Jonathan Z. Smith, To Take Place: Toward Theory in Ritual (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).

Reviewed by Peter J. Leithart.

The philosophes of the 18th century often attacked Christendom using the tools of anthropology and comparative religion. Rousseau contrasted the idyllic equality of primitive, natural peoples with the bondage of life in society. Diderot explicitly contrasted Christian sexual mores with the morals of primitive islanders, and made sure that Christian morality suffered by comparison. This background makes all the more surprising the embrace of anthropology and comparative religions by students of Biblical studies, which began, as Mary Douglas shows, already in the last century. The old charge that modernism reduces theology to anthropology must be seen to have a double meaning.

Today, however, it is not only modernist Biblical scholars who are fruitfully employing the insights of various branches of anthropology and comparative religion. Anthropology takes seriously many elements of the Biblical world and Biblical teaching that are overlooked by more philosophical approaches to the text. Signs, symbols, gestures, postures, rituals, foods, “taboos” — all these are prominent in the Bible, yet go little noticed by those who seek only to systematize the text. So long as the presuppositions of modern anthropology are clearly understood, and its insights carefully evaluated from a Biblical perspective, there is no reason not to make use of anthropology.

Among the important concepts that anthropology and comparative religion bring to the fore is the idea of place, and especially of sacred space. Jonathan Smith’s slim volume is an attempt to arrive at a theory that synthesizes ritual and place. Among his larger conclusions are the following: place is a human construct, that is, humans are not placed, but rather they place (p. 28); ritual is not a response to sacred, but makes the sacred (p. 105); sacred things should be linguistically understood, that is, they are given meaning only by their place in the hierarchical system, and have no meaning in themselves (pp. 107-9); ritual is the temporal extension of holy space (p. 115).

We cannot accept all of Smith’s conclusions. After all, while it is true that human beings create places out of spaces, and thus humans place themselves and things, it is not correct to say that humans are not placed by anything else. God placed Adam and Eve in the Garden, and we understand that God “places” us throughout our lives. Moreover, for the Christian, Smith’s contention that ritual is not a response to the sacred, but makes the sacred, must be reversed: Worship is a response to truth and to God’s presence. Rightly understood, Christian worship does not call down God, nor it is designed to stimulate the worshipper into an enchanted state.

Smith’s theory, however, is of less interest than his specific discussions. In this review, I would like to highlight several of those points. First, Smith spends the first chapter challenging the late Mircea Eliade’s emphasis on the universality of the “cosmic center” theme. While admitting that Eliade’s construction may be found in some religions, he denies that it is universal. He advances a careful discussion of one of Eliade’s books concerning the Tjilpa (an Australian aborigine tribe) myth of the broken pole. For Eliade, the breaking of the pole was a return to primordial chaos, the loss of the connection with the transcendent world. Smith shows that Eliade’s understanding was based on a Christianized reworking of the original myth, and that the pattern of the myth is simply an event followed by a memorial of the event. Smith’s challenge to Eliade is convincing; yet, this does not reduce Eliade’s usefulness for students of the Bible, where the patterns that Eliade emphasizes are clearly in evidence.

Chapter 3 is an extended examination of the temple of Ezekiel, which he explicates using Louis Dumont’s distinction between hierarchies of status and hierarchies of power. Smith shows that the temple of Ezekiel is a complex spatial hierarchy, with zones of varying degrees of holiness marked off by barriers and by vertical changes.

From Ezekiel’s vision, Smith turns toward Jerusalem, where he examines the intriguing overlap of sacred spaces in that city. He argues that the rediscovery and exploitation of the Holy Sepulchre and Golgotha in the early centuries of the Christian era revolutionized the early medieval liturgy. A visitor to Jerusalem made a pilgrimage of the stations of the city, all of them associated with the life of Christ; at each station a portion of Scripture was read. This new emphasis on the chronology of the earthly life of Christ was reproduced in medieval liturgies and in the medieval Church calendar. Feast days that were once celebrated together were separated, as narrative patterns overcame the more thematic and doctrinal emphasis of the earlier liturgy. Ritual thus overcame the “divisiveness and particularity of space” (p. 95). This correlation of portions of the liturgy with events in the life of Christ relates to what Schmemann calls “mysteriological piety.”

Finally, Smith discusses the Zwinglian attack on ritual, quoting Indian scholar J. P. Singh Uberoi to the effect that the source of modern Western rationalism is to be discovered in the Reformation debate over “the mode of presence of divinity in Christian ritual” (p. 99). By dividing between the real and the symbolic, Zwingli ushered in the dualism of the modern age. After Zwingli, modern thought has assumed that nothing can be spiritual and material at the same time: “Spirit, word and sign had finally parted company for man at Marburg in 1529; and myth and ritual was no longer literally and symbolically real and true” (p. 99). Ritual is therefore seen as something that takes place on the surface, and to say something is symbolic is to mean that it is merely symbolic. Again, Schmemann comes to mind, with his contention that Western theology “fell” during the medieval eucharistic debates when theologians first began to oppose “symbol” and “reality.”

Smith’s book has a good deal that would be of interest only to specialists in comparative religion or anthropology. Yet, it also contains many stimulating insights into the patterns of Biblical revelation and of Christian history, and points the reader to a wide range of useful literature.

Peter Leithart is President of Theopolis Institute. This post originally appeared on Biblical Horizons.