Belief Beyond the Bugbear: Propositional Theology and Intellectual Authority in a Transylvanian Catholic Ethnographic Memoir

ABSTRACT

By overlooking the history of Catholic thought, anthropologists have made contemporary processes for negotiating intellectual authority in the Catholic Church into a lacuna in the anthropology of Christianity. I develop this claim by examining an ethnographic memoir called The Secret of Csíksomlyó by Árpád Daczó, a widely known contemporary Transylvanian Hungarian Catholic intellectual. Daczó blends autobiography and ethnography to argue that the Hungarian Virgin Mary is a Christianized pagan moon goddess. Halfway through, Daczó switches genres to propositional theology and defends himself to the magisterium, the Church's institutional guarantor of orthodoxy. I situate Daczó's effort to anticipate his critics in the history of Catholic-Protestant theological polemics, which helped make propositional theology into the Catholic Church's privileged language for investigating heresy. By placing Daczó's use of propositional theology against the backdrop of contemporary Catholic theologians’ debates about the magisterium's authority, I challenge anthropological assumptions about the social significance of propositional belief.

KEYWORDS:

• Theology
• ethnography
• authority
• Catholicism
• Romania

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 The book's blend of ethnography and autobiography makes it a cousin of memoirs of socialist-era fieldwork like László Kürti's The Remote Borderland (2000a) and Katherine Verdery's My Life as a Spy (2018), and a distant relation of Claude Levi-Strauss's Tristes Tropiques (2012 [1955]), Michael D. Jackson's The Accidental Anthropologist (2006), and Clifford Geertz's After the Fact (1995).

2 Examples of this use of propositional theology, in the order of topics in this list, include: De Vries 2001: 4; Csordas 1994: 280; Orsi 2005: 164; Luhrmann 2018; Keane 2016: 213; Napolitano 2016: 88–95.

3 Handman 2014 and Norget et al. 2017 call for research on institutions and the magisterium.

4 Trencsényi's point appears in Mishkova et al. 2012 and Trencsényi et al. 2016.

5 Historian Călin Cotoi captures science's authoritative status for judging legitimate ethnographic research: In the sociology of the 1970s, he writes, “the gambit of scientificity was played between historical materialism, Western structural-functionalism, empirical research, and fieldwork, but also interwar models of national science” (Cotoi 2011: 135).

6 This passage is the same in his socialist-era publication (Daczó 1980: 234).

7 For other discussions of interviewer influence by Eastern Europeanist anthropologists, see Kligman and Verdery 2011.

8 Katherine Verdery's work established this approach as the norm for studies of religious devotion in Eastern Europe. See, for instance, Verdery 1999; Bernstein 2013; Kürti 2000a; Hann 1990.

9 Daczó's account follows the ethnographic convention that he uses throughout the book. He gives the woman's name, age, and place of residence so that others can examine and replicate his findings.

10 Fiorenza and Livingston state that one consequence of the magisterium's authorization of Thomas Aquinas for European Catholic theologians was that any departure from prevailing Catholic theological ideas and teachings had to arise from within research on Thomistic thought (2000: 198–199). In the early twentieth century, Catholic theologians developed an innovative new conceptualization of God's relationship with human beings by ‘rediscovering’ the proper interpretation of Thomas's concept of a ‘proportional analogy of being’ (2000: 207–208) Daczó's argument that God's love is proportionally more perfect than human love, rather than qualitatively distinct from it, therefore echoes a trend in twentieth century Catholic theology to use authoritative sources of orthodox Catholic thought in a creative and reconstructive mode.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by American Council of Learned Societies, Central European University and Harvard University.