Key Hypotheses and State of the Art

The most central hypothesis is that in ancient Judaism and Christianity, radical habits of the heart are indeed habits of the heart, i.e. the body and its parts, the interior organs, as the seat of emotions and the self. The ancient evidence that speaks of strong, religious commitment does not use conceptual meta-terms or belief-oriented statements, but instead comes in the form of expressions targeting the interior organs or body parts of the self: the heart, the liver, throat, the kidneys, the eyes or blood, like Mattathias who, in 1 Maccabees 2:24, became zealous, his kidneys trembled, and he let his wrath go… he slaughtered the man on the pagan altar, like the command to Israel, via Moses, in Deut. 6:5: You must love the Lord with all your heart, with all your throat [trad. translated “soul”], and with all your strength. Or like Perpetua, the female Christian martyr from early 3rd cent. Carthage, who, on the way into the arena, went along with shining countenance and calm step, as the beloved of God, the wife of Christ, putting down everyone’s stare with her own intense gaze (The Martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicitas, ch. 13), or Antony, the ancient world’s most famous hermit who advocates a heart of knowledge and a spirit of discernment (Antony, ep. 6.27-29, 49) and sees weakness in commitment revealed through the body (e.g., Antony, ep. 1.35-41, 42-45). 

RADHEART analyses how ancient models of strong commitment (i.e., radical habits of the heart) use emotionality and embodiment in promoting the individual and how they affect the embodied selves of the audience. The aim is to kickstart a watershed transformation that puts emotionality and embodiment at the centre of research on RAR and to contribute with these foci to the field of radical religion in general, still studied too little even in contemporary formations. To do this, RADHEART analyses the role of emotions and the embodied, experiencing individual or self in strong commitment in RAR. The core hypotheses are, further, that:

• Radical habits of the heart can be cultivated in individuals via expressed ideals of the self’s strong, religious commitment; aesthetic media promoting strong religious commitment both express and cultivate religious commitment in audiences via emotionality and experientiality.
• Radical habits of the heart evolve over time in ancient forms of Judaism and Christianity; we can trace their emergence and follow how they evolve historically; and, following from this.
• An emotions-and-embodiment-based theoretical perspective on RAR as radical habits of the heart can contribute innovatively to research on radicalism and the role of the individual in RAR, as well as to contemporary research on radical religion and extremism.

State of the Art

Over against the enormous focus on contemporary religious formations in radical religion research (Peels 2023; Larsen and Qvotrup 2023; Juergensmeyer 2020; Pratt 2018; Kühle 2018; Kaplan 2015; Ward&Sherlock 2013), RADHEART proposes to study those radical habits of the heart that over time exerted their influence via authoritative and formative (Najman 2017) aesthetic-religious media – and still influence devotees today. 

The factors most often underscored as decisive traits in radical religion research are beliefs, ideology, marginalisation, and the use of violence (Malthaner 2017). It is fair to say that push factors and societal frameworks have been at the centre of radical religion research (Feldt 2023a; Malthaner 2017). Instead, RADHEART proposes that kindling radical habits of the heart, involving the emotions and subjectivity of the individual member, is decisive for the strength and persistence of commitment, that then can feed ideology and beliefs. 

We approach strong religious commitment as connected deeply to subjectivity via the emotions and embodied experience of the self. Ways of cultivating commitment vary, but the felt experience of strong religious commitment is something that can be, and is, trained. In the cultivation of strong commitment, sets of habitual and aesthetically mediated expressions of strong commitment matter profoundly and these affect a religious audience (Luhrmann and Weis et al. 2022; Luhrmann 2020). Religious actors use expressions and ideals as centres of gravity to model, train, and scale religiosity in terms of perfection or strength (Feldt 2023a, 2023b; Aran 2013). 

RADHEART investigates not only the expressions of such ancient habits of the heart but also enquires into their formativity. While all religions can be said to cultivate habits of the heart in the sense of an experience of belonging, radical religious formations thrive on explicit models of and for commitment cultivation. Analysis of the role of the emotions and embodiment in these is crucial, as those are factors that profoundly affect the basis of subjectivity and are intimately tied to the experience of a self (Feldt fc.; Geertz and Jensen 2011; Ochs and Capps 1996). 

The analyses tackle expressions and the cultivation of commitment in an unparalleled scope, namely the entire era that saw the emergence of the “inner person”, along with the first spread of enduring radical religion forms like martyrs and ascetics, namely forms of Judaism and Christianity from the editing of biblical traditions to late antiquity (Feldt 2023ed.; 2023a; Kugel 2017), i.e., post-exilic times to Late Antiquity (ca. 500 BCE to ca. 600 CE. RAR has not been researched with a focus on the individual, embodiment, and emotionality, not even in the case of the emotionally intense martyrdom accounts (cf. Avemarie, van Henten and Furstenberg 2023; esp. van Henten 2022).