, importantly, in regard to spiritual healing — when engaging
with it: Thomas G. Kirsch, ‘Restaging the Will to Believe: Religious Pluralism,
Anti-Syncretism, and the Problem of Belief’, American Anthropologist, cvi,
4 (2004).
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see that the medieval past (which even Latour fantasizes as a
simple age of faith) may in fact have been more complicated —
may have involved more effort in its acts of belief, may have seen
belief change over time, may even have contained occasions of
unbelief — might help us to move beyond the narrative we have
inherited from Gibbon and others.
John H. Arnold
University of Cambridge, UK
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