A brief history of charisma
Guest post from University of Chicago researcher Kian Yoo-Sharifi on the word's religious and post-Christian history.
by Kian Yoo-Sharif
Pauline charisma
To understand charisma, we need to return to the apostle Paul, and the early Christian Church. Paul used ‘charisma’ to refer the gifts of God’s grace—the spiritual gifts that permeated the Christian community, and which united the members of the congregation in the experience of the Holy Spirit. These spiritual gifts included mundane qualities such as faith and interpretive skill, but the most famous of the charisma by far were the supernatural abilities: the early Christian congregations abounded with individuals who claimed the gift of prophecy, miraculous healing, or speaking in tongues. Nonetheless, Paul is very clear that these abilities exist to serve the community, and their only value lies therein. Accordingly, he exalts both the charisma of the apostle and prophet and the charisma of the teacher for the abilities each confers in guiding the congregation: though every charisma can serve the community in some fashion, the highest are those that can best do so, and there is no greater service than spiritual enlightenment.
As time went on, however, this notion of a communal spiritual experience would become less and less relevant. The notion that mundane abilities were charismata would fade over time, with fourth and fifth Church theologians being focused solely on the supernatural and extraordinary gifts they saw as less and less present within the Church. As the Church became more and more of a stable institution, revelation and miracles receded in favor of scripture and orthodoxy, and the Church became unwilling to recognize the prophets as the spiritual leaders they once seen as. Similarly, the Christian congregation was no longer united by a single experience of the Holy Spirit—which took on various forms—but a stable organization and codified ritual. In this way, teachers and assistants largely fellow out of the definition of charisma, while the true charismatics—the prophets, the healers, and mystics—slowly became irrelevant and then anathema to the Christian Church.
Rudolph Sohm rediscovers charisma
If it were not for the German scholar Rudolph Sohm, it is likely that the term ‘charisma’ would have remained a historical curiosity. Rudolph Sohm was a Protestant historian and law professor who devoted most of his career to studying canon law, or the law of the Christian Church: his masterwork, Kirchenreich—or Canon Law—served as an intervention designed to clarify the nature of the early church, and how exactly Catholicism had gone astray (the fact that it had was presupposed). It is here that he recovers the notion of charisma, which he places as central to the organization of the early Church.
For Sohm, the early Church was a charismatic organization because it relied on the governance of teachers. These teachers were significant because they were tasked with revealing the word of God, which the early Christian Church took as unquestioned command: in this way, prophets and more mundane teachers served to provide direct moral guidance through illuminating divine necessity. Sohm argued that as the Church institutionalized, they substituted these teachings—metaphysical truth that weighed on prophet and follower alike—for law, which simply attempted to curb human error. If the Catholic Church retained the early Church’s focus on teachings, there would be no error, for the revelation of the truth weighed so heavily on the congregation that simple understanding would lead to right action. And while Sohm gives a nod to the Pauline notion that charisma suffused the whole community, his focus is on maintaining the contradiction between the authority of the charismatic and the law of the later Church.
Weberian charisma
If Sohm unearthed the term, the 20th century sociologist Max Weber secularized and popularized it, and it is Weber who has received the credit for introducing the term into modern discourse. Weber read the works of Sohm heavily, directly citing him with inspiring his notion of charismatic authority. For Weber, charisma was the supernatural or superhuman abilities that granted a leader an perceived mandate and from that mandate a following: where other forms of authority were based on legal or traditional norms, the charismatic commanded authority because they in some way were special. It is this awe that Weber understood as core to the early religious experience, and the basis of the authority of the prophets, who rewrote religious law with their divinely gifted authority. However, Weber also understood this awe as informing the followings of Napoleon and Joseph Smith: what mattered was not the reality of these spiritual or superhuman gifts, but their ability to convincingly demonstrate them to their followers.
In this way, Weber divorces charisma from its spiritual grounding. Sohm focused on the prophets and teachers because they spoke the word of God, but Weber focused on the prophets and teachers because their followers believed that they did, and used that belief as the basis for granting them authority. Counterposing this authority through charismatic belief with traditional norms, Weber argues that these prophets drew on a distinctly different force than the religious figures Sohm lumped them in with: indeed, this authority is uniquely poised to overthrow traditional norms, because it is based solely on the qualities of the individual themself. In this way, Weber flips Sohm on his head. Where Sohm had elevated the teacher-follower relationship in defense of the traditional Church and against Catholicism, Weber used that elevation as the basis for a secular model of authority that lumped together Isaiah with Toussaint L’Ouverture, and pushed the tension between canon law and pre-Christian teachings to its logical extension. If charisma was now a secular concept, Weber and Sohm must share much of the credit (however much it would horrify Sohm).
Charisma in the 20th century
Before Weber introduced the term, there was already a great hunger in liberal society for a term to serve charisma’s purpose. In France, the hypnotist Franz Mesmer amazed and frightened audiences who saw his therapeutic hypnotism as emblematic of the susceptibility of the masses. the late 19th and early 20th century fixated on the concept of ‘magnetism’ to explain the populist and religious mass movements—all fueled by commanding oratory—sweeping America, while liberal thinkers like John Adams agonized over the power democracy had given to demagogues who inflamed the emotions of the masses. The rise of the movie star had led individuals to discuss these figure’s “personality” as a descriptor for their ability to inspire extraordinary devotion to the masses.
When charisma entered the mainstream in the 160’s—being used to refer to John F. Kennedy—the term quickly took off, quickly moving past Weber’s narrow definition focused on authority to apply to any kind of figure with mass appeal. Though we are certainly fixated on charisma in our politics—often applying the term to any mildly attractive and amiable politician with media savvy—we also see celebrities described as charismatic, and the market is saturated with a glut of self-help books peddling the path to increasing charisma of one’s own. The notion of charisma providing individuals with a mandate seems incredibly remote: indeed, sometimes it seems as if charisma is nothing more than an alternate term for interpersonal skills. As Weber transformed and secularized Sohm and Sohm weaponized Paul in his anti-Catholic polemics, the secular nature of charisma has permitted it to be reduced to little more than mass appeal. Where charisma will go conceptually next is an open-ended question. One thing seems sure, however: for better or worse, the concept of charisma is here to stay.