The following essay by Thomas O

The following essay by Thomas O'Dea echoes several important themes that were first contributed by sociology's classical period founders. In the tradition of Durkheim and Otto, he argues that the starting point for the analysis of all religious organizations is the recognition of the unique quality of the “sacred” or “holy.” From this vantage point O'Dea argues that all religious groups must cope with the problem of “transforming the religious experience to render it continuously available to the mass of men and to provide for it a stable institutional context.” In other words, much like Weber, O'Dea is greatly concerned with the problem of institutionalization and with what Weber called the “routinization of charisma.” All religious groups, in order to survive, must communicate the uniqueness of their message or the immediacy of the religious experience from one generation to the next. For O'Dea this fact results in five distinct “dilemmas” for religious organizations.

Although much fruitful research has been done in the sociology of religion, the explicit formulation of an adequate conceptual scheme for observation and interpretation of data still leaves much work to be done. American thinking in this field in recent years has largely been in terms of what may be called a “functional” frame of reference. While helpful in the study of many aspects of religion life, the functional approach does not focus attention squarely upon the problems of the sociology of religion as such. Rather it raises two questions, important in their own right. First of all, it concerns itself with what religion does for and to society, seeing religious institutions as one set of institutions among others, and interesting itself in the contribution of religious institutions and religious ideas to the maintenance of the ongoing equilibrium of the social system. In a more psychological, but still basically functional frame of reference, it also asks what is the contribution of religion to the preservation and achievement of adequate adaptation and stability for the individual personality.

The first question is not, of course, the sociology of religion in any but a peripheral sense. It is rather the sociology of total social systems, particularly concerned with the contribution of one institutional complex, in this case the religious, to the functioning of society. The second, while directing our understanding to important problems involving religion and stratification, religion and social disorganization, religion and social change, and the general area of problems involved in selfhood and identity, does not aim its sights squarely upon religious phenomena in their own right.^[1]

The functional approach sees the importance of religion in that religion gives answers to questions that arise at the point of ultimacy, at those points in human experience that go beyond the everyday attitude toward life with its penultimate norms and goals. The study of religion is an important part of the study of human society because men are cognitively capable of going to the “limit-situation,” of proceeding through and transcending the conventional answers to the problem of meaning and of raising fundamental existential questions in terms of their human relevance. Such “breaking points” of routine experience often appear in the context of experienced uncertainty, of adversity and suffering, and in the frustrating but inevitable experience of the limitations of human finitude._[2]

Moreover, the ultimate tends to be apprehended in a special modality all its own. In terms of Durkheim and Otto, man experiences the “sacred” or “holy” as an irreducible category of existence that is drastically other than the ordinary prosaic workaday world.^[3] From a functional point of view religion is important because it sustains life precisely at these breaking points. From the religious point of view, however, these breaking points are important precisely because they are the occasions of the experience out of which religion arises. Talcott Parsons years ago emphasized the importance in sociological study of taking the point of view of the participators in the social action studied.”[4] Since religious institution arise out of this experience of ultimacy and the sacred, the sociology of religion must begin with considerable empathy precisely at this point.

From the unusual religious experiences of unusual people the founded religions emerge, translating and transforming the insights of founders into institutional structures. Thus there arise the formed and formulated entities of belief-systems, systems of ritual and liturgy, and organization._[5] It is important therefore especially in the study of the founded religions to begin with a phenomenological analysis of the religious experience as such, for out of it emerge the chief dimensions of religious institutions as well as their chief functional problems. Here man is seen neither in terms of the Cartesian “I think, therefore I am” which was the model of 17th century thinking, nor of the “I do, therefore I am,” of 19th century thought. Rather he is recognized as a being who is not a dichotomous compartmentalization of “adaptive” and “expressive” needs but one capable of and exhibiting holistic response and commitment to what he experiences as impinging upon his consciousness._[6] It is indeed because man is primarily a responding animal and because his responses in interaction with those of his fellows become crystallized into stabilized expectations and allegiances, that contemporary sociology has proved its greater adequacy for the study of human action over the rationalistic conceptions of the past century. Yet modern sociological theory often reads as though it had not in fact superseded those older partial views of man.

Religion is first of all a response and a response is to something experienced. The religious response is a response to the ultimate and the sacred which are grasped as relevant to human life and its fundamental significance. While the religious response is indeed peripheral and residual to the day-to-day life of men and the penultimate ends of that life and related to them only as their ultimate ontological underpinning, it is central to the religious life. It is its constitutive element and out of it proceeds the process of the elaboration and standardization of religious institutions. Since such institutionalization involves the symbolic and organizational embodiment of the experience of the ultimate in less-than-ultimate forms and the concomitant embodiment of the sacred in profane structures, it involves in its very core a basic antinomy that gives rise to severe functional problems for the religious institution. In fact this profound heterogeneity at the center of religious institutionalization constitutes a severe and unavoidable dilemma from which problems arise for religious movements and institutions that recur again and again and can never be finally solved. Moreover, since the religious experience is spontaneous and creative and since institutionalization means precisely reducing these unpredictable elements to established and routine forms, the dilemma is one of great significance for the religious movement.

This view which concentrates upon religious phenomena makes possible an “internal functionalism” of religious institutions themselves since it concentrates attention upon the peculiarly religious problems or more precisely the specific problems of religious institutions qua religious institutions.

An institutional complex may be viewed as the concrete embodiment of a cultural theme in the on-going life of a society, as the “reduction” of a set of attitudes and orientations to the expected and regularized behavior of men. These institutionalized expectations include definitions of statuses and roles, goals, and prescribed and permitted means, and they articulate with the culture of the society and with the personality structures that the socialization processes have produced in a given society._[7]It is the great virtue of social institutions from the point of view of the functioning of social systems that they provide stability in a world of inconstancy. The unusual and creative performance of the hero, sage or saint, though of great exemplary and genetic importance, is too unpredictable to become the basis of everyday life. The human world would be an unsteady and incalculable affair indeed were it chiefly dependent upon such phenomena. Yet the achievement of the necessary stability involves a price. It involves a certain loss of spontaneity and creativity, although these are often found operating in some measure within the expectations of institutional patterns.

The founded religions display this fundamental antinomy in their histories. They begin in “charismatic moments” and proceed in a direction of relative “routinization.” This development necessity to give objective form to the religious movement and insure continuity may in Weber's terms proceed either in a traditional a rational-legal direction._[8] Such routinization is an unavoidable social process, and as such represents for religious institutions a many-sided and complex paradox.

The charismatic moment is the period of the original religious experience and its corresponding vitality and enthusiasm. Since, as we have seen, this experience involves the deep engagement of the person involved with a “beyond” which is sacred, it is unusual a special sense. It would remain a fleeting and impermanent element in human life without its embodiment in institutional structures to render it continuously present and available. Yet in bringing together two radically heterogeneous elements, ultimacy and concrete social institutions, the sacred and the profane, this necessary institutionalization involves a fundamental tension in which five functional dilemmas take their origin.

In other words, religion both needs most and suffers most from institutionalization. The subtle, the unusual, the charismatic, the supra-empirical must be given expression in tangible, ordinary, and empirical social forms. Let us now examine the five dilemmas which express this fundamental antinomy inherent in the relation of religion to normal social processes.

In the pre-institutionalized stage of a religious movement, the classical type of which is the circle of disciples gathered about a charismatic leader, the motivation of the followers is characterized by single-mindedness. The religious movement does satisfy complex needs for its adherents, but it focuses their satisfaction upon its values and their embodiment in the charismatic leader. The charismatic call receives a wholehearted response. With the emergence of a stable institutional matrix, there arises a structure of offices—of statuses and roles—capable of eliciting another kind of motivation, involving needs for prestige, expression of teaching and leadership abilities, drives for power, aesthetic needs, and the quite prosaic wish for the security of a respectable position in the professional structure of the society.

The contrast we have drawn between the earlier and later stages is not absolute as we can see in the Gospel where we read of the disciples of Jesus concerning themselves with who shall be highest in the kingdom (Matt. 18:1, Mark 10:37). Yet such self-interested motivation is in the charismatic period easily dominated by the disinterested motivation of the charismatic response._[9]Moreover, while the charismatic movement offers security to its adherents, it does so quite differently than do the statuses of well-institutionalized organizations.

It is precisely because of its ability to mobilize self-interested as well as disinterested motivation behind institutionalized patterns that institutionalization contributes stability to human life. Yet if this mobilization of diverse motives is its great strength, it is paradoxically also its great weakness. It may in fact become the Achilles' heel of social institutions. The criteria of selection and promotion within the institutional structure must of necessity reflect the functional needs of the social organization and emphasize performance and therefore will not distinguish very finely between the two types of motivation involved. Thus it may develop that the self-interested motivation will come to prevail. There will then result a slow transformation of the original institutional aims, in many cases amounting to their corruption. When the institution so transformed is suddenly confronted by threat or crisis, the transformed motivation and outlook may reveal itself as impotence. Careerism that is only formally concerned with institutional goals, bureaucratic rigorism of a type that sacrifices institutional goals to the defense or pursuit of vested interests,_[10] and official timidity and lethargy are some evidences of the transformation.

Such developments give rise to movements of protest and reform, ever recurring phenomena in the history of the founded religions. The Cluniac reform of the Middle Ages offers a striking example as does the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century.

This dilemma of mixed motivation is found not only among those who occupy important positions in the religious organization. It is also characteristic of changes in the composition of the membership with the passing of the charismatic movement and the founding generation. The passing of the founding generation means that the religious body now contains people who have not had the original conversion experience. Many are born members and their proportion increases with the years. The selection process which voluntary conversion represented often kept out of the organization precisely the kinds of persons who are now brought up within it. Already in the year 150 A.D., Hermas in The Shepherd draws a most unflattering picture of some of the lukewarm “born Christians” in the Church.

Man's response to the holy finds expression not only in community but also in acts of worship._[11] Worship is the fundamental religious response but in order to survive its charismatic moment worship must become stabilized in established forms and procedures._[12]Thus ritual develops, presenting to the participant an objectified symbolic order of attitude and response to which he is to conform his own interior disposition. Worship becomes something not immediately derivative of individual needs, but rather an objective reality imposing its own patterns upon the participants.

Such objectification is an obvious prerequisite for common and continuous worship, for without it prayer would be individual and ephemeral. The symbolic elements of worship are not simply expressions of individual response, but have an autonomy enabling them to pattern individual response. Yet here too the element of dilemma appears. The process of objectification, which makes it possible for cult to be a genuine social and communal activity, can proceed so far that symbolic and ritual elements become cut off from the subjective experience of the participants. A system of religious liturgy may come to lose its resonance with the interior dispositions of the members of the religious body. In such a case the forms of worship become alienated from personal religiosity and whereas previously cult had evoked and patterned response and molded personal religiosity after its own image,_[13] now such an overextension of objectification leads to routinization. Liturgy then becomes a set of counters without symbolic impact upon the worshipers. It may of course retain its element of sacredness through the very fact of its obscurity and mystery, a situation conducive to the development of a semi-magical or magical attitude.

This process may be seen in the Christian history of the Middle Ages when it became necessary for Churchmen to replace the lost correspondence between external act and gesture and interior psychological disposition in the Mass with an elaborate secondary allegorization such as that of Durandus which appears so ridiculous in the light of modern liturgical research. One result of such alienation of symbolic systems is to weaken the social character of worship with a consequent weakening of the solidarity of the religious community. Individual prayer as a concomitant of public rites replaces communal worship.

What we have indicated with respect to cult could also be traced out with respect to graphical and musical expression as well. Here too, overextension of the objectification of symbols can turn them into counters, themes can degenerate into clichés, and at times symbols may become simply objectively manipulatable “things” to be used for achieving ends. In the last case religion becomes semi-magic. Parallels can be made with verbal symbolism where the statements of important religious insights in words suffers routinization and a consequent alienation from interior religiosity and deep understanding occurs. Profound statements then become merely facile formulae.

The alienation of symbolism is one of the most important religious developments and its possibility and likelihood derives from the fact that the religious symbol is in itself an antinomy—an expression par excellence of the dilemma of institutionalizing religion._[14] To symbolize the transcendent is to take the inevitable risk of losing the contact with it. To embody the sacred in a vehicle is to run the risk of its secularization. Yet if religious life is to be shared and transmitted down the generations the attempt must be made.

Historians have too often failed to see the importance of this dilemma, although the history of religious protest movements is full of evidence of just how central it is. The symbol—word, gesture, act, or painting, music and sculpture—provides the medium of genuine communication and sharing and thereby the basis for socializing the religious response. When it is lost a central element in the religious life disappears. Moreover, when the resonance between the external and internal is lost, the symbol often becomes a barrier where previously it had been a structured pathway. It then becomes the object of aggression. Hence it is that the English Reformation concentrated so much of its fire upon the Mass, the priest as the celebrant of the Mass, the destruction of altars, stained glass, statues, etc. The radical anti-symbolism of the Puritans derives from the same experience of lost resonance with the established liturgy. This is one kind of protest that can arise as a response to this dilemma. In the Catholic and Protestant movements for liturgical renascence to be seen in our own day we see another kind of response to these developments.

Max Weber showed that charismatic leadership soon undergoes a process of routinization into a traditional or rational-legal structure made up of a chief and an administrative staff. There is an elaboration and standardization of procedures and the emergence of statuses and roles within a complex of offices. One important aspect is the development in many cases of a distinction between the office and its incumbent, which has become characteristic of the bureaucratic structures of the modem world. The Catholic Church has been the chief prototype in this evolution of the concept of office in European society.

It is characteristic of bureaucratic structure to elaborate new offices and new networks of communication and command in the face of new problems. Precedents are established which lead to the precipitation of new rules and procedures. One result may indeed be that the structure tends to complicate itself. This state of affairs evolves in order to cope with new situations and new problems effectively. Yet such self-complication can overextend itself and produce an unwieldy organization with blocks and breakdowns in communication, overlapping of spheres of competence, and ambiguous definitions of authority and related functions. In short developments to meet functional needs can become dysfunctional in later situations. Weber noted that bureaucracy of the rational-legal type was the most effective means for rational purposeful management of affairs. Yet the word “bureaucracy” has not become a pejorative epithet in the folklore of modern Western societies for nothing. The tendency of organization to complicate itself to meet new situations often transforms it into an awkward and confusing mechanism within whose context it is difficult to accomplish anything.

This dilemma of the necessity of developing a system of administrative order versus the danger of its over-elaboration must be seen in relation to the first dilemma—that of mixed motivation. For the involvement of secondary motivation in bureaucratic vested interests complicates this third dilemma considerably. Genuine organizational reform becomes threatening to the status, security and self-validation of the incumbents of office. The failure of many attempts at religious and ecclesiastical reform in the 14th and 15th centuries is significantly related to this third dilemma and its combination with the first. The Tridentine insistence on organizational reform in the Catholic Counter Reformation as well as the great concern of the Protestant Reformation with the forms of ecclesiastical organization indicates that contemporaries were not unaware of this aspect of their problems.

Certainly such self-complication of procedures and offices is one of the elements involved in Arnold J. Toynbee's observation that an elite seldom solves two major problems challenging its leadership, for successful solution of the first transforms and incapacitates it for meeting the second.

4. The Dilemma of Delimitation:
Concrete Definition versus Substitution of Letter for Spirit

In order to affect the lives of men, the import of a religious message must be translated into terms that have relevance with respect to the prosaic course of everyday life. This translation is first of all a process of concretization. It involves the application of the religious insight to the small and prosaic events of ordinary life as lived by quite ordinary people. In that process the religious ideas and ideals themselves may come to appear to be of limited prosaic significance. Concretization may result in finitizing the religious message itself. For example, ethical insights are translated into a set of rules. Since rules, however elaborate, cannot make explicit all that is implied in the original ethical epiphany, the process of evolving a set of rules becomes a process of delimiting the import of the original message. Translation becomes a betraying transformation. Moreover, the more elaborate the rules become in the attempt to meet real complexities and render a profound and many-sided ethic tangible and concrete, the greater the chance of transforming the original insight into a complicated set of legalistic formulae and the development of legalistic rigorism. Then, as St. Paul put it, "The letter killeth but the spirit giveth life."

Yet the fact is that the ethical insight must be given some institutionalized concretization or it will remain forever beyond the grasp of the ordinary man. The high call of the ethical message may well, however, be reduced to petty conformity to rules in the process. Brahmanic developments of ritual piety, Pharisaic rituals in late classical Judaism, and legalism in Catholicism offer three examples. This fourth dilemma may be compounded with the third and the over-elaboration of administrative machinery may be accompanied by a deadening legalism. It may also become compounded with the second, and the delimitation of the religious and ethical message may contribute to and be affected by the loss of interior resonance of the verbal and other symbols involved.

The religious experience exercises a call. In Otto's words, its content “shows itself as something uniquely attractive and fascinating.”_[15]Moreover, the propagation of the religious message in Christianity has involved an invitation to interior change. This interior “turning” or “conversion” is the classical beginning of the religious life for the individual. With institutionalization of the religious movement, such a conversion may be replaced by the socialization of the young so that a slow process of education and training substitutes for the more dramatic conversion experience. Yet even in this case, the slower socialization in many instances serves as a propaedeutic [Ed: an anticipatory or introductory course] for conversion. Christians, both Catholic and Protestant, agree that the act of acceptance must be voluntary, involving such interior turning.

However, as religion becomes institutionalized it becomes a repository of many of the values from which much of the life of the society derives its legitimation. Thus the perseverance of religious beliefs and even the maintenance of the religious organization can come to be intertwined with societal problems of public order and political loyalty. This tends to become the case whether or not there is a legal separation of church and state.

In addition, since religion is dependent upon interior disposition and since that disposition is subject to numerous unexpected shocks and is always weak among those merely nominally religious, there is always the subtle temptation for religious leaders to avail themselves of the close relation between religion and cultural values in order to reinforce the position of religion itself. A society may find itself unable to tolerate religious dissent, since such dissent is seen as threatening the consensus upon which social solidarity rests. Religious leaders may be tempted to utilize the agencies of a society so disposed to reinforce the position of their own organization.

While such an interpenetration of religious adherence and political loyalty may strengthen the position of religion in the society, it may also weaken it in important respects. It may antagonize members of the religious body who are political oppositionists, and it may antagonize political oppositionists who otherwise might have remained religiously neutral. Second, it may produce an apparent religiosity beneath which lurks a devastating cynicism. History offers many examples of such a coalescing of religious and political interests. Punitive use of the secular arm, the later confessional states in both Catholic and Protestant countries with their “union of throne and altar,” and the real though unofficial identification of Protestantism with American nationalism and even nationality in the 19th century offer some cases.

A genuine dilemma is involved. Religion cannot but relate itself to the other institutions of society since religious values must be worked out to have some relation to the other values of a particular cultural complex. Since religion is concerned with ultimate values which legitimate other values and institutions, a relation with established authority and power structures is unavoidable. Such partial identification of basic values in religion and culture tends to strengthen both religious conformity and political loyalty. Yet with the progressive differentiation of society, the confusion of the two soon tends to be detrimental to both. It weakens the bonds of the religious community by weakening voluntary adherence and thereby diluting the religious ethos and substituting external pressures for interior conviction. It weakens the general society by narrowing the possibility of consensus among the population by insisting on a far greater area of value agreement than would in fact be necessary to the continued life of society. Yet some relation between the functionally necessary values in a society and the ultimate sanction of religion is necessary and it necessarily involves a relation between religious institutions and power and authority structures.

Anyone acquainted with the religious wars of the 16th century will readily recognize this dilemma as one important element involved. The long and painful travail of the development of religious freedom was made more difficult by such a confusion of religious and societal interests. Moreover, this confusion caused many men to welcome secularization since it brought a measure of liberation from the fanatical conflicts of the preceding period.

These five dilemmas represent five sides of the central dilemma involved in the institutionalization of religion, a dilemma which involves transforming the religious experience to render it continuously available to the mass of men and to provide for it a stable institutionalized context. The nature of the religious experience tends to be in conflict with the requisites and characteristics of the institutionalization process and the resultant social institutions From this incompatibility there derive the special problems of the functioning of religious institutions delineated in this paper. Some of these antinomies have their analogues in other social institutions. Yet there is reason to suspect that because of the unique character of the religious experience, its elements of incompatibility with institutionalization are more exaggerated than is the case with other areas of human activity. Yet, mutatis mutandis, these dilemmas an applicable to other institutions as well. Indeed the present theoretical formulation represents one way of apprehending general instabilities inherent in social processes or more precisely in this relation between institutionalization and spontaneous creativity.

Such instabilities have been studied—in some cases for a very long time—in terms of other categories of analysis. The first and fifth dilemmas are related to the problem of restraining force and fraud which besets all societies, and which has been a concern of European political philosophy since the Middle Ages. Yet our treatment reveals important new elements. It gets away from an ethical treatment to an analysis of inevitable tendencies in the development of social organizations and their changing relation to their participants. The second, third, and fourth dilemmas are really special forms of that general social process that Weber called “the routinization of charisma.” Our formulation has, however, indicated facets of this problem which Weber did not pursue. Actually the fifth dilemma is discussed, in substantially the form presented here, by Talcott Parsons in his book, The Social System. He was the first to use the term “dilemma of institutionalization” which he applied to this fifth dilemma._[16]

The present formulation obviously bears a close resemblance to Troeltsch's treatment of the perennial tension between the transcendent call of the New Testament and the world, giving rise to the ecclesiastical tendency to compromise and the sectarian rejection of compromise with the world. The present treatment, however, calls attention to other and more subtle aspects of the “world” which need considerable empirical investigation. For example, nowhere is the social and psychological problem of the alienation and “wearing out” of symbolism given the kind of investigation it deserves. Nor are the functionally unavoidable elements involved in the dilemma of mixed motivation the object of the kind of research which is needed if we are to understand on both sociological and psychological levels what actually is involved in the day-to-day functional problems of religious institutions.

The present statement does attempt to indicate how we can go beyond all these previous formulations and tries to gather their sights into a consistent scheme dealing with one important dynamic set of factors internal to the functioning of religious movements and bodies. It is a conceptual scheme derived chiefly from the history of Christianity, and particularly of Catholicism. In no way does it pretend to be an overall framework for the sociology of religion, but rather to be what Merton called theory of the middle range dealing with one side or aspect of the complex phenomenon of institutionalized religion. A further examination of the meaning of ultimacy in the religious experience, for example, would throw meaningful light on the element of authoritarianism in much of the story of institutionalized religion in the West. For it is precisely this recognition of and. response to the ultimate which, when objectified in institutionalized forms, has in the past led to ecclesiastical imperialism and authoritarian rigor.

In the present paper we have simply attempted to indicate the importance of an internal functional analysis of religious institutions based upon their own peculiar inner structure which derives from the particular religious experience upon which they happen to have arisen. Then we turned to follow out such an analysis with respect to one aspect of the founded religions, that derived from the basic antinomy involved in an institutionalization of religion. The present statement has the advantage of articulating with other theoretical developments in sociology today. It is consistent with theory in the field of the analysis of social systems, and with much theory and research upon bureaucratic structure. Its emphasis upon emergence relates it to work done by both sociologists and social psychologists on small groups. Moreover, it introduces the historical dimension to the heart of sociological analysis. The understanding of behavior in old established religious bodies requires some knowledge of the transformations which the group has undergone in its past history._[17] Finally it indicates the relation of certain of these historical processes to human motivation and its transformation and expression in institutional forms.

While specific to the field of the study of religious institutions, the present analytical scheme points to a fundamental dilemma involved in all institutionalization. It may be stated with stark economy as follows: what problems are involved for social systems in their attempt to evolve workable compromises between spontaneity and creativity on the one hand and a defined and stable institutionalized context for human activity on the other? Spontaneity and creativity are the very stuff of human vitality and the source of necessary innovation. Yet social institutions are necessary as the context for action for without them life would dissolve into chaos. Moreover, men inevitably evolve stable institutionalized forms. The present emphasis provides some element of corrective to the kind of “sociologism” which sees the ready-made, the emerged, the products of past interaction as so important that the importance of the new, the emergent, the coming-to-be, is missed.

*Reprinted from Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 1, no. 1 (1961): 30-39. Used with permission of the author and publisher.

Thomas O'Dea is professor of religious studies and sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara.. A collection of his papers appear under the title Sociology and the Study of Religion (1970). He is the author of The Mormons (1957), American Catholic Dilemma (1958), and The Sociology of Religion (1966); and is co-author of Religion and Man (with Comstock, Baird, Bloom, O'Dea, and Adams,1971).

^[1]For example see Kingsley Davis, Human Society (New York: Macmillan, 1950), p. 529; Bronislaw Malinowski, Magic, Science, and Religion and other essays (Glencoe, Illinois: The Free Press, 1948), among other works. For a worthwhile discussion see “The Sociology of Religion,” Charles Y. Clock, in Sociology Today, Robert K. Merton, Leonard Broom, and Leonard S. Cottrell, Jr., eds. (New York: Basic Books, 1959).

_[2] See Talcott Parsons, “The Theoretical Development of the Sociology of Religion,” Essays in Sociological Theory (Glencoe, Illinois: The Free Press, 1959), pp. 194-211.

_{[ 3]} Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, J. W. Swain, tr. (Glencoe, Illinois: The Free Press, 1954); and Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy, J W. Harvey, tr. (London: Oxford University Press, 1923).

_[4] Talcott Parsons, The Structure of Social Action (Glencoe, Illinois: The Free Press, 1949), passim.

[5] Joachim Wach, Sociology of Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1944), ch II, pp. 17-34.

[6] For a good discussion see the final chapter, “Respondeo, ergo sum,” of Existentialism and the Modern Predicament, F. H. Heinemann (New York: Harper Torchbooks, Harper & Brothers, 1958), pp. 190-204.

[7] See Talcott Parsons, The Social System (Glencoe, Illinois: The Free Press, 1951).

[8] Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organizations, Talcott Parsons and A. M. Henderson, tr. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1947), pp. 363 ff. Also, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills, tr. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), pp. 53, 54, 262ff, 297, 420.

[9] Talcott Parsons has most clearly shown how social structure is a balance of motivation. See his The Social System and Essays in Sociological Theory, cited above.

[10] Robert K. Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure (Glencoe: Illinois: The Free Press, 1957), expecially “Social Structure and Anomie,” pp. 131-160.

[11]An important book, recently reissued, on this subject is Evelyn Underhill, Worship (New York: Tourchbook, Harper & Brothers, 1957). There is much modern liturgical research; for example see Louis Bouyer, Liturgical Piety, (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1955). See also Early Christian Worship, Oscar Cullman, A. Sterward Todd, and James B. Torrence, tr. (London SCM Press, 1953).

[12] Christian Worship: Its Origin and Evolution, Louis Duchesne, M. L. McClure tr. (New York: Gorham, 1904).

[13] See Dietrich von Hildebrand, Liturgy and Personality (New York, London, Toronto: Longmans, Green and Co., 1943).

[14] Mircea Eliade, Comparative Patterns of Religion (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1958).

[15] Rudolf Otto, op. cit., p. 31.

[16] Talcott Parsons, The Social System (Glencoe, Illinois: The Free Press, 1951) pp. 165-166.

[17] The Social Teachings of the Christian Churches, Ernst Troeltsch, Olive Wyon, tr. (New York and London: Macmillan, 1931), Vols. I and II.