Two Anthropologists and Innocent III (d. 1216)

The anthropologists of religion Mary Douglas (d. 2007) and Louis Dumont (d. 1998) developed analytical concepts that can illuminate aspects of the medieval Church which are articulately distilled into a letter of Pope Innocent III (d. 1216). Mary Douglas associated “high grid” (meaning thoroughgoing social classification) with “condensed symbolism.” The combination can occur in both literate and non‐literate cultures. She found the combination in her own fieldwork on the Lele of the Kasai, and Victor Turner's work on the Ndembu of Zambia. It is also strikingly evident, once one looks, in a letter in which Innocent III abandoned genre restraint to write an essay on anointing and hierarchy in the Church as he understood it, which was quite well, since he was not only an observer, but a participant with great power over the system. Dumont, an approximate contemporary of Douglas, provides insights, supplementing those of Douglas, that further enhance understanding of Innocent III's letter and the whole social system which it instantiates. With the help of Mary Douglas, Louis Dumont and Innocent's essay on unction, we can identify a social form which, without being universal, transcends particular regions and periods.