LESSON ONE:
THE RITE

What makes an act a rite

The anthropologist Roy Rappaport spent a long book on one sentence. A rite, he wrote, is

“the performance of more or less invariant sequences of formal acts and utterances not entirely encoded by the performers.”¹

Three of its terms carry the weight.

More or less invariant

The same each time. A rite that is improvised is a performance, and a rite that is revised to suit the occasion is a meeting.

Formal

Set apart from how the same thing would ordinarily be done. Bread is eaten every day; it is eaten this way on one.

Not entirely encoded by the performers

This is the term that does the work. The words are somebody else's, and they were finished before you arrived. A form that asks you to write a line is an exercise. A rite hands you a sentence that is already complete and asks only whether you will say it.

What the doing produces

Rappaport's answer is acceptance, and he is careful to keep it apart from belief. Belief is a private state. Acceptance is a public act, and it is the only one of the two a rite can see. A person may kneel in doubt, or in boredom, or thinking about lunch. They have still knelt, in front of the others, and are from then on someone who did. The rite produces a standing, and the standing holds whether or not the conviction ever arrives.¹

J. L. Austin had already given the grammar of this. Some sentences do not describe anything: I do. I name this ship. I bet you sixpence. They cannot be true or false. They can only come off or misfire — said by the wrong person, in the wrong place, in the wrong order.² A rite is made of sentences of that kind, which is why arguing with one about its accuracy gets nowhere. Nothing was asserted.

A more recent account calls the result a world in the subjunctive: an order performed as if it were the case, by people who know that it is not, or not yet. Its opposite, on this account, is not disbelief. It is sincerity — the demand that nothing be said until it is meant — and the authors' charge is that a culture which keeps only sincerity has given up a way of acting together that does not wait on agreement.³

And its warning label

The Church's own page quotes Althusser's version: Kneel down, move your lips in prayer, and you will believe.⁴ Pascal's sentence is blunter than the one made of it. His unbeliever has conceded the wager and says he still cannot believe; he asks what he is to do. He is told to do what the believers did when they began — “taking the holy water, having masses said” — and then what will follow:

“Even this will naturally make you believe, and deaden your acuteness.”⁵

The last four words are the part usually left out. Pascal's French is vous abêtira: it will make you stupid, or, nearer the root, make a beast of you. The man recommending the practice says in the same breath what it costs.

This department takes both halves. The rite works, and it works partly by quieting the faculty that was asking whether it should. A lesson that taught only the first half would be an advertisement.

One rite, small enough to watch

The Church keeps a rite. The page gives the first half of each line of the hymn and the reader gives the second. It was built for this lesson and is not a report of anything observed.

Against the definition: it is invariant, five lines in one order every time. It is formal, in that a response is accepted only in its own words. And it is not encoded by the performer. The reader did not write the hymn and cannot amend it there.

What it does with a reader who types but no one's a sinner without believing it is the lesson in miniature. The page accepts the line. It could not do otherwise: it can compare the words and has no instrument for anything else. For a reader who says the line aloud it cannot even see the words, and takes theirs. That looks like a defect in a web page. It is the condition of every rite ever kept. No congregation has been audited for conviction, because none can be, and the practice was built to work under that condition, not in spite of it.

What the case cannot show

A rite on a page is done alone, and the literature above is mostly about what happens in company. Nobody sees the reader say the line. So the public half of Rappaport's acceptance — being seen to have done it — is missing, and what is left is a person who knows they said it. Whether that is enough to count as a rite, or only as a rehearsal of one, is an open question. This department does not know the answer.

What this lesson rests on

The claim

That in a rite the practice precedes the conviction, and that what the practice produces is a standing in the person and not a meaning in the act.

What counts as evidence

Published theory of ritual, read and cited below, and one constructed case.

The procedure

Each term of a standard definition is tested against the case, and the case is then asked what it fails to show.

The limits

No fieldwork and no congregation. The Church's rite keeps no record by design, so this department holds no data on its own rite and will not acquire any. The lesson can describe a mechanism. It cannot measure one.

Two reasons to doubt it

That a rite means nothing at all

Frits Staal, working from Vedic ritual, argued that ritual has no meaning. It is activity governed by rules and concerned with itself; it does not refer to anything, and the meanings attached to it, by participants and by scholars, are supplied afterwards.⁶ If he is right, the sentence over the door of this site — meaning is produced — stops at the door of this room.

The lesson concedes most of this and keeps one thing. Staal's argument is about what the acts refer to, and the claim here was never that they refer. What a rite produces, on this account, is not a meaning in the act but a fact about the actor: somebody who has done it. Rules without meaning can still leave a person changed. That is a narrower claim than the one the lesson would like to make, and it is the one that survives him.

That the question is the wrong one

Talal Asad's objection is to the terms. “Ritual” as a category of symbolic action, waiting to be interpreted, is a modern construction, and so is the habit of asking which belief lies behind a practice. In the medieval monastery he studies, a rite was a discipline: a trained capacity, done well or badly, and not a sign of some inner state that could be examined separately.⁷

This lands. The lesson's first sentence — the rite comes before the belief — is written in exactly the vocabulary Asad shows to be recent, and it would have made little sense to the people who built the practices it describes. The sentence is kept because the lesson's readers arrive with that vocabulary. What it costs is stated here: the rite, in the singular, across every tradition, is this department's convenience and not a thing found in the world.

This was Lesson One

So is the next. The curriculum names five more, and none of them follows from this one.

The Apparatus

1. Roy A. Rappaport, Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity (Cambridge University Press, 1999). The definition is at p. 24. The distinction between acceptance and belief is paraphrased here, not quoted.
2. J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Clarendon Press, 1962). Paraphrased. The three examples are Austin's, shortened.
3. Adam B. Seligman, Robert P. Weller, Michael J. Puett and Bennett Simon, Ritual and Its Consequences: An Essay on the Limits of Sincerity (Oxford University Press, 2008). Paraphrased.
4. Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation),” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (Monthly Review Press, 1971). Althusser gives the line as what Pascal says “more or less.”
5. Blaise Pascal, Pensées, the wager fragment (“Infinite—nothing”), trans. W. F. Trotter, Harvard Classics vol. 48 (P. F. Collier & Son, 1910). Fragment numbers differ between editions and are not given here.
6. Frits Staal, “The Meaninglessness of Ritual,” Numen 26, no. 1 (1979): 2–22. Paraphrased. The argument is developed in his Rules Without Meaning: Ritual, Mantras and the Human Sciences (Peter Lang, 1989).
7. Talal Asad, “Toward a Genealogy of the Concept of Ritual,” in Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993). Paraphrased.

← The Church of the Absolute Beginner