Thinking with Jonathan Z. Smith and Drudgery Divine on the 35 th Anniversary of Its Publication

DRUDGERY DIVINE: ON THE COMPARISON OF EARLY CHRISTIANITIES AND THE RELIGIONS OF LATE ANTIQUITY. By Smith, . Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1990. Pp. xvi + 147. Paperback, $30.00. Since the first chapter of Drudgery Divine: On the Comparison of Early Christianities and the Religions of Late Antiquity is organized around the theme of origins, it seems both fitting and useful to begin with an origin story. In the autumn of 1997, I had just begun my master’s degree work at the University of Chicago Divinity School. First-year MA students were required to take a three-quarter sequence of classes, with each class functioning as an introduction to the Divinity School’s different committees. Professors Frank Reynolds and Anthony Yu had organized the Introduction to Religion and the Human Sciences class around guest lectures from Chicago-affiliated faculty, including a series of lectures from Jonathan Z. Smith (Smith 1990). The journey that eventually led to my arrival at Swift Hall began in a small Christian Reformed Dutch immigrant farming community in rural Montana, where I had a thoroughly Calvinist, quasi-evangelical Bible-based education and worldview. In 1990, the same year Smith published Drudgery, I found my way to a liberal arts college in the Midwest, where I then found my way to majoring in Religious Studies. In retrospect, I characterize my undergraduate years as a time when I began to shed my biblical worldview. Like Dorothy’s discovery that the Wizard of Oz was just a man behind a curtain, learning about biblical criticism and the various Quests for the Historical Jesus taught me about the ordinary and human mythmaking behind what I had taken to be an authoritative theological framework.1 This discovery brought on what, at the time, I referred to as a “crisis of meaning,” and I began the lifelong project of cobbling together a different understanding of the world and my place in it. When I arrived at Swift Hall, I was excited to learn more about what I surmised to be the next most interesting and available option: an Eliade-esque worldview with generous portions of Joseph Campbell’s and Paul Tillich’s ideas thrown into the mix. Eliade and Campbell shared the project of identifying universal patterns emanating from what they variously called “the sacred,” “the eternal,” or “the transcendent.” All three of them shared what I saw as a concern with a modern loss of meaning or a disconnection from what Tillich described as a kind of authentic “ultimate concern.” I felt fortunate to be learning about these ideas in Swift Hall at the University of Chicago, where both Eliade and Tillich had taught. Aah, the Chicago School. I was there for it! This feeling was amplified when one of the first assigned texts was Eliade’s The Quest: History and Meaning in Religion, where he described his larger project in pursuit of a “new humanism.” Jonathan Z. Smith’s lectures were next on the course calendar. Prior to hearing Smith’s lectures, I had not yet encountered, much less considered, the idea that a scholarly approach looking for similarities among religions might have some problems. After his last lecture, Smith took questions. I had, by now, thoroughly grasped that he had serious problems with the similarity approach, but I was not at all clear on what we should be doing instead. I timidly raised my hand and asked some version of the “so then what’s the point?” question. He took a deep breath and said, “Well ... now ... that’s what I call Drudgery Divine!” I no longer remember exactly what he said after that, but it was a major turning point for me. I read the book—and everything he had written—and took several Independent Studies with him before I left to pursue a PhD in the interdisciplinary History of Consciousness program at the University of California Santa Cruz, and an academic career more on the periphery of Religious Studies. Smith approved of this move and direction for me, though he worried that people seemed to take an atypically long time to finish their PhDs in this funky program. His concern would turn out to be prophetic for me, but I did eventually finish. For many years, we maintained a mentor/mentee relationship. I now work at the intersections of feminist science studies, religious studies, political theory, and the environmental humanities. In 2024, I was invited to give a talk at a joint session at the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL) and North American Association for the Study of Religion (NAASR) meeting at the 2024 annual conference in San Diego. The session, organized by the Redescribing Christian Origins unit that Smith co-founded, explored the continued relevance and scholarly impact of Drudgery Divine. When asked if I would be interested in being part of this panel, I immediately remembered the “That’s what I call Drudgery Divine!” incident, which so drastically changed my direction of study. Initially, I did not remember much about the content of Drudgery, but I did remember that reading anything he wrote was always a rewarding and pleasurable experience. Yes, I would love to re-engage with the book. This article evolved out of that presentation. End of origin story. Beginning of re-engagement. My copy of Drudgery is full of underlined sentences, marginalia, question marks, and exclamation points from my 20-something self. My current self is a bit more measured with the enthusiasm, and I now find it useful to think with and about the book through three different lenses: critique, redescription, and relation—all of which belong to the class of methodological and theoretical considerations in the study of religion. Smith’s masterful textual, linguistic, and historical analyses of both the data and the dominant scholarly assessments and comparisons provide a rich excavation and an incisive critique of the Protestant apologist bias that has dominated the comparative enterprise between early Christianities and other religions of late antiquity, particularly the mystery religions. Indeed, this critique may be what Smith is most well known for. The Protestant framework continuously assumes that a “genuine” or “pure” Christianity has been corrupted by external influences variously identified as Platonic, pagan, and/or papal. As Smith so eloquently explains, the way that scholars have been doing these comparisons rests on their assumptions that the emergence of what they understood to be the original Christianity was a unique, sui generis, event. To declare or argue that something, particularly a religious formation, is sui generis is to close off the option of relating, of attempting translation, communication, and understanding. Smith weaves this argument throughout the first few chapters of Drudgery, and one can find a more distilled version of it in a 1992 talk he gave to the Department of Religious Studies at Arizona State University entitled “Differential Equations: On Constructing the ‘Other.’”2 While stories of the sui generis have all the drama of a Phoenix rising, they entail an illicit transfer from the ontological to the historical that only serves to craft a hierarchical and binary relationship with its attendant moral valuations. They do not permit the acknowledgment of ordinary difference. In chapter 2 of Drudgery, “On Comparison,” Smith argues that a better approach attends to more mundane instances of difference. Here, we find the answer to my youthful question: So what’s the point of studying, particularly comparing, religions? Drudgery Divine is an argument for the mundane study of social formations traveling under the sign of “divine.” But it’s more than that. “Drudgery” typically connotes some kind of activity that one dislikes because it is dull or uninteresting. However, Smith transforms the meaning when he pairs it with “divine.” He clearly savored this mundane comparative thinking—the way one might savor divinely delicious food. When I describe Smith’s intervention in Drudgery Divine as a critique, I am thinking of critique as a detailed historical, linguistic, and textual analysis supporting the conclusion that there is something seriously wrong with the dominant scholarly mode of comparing early Christianities with religions of Late Antiquity thus far. The way scholars have been thinking and enacting these comparisons is flawed. To think about Drudgery this way is to see critique as a kind of debunking move where the project is to point out flaws, to prove something wrong through argument and evidence, to question its validity, and/or to expose the inadequacy of a model. While I think this kind of critique is important and necessary, I have long thought that it surely cannot be the only end of studying religion. The vocation also must include crafting situated but reliable knowledge. One can easily get lost, epistemologically and theoretically, in discussions of what exactly critique is and whether or not we are or should be post-critique.3 Without engaging in today’s conversations, Smith’s work navigates that territory skillfully as he both launches critiques while also working to craft better knowledge about just what might have been happening in those centuries and places of long, long ago. One can find a summation of Smith’s proposals for how to craft better knowledge about religion in his epilogue to the edited volume, A Magic Still Dwells: Comparative Religion in the Postmodern Age, which was published 10 years after Drudgery. He writes, “The ‘end’ of comparison cannot be the act of comparison itself,” and he goes on to identify four key moments in the comparative enterprise: description, comparison, redescription, and rectification. For the purposes of this paper, I want to linger on redescription. In the chapter “On Comparison” in Drudgery, Smith explains that comparison does not tell us how things are but rather, “like models and metaphors ... tells us how things might be conceived, how they might be redescribed. (52)” Using his methodology, redescription can only happen once the scholar has made a double move of contextualization. The first move locates a given example within the “social, historical, and cultural environments that invest it with its local significance.” The second task is a kind of reception history that accounts for how our second-order scholarly tradition has accepted the datum as “significant for the purpose of argument (Smith 2000, 239).” For me, the most compelling and provocative redescription in Drudgery takes place in the last two chapters, “On Comparing Stories” and “On Comparing Settings,” where Smith introduces the terminology of locative and utopian traditions. These distinctions are key to understanding different kinds of early Christianities. Locative traditions are primarily concerned with maintaining cosmic and social order, proper boundaries, and the existing proper order in what they perceive to be a fragile cosmos. These traditions understand the dead as permanently dead. There is no possibility of resurrection. If stories arise in which the dead walk among the living, they soon become objects of relocation. Utopian perspectives, on the other hand, view the cosmos and social order as alienating; the world is fundamentally flawed and unworthy. These traditions prioritize escaping from or transcending the world, and any occurrence of the dead resurrecting and walking among the living is cause for celebration. Using these classifications, Smith’s analysis identifies the early Jesus movements, pre-Constantinian forms of Christianity, and some of the early Christ traditions as locative. Smith then identifies the mid-2nd century as a key transformative period when, with the emergence of Pauline Christianity, we see a move from the locative to the utopian. This rectified history that Smith provides not only critiques but also replaces the apologetic model in several ways. First, it eliminates the assumption of Christian uniqueness. Early Christianities were, just like some other religions of the time, locative. Paul’s utopian reinterpretation is where a more radical break takes place. Second, it undermines the Protestant apologetic agenda, which relies on its assertion of an ancient pedigree to bolster its alleged superiority. Third, it utilizes comparison to understand how different kinds of traditions (locative and utopian) differently organize human experience. Imagine, if you will, a rectified academic study of religion where, instead of offering “Introduction to World Religions,” we taught courses on locative and utopian perspectives. What kinds of worlds might a drastically redescribed and rectified mode of education allow us to midwife into being? The work of comparison, within and without the area of Late Antiquity, requires acceptance of the notion that, regardless of whether we are studying myths from literate or non-literate cultures, we are dealing with historical processes of reinterpretation, with tradition. That, for a given group at a given time to choose this or that mode of interpreting their tradition is to opt for a particular way of relating themselves to their historical past and social present (106-107). One of the lessons I learned from both Jonathan Z. Smith and the feminist science studies scholar, Donna Haraway, is the importance of “thinking with” others (i.e., relating) when making knowledge (crafting relations) (Haraway 2003; 2008). This lesson came back to me as I was thinking about relating while rereading Drudgery, particularly when I remembered that the anthropologist Marilyn Strathern thinks of relations, rather than bounded objects, as the fundamental unit of analysis (Strathern 1988; 1991; 1992). In her most recent book, Staying with the Trouble, Haraway describes Strathern as an “ethnographer of thinking practices.” Riffing on Strathern’s statement that “it matters what ideas we use to think to think other ideas (with),” Haraway expands this insight: “It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what descriptions describe descriptions (Haraway 2016, 12).” Haraway’s recursive formulation performs always already relational thinking that actively shapes the conditions for what might become thinkable. “Thinking with” acknowledges that knowledge emerges from embodied relationships and encounters with all kinds of others (many of whom are not human). Thinking here is a material practice that participates in what Haraway calls ‘worlding’—the ongoing process of making worlds through our co-constitutive entanglements. Better modes of relating require cultivating ‘response-ability’—the ability to respond well in the web of relationships that make us all. To better navigate the many challenges our worlds are currently facing, Haraway and others insist on the priority of attending to the ways we relate. In our post-truth era, questions like “what is the case about the world?” will not get far without also addressing questions like “what are the best ways to be in relation with those who see things differently?” My re-engagement with Smith’s text 35 years after its initial publication concludes with his words in the Acknowledgements: “It is appropriate, in a work devoted to matters of genesis and growth, to acknowledge and celebrate the excitement and joy generated by [his children] Siobhan and Jason in their different but equally wonderful ways.” Celebrating difference speaks to the heart of Smith’s argument throughout Drudgery Divine: that accurate and reliable knowledge emerges not from hunting for similarities or asserting uniqueness but from paying careful attention both to difference and to how one relates to difference. Smith’s commitment to the mundane—his preference for ordinary difference over dramatic uniqueness—offers us a methodological orientation that reaches well beyond Religious Studies. It reminds me that we (a category much bigger than ‘the human’) exist in ongoing relation with each other. The work of comparison, as Smith showed us, is ultimately about learning how to relate responsibly across difference, whether that difference is historical, cultural, or more than human

Christianity · Criticism · Divinity · Liberal arts education · Missiology · Swift · The arts · Catholicism and Religious Studies · Mormonism, Religion, and History · Study and Philosophy of Religion

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