Weber as a Reader of Rudolph Sohm, and the Incomplete Concept of ‘Office Charisma'

Abstract

Abstract:The purpose of this article is to revisit the concept of ‘office charisma', as Max Weber introduced it in his Sociology of Religions. Weber's conceptualization of it seems unfinished, and used only to characterize a form of degeneration of personal charisma, and more precisely, as the form that the charisma takes when it becomes quotidian. The discussion of this hypothesis requires a re-examination of the sources used by Weber, namely Rudoph Sohm's Kirchenrecht, published in 1892. It was from Sohm that Weber drew the opposite pair of personal charisma and office charisma. Kirchenrecht was published in a Lutheran context, and it seems that Weber, in his interpretation and secularization of the notion of charisma, remained a prisoner of Lutheran precepts; in particular, they prevented him from achieving a genuinely autonomous characterization of ‘office charisma'. But Sohm's book has also continued to stimulate reflection on the question of charisma among Catholics; it has led them, in particular, to rediscover the pneumatic dimension in their theology of the Church and ministries. The question that arises, then, is whether Catholic theology, and more precisely its ecclesiology, might allow us to think differently about charisma, especially in its relationship to the institution — so that this ecclesiology would be a possible lateral path for the sociology of charisma. How, in the light of this Catholic reflection, could an alternative concept of office charism can be reconstructed?