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| Arthur Darby Nock (1902-1963) |
In his 1933 book,
Conversion: The Old and the New in Religion from Alexander the Great to Augustine of Hippo, the Harvard classicist A. D. Nock distinguished between two understandings of and approaches to religious initiation:
adhesion versus
conversion.
Adhesion, said Nock, involves the "acceptance of new worships as useful supplements" but "not as substitutes." It does not involve "the taking of a new way of life in place of the old."[1] Adhesion is an understandable, maybe even preferable practice whenever two non-exclusive religious traditions meet. It simply involves the adoption of whatever one finds useful in a tradition that is new to him. The tradition, or folkway, has no absolute truth to tell. It has an outlook, accompanied by rituals or other practices, that might be attractive to the newcomer.
By contrast, Nock defined conversion as “a re-orientation of the soul, a deliberate turning from indifference or from an earlier form of piety to another, a turning which implies a consciousness that a great change is involved, that the old was wrong and the new is right.”[2] Conversion takes place when the truth claims of a religion, which are thought to extend to all of humanity, require the hearer to make an either-or choice. It requires "either the renunciation of his past and entry into a kingdom, . . . or the refusal of this dream as chimerical."[3]
As this overview suggests, Nock explained these two distinct approaches as stemming from two separate types of religion. Adhesion correlates to religion that is merely traditional. It is common wherever one's religion has for him "the emotional value attaching to a thing in which he has grown up."[4] In this circumstance, religion amounts to a set of time-honored customs. The religion has been "hallowed by preceding generations."[5]
Again by contrast, conversion is not rooted in traditional religion, but rather in prophetic religion. According to this type of religious lifeway, at some point in the past, an individual received a non-mediated message from the deity. Because it is the deity who has spoken to him, the deity then speaks through him, for now the prophet "has a message which he feels an inward and instant impulse to deliver."[6] And conversion is "the positive response of a man to the choice set before him" through the claims of evangelists representing a prophetic religion."[7] Such a changeover, said Nock, depended on a common cultural matrix, one that enabled hearers to make sense of the truth claims they were called upon to accept and the commands they were expected to obey. Human beings are not likely to accept what to them is entirely new. Prophetic religion truly succeeds only where it "finds men's minds in a measure prepared," which is a critical distinction.[8]
As the subtitle of his book indicates, Nock used the lens of his theory in order to examine distinctions between paganism of the ancient world as compared to Judaism and Christianity. In short, to the extent that ancient paganism reached newcomers, the new condition was the result of adhesion. But Judaism and Christianity, with their claims issued by the only true and living God, claims communicated by the prophetic figures known as Moses and Jesus, demanded conversion.
My guess is that Nock's distinction between adhesion and conversion might go a long way in explaining the religious interface between the first peoples of North America and later Euro-Americans. More about that later.
Notes
[1] Arthur Darby Nock,
Conversion: The Old and the New in Religion from Alexander the Great to Augustine of Hippo (London and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933), 7.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid., 5.
[4] Ibid., 2.
[5] Ibid., 3.
[6] Ibid. Here, many passages from the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament come to mind. In Amos 3:8, for example, the prophet asked, "The lion has roared-- who will not fear? The Sovereign LORD has spoken-- who can but prophesy?" (New International Version).
[7] Ibid., 7.
[8] Ibid., 9.
