Religious memory, between orality and writing

Abstract

Since the groundbreaking studies of Maurice Halbwachs, all written before the end of the World War II, it seems that only small progress has been made toward a better understanding of “religious memory,” a concept coined by him. Mainly basing myself upon early Christianity (Halbwachs’ field of predilection), I argue here that one can distinguish between two kinds of religious memory: implicit and explicit religious memory. This double nature of religious memory seems to reflect the two modes of religiosity described by the anthropologist Harvey Whitehouse and of course the two systems of memory, semantic and episodic. The transformations of religion itself in late antiquity, with the passage from a society mainly based on oral traditions to one established on scriptures and their written exegesis, show how these two systems of religious memory function together, complementing one another.