To browse Academia. Charisma-a special gift from God that enables some believers to perform prodigious feats such as prophecy, preaching, pardon, and miracles, for the good of the community-was originally conceptualized by St [ The relationship between charisma and authority was a major social force in the development of the early Church. According to the prevailing paradigm of the German scholar Gerd Theissen, the social context of the first Christian communities was mainly marked by traveling charismatic preachers who, legitimizing their own authority through personal charisma, contributed to the original spread of the new faith.
This paper suggests a different model for understanding the relationship between officeholders and charismatic individuals. Rather than conflict, these two parts of early Christian communities coexisted alongside one another. The paper concludes that there was no basis for a conflict between officeholders and charismatic individuals. Charles Lindholm. New York: Palgrave-Macmillan. This introduction to a volume on the anthropology of religious charisma provides some personal history of my interest in the topic as well as a survey of the major theories of charisma, starting with Rousseau and encompassing Goethe, Mill, Nietzsche, Sohm, Freud and Durkheim and, most importantly, Weber.
More recent contributors include the Weberians Geertz and Shils, and, from a different direction, Asad. I argue that Shils and Geertz utilized the meaning-centered Weberian paradigm to explore the cultural specificity of institutionalized charisma, but at the cost of ignoring the emotional force that is the heart of primary charisma. These one-sided theories that stressed either meaning or routine offered little to advance the anthropological understanding of the raw emotional power or the trajectory of charismatic relationships.
In consequence, the study of charismatic movements remained to a great extent outside the range of ethnography. Reasons for this absence are explored, and new approaches - as exemplified in the edited volume - are outlined. We show that, at least in this case, cults of miracle workers were able to preserve their charismatic character even after the death of their leader by securing recognition from the church of their leader as a saint.
While the Church in general was concerned over the proliferation of magic, its attitude toward miracle workers in this period was not hostile. Instead, we show that the Church established a canonization procedure that was biased in favor of those miracle workers whose acolytes formed densely connected networks capable of harnessing local support. Rather than being inimical to each other, charismatic authorities and existing institutional structures formed symbiotic relationships.
