The Inalienable Gift
Godelier's fundamentally anthropological account of gift-giving and human identity makes a valuable contribution to theological considerations of relationship with the divine. Though it is ultimately inextricable from our discussion of reciprocity in Chapter 3, Godelier's major contribution has been retained until now to emphasize the key distinction between things that are 'alienable' and explicitly 'given' through reciprocal acts and 'inalienable' things that can never be 'given' in exchange. These inalienable phenomena dominate Godelier's interpretation of Mauss, making it invaluable for theological use. By developing Mauss's notion of the 'fourth obligation', the obligation to give to the gods, rather than the first three obligations, to give, to receive, and to give in return, that pertain to human realms, Godelier shows how inalienable things serve as an 'anchorage in time', relating people to their past and to their origin, as they 'concentrate the greatest imaginary power and, as a consequence, the greatest symbolic value' (1999:32-3). Accordingly, while contractual exchange and non-contractual transmission make up the undercurrent of social life, it is the inalienable elements that help 'constitute an essential part' of the identity of specific groups (1999:120). They are as inalienable as the group's identity is inalienable, and to sell them would be tantamount to selling one's birthright in the most literal of senses.
One criticism that could be made of Godelier and Mauss is that they create too sharp a distinction between reciprocity amongst humans and between humans and the gods (Boyer 1994:32). Partly for this reason, my own discussion in Chapter 3 assumed that both Mauss's threefold and his fourth obligations may apply to religious realms. By so doing it was possible to show aspects of the inappropriateness of gift-discourse to analyses of grace. Now we can develop a model allowing for a more complex understanding of 'gift-language' within Christian soteriology, one that also brings added depth to the ritual of eucharistic liturgy. The heart of the matter is that Christ needs to be interpreted in terms of Godelier's inalienable gift, that can be 'given without really being "alienated" by the giver' (1999:37). Part of the giver is retained in the 'gift', and the giver retains some rights over it. Here Godelier's inalienable gift bears strong resemblance to St Paul's 'inexpressible gift' (II Cor. 9:15). Godelier does, albeit only in passing, refer to Christ's gift of his life for the forgiveness of sin as 'the supreme example of the absolutely free gift freely given', and sees it as one reason why gifts between friends remains important in Western society (1999:145). But here I suspect that Godelier does not fully appreciate the theological complexity of Christ 'as gift' in terms of the overall relationship between God as 'Father' and believers at large. To see Christ as God's gift in which the divine retains an interest, yet which alters the state of the recipient, is, precisely, to see him in terms of the inalienable gift, one that enhances the notion of grace as a quality of relationship and not as some kind of commodity that has been passed from one to another, even if spontaneously, or that needs repayment through 'faith' or 'good works'. But, in fact, Godelier's overall theory allows us to press this interpretation further than he does himself, and further than our earlier analysis in Chapter 3, which was restricted to Mauss's threefoldness of reciprocity without progressing to his 'fourth obligation' , that of giving to the divine.
Before taking that final step it is worth recalling Georg Simmel's brief theoretical suggestions that presaged Mauss's division of gifts and Berger's insight into self-abnegation and masochism, discussed in Chapter 2, and the process of higher-order 'framing' of Chapter 6. Simmel's condensed style integrated these issues without spelling them out in any real sense. He speaks of a passing into the 'transcendental dimension' of certain elements basic to ordinary social relationships, especially the desire for 'surrender or acceptance' , and it is this core that he reckons underlies the phenomenon of sacrifice (1997:158). Rhetorically, he asks whether this relationship between gods and their devotees is a 'metaphysical extension of the economic exchange of value and equivalent value? Rejecting that possibility, he suggests that it might 'derive from the spiritual significance that all giving has and which goes beyond the actual value of the gift'. This brings him to speak of an 'inner bond' that 'cannot be cancelled by returning something of the same outward value', and identifies 'the sociological relationship of giving and receiving' as being moulded by a general sense of religiousness into a transcendent phenomenon' (1997:159). Here Simmel explores what would become the broad duality of gifts in Mauss, elaborated in Godelier. First come things pertaining to economic exchange of known value, things that Mauss would have within his threefold obligation, and then phenomena involving the 'inner bond' that cannot be cancelled and in which is 'inherent... a sense of favour and goodwill', a clear expression of Mauss's fourth obligation (ibid.). It is sufficient to indicate this trend of thought in Simmel to show how economic models appeal to sociological minds, as they did to Weber, and yet hint at crucial constraints when they pass into relation with the divine.
Unlike Simmel, for whom the immediacy of encounter with deity furnished the very source of human creativity, Godelier defines the sacred as 'a certain kind of relationship with the origin' of a particular people (1999:169). He also prefers this approach to the sacred than to Durkheim's rather sharp distinction between the sacred and the profane as expressing the divide between the religious and the political. In this I think he is correct. Godelier then suggests that in societies where 'the bulk of social relationships take the form of personal relationships' a view of the world emerges in which 'things are also persons' generating a kind of 'enchanted' world (1999:105). Indeed, he coins the word 'thing-persons', or sometimes 'person-things', to cope with this phenomenon (1999:106, 69). This powerful analysis could benefit from the cognitive anthropologists' argument that human development in childhood involves an intuitive sense of the difference between animate things and artefacts. Pascal Boyer, for example, outlined three aspects of religious symbolism and its acquisition that are germane to this argument, its implicitness in being acquired rather than formally taught, the intrinsic vagueness and inconsistency of religious language, and the 'under-determined' nature of religious symbolism, which leaves much to the individual's 'intuitive heuristics' in arriving at a grasp of what is going on in the 'domain' of religious symbolism (Boyer 1993a: 34ff.; 1993b, 139-40).
This means that individuals know intuitively that a supernatural realm 'exists', and when people talk about it in a 'bits and pieces' fashion they are able to assemble those elements in a way that makes sense to them. The particularly informative speculation within this contribution of cognitive anthropology is the idea that the 'domain' of religiosity has to do with the perception of a 'personal' world. Without being taught that God is personal, people 'know' it. Problems emerge when explicit education includes knowledge that appears to be counter-intuitive, perhaps in notions such as that of the Holy Trinity or of the Buddhist notion of a non-enduring self. There is also a serious issue of method involved here, since it has generally been the philosophers of religion who have defined 'the idea of the holy', and cognitive psychology might indicate the inappropriateness of their form of logical consideration. This perspective also runs counter to a great deal of social learning theory, espoused in anthropology, which assumes that people learn all they know, and know it in culturally particular ways. Here, some might see theological possibilities of another argument for the existence of God after the fashion of John Bowker's 'cues of meaning' (1973:45) or Peter Berger's 'signals of transcendence' (1971:75). My reason for including this discussion of the intuitive grasp of 'pseudo-natural kinds' is to indicate a possible theoretical way of interpreting Godelier's category of 'things as persons', for, if there is some truth in this intuitiveness of viewing the world, it would emphasize the importance of different kinds of 'gifts', and might add to the significant distinction between 'inalienable' and 'alienable' gifts.
Certainly, Christianity is typified by periods of intense personal relationships. From its birth in the disciple-group of Jesus and the subsequent expanded community described in the Acts of the Apostles, to many forms of religious communities, including the intense life of Charismatic and other Christian communities of the present, we witness a strong community organization and ethos. Sometimes this extends to a negative personification the world in terms of evil spirits; but, more positively, it embraces the world not as inert but as living, as in the ancient Jewish text and subsequent Christian hymn, the Benedicite. This offers an example in which all aspects of the universe, from sun and moon through to seasonal aspects of winter and snow, are called upon to bless the Lord and praise Him for ever. Within such a cosmic view gifts become increasingly dynamic, and forms of gift-giving easily become sacrificial. The Christian theology of creation ascribes a status to all things that have been created, bringing them into a distinctive mutual relationship with each other. This does not make it absurd for the Benedicite to exhort 'fire and hail' to praise the Lord. But neither does it become absurd for believers to consider themselves involved in forms of sacrifice and self-sacrifice, as things or circumstances are transformed into sacrificial gifts.
Inalienable Charismata?
There is, however, a paradox in all this: for Godelier implies that in societies where many relationships are impersonal, guided by market economies where money serves as the impersonal medium of transaction, the world ceases to be so enchanted. While this continues Max Weber's notion of the disenchantment of the world in an industrialized context, its very accuracy demands to be carried into post-industrial contexts. When the majority of people pass from being industrial operatives to service providers, we may expect their symbolic language of exchange and relationships to change. This is already a well-established process in most Western societies, and led me, some time ago, to argue that contemporary Charismatic movements exemplified the relational intimacy of service society rather than the formal mentality of industrial societies (Davies 1984c). This leads to the question, for example, of whether charismatic gifts belong to the alienable or inalienable form? As it happens, the New Testament furnishes an example that throws light on the subject.
In the Acts of the Apostles Simon, a former magician of Samaria, is converted and is amazed at the miracles performed by Philip. Shortly afterwards, the Apostles Peter and John arrive at Samaria and, through them, the believers there receive the Holy Spirit as a further development of their identity as already baptized people. When Simon sees that 'the Spirit was given through the laying on of hands' he offers the Apostles money so that he too could may pass on the Spirit when he lays hands on people. To this Peter replies, 'Your silver perish with you, because you thought you could obtain the gift of God with money' (Acts 8:20). The poor man is called upon to repent, and seems to have done so, adding to the English language in the process the very term 'simony'. The dramatic impact of this story shows that the Holy Spirit is not a commodity to be purchased. This episode marks a minor yet significant theme running through the Acts that seeks to establish the difference between money exchanges between human beings and the relationships inherent within the scheme of divine gift-giving, human reception and human response - whether to God in thanksgiving or in generosity towards fellow believers through the provision of alms. The theme emerges early in Acts, in Chapter 2, with the account of the day of Pentecost and the conferring of the archetypal divine gift of the Holy Spirit manifested in the 'gift' of speaking in tongues. The gifted believers are said to have sold their possessions, distributed to all as each had need, shared food in each other's homes and praised God (Acts 2:45-47). At the beginning of Chapter 3 Peter and John, the key Apostles at this point of the narrative, go up to the temple to pray, encounter a cripple who asks them for alms. Peter calls the man to pay attention to them and then addresses him, 'Silver and gold I have none, but what I have I give you; in the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, walk'. The man stands, walks, then leaps into the temple giving praise to God (Acts 3:1-10). Two chapters later there appears the story of the deceit of Ananias and Sapphira. Although we alluded to this earlier in terms of ritual purity and the Spirit its significance here falls squarely on the theme of money and gift. The couple are amongst those who sell their property to give to the needy but they only part with a portion of the proceeds under pretence that it is the full amount. Peter addresses Ananias in respect of his deceit, as one who had lied 'to the Holy Spirit' (Acts 5:3).
The 'gift' of the Holy Spirit in these cases is an example of Godelier's 'inalienable gift'. It comes from the donor, but is never separated from the donor. God is its source and remains its ultimate referent. The recipient is caught up into the intention of the donor, and must act with a similar intent. The gift is the very vehicle of and for divine power and, in theological terms, of grace. Accordingly, it must be held sincerely by the recipient, who, in turn, can share it by 'passing' it on to others; but it can never be sold for money, just as money can have no part in determining the characteristic feature of the community of grace. This, perhaps, is why Paul, the major protagonist of the latter part of the Acts of the Apostles, makes it clear that he had never coveted anyone's money, but had worked with his own hands to sustain his ministry, always, as he put it, 'remembering the words of the Lord Jesus, how he said that 'it is more blessed to give than to receive' (Acts 20:35). Even in the closing verses of the Acts it is recorded that Paul lived in Rome for two whole years 'at his own expense' preaching the kingdom of God (Acts 28:30). These monetary references are often ignored in biblical scholarship, but are powerful symbolic markers of the relational community founded on grace.
Eucharistic Inalienability
It is within the Eucharist that the absolute inalienability of the divine gift becomes apparent. Both its theology and its liturgy emphasize the contemporary 'power of the Spirit' in letting the bread and wine 'become for us' the body and blood of Christ. These material elements, transformed and received as a divine gift, become part of the recipient, with the consecrated bread or host being a quintessential example of Godelier's 'person-thing', an entity that is both familiar and unfamiliar and echoes our argument in Chapter 2 on the elective affinity between one's own sense of embodiment and the embodiment of the divine gift in Christ. The very 'mystery' of the sacred mysteries - as the Eucharist has been traditionally described - lies in the fact that believers know the very ideas at the heart of their grasp of the meaning of life to be enshrined within the phenomena of the rite. These mystery-meanings are not spelled out propositionally, but are encountered symbolically, and it is in that way that the Christian community 'reproduces its identity, ensures its continuity', and 'maintains a constant connection with its origins' through 'its gestures and ceremonies' (Godelier 1999:169, original stress).
Complementing the theme of the ritual generation of time introduced in Chapter 7, the eucharistic liturgy becomes the prime context within which the inalienable gift is given and received. The fact that we may speak of certain types of ritual as occurring 'out of time' makes perfect sense in this context, because we might argue that 'inalienable' gifts, themselves, belong 'out of time'. Ordinary processes of reciprocity take place in time, because it 'takes time' for acts of giving, receiving and giving again to take place. The Eucharist is 'timeless' in the sense that it is a true symbol of its originating events and participates in the Last Supper and sacrifice of Christ. And this is also the case as far as the negative dimension of the Eucharist is concerned, in terms of the question of sin. Having, in Chapter 2, briefly mentioned sin as a negative moral commodity that parallels merit, I can now suggest that there is a sense in which sin can also be analysed in terms of alienable and inalienable factors. The alienable aspects of sin are those accumulated through individual behaviour in the normal process of life. These sins take time to emerge. But, at the heart of most Christian theology, there is another way of speaking about sin, enshrined in the technical term Original Sin. Original Sin is interpreted as a tendency to evil that is the common lot of humanity due to the original sin of Adam and Eve in the biblical myth of creation. Whether expressed in a biblical literalism of inheriting sin from our 'fallen' parents or interpreted existentially as the flawed domain of the human condition, sin remains problematic. And it is this 'givenness' of sin that constitutes its inalienable variety. Original Sin is 'inalienable' sin and, as such, is also timeless. This is why it makes perfect sense for Christians to 'confess' their propensity to sin itself, let alone to confess their actual sins committed 'in time'.
In terms of symbolic analysis it is this 'inalienable' aspect of sin that comes to be related to the 'inalienable' domain of grace. For grace is not the result of accumulated merit. Unlike our emphasis upon the accumulated merit that makes up the treasury of merit of the Catholic Church explored in Chapter 3, we now need to assert that grace is not to be equated with that endless depth of accumulated goodness. This was expressed in Chapter 3 when using the simple model of reciprocity to argue that the processes of making merit and the reception of grace belonged to different categories. We intimated then that the notion of grace in God was of the same category of phenomenon as faith in humanity: grace and faith are mirror images. These distinctions now become even more apparent, for merit and 'works' can be seen to belong to the category of alienable gifts, while grace lies with the inalienable. It is the possession of the inalienable gift that confers Christian identity, that grounds it in the historical and mythical accounts of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, and sets the believer in a position to pass it on, but in doing so to pass on that from which one can never be parted. Here tradition and commerce part company. Here, too, it would also be possible to extend Robert Hertz's slightly similar distinction between sin as an offence against God and crime as an offence against society (cf. Parkin 1996:131).
Our immediate purpose, however, takes a different direction, to suggest that a telling theoretical alignment may be made between Godelier's notion of inalienability and Bloch's rebounding conquest. Each deals with a sense of power that adds something to human ordinariness; each is related to transcendence. In Christian theology this is the meaning of grace. What is interesting about the history of Christian spirituality is the way in which that 'grace' can be used to frame charismatic gifts on the one hand and eucharistic gifts on the other; and, with time, circumstance and fashion, it becomes possible for the balance of emphasis to shift from one to the other. Yet underlying each is the sense that divinely sourced benefit comes to human beings and is not generated by them.
Human Divinity
For Bloch the sense of transcendence comes through contact with supernatural powers, which he is content simply to describe. Godelier, however, presses the dynamics of the supernatural further to explore that certain something that 'comes to' human beings. This, he acknowledges, is thought by people at large to be divine, but is identified by the social scientist as derivative from society itself. This, of course, is the classic expression of that process of human projection that lies hidden from its very authors, a fact of life that, in the modern era, reaches from the philosophical Feuerbach through the psychological Freud and the sociologists of knowledge to Godelier's description of the gods as the 'duplicate selves' of human beings, divine selves that 'individuals are not conscious of projecting and reifyng .. . [as] ... part of their own social being' (1999:198, 169). For him, however, this conclusion is not the daunting demystification of Needham's (1972) anthropological exploration of belief and experience, but a celebration of the 'imaginary', of what 'human beings add in their minds to their real capacities' (1999:134). Here,
Godelier speaks of 'a considerable social force' present in myths and surrounding those 'person-things', those symbols that reflect human values and purpose and echo the idea of the super-plus of meaning, or that capacity of embodiment for transcendence pursued throughout earlier chapters. Rather like Freud, Godelier's all-embracing theory of alienable and inalienable gifts reaches back to the origin of religions, arguing that religion was the very source of the idea of asymmetrical hierarchies demanding 'both reciprocal obligations and a relationship of obedience situated beyond any possible reciprocity' (1999:194). To highlight this speculation is not to commit oneself to it; indeed, Godelier's interpretation can stand without it.
Underlying all ritual relations with the deity is a 'mental and bodily feeling', an 'attitude ... of the believer' committed to the belief that there are '"true" gods'. Here we are in the same logical and sociological 'metaphysics' as Durkheim, with his certainty that the one absolute truth is 'society' and our human experience of society, albeit couched in terms of a deity. In terms of the existential consequence of social science we are in an intriguing situation, for while the general projectionist attitude might wish to abandon 'supernatural' religion to live authentically in the knowledge of the human source of religion, Godelier says 'we already "know" we cannot "believe" this, and we must not believe it' (1999:200). This paradoxical tension of consciousness - embracing the contradictory views of projection and revelation - leads into his final chapter, itself highly reminiscent of the closing chapter of James Frazer's Golden Bough; in fact, he dwells much on Frazer as he moves to a discussion of contemporary societies and the dominance of the money market within them. Godelier also echoes Mauss's original dismay at the decline of the personal and the rise of the market economy; yet he espouses a degree of cautious optimism in concluding that 'individuals as persons, as corporeal and spiritual singularities, cannot be put on the market as economic agents', despite the fact that even wombs are for hire in surrogate motherhood (1999:205). The ultimate dialectic in Godelier's scheme is between inalienable and alienable processes. For human life to be a successful medium of personhood there needs to be an inalienable base for alienable activities. There must, for example, be trust underlying market exchange. From his own cultural context he cites the political basis of France as a state that is the 'gift that free men and women bestow upon themselves', one in which 'the political sphere has taken the place of religion', yet it is one that can, itself, soon be 'secularised' (1999:207).
Ultimately Godelier's concluding thoughts root around within explicitly theological territory, pondering the nature of human social life and wondering what scope remains for the inalienable. The prime issue is that of reality and appearance. The loss of innocence on his own part, resulting from the knowledge that religion is a human invention, leads to the question of whether all human life now has to be grounded in contracts, in alienable transactions? He wants the answer to be 'no', but can see no obvious way out except that there is an inevitability about the fact that we have to 'produce society in order to live' (1999:210). This is the existential point at which sociological issues become both philosophical and religious, where the conversation between theology and anthropology becomes intimate and the partners decide issues to be either philosophical and ethical on the one hand or theological on the other, depending upon their personal predilections. But it is not stretching the word to say that this may be the point at which the most radical sense can be given to the word 'faith'. In terms of at least one strain of Christian theology, faith belongs to a group of ideas all bearing a strong family resemblance to each other, and including trust, hope and love, all typified by the property of being inalienable and not alienable. Neither trust, hope nor love can be bought; yet they combine in varying ways to provide the basis for many a market situation in which purchase is of the essence. What is more, these features belong to embodied lives grounded in commitment or, in Godelier's terms, to 'corporeal and spiritual singularities'. From a Christian theological perspective such embodiment is a venture in the kind of faith that is not grounded in certainties. This 'faith', when it is Christian, involves the symbol of Jesus as the Christ, the inalienable focus of identity for the individual and for the community within which belief becomes 'faith'. These issues of communal meaning-generation and identity-formation bring us directly to one of the few recent theologians to have taken the cultural nature of Christianity, seriously, George Lindbeck .
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