Laughing deities, crying virgins: Laughter in the history of religion

Author: Gylbert S. Chen Wenqing
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-09-01
Features: Ancient Near East: Mocking laughter and reborn laughter. Greece: When laughter touches the unthinking. Rome: The critique of laughter and the laughter of critique. Early Christianity: Laughter between the spirit and the flesh. Medieval Christianity: Carnival, Corpus Christi, and the laughter of the body. The re-sanctification of laughter in modernity: The dullness of the church and the healing laughter. The religious joke: A flirtation with the East. Religion and laughter are two different human phenomena: Religion involves an inverted worldview, while laughter is a bodily response. Religion seriously engages with the question of ultimate concern, while laughter is mostly unserious. In other words, religion and laughter cannot coexist well. However, they are indeed connected. Few religions are without some form of laughter, whether in myths, religious rituals, or theological papers. In many religions, there are laughing gods, spiritual shamans, holy fools, carnival festivals, performances of comedians and clowns. Clowns parody sacred things; when laughter sweeps across the sacred universe, for a moment, the sacred order is revealed as a whimsical construction. This book examines the history of laughter in myths, religious rituals, and Western religious festivals. The author argues that humans use laughter as a tool to experience the world, categorize, and make value judgments. However, laughter also transcends language and carries a sense of the sacred. Anu, the chief deity of Mesopotamia, Yahweh of the Jews, Dionysus of the Greeks, the Gnostic savior, and Jesus of modern times—all are laughing deities. The author explores the relationship between the laughter of embodied humans and the spiritual laughter of deities in the book. It is a reasonable combination of the study of religious history and social science methods.