THE HEDGEHOG REVIEW: VOL. 14, NO. 2 (SUMMER 2012)
A Conversation with Robert Bellah
Hans Joas
"One of the leitmotifs in your book is the formula, “nothing is ever lost.” It keeps reappearing in the text. Could you explain what you mean by that?
It again goes all the way back because the subatomic particles in our body were produced by the Big Bang, so parts of our body are 13.7 billion years old. Every cell in our body is genealogically descended from single cell organisms, which we call familiarly “bacteria.” So even biologically we haven’t lost anything. We’ve developed enormously new complex structures, but on the basis of things that remain fundamental for us all around. This is true culturally too. It’s possible, I argue, that maybe religion emerged before a fully grammatical modern language because bodily communications are so sophisticated among human beings. But whether that’s true or not, the body is central in religion—embodied practice. I belong to a tradition in which the Eucharist is the central act of worship. And that’s a physical practice. You’re partaking of some physical matter, bread and wine, which you believe is the body and blood of Christ. You participate in that, and it says to you, “yes, I am a member of the body of Christ.” The bodily involvement in religion is certainly never going to go away."
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