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Breaking with existing assumptions, methods, and foci in the study of RAR, I propose “radical habits of the heart” as a term for approaching RAR in an innovative way that can encompass the different forms of strong and enduring religious commitment in the ancient world. The term originally stems from Robert N. Bellah’s famous, but also criticised and sometimes misunderstood 1985 book, Habits of the Heart, that focused on the emergence of individualism in American religion (Bellah 1985; see also McGuire 2008). Taking inspiration from Bellah in investigating long-term religious changes of habits for individuals, and from anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann and collaborators’ work that demonstrates, based on robust cross-cultural evidence, the crucial role of models in religious experience (Luhrmann and Weisman 2022; Luhrmann and Weisman et al. 2021; Luhrmann 2020), RADHEART approaches religion as a social phenomenon that requires work and training to maintain (Najman 2021; Luhrmann 2020; Sloterdijk 2012). 

RADHEART analyses ancient models of strong religious commitment and how radical habits of the heart are kindled via religious media that target the audience’s emotions and embodied experience. It addresses a wide timespan, including all the ancient history of Judaism and Christianity, comparing different forms and mapping historical changes until the end of antiquity. It is important to keep in mind that the individual self’s commitment is decisive for the persistence of radical religious groups, but also that it can be learned, shared, and trained (McGuire 2016). To focus on emotionality and embodiment in religious commitment is important because commitment does not consist only of beliefs or ideas but is at its core emotions-based and embodied. Emotions and embodied experience are likely more important than beliefs for staying-in (Feldt 2023a). Emotions and experience are bodily and cognitive phenomena, but historically and culturally variable and shapable; sociality, history, and terminology heavily impact both. 

Emotions go beyond the body; they are situational, socially cultivated, and contingent on shared meanings and cultural framings and models (Cairns 2023; Feldt 2023a; Eidinow 2016; Johansen 2015, 49-51). As the bodily dimension is underdetermined, emotions are invariably entwined with evaluations, cognition, and social factors, as they take place between people (Hogan 2011; Nussbaum 2001; Goldie 2000; Damasio 1994). They stretch to our surroundings and to media from where emotion expressions and experientiality work back on us in a feedback loop; other people’s emotion expressions, also mediated ones are among the strongest eliciting conditions for emotions (Feldt 2023a, 10; Feldt and Geertz 2020; Johansen 2015; Hogan 2011). Thus, ancient emotionality and embodied experientiality can be studied textually, medially, and in terms of practice (Cairns 2023; Lasater 2019; Feldt 2020; Feldt 2016; Bourke 2014; Carraciolo 2014; Scheer 2012).

Scientific Methods

RADHEART devises an innovative and ambitious theoretical frame combining 1) the aesthetics of religion focusing on embodied, sensory and material mediation in religions (Johannsen et al. 2020; Grieser and Johnston 2017; Meyer 2014), only very rarely applied to ancient religions (Feldt 2023a-b; 2020; 2017); 2) the anthropology of experience and textual experientality research (Luhrmann 2020, Luhrmann and Weis et al. 2021; Luhrmann and Weisman 2022; Gallagher et al. 2018; Carraciolo 2014; Troscianko 2014), and 3) a historically grounded study of ancient emotions (Cairns 2023; Chaniotis 2021, 2014, 2012; Feldt 2023a, 2023b, 2020; Mermelstein 2021; Lasater 2019; Mirguet 2019). 

We combine this framework with attention to 4) ancient reading practices and dynamic philological methods that highlight the fluidity and material media contexts of religious traditions and the role of paratexts, notations, prologues and epilogues at the time of the final writing and editing of religious traditions, in order to work on their forward-oriented formativity and vitality, instead of approaching them as historical sources with attention to their “background” (Najman 2018; Lundhaug and Lied 2017). 

The strategy of analysis focuses on two main genres: religious poetry (WP I) and religious narrative (WP II) –and works on three axes: 

1. Textuality: RADHEART analyses the use of native terms for emotions and embodiment, i.e. interior organs and body parts, hearts, livers, kidneys, etc. in expressions of an individual’s strong commitment, unfolding the evolving ideals in poetry and narrative and tracing their changes across time. 
2. Mediality, RADHEART analyses the forward-oriented formativity in the religious media that promote strong commitment; in order words, the analysis tackles how they engage and affect the embodied selves of the audience via imagery, emotionality, and narrativity, and via paratexts, prologues and epilogues, where emic ideas about how they are supposed to engage, enact, and mobilise their audiences are likely expressed (i.e., their forward-orientated formativity).
3. Practice, RADHEART investigates traces of concrete usage in- and outside of the texts, other media used in combination with texts, music, song, or material media like churches, monastic settings, or material paraphernalia, thus providing an analysis of the contexts of usage for the two other axes, and tracing the available historical evidence for how radical habits of the heart were cultivated across ancient forms of Judaism and Christianity. 

This theoretical frame and strategy of analysis is used to examine the textuality, mediality, and practice of evolving radical habits of the heart to provide new answers to the questions of the role of emotions and embodiment in the strong commitment of the individual.

 ©Laura Feldt

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  ©Laura Feldt