Study of Religion
Main
attempt to understand the various aspects of religion, especially
through the use of other intellectual disciplines.
The study of religion emerged as a formal discipline during the 19th
century, when the methods and approaches of history, philology, literary
criticism, psychology, anthropology, sociology, economics, and other
fields were brought to bear on the task of determining the history,
origins, and functions of religion. No consensus among scholars
concerning the best way to study religion has developed, however. One of
the many reasons for this failure is that each discipline enlisted to
study religion has its own distinctive methods and topics, and scholars
often disagree about how to resolve the inevitable conflicts between
these different intellectual perspectives. Another reason is that
questions about the origins and functions of religion have often been
conflated with questions about the truth of religion, and this has led
to controversies that tend to hinder the development of common concepts,
methodologies, and problems.
Nature and significance » The essence of religion and the context of
religious beliefs, practices, and institutions
Even a commonly accepted definition of religion has proved difficult to
establish, though not for lack of trying. Attempts have been made to
find a distinctive ingredient in all religions, such as the numinous, or
spiritual, experience, the contrast between the sacred and the profane,
and the belief in one or more gods. But objections have been brought
against all these attempts, either because the rich variety of religions
makes it easy to find counterexamples or because the element cited as
central is in some religions peripheral. The gods play a merely
subsidiary role, for example, in most phases of Theravada (“Way of the
Elders”) Buddhism. A more promising method would seem to be that of
exhibiting aspects of religion that are typical of religions, though not
necessarily universal, such as the occurrence of the rituals of worship.
There are religions, however, in which even worship rituals are not
central. Thus, the preliminary task of the student of religion must be
to amass an inventory of kinds of religious phenomena.
Even if an inventory of kinds of belief and practice could be
gathered so as to provide a typical profile of what counts as religion,
some scholars would maintain that the differences between religions are
more significant than their similarities. Moreover, in the absence of a
tight definition there will always be a number of disputed cases. Thus,
some political ideologies, such as communism and fascism, have been
regarded as analogous to religion. Certain attempts at a functionalist
definition of religion, such as that of the German American theologian
Paul Tillich (1886–1965), who defined religion in terms of human beings’
ultimate concern, would leave the way open to count these ideologies as
proper objects of the study of religion (Tillich himself called them
quasi-religions). Although there is still no agreement on this issue,
the frontier between traditional religions and modern political
ideologies remains a promising topic of study.
Nature and significance » Neutrality and subjectivity in the study of
religion
Discussion about religion has been complicated further by the attempt of
some Christian theologians, notably Karl Barth (1886–1968), to draw a
distinction between religion and the Gospel (the proclamation peculiar
to Christianity). This distinction depends to some extent upon taking a
projectionist view of religion as a human product. This tradition goes
back in modern times to the seminal work of the German philosopher
Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–72), who proposed that God was the extension of
human aspirations, and it is found in the work of the philosopher Karl
Marx, the founder of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud, and others. Barth’s
distinction attempts to draw a line between the transcendent, as it
reveals itself to humans, and religion, as a human product involved in
the response to revelation. The difficulty of the distinction consists
chiefly in a denial that God, as the object of the response, is a
“religious” being (i.e., God is transcendent, not religious in the sense
of being a part of the human product), and the question about revelation
as a religious fact thus needs to be answered.
Nature and significance » Neutrality and subjectivity in the study of
religion » Subjectivity in the study of religion
There are doubts about how far there can be neutrality and objectivity
in the study of religion. Is it possible to understand a faith without
holding it? If it is not possible, then cross-religious comparisons
would mostly break down, for normally it is not possible to be inside
more than one religion. But it is necessary to be clear about what
objectivity and subjectivity in religion mean. Religion can be said to
be subjective in at least two senses. First, the practice of religion
involves inner experiences and sentiments, such as feelings of God
guiding the life of the devotee. Here religion involves subjectivity in
the sense of individual experience. Religion may also be thought to be
subjective because the criteria by which its truth is decided are
obscure and hard to come by, so there is no obvious “objective” test,
the way in which there is for a large range of empirical claims in the
physical world. As to the first sense, one of the challenges to the
student of religion is the problem of evoking its inner, individual
side, which is not observable in any straightforward way. In considering
a religion, however, the scholar is concerned not only with individual
responses but also with communal ones. Often the scholar is confronted
only with texts describing beliefs and stories, so the inner sentiments
that these both evoke and express must be inferred. The adherent of a
faith is no doubt authoritative as to his own experience, but what of
the communal significance of the rites and institutions in which the
adherent participates? Thus, the matter of coming to understand the
inner side of a religion involves a dialectic between participant
observation and dialogical (interpersonal) relationship with the
adherents of the other faith.
The other sense of the subjectivity of religion is properly a matter
for theology and the philosophy of religion. The study of religion can
roughly be divided between descriptive and historical inquiries on the
one hand and normative inquiries on the other. Normative inquiries
primarily concern the truth of religious claims, the acceptability of
religious values, and other such normative aspects; descriptive
inquiries, which are only indirectly involved with the normative
elements of religion, are primarily concerned with the history,
structure, and other observable elements of religion. The distinction,
however, is not an absolute one, for, as has been noted, descriptions of
religion may sometimes incorporate theories about religion that imply
something about the truth or other normative aspects of some or all
religions. Conversely, theological claims may imply something about the
history of a religion. The dominant sense in which the contemporary
study of religion is understood is the descriptive sense.
Nature and significance » Neutrality and subjectivity in the study of
religion » Neutrality in the study of religion
The attempt simply to describe and not judge religious beliefs and
practices is often considered to involve epochē—that is, the suspension
of belief and the “bracketing” of the phenomena under investigation. The
idea of epochē is borrowed from the philosophy of the German thinker
Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), the father of phenomenology, and the
procedure is regarded as central to the phenomenology of religion.
The term phenomenology refers first to the attempt to describe
religious phenomena in a way that brings out the beliefs and attitudes
of the adherents of the religion under investigation but without either
endorsing or rejecting the beliefs and attitudes. Thus, the “bracketing”
means forgetting about beliefs of one’s own that might endorse or
conflict with what is being investigated. The term phenomenology also
refers to the attempt to devise a typology, or classification, of
religious phenomena—religious activities, beliefs, and institutions.
To some extent the emphasis on neutral description arises in modern
times as a reaction to “committed” accounts of religion, which were for
long the norm and which still exist among those who treat religion from
a theological point of view. The Christian theologian, for example, may
see a particular historical process as providential. This is a
legitimate perspective from the standpoint of faith. But the historical
process itself has to be investigated “scientifically”—that is, by
considering the evidence, using the techniques of historical enquiry and
other scientific methods. Conflict sometimes arises because the
committed point of view is likely to begin from a more conservative
stance, accepting at face value the scriptural accounts of events,
whereas the “secular” historian may be more skeptical, especially of
records of miraculous events. The study of religion may thus come to
have a reflexive effect on religion itself, such as the manner in which
modern Christian theology has been profoundly affected by the whole
question of the historicity of the New Testament.
The reflexive effect of the study of religion on religion itself may
in practice make it more difficult for the student of religion to adopt
the detachment required by bracketing. Scholars do generally agree that
the pursuit of objectivity is desirable, provided this stance does not
involve the sacrifice of a sense of the inner aspect of religion. The
stress on the distinction between the descriptive and normative
approaches is becoming more frequent among scholars of religion.
History of the study of religion
Because the major cultural traditions of Europe, the Middle East, India,
and China have been independent over long periods, no single history of
the study of religion exists. The primary impulse that prompts many to
study religion, however, happens to be the Western one. On the whole, in
the ancient world and in the Middle Ages the various approaches to
religion grew out of attempts either to criticize or to defend
particular systems and to interpret religion in harmony with changes in
knowledge. The same is true of part of the modern period, but
increasingly the idea of a nonjudgmental, descriptive, or explanatory
study of religions, and at the same time the attempt to understand the
genesis and function of religion, has become established. Viewed thus,
the 19th century is the formative period for the modern study of
religion. The ensuing account here of the history of the subject takes
it up to the modern period and then considers the various disciplines
connected with religion in detail since the 19th century.
History of the study of religion » The Greco-Roman period » Early
attempts to study religion
One of the earliest attempts to systematize the seemingly conflicting
Greek myths and thereby bring order into this rather chaotic Greek
tradition was the Theogony of the Greek poet Hesiod (flourished c. 700
bce), who rather laboriously put together the genealogies of the gods.
His work remains an important source book of ancient myth. The rise of
speculative philosophy among the Ionian philosophers, especially Thales
of Miletus, Heracleitus, and Anaximander, led to a more critical and
more rationalistic treatment of the gods. Thus, Thales (6th century bce)
and Heracleitus (flourished c. 500 bce) considered water and fire,
respectively, to be the first substance, out of which everything else is
made, though Aristotle reported mysteriously in the 4th century bce that
Thales believed that everything was filled with the gods. Anaximander
(6th century bce) called the primary substance the infinite (apeiron).
In these various schemes of religious belief, there is a unitary
something that transcends the many clashing forces in the world and in
fact transcends even the gods. Heraclitus refers to the controlling
principle as logos, or reason, though the philosopher, poet, and
religious reformer Xenophanes (6th–5th century bce) directly assailed
the traditional mythology as immoral, out of his concern to express a
monotheistic religion. This theme of criticism of the myths was taken
over and elaborated in the 4th century bce by Plato. More
conservatively, the poet Theagenes (6th century bce) allegorized the
gods, treating them as standing for natural and psychological forces. To
some extent, this line was pursued in the works of the Greek tragedians
and by the philosophers Parmenides and Empedocles (5th century bce).
Criticism of the ancient Greek tradition was reinforced by the reports
of travelers as Greek culture penetrated widely into various other
cultures. The historian Herodotus (5th century bce) attempted to solve
the problem of the plurality of cults by identifying foreign deities
with Greek deities (e.g., those of the Egyptian Amon with Zeus). This
kind of syncretism was widely employed in the merging of Greek and Roman
culture in the Roman Empire (e.g., Zeus as the Roman god Jupiter).
The plurality of cults and gods also induced skepticism, as with the
Sophist Protagoras (c. 481–411 bce), who was driven from Athens because
he dared to question the existence of the gods. Prodicus of Ceos (5th
century bce) gave a rationalistic explanation of the origin of deities
that foreshadowed Euhemerism (see below Later attempts to study
religion). Another Sophist, Critias (5th century bce), considered
religion to have been invented to frighten humans into adhering to
morality and justice. Plato was not averse to providing new myths to
perform this same social function—as is seen in his conception of the
“noble lie,” or the invention of myths to promote morality and order, in
the Republic. He was strongly critical, however, of the older poets’
(e.g., Homer’s) accounts of the gods and substituted a form of belief in
a single creator, the Demiurge, or supreme craftsman. This line of
thought was developed in a stronger way by Aristotle in his conception
of a supreme intelligence that is the “unmoved mover.” Aristotle
combined elements of earlier thinking in his account of the genesis of
the gods (coming from the observation of cosmic order and stellar beauty
and from dreams).
History of the study of religion » The Greco-Roman period » Later
attempts to study religion
Later Greek thinkers tended to vary between the positions adumbrated in
the earlier period. The Stoics (philosophers of nature and morality)
opted for a form of naturalistic monotheism, whereas the philosopher
Epicurus (341–270 bce) was skeptical of religion as ordinarily
understood and practiced, though he did not deny that there were gods
who, however, had no transactions with human beings. Of considerable
influence was Euhemerus (c. 330–c. 260 bce), who gave his name to the
doctrine called Euhemerism—namely, that the gods are divinized humans.
Although Euhemerus’s own argument was based largely upon fantasy, there
are certainly some examples, both in Greek religion (e.g., Heracles) and
elsewhere, of the tendency to make humans into gods, but it is obviously
not universal.
Most of the Greek concepts about religion proved to be influential in
the Roman world also. The atheistic Atomism of the Roman natural
historian Lucretius (c. 95–55 bce) owed much to Epicurus. The eclectic
thinker and politician Cicero (106–43 bce), in his De natura deorum
(“Concerning the Nature of the Gods”), criticized Stoic, Epicurean, and
later Platonic ideas about religion, but the book remains incomplete.
Much of the skepticism about the gods in the ancient world was concerned
with the older traditional religions, whether of Greece or Rome. But in
the early empire the mystery cults, ranging from the Eleusinian
mysteries of Greece to those of the Anatolian Cybele and the Persian
Mithra, together with philosophically based religions such as
Neoplatonism and Stoicism, had the greatest vitality. The patterns of
religious belief were complex and of different levels, with various
kinds of religion existing side by side.
Into this situation Christianity was injected, and in its encounter
with classical civilization it absorbed a number of the critiques of the
gods of the older thinkers. In particular, Euhemerism was fashionable
among the Church Fathers (the religious teachers of the early church) as
an account of paganism. On the “pagan” side, there were persistent
attempts to justify the popular cults and myths by the extensive use of
allegory—a technique well adapted to the synthesis of philosophical and
popular religion. Christianity’s own contribution to theories of the
genesis of polytheism was through the doctrine of the Fall of Man, in
which pure monotheism was believed to have become overlaid by demonic
cults of the gods. This account could help to explain some underlying
similarities between the Jewish and Christian traditions on the one hand
and the Greek and Roman traditions on the other. In this view lies the
germ of an evolutionary account of religion. On the whole, however, the
theories of religion in the ancient world were naturalistic and
rationalist.
History of the study of religion » The Middle Ages to the Reformation »
Theories of the Middle Ages
The spread of Christianity into northern Europe and other places outside
the Roman Empire presented problems similar to those encountered in the
pagan world. Similar solutions were offered—for example, the
identification of northern and Roman and Greek gods, sometimes using
etymologies that owed much to superficial resemblances of names. Thus,
the Icelandic historian Snorri Sturluson (1179–1241) made use of this
method in his handbook of Icelandic mythology—a work that was necessary
to pass on the myth-laden Norse poetic lore that had survived the
Christianization of the north—by adding to it Euhemeristic elements.
Meanwhile, Islamic theology had had an impact on Western
Christianity, notably upon medieval Scholastic philosophy, in which the
values of both reason and revelation were maintained. Muslim knowledge
of other religions was more advanced than European knowledge, notably in
the work of the theologian Ibn Ḥazm (994–1064). Nevertheless, the
reports of some European travelers, such as the Italian Marco Polo (c.
1254–1324) and also Odoric of Pordenone (14th century), gave Westerners
some knowledge of Asian religions. This knowledge opened the way toward
a more factual, less speculative treatment of the phenomena of other
religions. Although most Christian, as well as Islamic and Jewish,
theologians tended to consider the question of whether natural religion
gives insight into God’s nature—treating religion as a relation to the
first cause of the universe—the English philosopher Roger Bacon (c.
1220–c. 1292) preferred to categorize the various manifest kinds of
religion as a preliminary effort to establishing a true theology.
Theorists of the medieval period continued to accept the thesis that
polytheism had its origin in the Fall of Man, but two new theories
modified attitudes of Christians to other faiths. First, the theory
arose that God adapts customs and rites to a pagan style in order to
combat paganism itself—as a concession to the human condition. This
theory could be used to explain the divergencies of practice within
Christendom and to show points of contact between Christianity and
paganism. Second, the doctrine of humanity’s innate capacity to know God
by reason enabled thinkers to discern some measure of truth in other
religions. The questions raised by these theories were further explored
during the Renaissance.
History of the study of religion » The Middle Ages to the Reformation »
Theories of the Renaissance and Reformation
The Renaissance consisted in the invigoration of European culture
through the rediscovery of Greek and Roman art, literature, and
philosophy and thus was bound to set up tensions between Christians
about paganism. The Italian Humanist Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–75)
attempted to resolve these tensions in a medieval way by extensively
allegorizing the ancient myths. The Dutch Humanist Desiderius Erasmus
(1469–1536) and others, however, went farther in stating that the
ancient thinkers had a direct knowledge of the highest truth and
sometimes in comparing them favourably with Scholastic theologians. One
of the interlocutors in his Convivium religiosum suggests that it would
be better to lose the Scholastic theologian Duns Scotus than the ancient
Roman thinkers Cicero or Plutarch, and another speaker restrains himself
with difficulty from praying to the Greek philosopher Socrates (c.
470–399 bce) as if he were a Roman Catholic saint. But a new turn to the
arguments about idolatry, which were essentially apologetic, was given
by the Protestant Reformers’ attack on idolatry within the Roman
Catholic Church and by their comparison between what they took to be the
Christianity of the New Testament and the religion of Rome.
The need for a comparative treatment of religion became clear, and
this need prepared the way for more modern developments. Also
preparatory for the modern study of religion was the new trend toward
more or less systematic compilations of mythological and other material,
stimulated partly by the Renaissance itself and partly by the discovery
of the Americas and other lands. Europeans were introduced to the
richness and variety of human customs and beliefs. The most important
figures in the exploration of the religions of the non-European world
were the Spanish monk Bernardino de Sahagún (c. 1499–1590), who
conscientiously gathered information in New Spain, J. Lafitau
(1685–1740), a French missionary in Canada, and the Italian Jesuits
Roberto De Nobili (1577–1656) and Matteo Ricci (1552–1610). The last
two, who brought to bear a deep understanding of Indian and Chinese
cultures, were unparalleled in that area of study until modern times.
Thus, some of De Nobili’s discussions with Brahmans (priests) were
probably the first profound dialogues between Hindus and Christians. The
inquiries of the 16th to 18th century thus initiated an accumulation of
data about other cultures that stimulated studies of the religions of
other cultures.
History of the study of religion » The beginnings of the modern period »
The late 17th and 18th centuries
Attempts at a developmental account of religion were begun in the late
17th and 18th centuries. Notable was the scheme worked out, though not
in great detail, by the Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico
(1668–1744), who suggested that Greek religion passed through various
stages: first, the divinization of nature; second, the divinization of
powers that human beings had come to control, such as fire and crops;
third, the divinization of institutions, such as marriage; and finally,
the process of humanizing the gods, as in the works of Homer. The
Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711–76) gave another account in his
Natural History of Religion, which reflected the growing rationalism of
the epoch. For Hume, original polytheism was the result of a naïve
anthropomorphism (conceiving the divine in human form) in the assignment
of causes to natural events. The intensification of propitiatory and
other forms of worship, he believed, led to the exaltation of one
infinite divine Being. His Essay upon Miracles was also important in
posing vital questions about the historical treatment of sacred texts, a
set of problems that was to preoccupy Christian theologians starting in
the 19th century.
The rationalism of the period often involved a rejection of both
paganism and dogmatic Christianity in the name of “natural religion.”
This natural religion, also called deism, was the intellectual
counterpart to the more emotional antidogmatic faith of the Pietists,
who advocated “heart religion” over “head religion.” Among the French
philosophes and Encyclopaedists, Voltaire (1694–1778) espoused an
anticlerical deism, which viewed the genesis of polytheism in the work
of priests—a point also developed by another Encyclopaedist, Denis
Diderot (1713–84). Voltaire was, incidentally, somewhat influenced and
impressed by reports of the ethics of the Chinese social and religious
sage Confucius (6th century bce).
The culmination of 18th-century Rationalism was found in the works of
the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), but his was a
rationalism modified to leave room for religion, which he based
essentially on ethics. Kant held that all humans, in their awareness of
and reverence for the categorical imperative (i.e., the notion that one
must act as though what one does can become a universal law), share in
the one religion and that the preeminence of Christianity lay in the
conspicuous way in which Jesus enshrined the moral ideal. A series of
reactions against the highly influential Kantian account paved the way
for the various approaches to religion in the 19th century. In the
meantime, the first beginnings of the development of Oriental studies
and of ethnology and anthropology were making available more data about
religion, though discussion in the 18th century continued to conceive
religions other than Judaism and Christianity largely in terms of the
paganism of the ancient world. The French scholar and politician Charles
de Brosses (1709–77) attempted to explain Greek polytheism partly
through the fetishism (belief in the magical powers of certain objects)
found in West Africa. This approach was pioneering in its comparison of
Greek myths with “primitive” ones. The French Abbé Bergier (1718–90)
explained primitive religions by means of a belief in spirits arising
from a variety of psychological causes; his view was thus a precursor of
animism, or belief in the existence of souls in persons and in things.
One of the critics of Kant’s view of religion was the German
philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803), who adopted an
evolutionary account of the human race and who saw in mythology
something much deeper than a record of follies. His concern with
symbolic thinking makes him the first modern student of myth. The German
philosopher Friedrich Schelling (1775–1854) continued this positive
approach, in the tradition of Romanticism. Furthermore, the advances in
the knowledge of non-European, especially Indian, religion gave a wider
perspective to discussions of the nature of religion, as was clear in
the work of the German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel (1770–1831). Hegel’s
self-confident supposition that his philosophy represented the
culmination of the history of philosophy may amuse contemporary
scholars. Hegel was, nevertheless, immensely influential over a wide
range of scholarship, including the study of religion. His followers
were in large measure the founders of modern scientific history.
Admittedly his theory of the historical dialectic—in which one movement
(the thesis) is countered by another (the antithesis), the interplay
giving rise to a third (the synthesis), which now becomes the thesis of
a new dialectical interplay, and so on—has been viewed as too
artificial. But in providing a theoretical skeleton, the dialectic
inspired attempts to make sense of the multitude of historical data, so
scholars were driven to the investigation and discovery of particular
facts that might exhibit the universal patterns postulated. Hegel also
had a modified relativism, which implied that each phase of religion has
a limited truth. This, together with his dialectic scheme, led to a
general theory of religions, which though dated, much too neat, and
based on imperfect information, nevertheless represents an important
attempt at a comparative treatment, and one that was evolutionary.
History of the study of religion » The beginnings of the modern period »
The early 19th century
Hegel, as an idealist, stressed the formative power of the spiritual on
human history. By contrast, the French social philosopher Auguste Comte
(1798–1857), from a positivistic and materialist point of view, devised
a different evolutionary scheme in which there are three stages of human
history: the theological, in which the supernatural is important; the
metaphysical, in which the explanatory concepts become more abstract;
and the positivistic—i.e., the empirical. A rather different positivism
was expressed by the English philosopher Herbert Spencer (1820–1903); in
it religion has a place beside science in attempting to refer to the
unknown (and unknowable) Absolute. Evolutionary accounts, which
antedated Charles Darwin and focused as much on the survival of the
outdated as on the survival of the fittest, were much boosted in the
latter part of the 19th century by the new theory of biological
evolution and had a marked effect on both the history of religions and
anthropology.
Meanwhile, the German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–72)
propounded, in his Lectures on the Essence of Religion, a view of
religion as a projection of the aspirations of humans. His understanding
of religion as a form of projection—an explanation that goes back to the
ancient Greek thinker Xenophanes—was taken up in various ways by, among
others, Marx, Freud, and Barth. These various movements were
supplemented by the growth of scientific history, archaeology,
anthropology, and other sciences. The rise of the social sciences
provided for the first time systematic knowledge of cultures worldwide.
Although the 19th-century theories that form the starting point of
the modern study of religion were often based directly on metaphysical
schemes in competition with Christian and other theologies, there was an
atmosphere notably different from that of preceding periods, and the
stage was set for a more complex understanding of the history and nature
of religion.
Robert Segal
Basic aims and methods
The growth of various disciplines in the 19th century, notably
psychology and sociology, stimulated a more analytic approach to
religions, while at the same time theology became more sophisticated
and, in a sense, scientific as it began to be affected by and thus to
make use of historical and other methods. The interrelations of the
various disciplines in relation to religion as an area of study can be
described as follows.
Religions, being complex, have different aspects or dimensions. Thus,
the major world religions typically possess doctrines, myths, ethical
and social teachings, rituals, social institutions, and inner
experiences and sentiments. These dimensions lie behind the creation of
buildings, art, music, and other such extensions of basic beliefs and
attitudes. But not all religions are like Christianity and Buddhism, for
example, in possessing institutions such as the church and the saṅgha
(Buddhist monastic order), which exist across national and cultural
boundaries. In opposition to such institutionalized religions, tribal
religion, for example, is not usually separately institutionalized but
in effect is the religious side of communal life and is not treated as
distinct from other things that go on in the community.
The various dimensions of religion noted above represent a cross
section of a tradition; but to see the latter in a well-balanced
perspective it is necessary to view it as historical—as a religion
having a past and the capacity for development in the future (“dead”
religions, obviously enough, being the exception). Thus, there are
various disciplines that may examine a religion cross-sectionally to
find its basic patterns or structures. Psychology views religious
experience and feelings and to some extent the myths and symbols that
express experience; sociology and social anthropology view the
institutions of religious tradition and their relationship to its
beliefs and values; and literary and other studies seek to elicit the
meanings of myths and other items. These structural enquiries sometimes
benefit from being comparative—as when recurrent motifs in the doctrines
of different religions are noticed. On the other hand, the
aforementioned disciplines need to be supplemented by history,
archaeology, philology, and other such disciplines, which have their own
various methods of elucidating the past. Philosophy generally has
attempted wide-ranging accounts of the nature of religion and of
religious concepts, but it is not always easy to disentangle these
enquiries from issues raised by normative theology.
Basic aims and methods » Historical, archaeological, and literary
studies » Historical and literary studies
The expansion of European empires in the early 19th century and the
growth of scientific methods in history and philology combined to place
Oriental and other non-European studies on a new basis. Another stimulus
to the new approach to history and philology was Napoleon’s expedition
to Egypt, which was accompanied by scholars and scientists; it was a
notable attempt to gather knowledge of a culture systematically. The
discovery and editing of sacred and other texts from other cultures also
had profound effects upon European thinking. A notable publishing
venture was the series Sacred Books of the East, edited under the
leadership of the German Orientalist and philologist Max Müller
(1823–1900), which placed at the disposal of Westerners translations of
the major literary sources of the non-Christian world. Earlier, Müller
had published translations of the more important Vedic texts (Hindu
sacred works), of which the Ṛgveda was given a complete scholarly
edition in 1861–77. Interest in these ancient Indian texts was intense
among Europeans and Americans in that earlier reports had suggested that
these represented a world outlook from the “dawn of humanity” and that
the origin of polytheism lay in nature worship. The Vedas, however,
turned out to be of a very different character. The length of human
history and prehistory, as implied by evolutionary theory and the
growing archaeological discoveries, precluded looking upon the Vedic
hymns as anything but late; though the contents showed them to be highly
artificial and complex compilations for use in a priest-dominated ritual
context, they were not at that time seen as spontaneous outpourings of
the human spirit. Müller himself reacted rather sharply by adopting a
different theory, which expressed his philological slant—namely, that
polytheism was the result of a disease of language, in which the terms
for natural phenomena came to be treated as having independent and
personal reality: nomina (“names”) became numina (“spirits”). The theory
was in vogue for a time but was later replaced by more realistic
insights drawn from anthropology. Furthermore, study of the greater part
of the corpus of Indian sacred writings, including those in vernacular
languages (especially Tamil), gradually modified the preoccupation with
the earliest texts—the Vedic hymns and the Upaniṣads (philosophical
treatises).
Throughout the development of the study of non-European languages
there was a supposition that a non-Christian equivalent of the Bible
could be found, a sacred writing that would thus provide the
authoritative key to the beliefs, practices, and institutions of the
religion under consideration. Gradually, however, it became apparent
that sacred scriptures play very different roles in different religious
cultures. Somewhat later in developing were studies of the Buddhist
canon in Pāli (an ancient Indian language), which, through the work of
such scholars as the English Orientalist T.W. Rhys Davids (1843–1922)
and of the Pāli Text Society, which he founded, had a remarkable impact
in revealing to the West the full range of Theravādin (southern
Buddhist) religious literature; it tended to make Western scholars look
upon the Theravāda as the earlier, “purer” form of Buddhism; but the
editing of early Mahāyāna (“Greater Vehicle,” or northern Buddhist)
texts and the recognition of the different strata in the Pāli canon have
modified this view. Buddhist studies were enhanced by the growth of
Tibetan, Chinese, and Japanese studies. Some of the more important
modern scholars of Zen Buddhism (a Mahāyāna sect) have been Japanese,
notably the philosopher D.T. Suzuki (1870–1966), sometimes called the
apostle of Zen Buddhism to America, whose editions and interpretations
have been widely influential.
The productivity of the study of religious literature of the late
19th century was immense, for it was not confined to the foregoing
literary and archaeological activities but to the investigation of the
Chinese Classics and the roots of Chinese civilization as well. Thus, by
the early 20th century, Western scholars were in a position to study the
main range of non-Western literary cultures. The wave of interest in
these texts and the freeing of their dissemination from some of their
traditional constraints (e.g., the restriction of Vedic revelation to
the upper classes of the Indian caste system) contributed to the revival
of other religious cultures—notably Hinduism and Buddhism, under the
stimulus of the Western challenge. Modern scholarship thus provided the
basis for a new self-understanding among such religious traditions.
Meanwhile, the texts of Zoroastrianism, an Iranian religion
originating in the 6th century bc, were being discovered and edited
(from 1850 onward). The disentangling of different layers of varying
antiquity indicated the complex ways in which the religion of Zoroaster
had developed.
During the latter part of the 19th and early part of the 20th
century, there was a remarkable flowering of ancient Middle Eastern
studies. Archaeology contributed to the unravelling of non-Jewish and
Jewish religious history. The discovery of the Epic of Gilgamesh, a
major work of Mesopotamian religious literature, and other materials
brought a whole new perspective to the development of ideas in
Mesopotamia; and in Egypt archaeological and papyrological studies
brought to light the famous and revealing Egyptian funerary text, the
Book of the Dead. These various ancient Middle Eastern discoveries have
thrown light on the evolution of Judaism, and Semitic studies have
likewise illuminated the origins and background of Islām. Furthermore,
classical and European studies assembled data about the pre-Christian
religions of the West so that scholars might gain a more detailed and
scientific understanding of them. Compilations such as the Corpus
Inscriptionum Graecorum and the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum,
assembled in the 19th century, and the publication of Germanic, Celtic,
and Scandinavian texts provided the tools for a reappraisal of these
older traditions. Throughout the period intense researches into the
composition and milieu of the Old and New Testaments reflected a new and
“scientific” spirit of enquiry—which was, however, not without its
controversial elements, sometimes because of the intimate tie between
religious positions and evaluations of the Bible and sometimes because
of the application of speculative patterns in the history of
(non-Christian) religions to the New Testament. Meanwhile, the
assemblage of materials extended forward into Christian history through
the application of classical philological methods to patristic texts
(the writing of the early Church Fathers) and to the corpus of
Reformation writings.
Basic aims and methods » Historical, archaeological, and literary
studies » Archaeological studies
The great archaeological discoveries of Heinrich Schliemann, the German
excavator of Troy; the English archaeologists Arthur Evans in Crete and
Wm. M. Flinders Petrie in Egypt; the French archaeologist Jacques de
Morgan in Elam; the German Orientalist Hugo Winckler in Boğazköy
(Anatolia); the French archaeologists Claude Schaeffer and C. Virolleaud
in Ras Shamra (Ugarit); and other archaeologists greatly enlightened
modern knowledge of the Greco-Roman and ancient Middle Eastern worlds.
Biblical archaeology, culminating perhaps in the discovery of Masada,
the Judaean hill fortress where the Jews made their last stand against
the Romans in the revolt of ad 66–73 and that was mainly excavated in
1963, has given a new perspective to Old Testament, intertestamental,
and later studies of ancient Judaism. The spectacular discovery by the
English archaeologist John Marshall and others of the Indus Valley
civilization pushed back knowledge of Indian prehistory to about 3500 bc
and called into question the earlier theory of the primacy of Vedic
culture in the formation of the Indian tradition, many features of which
appear to have their first manifestation in the Indus Valley cities.
Archaeology made another profound impact on the study of religion
when in 1841 the discovery of prehistoric human artifacts and later
finds gave clues to early man’s magico-religious beliefs and practices.
These discoveries, notably the cave paintings in the Dordogne, northern
and eastern Spain, and elsewhere, gave scholars encouragement to work
out the course of man’s religious evolution from earliest times.
Spectacular as prehistoric archaeology was proving to be, however, it
could only yield fragments of a whole that is difficult to reconstruct.
Even the famous cave paintings of Les Trois Frères, in the Dordogne, for
example, which portray among other things a dancing human with antlers
on his head and a stallion’s tail decorating his rear, does not yield an
unambiguous interpretation: is the dancing figure a sorcerer, a priest,
or what? He very likely is a priest presenting himself as a divine
figure connected with animal fertility and hunting rites—but this
remains as only an educated guess. Hence, it became attractive to many
scholars of religion to try to supplement ancient archaeological
evidence with data drawn from contemporary primitive peoples—i.e., to
interpret the prehistoric Stone Age through present-day stone age
cultures. This procedure has several pitfalls—partly because
contemporary “primitives” are themselves the product of a long
historical process and because their culture may have changed over the
millennia in many and various ways.
The work of the archaeologists has not merely stimulated new thinking
about the early stages of religious history but it has also been a
factor in drawing attention to the roles of buildings and art objects in
religion. During the present century, spectacular religious monuments of
the past, such as Angkor Wat (Cambodia), Borobuḍur (Indonesia), Ellora
and Ajantā (India), and the Acropolis (Athens), have been officially
preserved for scholarly and public viewing. Though iconography (the
study of content and meaning in visual arts) has been better developed
among art historians, students of religion are now paying increased
attention to the religious decipherment of the visual arts. By contrast,
very little has been done in the sphere of music, despite the
considerable role it plays in so many religions. This is a further way
in which the study of texts and ideas needs to be supplemented by
knowledge of the milieu in which they have their meaning.
Basic aims and methods » Anthropological approaches to the study of
religion » Theories concerning the origins of religion
To draw a clear line between anthropology and sociology is difficult,
and the two disciplines are divided more by tradition than by the
scholarly methods they employ. Anthropology, however, has tended to be
chiefly concerned with nonliterate and technologically primitive
cultures and thus has stressed a certain range of techniques, such as
the use of participant observation. Much anthropological investigation,
however, has been carried out recently in more complex societies, such
as in various Hindu areas of India, where there are different layers of
society, ranging from an educated elite to illiterate workers who carry
out the traditional menial tasks of the lowest castes and the outcastes.
Because of the anthropologists’ interest in tribal and “primitive”
societies, it has not been unnatural for them to try to use the data
gained in the study of such societies to speculate about the genesis and
functions of religion.
An early attempt to combine archaeological evidence of prehistoric
peoples, on the one hand, and anthropological evidence of primitive
peoples, on the other, was that of the English anthropologist John
Lubbock (1834–1913). His book, The Origin of Civilization and the
Primitive Condition of Man, outlined an evolutionary scheme, beginning
with atheism (the absence of religious ideas) and continuing with
fetishism, nature worship, and totemism (a system of belief involving
the relationship of specific animals to clans), shamanism (a system of
belief centring on the shaman, a religious personage having curative and
psychic powers), anthropomorphism, monotheism (belief in one god), and,
finally, ethical monotheism. Lubbock recognized a point later made by
the German theologian and philosopher Rudolf Otto (1869–1937) in
distinguishing between the unique holiness (separateness) of God and his
ethical characteristics. Unfortunately, much of his information was
unreliable, and his schematism was open to question; he foreshadowed,
nevertheless, other forms of evolutionism, which were to become popular
both in sociology and anthropology. The English ethnologist E.B. Tylor
(1832–1917), who is commonly considered the father of modern
anthropology, expounded, in his book Primitive Culture, the thesis that
animism is the earliest and most basic religious form. Out of this
evolves fetishism, belief in demons, polytheism, and, finally,
monotheism, which derives from the exaltation of a great god, such as
the sky god, in a polytheistic context. A somewhat similar system was
advanced by Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) in his Principles of Sociology,
though he stresses ancestor worship rather than animism as the basic
consideration.
The classifications of religion—polytheism, henotheism (i.e., the
worship of one god as supreme without necessarily excluding the
possibility of other groups’ gods), and monotheism—begin from concern
with gods and often imply the superiority of monotheism over other forms
of belief. Naturally, the anthropologists of the 19th century were
deeply influenced by the presuppositions of Western society.
The English anthropologist R.R. Marett (1866–1943), in contrast to
Tylor, viewed what he termed animatism as of basic importance. He took
his clue from such ideas as mana, mulungu, orenda, and so on (concepts
found in the Pacific, Africa, and America, respectively), referring to a
supernatural power (a kind of supernatural “electricity”) that does not
necessarily have the personal connotation of animistic entities and that
becomes especially present in certain men, spirits, or natural objects.
Marett criticized Tylor for an overly intellectual approach, as though
primitive men used personal forces as explanatory hypotheses to account
for dreams, natural events, and other phenomena. For Marett, primitive
religion is “not so much thought out as danced out,” and its primary
emotional attitude is not so much fear as awe (in this he is close to
Otto, whom he influenced).
Another important figure in the development of theories of religion
was the British folklorist Sir James Frazer (1854–1941), in whose major
work, The Golden Bough, is set forth a mass of evidence to establish the
thesis that men must have begun with magic and progressed to religion
and from that to science. He owes much to Tylor but places magic in a
phase anterior to belief in supernatural powers that have to be
propitiated—this belief being the core of religion. Because of the
realization that magical rituals do not in fact work, primitive man then
turns, according to Frazer, to reliance on supernatural beings outside
his control, beings who need to be treated well if they are to cooperate
with human purposes. With further scientific discoveries and theories,
such as the mechanistic view of the operation of the universe, religious
explanations gave way to scientific ones. Frazer’s scheme is reminiscent
of that of the French “father of sociology,” Auguste Comte.
These and other evolutionary schemes came in for criticism, however,
in the light of certain facts about the religions of primitive peoples.
Thus, the Scottish folklorist Andrew Lang (1844–1912) discovered from
anthropological reports that various primitive tribes believed in a high
god—a creator and often legislator of the moral order. Marett and other
anthropologists contended that Lang’s attempt to argue for an
Urmonotheismus (primordial monotheism) was contrary both to evolutionary
ideas and to the established view of the lack of sophistication and
half-animal status of the so-called savage. Since Lang was more of a
brilliant journalist than an anthropologist, his view was not taken with
as much seriousness as it should have been.
The German Roman Catholic priest and ethnologist Wilhelm Schmidt
(1868–1954), however, brought anthropological expertise to bear in a
series of investigations of such primitive societies as those of the
Tierra del Fuegians (South America), the Negrillos of Rwanda (Africa),
and the Andaman Islanders (Indian Ocean). The results were assembled in
his Der Ursprung der Gottesidee (“The Origin of the Idea of God”), which
appeared in 12 volumes from 1912 to 1955. Not surprisingly, Schmidt and
his collaborators saw in the high gods, for whose cultural existence
they produced ample evidence from a wide variety of unconnected
societies, a sign of a primordial monotheistic revelation that later
became overlaid with other elements (this was an echo of earlier
Christian theories invoking the Fall to similar effect). The
interpretation is controversial, but at least Lang and Schmidt produced
grounds for rejecting the earlier rather naïve theory of evolutionism.
Modern scholars do not, on the whole, accept Schmidt’s scheme. Some,
such as the Italian anthropologist Raffaele Pettazzoni (1883–1959), have
stressed merely that a sky god has a certain natural preeminence; others
emphasize that the high god is often a deus otiosus (“idle god”)—i.e.,
not active in the world and hence not the recipient of a functioning
cult. In any event, it is a very long jump from the premise that
primitive tribes have high gods to the conclusion that the earliest men
were monotheists.
Others who have looked at religions from an anthropological point of
view have emphasized the importance, in a number of cultures, of the
mother goddess (as distinct from the male sky god). A pioneer work in
this direction was that of the Swiss anthropologist and jurist J.J.
Bachofen (1815–87), whose Das Mutterrecht (“The Mother Right”)
unravelled some puzzles in ancient law, mythology, and art in terms of a
matriarchal society.
Basic aims and methods » Anthropological approaches to the study of
religion » Functional and structural studies of religion
The search for a tidy account of the genesis of religion in prehistory
by reference to primitive societies was hardly likely to yield decisive
results. Thus, anthropologists became more concerned with functional and
structural accounts of religion in society and relinquished the
apparently futile search for origins.
Notable among these accounts was the theory of the French sociologist
Émile Durkheim (1858–1917). According to Durkheim, totemism was
fundamentally significant (he wrongly supposed it to be virtually
universal), and in this he shared the view of some other 19th-century
savants, notably Salomon Reinach (1858–1932) and Robertson Smith
(1846–94), not to mention Sigmund Freud (1856–1939). Because Durkheim
treated the totem as symbolic of the god, he inferred that the god is a
personification of the clan. This conclusion, if generalized, suggested
that all the objects of religious worship symbolize social relationships
and, indeed, play an important role in the continuance of the social
group.
Various forms of functionalism in anthropology—which understood
social patterns and institutions in terms of their function in the
larger cultural context—proved illuminating for religion, such as in the
stimulus to discover interrelations between differing aspects of
religion. The Polish-British anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski
(1884–1942), for instance, emphasized in his work on the Trobriand
Islanders (New Guinea) the close relationship between myth and ritual—a
point also made emphatically by the “myth and ritual” school of the
history of religions (see below Other studies and emphases).
Furthermore, many anthropologists, notably Paul Radin (1883–1959), moved
away from earlier categorizations of so-called primitive thought and
pointed to the crucial role of creative individuals in the process of
mythmaking.
A rather different approach to myths was made by the 20th-century
French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, whose rather formalistic
structuralism tended to reinforce analogies between “primitive” and
sophisticated thinking and also provided a new method of analyzing myths
and stories. His views had wide influence, though they are by no means
universally accepted by anthropologists.
Basic aims and methods » Anthropological approaches to the study of
religion » Specialized studies
The impact of Western culture, including missionary Christianity, and
technology upon a wide variety of primitive and tribal societies has had
profound effects and represents a specialized area of study closely
related to religious anthropology. One pioneering work is Religions of
the Oppressed by the Italian anthropologist and historian of religion
Vittorio Lanternari. What is striking is the way in which similar types
of reaction, creating new religious movements, occur at different points
across the world. There are, thus, many possibilities of a comparative
treatment.
Among a number of contemporary anthropologists, including the
American Clifford Geertz, there is a concern, after a period of
functionalism, with exploring more deeply and concretely the symbolism
of cultures. The English social anthropologist E.E. Evans-Pritchard
(1902–73), noted among other things for his work on the religion of Nuer
people (who live in The Sudan), produced in his Theories of Primitive
Religion a penetrating critique of many of the earlier anthropological
stances. Though it has always been difficult to confirm theories in view
of the complexity of the data, a statistical approach has been
attempted—e.g., by G. Swanson in his Birth of the Gods, which attempts
to exhibit correlations between types of social arrangement and
religious beliefs, such as the caste system and belief in reincarnation.
Because of the nature of the societies that typically have come under
the scrutiny of anthropology, the discipline has necessarily had to come
to terms with religion. In terms of the methods used, the
anthropological approach is of considerable interest to historians of
religion and is a corrective to overintellectual, text-based accounts of
religions. Also, the present concerns for comparative studies and
symbolic analysis coincide with existing concerns in the phenomenology
of religion (see below History and phenomenology of religion).
Basic aims and methods » Sociological studies of religion » Theories of
stages
Auguste Comte (1798–1857) is usually considered the founder of modern
sociology. His general theory hinged substantially on a particular view
of religion, and this view has somewhat influenced the sociology of
religion since that time. In his Cours de philosophie positive (The
Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte) Comte expounded a naturalistic
Positivism and sketched out the following stages in the evolution of
thought. First, there is what he called the theological stage, in which
events are explained by reference to supernatural beings; next, there is
the metaphysical stage, in which more abstract unseen forces are
invoked; finally, in the positivistic stage, men seek causes in a
scientific and practical manner. To seek for scientific laws governing
human morality and society is as necessary, in this view, as to search
for those in physics and biology—hence Comte’s role in advocating a
science of society, namely sociology. Among the leading figures in the
development of sociological theories were Spencer and Durkheim (see
above Anthropological approaches to the study of religion).
A rather separate tradition was created by the German economic
theorist Karl Marx (1818–83). A number of Marxists, notably Lenin
(1870–1924) and K. Kautsky (1854–1938), have developed social
interpretations of religion based on the theory of the class struggle.
Whereas sociological functionalists posited the existence in a society
of some religion or a substitute for it (Comte, incidentally, propounded
a positivistic religion, somewhat in the spirit of the French
Revolution), the Marxists implied the disappearance of religion in a
classless society. Thus, in their view religion in man’s primordial
communist condition, at the dawn of the historical dialectic, reflects
ignorance of natural causes, which are explained animistically. The
formation of classes leads, through alienation, to a projection of the
need for liberation from this world into the transcendental or heavenly
sphere. Religion, both consciously and unconsciously, thus becomes an
instrument of exploitation. In the words of the young Marx, religion is
“the generalized theory of the world . . . , its logic in popular form.”
The modern intellectualist accounts of religion, tending to ignore the
rituals, experiences, and institutions but concentrating rather on the
doctrines and myths, have proved something of a problem for later
Marxist applications of their theory. Since the theory was a product of
a rather early and unsophisticated stage of theorizing about religion,
it was not adapted particularly well to deal with other cultures—hence a
considerable debate in modern China on the status of Chinese religion in
the light of Marxism, some holding that Marx’s critique did not, for
example, fit Buddhism.
Basic aims and methods » Sociological studies of religion » Comparative
studies
One of the most influential theoreticians of the sociology of religion
was the German scholar Max Weber (1864–1920). He observed that there is
an apparent connection between Protestantism and the rise of capitalism,
and in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism he accounted
for the connection in terms of Calvinism’s inculcating a this-worldly
asceticism—which created a rational discipline and work ethic, together
with a drive to accumulate savings that could be used for further
investment. Weber noted, however, that such a thesis ought to be tested;
and a major contribution of his thinking was his systematic exploration
of other cultural traditions from a sociological point of view. He wrote
influentially about Islām, Judaism, and Indian and Chinese religions
and, in so doing, elaborated a set of categories, such as types of
prophecy, the idea of charisma (spiritual power), routinization, and
other categories, which became tools to deal with the comparative
material; he was thus the real founder of comparative sociology. Because
of his special interest in religion, he can also be reckoned a major
figure in the comparative study of religion (though he is not usually
reckoned so in most accounts of the history of religions). Though he
made significant contributions to the study of religion, his judgments
on Indian and other religions are not all or mostly accepted now—since
he necessarily based his views on secondary sources—and some of his
categorial distinctions are open to debate, such as his rather broad use
of the category of prophet.
Weber’s comparative method in the scientific sociology of religion
introduced an analogue to experimentation (i.e., looking at similar
patterns in independent cultures with varying contextual conditions).
Since the 1950s there has been considerable emphasis on statistical
methods, side by side with the more theoretical discussions arising from
classical sociology. Typical of the trend is the American sociologist
Gerhard Lenski’s Religious Factor, which delineates the relations
between religious allegiance and other factors in a large city in the
United States.
Basic aims and methods » Sociological studies of religion » Other
sociological studies
An extensive literature on religious sects and similar groups has also
developed. To some extent this has been influenced by the German
theologian Ernst Troeltsch in his distinction between church and sect
(see below Theological studies). Notable among modern investigators of
sectarianism is the British scholar Bryan Wilson. Church organizations
also have attempted to use the insights of sociology in the work of
evangelism and other church-related activities—a use of the discipline
that is sometimes called “religious sociology” to distinguish it from
the more theoretical and “objective” sociology of religion.
Coordination between sociology and the history of religions is not
usually very close, since the two disciplines operate as separate
departments in most universities and often in different faculties. From
the sociological end, Weber represents one kind of synthesis; from the
history-of-religions end, the writings of the German-American scholar
Joachim Wach (see below The “Chicago school”) were quite influential. In
his book Sociology of Religion he attempted to exhibit the ways in which
the community institutions of religion express certain attitudes and
experiences. This view was in accordance with his insistence on the
practical and existential side of religion, over against the
intellectualist tendency to treat the correlate of the group as being a
system of beliefs.
Among the more recent theorists of the sociology of religion is the
influential and eclectic American scholar Peter Berger. In The Sacred
Canopy he draws on elements from Marx, Durkheim, Weber, and others,
creating a lively theoretical synthesis. One problem is raised by his
method, however; he espouses what he calls “methodological atheism” in
his work, which appears to presuppose a view about religion. Despite
Berger’s sympathy in dealing with religious phenomena, the
methodological stance adopted in this book seems to imply a reductionist
position—namely, one in which religious beliefs are explained by
reference to basically nonreligious sentiments, sociopsychological
circumstances, and other factors. In itself, this is a theory having
possibilities, for the study of religion cannot rule out a priori the
thesis that religion is a projection—e.g., that it rests upon an
illusion—or other such theses; but the question arises as to whether or
not the methods espoused in the scientific study of religion have
already secretly prejudged the issue.
On the whole, modern sociology is largely geared to dealing with
Western religious institutions and practices, though some notable work
has been done, especially since World War II, in Asian sociology of
religion. Emphasis has been placed upon the process of secularization in
a number of Western sociological studies (which have had some impact on
the formation of modern Christian theology), notably in The Secular City
of the American theologian Harvey Cox. There are indications that the
process of secularization does not occur in the same degree or occurs in
a different manner in non-Western cultures.
In general, the main question of the sociology of religion concerns
the effectiveness with which it can relate to other studies of religion.
This question is posed in The Scientific Study of Religion, by the
American sociologist J. Milton Yinger. A similar tendency is noted in
the synthesis between the history and the sociology of religion in a
new-style evolutionism propounded by another American scholar, Robert
Bellah.
Basic aims and methods » The psychology of religion
The study of religious psychology involves both the gathering and
classification of data and the building and testing of various (usually
rather wide-ranging) explanations. The former activity overlaps with the
phenomenology of religion, so it is to some extent an arbitrary decision
under which head one should include descriptive studies of religious
experience and related subjects.
Basic aims and methods » The psychology of religion » Psychological
studies
Notable among investigations by psychologists was The Varieties of
Religious Experience, by the American philosopher and psychologist
William James (1842–1910), in which he attempted to account for
experiences such as conversion through the concept of invasions from the
unconscious. Because of the clarity of his style and his philosophical
distinction, the work has had a lasting influence, though it is dated in
a number of ways and his examples come from a relatively narrow
selection of individuals, largely within the ambit of Protestant
Christianity. This points to a recurring problem—that of relating
individual psychology to the institutions and symbols of different
cultures and traditions.
More radical, but drawing from a rather larger range of examples, was
the American psychologist J.H. Leuba (1868–1946). In A Psychological
Study of Religion he attempted to account for mystical experience
psychologically and physiologically, pointing to analogies with certain
drug-induced experiences. Leuba argued forcibly for a naturalistic
treatment of religion, which he considered to be necessary if religious
psychology was to be looked at scientifically. Others, however, have
argued that psychology is in principle neutral, neither confirming nor
ruling out belief in the transcendent. Most scholars would, however,
consider the problem to be a complex philosophical one, which goes
beyond psychology as such.
Among those who have attempted a fairly detailed classification of
mystical experience, but not necessarily from a scientific-psychological
point of view, mention should be made of the English scholar Evelyn
Underhill (1875–1941), drawing on examples from the Jewish, Christian,
and Islāmic traditions. Recently, systematic explorations (taking into
account Eastern mysticism as well) have been undertaken. Rudolf Otto was
important in elucidating the nature of numinous experience, and there
has also been a certain amount of scholarly work performed in the
description and classification of types of shamanism, spirit possession,
and similar phenomena.
Basic aims and methods » The psychology of religion » Psychoanalytical
studies
More influential than James and Leuba and others in that tradition were
the psychoanalysts. Freud gave explanations of the genesis of religion
in various of his writings. In Totem and Taboo he applied the idea of
the Oedipus complex (involving unresolved sexual feelings of, for
example, a son toward his mother and hostility toward his father) and
postulated its emergence in the primordial stage of human development.
This stage he conceived to be one in which there were small groups, each
dominated by a father. According to Freud’s reconstruction of primordial
society, the father is displaced by a son (probably violently), and
further attempts to displace the new leader bring about a truce in which
incest taboos (proscriptions against intrafamily sexual relations) are
formed. The slaying of a suitable animal, symbolic of the deposed and
dead father, connected totemism with taboo. In Moses and Monotheism
Freud reconstructed biblical history in accord with his general theory,
but biblical scholars and historians would not accept his account since
it was in opposition to the point of view of the accepted criteria of
historical evidence. His ideas were also developed in The Future of an
Illusion. Freud’s view of the idea of God as being a version of the
father image and his thesis that religious belief is at bottom infantile
and neurotic do not depend upon the speculative accounts of prehistory
and biblical history with which Freud dressed up his version of the
origin and nature of religion. The theory can still stand as an account
of the way in which religion operates in individual psychology, though
of course it has also attracted criticism on grounds other than
historical ones (e.g., Buddhism does not have a father figure to
worship).
A considerable literature has developed around the relationship of
psychoanalysis and religion. Some argue, despite the atheistic mood of
Freud’s writing and his critique of religious belief, that the main
theory is compatible with faith—on the grounds, for instance, that the
theory describes certain mechanisms operative in people’s religious
psychology that represent modes in which people respond to the challenge
of religious truth. Even if this position can be sustained, it is clear,
nevertheless, that acceptance of Freudian insights makes a considerable
difference to the way in which religious experience and behaviour are
viewed. Questions have arisen about the range of applicability of
Freud’s ideas—e.g., whether or not his theories apply outside the
Western milieu, such as in Theravāda Buddhism, which does not possess a
father figure or worship a god. Various attempts have been made to test
Freud’s theory of religion empirically, but the results have been
ambiguous.
The Swiss psychoanalyst C.G. Jung (1875–1961) adopted a very
different posture, one that was more sympathetic to religion and more
concerned with a positive appreciation of religious symbolism. Jung
considered the question of the existence of God to be unanswerable by
the psychologist and adopted a kind of agnosticism. Yet he considered
the spiritual realm to possess a psychological reality that cannot be
explained away, and certainly not in the manner suggested by Freud. Jung
postulated, in addition to the personal unconscious (roughly as in
Freud), the collective unconscious, which is the repository of human
experience and which contains “archetypes” (i.e., basic images that are
universal in that they recur in independent cultures). The irruption of
these images from the unconscious into the realm of consciousness he
viewed as the basis of religious experience and often of artistic
creativity. Religion can thus help men, who stand in need of the
mysterious and symbolic, in the process of individuation—of becoming
individual selves. Some of Jung’s writings have been devoted to
elucidating some of the archetypal symbols, and his work in comparative
mythology, the history of alchemy, and other similar areas of concern
has proved greatly influential in stimulating the investigations of
other interested scholars. Thus, the Eranos circle, a group of scholars
meeting around the leadership of Jung, contributed considerably to the
history of religions. Associated with this circle of scholars have been
Mircea Eliade, the eminent Romanian-French historian of religion, and
the Hungarian-Swiss historian of religion Károly Kerényi (1897–1973).
This movement has been one of the main factors in the modern revival of
interest in the analysis of myth.
Among other psychoanalytic interpreters of religion, the American
scholar Erich Fromm (1900–80) modified Freudian theory and produced a
more complex account of the functions of religion. Part of the
modification is viewing the Oedipus complex as based not so much on
sexuality as on a “much more profound desire”—namely, the childish
desire to remain attached to protecting figures. The right religion, in
Fromm’s estimation, can, in principle, foster an individual’s highest
potentialities, but religion in practice tends to relapse into being
neurotic. Authoritarian religion, according to Freud, is dysfunctional
and alienates man from himself.
Basic aims and methods » The psychology of religion » Other studies
Apart from Jung’s work, there have been various attempts to relate
psychoanalytic theory to comparative material. Thus, the English
anthropologist Meyer Fortes, in his Oedipus and Job in West African
Religion, combined elements from Freud and Durkheim, and G.M. Carstairs
(a British psychologist), in The Twice Born, investigated in depth the
inhabitants of an Indian town from a psychoanalytic point of view and
with special reference to their religious beliefs and practices. Among
the more systematic attempts to evaluate the evidences of the various
theories is Religious Behaviour, by Michael Argyle, another British
psychologist.
A certain amount of empirical work in relation to the effects of
meditation and mystical experience—and also in relation to drug-induced
“higher” states of consciousness—has also been carried on. Investigation
of religious responses as correlated with various personality types is
another area of enquiry; and developmental psychology of religion,
largely under the influence of the French psychologist Jean Piaget
(1896–1980), has played a prominent part in educational theory in the
teaching of religion. Most scholars agree, however, that more needs to
be done to make results in the psychology of religion more precise; and
also, for reasons that are unclear, very few people recently have
concerned themselves with the field, which thus is in a state of
suspension after a flurry of activity in the late 19th and early 20th
centuries.
Basic aims and methods » Philosophy of religion » The concerns of the
philosophy of religion
The scope of the philosophy of religion has changed somewhat in the last
century and a half—that is, in the time since it came to be recognized
as a separate branch of philosophy. Its nature is, as is typically the
case in philosophy, open to debate. Three main trends, however, can be
noted: (1) the attempt to analyze and describe the nature of religion in
the framework of a general view of the world; (2) the effort to defend
or attack various religious positions in terms of philosophy; and (3)
the attempt to analyze religious language. Philosophical materials are
also often incorporated into theologies—a modern example being the use
of Existentialism in the theology of Rudolf Bultmann, the German New
Testament scholar (see below Neo-orthodoxy and demythologization), and
others; an older example is the medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas’ use
of Aristotle and of his (Aquinas’ own) insights in the service of a
systematic Christian theology. The different activities mentioned above
overlap substantially. The second of them is usually taken to include
the exploration of natural theology (i.e., the truths about God that can
be known, as it is claimed, by the aid of reasoning and insight,
independently of the truths vouchsafed by revelation). Metaphysical
systems (concerning the nature of reality) sometimes function as
analogues to natural theology and thus provide a kind of support for a
revealed religious belief system. Thus, much of philosophy of religion
is concerned with questions not so much of the description of religion
(historically and otherwise) as with the truth of religious claims. For
this reason philosophy can easily become an adjunct of theology or of
antireligious positions. To this extent, philosophy lies outside the
main disciplines concerned with the descriptive study of religion; thus,
it is often difficult to disentangle descriptive problems from those
bearing on the truth of the content of what is being described.
Feuerbach’s “projection” theory of religion, for example, possessed a
metaphysical framework, but it also included empirical claims about the
nature of religion. The following brief account of philosophical trends
is necessarily selective, leaning toward those philosophical theories
that have a stronger content of, or relevance to, descriptive claims
about religion.
Basic aims and methods » Philosophy of religion » Theories of
Schleiermacher and Hegel
Immanuel Kant’s powerful critique of traditional natural theology
appeared to rob religion of its basis in reason and to make it an
adjunct to morality. But Kant’s system depended on drawing certain
distinctions, such as that between pure and practical reason, which were
open to challenge. One reaction that attempted to place religion in a
more realistic position (i.e., as neither primarily to do with pure nor
with practical reason) was that of the German theologian and philosopher
Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834) in his On Religion: Speeches to Its
Cultured Despisers. He attempted there to carve out a separate territory
for religious experience, as distinct from both science and morality.
For him the central attitude in religion is “the feeling of absolute
dependence.” In drawing attention to the affective and experiential side
of religion, usually neglected in preceding philosophical discussions,
Schleiermacher set in motion the modern concern to explore the
subjective or inner aspect of religion. Schleiermacher’s main goal,
however, was not the exploration of religion as such but rather the
construction of a new type of theology—the “theology of consciousness.”
In so doing he relegated doctrines to a secondary role, their function
being to express and articulate the deliverances of religious
consciousness. Thus, incidentally, it became important for New Testament
historians who were influenced by Schleiermacher to penetrate the
religious consciousness of Jesus—this becoming, in effect, the reputed
locus of his divinity.
G.W.F. Hegel had, as noted above, a profound effect upon the
development of historical and other studies. His own system, the system
of the Absolute, contained a view of the place of religion in human
life. According to this notion, religion arises as the relation between
man and the Absolute (the spiritual reality that undergirds and includes
the whole universe), in which the truth is expressed symbolically, and
so conveyed personally and emotionally to the individual. As the same
truth is known at a higher—that is, more abstract—level in philosophy,
religion is, for all its importance, ultimately inferior to philosophy.
The relationship between abstract and concrete truth was, incidentally,
taken up in the 19th-century Hindu renascence as a parallel to the
doctrine of the Absolute—the Advaita (nondualism), the dominant
expression of Hindu metaphysics—held by the 8th-century Hindu
philosopher Śaṅkara. The Hegelian account of religion was worked out in
the context of the dialectical view of history, according to which
opposites united in a synthesis, which in turn produced its opposite,
and so on. Hegel was influential in the interpretation of Christian
history: Jesus as thesis, Paul as antithesis, and early Catholicism as
the synthesis, the latter becoming a new thesis that would elicit a new
antithesis, Protestantism.
Hegel attracted some radical criticism, however. One such was that of
the aforementioned German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–72), whose
ideas have been sketched above. Another was that of the Danish
philosopher and theologian Søren Kierkegaard (1813–55), sometimes
regarded as the father of modern Existentialism, who reacted against the
metaphysical and “rational” approach to Christianity in Hegel’s thought.
Kierkegaard’s penetrating psychological insights were put to the service
of philosophy and theology and threw new light on the nature of
religious experience and its relation to features of man’s inner life,
such as dread and despair. Kierkegaard’s main concern, however, was
prophetic rather than descriptive. From a very different standpoint
(i.e., that of liberal Protestantism), the German theologian Albrecht
Ritschl (1822–89) made an apologetic defense of Christianity in his
attempt to analyze theological utterances as essentially affirming value
judgments.
Schleiermacher’s delineation of religious experience was complemented
by attempts among the Romantics and by the German philosopher Ernst
Cassirer (1874–1945) to exhibit the nature of symbolic thinking and in
particular the special character of religious symbolism. This was some
distance from the rationalism of Kant, though Cassirer was nevertheless
influenced by the Neo-Kantian tradition.
Basic aims and methods » Philosophy of religion » Empiricism and
Pragmatism
The Hegelian school, very influential in the 19th century, entered a
period of rapid decline in the early part of the 20th. The common sense
and scientifically oriented philosophy of the English scholars G.E.
Moore (1873–1958) and Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) introduced a period
of Empiricism in Britain, while William James’s Pragmatism had a similar
effect in America. Theologically, there was an antimetaphysical
revolution during and after World War I. On the continent of Europe, the
increasing influence of Existentialism was hostile to the old type of
metaphysics. British Empiricism was expressed very strongly in Logical
Positivism (maintaining the exclusive value of scientific knowledge and
the denial of traditional metaphysical doctrines) and its linguistic
aftermath. This stimulated the analysis of religious language, and the
movement was complicated by the transformation in the thought of the
Austrian-English philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951), who in his
later thought was very far removed from his early, rather formalistic
treatment of language.
Theoretically, the Analytic attempt to exhibit the nature of
religious language could have been a chiefly descriptive task, but, in
fact, most analyses have occurred in the context of questions of
truth—thus some scholars have been concerned with exhibiting how it is
possible to hold religious beliefs in an Empiricist framework, and
others with showing the meaninglessness or incoherence of belief. A
landmark was the publication, in 1955, of New Essays in Philosophical
Theology, edited by the English philosophers A.G.N. Flew and A.
MacIntyre. Though Wittgenstein stressed the idea of “forms of life,”
according to which the meaning of religious beliefs would have to be
given a practical and living contextualization, little has been done to
pursue the idea empirically. The discovery by the English philosopher
J.L. Austin (1911–60) and others of performative uses of language has
stimulated some enquiry in this direction. On the whole, however, the
Analytic philosophy of religion has been pursued rather independently of
the descriptive study and history of religion.
Basic aims and methods » Philosophy of religion » Modern Existentialist
and Phenomenological studies
Since linguistic philosophy tends to be considered by its proponents to
be a method or a group of methods, internal diversity within the area of
concern is not surprising. Similarly, Existentialism, which is less of
an “-ism” than an attitude, expresses itself in a variety of ways. The
most influential modern Existentialists have been the German philosopher
Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) and the French philosopher, dramatist, and
novelist Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80); the former was especially important
in the development of modern continental theology, particularly for the
use made of some of his ideas by Rudolf Bultmann.
According to Heidegger, man’s existence is characterized as “care.”
This care is shown first in possibility: man makes things instrumental
to his concerns and so projects forward. Secondly, there is his
facticity, for he exists as a finite entity with particular limitations
(his “thrownness”). Thirdly, man seeks to avoid the anxiety of his
limitations and thus seeks inauthentic existence. Authenticity, on the
other hand, involves a kind of stoicism (positive attitude toward life
and suffering) in which death is taken up as a possibility and man faces
the “nothing.” The structure of man’s world as analyzed by Heidegger is
revealed, in a sense, affectively—i.e., through care, anxiety, and other
existential attitudes and feelings.
Sartre’s thought has had less direct impact on the study of religion,
partly because his account of human existence represents an explicit
alternative to traditional religious belief. Sartre’s analysis begins,
however, from the human desire to be God: but God is, on Sartre’s
analysis, a self-contradictory notion, for nothing can contain the
ground of its own being. In searching for an essence man fails to see
the nature of his freedom, which is to go beyond definitions, whether
laid down by God or by other human beings.
The French philosopher Gabriel Marcel (1889–1973) is not
individualistic like Sartre (or at least the early Sartre, whose
thinking was modified by Marxism); instead, he stresses the communal
character of human existence—the highest virtue being fidelity. Marcel
also emphasizes the mysterious (as distinguished from the empirically
problematic) character of love, evil, hope, freedom, and, above all,
being. His work provides a rich analysis and interpretation of the
religious dimensions of human experience and thus is a philosophical
basis for the study of religious experience.
The Existentialist approach attempts to describe and evoke the way
human beings are and thus can lay claim to be phenomenological. It is
clear, however, from the divergencies among Existentialists, that they
contain speculative and idiosyncratic elements, and one question raised
about the general applicability of their characterizations is how far
they are bounded by the product of a particular mood in Western culture.
The German philosopher Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) has had, as the
main exponent of Phenomenology, a wide effect on the study of religion.
His program of describing experience and “bracketing” the objects of
experience, in the pursuit of essences of types of experience, was in
part taken up in the phenomenology of religion. Husserl distinguished
Phenomenology from psychology, however, because, in his view, the latter
concerns facts in a spatio-temporal setting, whereas Phenomenology
uncovers timeless essences. This aspect of Husserl’s thinking has not
always or wholly been accepted by phenomenologists of religion, who have
been much more oriented toward facts, though Husserl’s emphasis on
essences often has tended to make religious phenomenology lean toward a
static typology.
Basic aims and methods » Philosophy of religion » Relationship between
Western and non-Western philosophy in regard to religion
Western philosophy has thus had a significant influence on the study of
religion. It has also come into contact with non-Western traditions and
has thus stimulated concern with the problem of the nature of religious
truth in a world perspective. The most influential product of this
interplay has most likely been the neo-Advaitin philosophy (a new
version of Advaita, or nonduality) espoused by a number of modern
Indians, such as Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902), who made a sensational
appearance at the Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893, and the
Indian philosopher Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (1888–1975). Both of these
thinkers attempted to reveal the underlying unity in the great
religions—a unity described from a point of view drawing on the thought
of Śaṅkara.
The U.S. philosopher William Ernest Hocking (1873–1966) pursued
similar interests in the construction of a world faith that he
considered might come about through the mutual modification of, and
interchange between, the great religious traditions. These concerns have
raised important questions about the criteria of truth between
religions, the tests of whether one religion is truer than others, and
the extent to which valid identifications of belief can be made between
one faith and another. The various elements of the philosophical
traditions of the last two centuries have thus had a bearing on
religious questions, and most scholars consider that though the
philosophy of religion tends to be normative rather than descriptive, it
is a necessary adjunct to descriptive studies. Philosophical insights
and expertise are of significant relevance to the numerous questions of
method that arise in the study of religion. (See also religion,
philosophy of.)
Basic aims and methods » Theological studies » Historical-critical
studies
The major feature in the development of Christian theology during the
19th and 20th centuries has been the impact of historical enquiry on the
biblical sources of belief (there has also been a similar effect on
Jewish and other theologies, but Christian theology has been the most
influential in the development of Western culture). A pioneer in the
attempt to understand the mythological elements in the New Testament was
the German theologian David F. Strauss (1808–74), whose controversial
Life of Jesus (published in German, 1835–36) was an attempt to sift out
the historical Jesus from the overlay of myth created by the poetic
imagination of the early church. Similarly, the German church historian
Adolf von Harnack (1851–1930), influenced by Albrecht Ritschl, intended
to penetrate the accretions of dogma attached to the historical Jesus.
Such attempts were later to come under radical criticism from, among
others, the Alsatian philosopher-theologian and Nobel laureate Albert
Schweitzer (1875–1965) for describing the alleged Jesus of history in
terms tailored to fit the presuppositions of liberal Protestantism. Thus
was raised an important methodological question on how to deal with such
material as the Gospels.
Important in trying to spell out principles for dealing with the
material was Ernst Troeltsch, who argued that history has to be written
in accordance with the following principles: first, the principle of
criticism—i.e., the sifting of the evidences and testing of conclusions
(thus historical certainty about much in the ancient witnesses to Jesus
is impossible); second, the principle of analogy—i.e., in the absence of
firsthand experience, scholars must treat reports of miraculous events
with skepticism since people do not encounter such events in their own
experiences (here Troeltsch adopts the position of David Hume); and
third, the principle of correlation—i.e., events in history are
continuous with one another in a causal nexus, which rules out
irruptions into the causal order by God: if he works in history he is
immanently in all of it. Troeltsch, it may be noted, had some effect on
the sociology of religion—e.g., in his distinction between church-type
and sect-type organizations in the history of Christianity, a
distinction that has formed the starting point of considerable
researches in recent times, as noted above. The implications of
Troeltsch’s historical treatment of religion seemed to be relativistic.
Christianity, at any rate, is viewed as a part of religious history as a
whole, a point that had not always been clearly recognized by
theologians. Troeltsch thereby raised some important questions about the
relationship between Christianity and other religions and showed how
Christian theology was beginning to take a more realistic view of
mankind’s religious experience and history, in distinction to the
earlier rather simplistic dichotomies between special (i.e.,
Judeo-Christian) and general (i.e., natural) revelation.
Discoveries about ancient Middle Eastern religions were also bound to
affect biblical studies, and a well-defined school developed in
Germany—the Religionsgeschichtliche Schule (History of Religions
school)—which was critical of the rather unhistorical treatment of Jesus
by Ritschl and others. This school emphasized the degree to which
biblical ideas were the product of the ancient cultural milieu.
Important in this line of development was Albert Schweitzer, in whose
Quest of the Historical Jesus the eschatological teachings (statements
about the “last times,” or end of the world as it is now understood) of
Jesus are emphasized, together with the dissimilarity of his thought
world from our own. Criticism of Harnack also came from a different
direction. The French theologian Alfred Loisy (1857–1940), from a Roman
Catholic point of view but taking into account the work of Protestant
biblical critics, found the essence of Christianity in the faith of the
developed church, which could not be found simply by trying to discover
the nature of the historical Jesus. The founder, in effect, of Modernism
within the Roman Catholic Church, Loisy was excommunicated; and this was
a main factor in discouraging some of the livelier Roman Catholic
studies of the New Testament until after the epochal ecumenical second
Vatican Council (1962–65).
Basic aims and methods » Theological studies » Neo-orthodoxy and
demythologization
Liberal Protestantism of the Harnack type was severely criticized by
Karl Barth, the founder of Neo-orthodoxy; liberalism’s optimism, in any
event, came under a cloud through the outbreak of World War I. Barth’s
Epistle to the Romans and his later Church Dogmatics became highly
influential. His theology depended in part on a distinction between the
Word (i.e., God’s self-revelation as concretely manifested in Christ and
in preaching) and religion. The latter, according to Barth, is the
product of human culture and aspirations and is not to be identified
with saving revelation (for salvation cannot come from mankind, only
from God). This rather uncompromising view made use of the projectionist
theory of religion expressed by Feuerbach and others. Barth’s conclusion
was challenged somewhat by another Swiss theologian, Emil Brunner
(1889–1966), who allowed a modicum of insight for fallen man into God’s
nature. The concession was, however, a slight one. The Dutch theologian
Hendrik Kraemer (1888–1965) applied the doctrine of the theology of the
Word to non-Christian religions in The Christian Message in a
Non-Christian World, which had a wide impact on the overseas mission
field. Since man’s religions are cultural products and since each system
of belief is organic and particular, there are, according to Kraemer, no
points of contact between them and the Gospel (even Christianity as an
empirical religion must be distinguished from it: its only advantage is
to have been continuously under the judgment and influence of the
Gospel). Kraemer’s position has come under some criticism from students
of comparative religion; one of the theological problems it poses is
that it seems to shut off the possibilities of dialogue between
religions.
After Barth, the most influential theologian in the 20th century has
been Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976). Though he was mainly concerned with
the presentation of the faith, his project of “demythologization” has
had a wide significance for the historian of religions, for it involves
a theory of myth. Bultmann came to the New Testament material partly as
a historian and partly as a theologian influenced by the Existentialism
of Heidegger. He centred his interest on the difference between the
style of thinking in the early church, as expressed in the New Testament
writings, and modern thought. Modern man, he held, cannot think in the
mythological terms employed in the New Testament presentation of the
Gospel. Therefore, it is necessary to demythologize the New Testament
message. For Bultmann, the mythological elements are belief in the
pre-existence of Christ, the three-layer universe (heaven, earth, and
hell), miracles, ascension into heaven, demonology, and various other
elements of the Judeo-Christian-Hellenistic world view. The inner
meaning of the myths, he claimed, must be explicated in existential
terms and purged of the objectifications that they contain. Thus, his
theory contains an empirical claim, namely about the original function
of myths (expressing existential attitudes through objectified
representations). Bultmann’s theory, however, has not yet been brought
together with anthropological and other theories of myth.
A follower of Bultmann, Fritz Buri, considers Bultmann’s stance to be
insufficiently radical, for Bultmann differentiated between the kerygma
(the essential proclamation of the early church) and the myths, desiring
to retain the former, but not the latter. Buri has attempted to overcome
this distinction. Authentic existence is not, according to Buri,
distinctively Christian, and he has been led to a position not
altogether different in principle from that of Troeltsch. Buri’s views
have also led him into considering in some depth the significance of
other religions.
Basic aims and methods » Theological studies » The relationship of
Western Christianity to other religions
Since World War II, Western Christianity has found it difficult, from a
cultural point of view, to ignore the challenge of other religions; and
the mood has changed somewhat from the more rigorous climate in which
the theology of the Word (i.e., Barth’s position) was dominant. The
“theology of religions” (analogous to the “history of religions”) has
moved in the direction of dialogue, which sometimes simply refers to
mutual acquaintance in charity so that people of differing faiths can
come to understand more deeply the meaning of each other’s religions.
More significantly, it means a kind of mutual theologizing. Among the
more prominent writers who have been involved one way or another in the
process of dialogue have been the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber
(1878–1965), the English Islāmic scholar Kenneth Cragg, and the Canadian
Islāmic scholar Wilfred Cantwell Smith. In effect, modern dialogue
continues an earlier tradition that emphasized some continuities between
religions, notably the work of the British theologian John Oman
(1860–1939), who was influenced both by Schleiermacher and Otto, though
critical of the latter. Oman contrasted prophetic and mystical religion
and considered that the former had the highest conception of the
supernatural. There are analogies between his position and that of the
important Swedish theologian, historian of religion, and archbishop
Nathan Söderblom (1866–1931).
A rather different theory of myth and symbolism from that of Bultmann
was expressed by Paul Tillich, who viewed religion as having to do with
what concerns man ultimately. He taught that symbolic and mythological
language, used by all religions, points beyond itself to the being in
which the symbols participate. Tillich used the term being in an
existential sense (one related directly to human experience and
commitment) rather than a strictly metaphysical sense. Also, he claimed
that it is not possible to dispense with the symbolic, which is
essential to the task of speaking about ultimate reality, but the myths
are to be “broken”—that is, they are to be seen as not being literally
true.
Christian theology, in the 19th and 20th centuries, has been more
concerned with intellectual and social challenges, however, than with
the analysis of religion, which has been secondary to that concern.
Basic aims and methods » History and phenomenology of religion
The history of religions and the phenomenology of religion are generally
understood by scholars to be nonnormative—that is, they attempt to
delineate facts, whether historical or structural, without judging them
from a Christian or other standpoint. At any rate, their tasks are
considered to be different from that of articulating and systematizing a
faith. The same, in principle, is true for the comparative study of
religion, though this sometimes is thought to cover the theology of
other religions, such as the Christian appraisal of Hindu history.
Needless to say, the fact that a discipline aims to be nonnormative does
not mean that it will succeed in being so. Also, the history and
phenomenology of religion tend to raise essentially philosophical
questions of explanation, where the issues are often debatable.
Basic aims and methods » History and phenomenology of religion » Modern
origin and development of the history and phenomenology of religion
The history of religions on a cross-cultural basis, though it has quite
an ancient pedigree, came into its own in a modern sense from about the
time of Max Müller. During the latter part of the 19th century an
attempt was made to place comparative methodology on a systematic basis
(often called the Science of Religion), and in this connection the work
of the Dutch theologians P.D. Chantepie de la Saussaye (1848–1920) and
C.P. Tiele (1830–1902) was important. During this period, various
lectureships and chairs in the subject were instituted. In The
Netherlands, following the reform of the theological faculties in 1876,
four chairs in the history of religions were founded. In 1879 a chair
was founded at the Collège de France (followed by others elsewhere in
France), while a number were created in Switzerland. The subject also
spread to Great Britain (where chairs at Manchester and London were
instituted), the United States (at Harvard and Chicago), and elsewhere
in the Western world. In Germany, on the other hand, there was strong
resistance, notably from Adolf von Harnack, who thought that theology
should avoid what he regarded as dilettantism and that the subject was
sufficiently covered in the study of biblical religion.
The first congress of Religionswissenschaft (Science of Religion)
took place in Stockholm in 1897, and a similar one in the history of
religions at Paris in 1900. Later, the International Association for the
History of Religions, dedicated to a mainly nonnormative and
nontheological approach, was formed. Also important was the compilation
of encyclopaedias, notably Hastings’ Encyclopaedia of Religion and
Ethics, with many distinguished contributions. Thus, there were
development and progress in the new subject in the latter part of the
19th and early part of the 20th century. In the 1960s came the next
major burst of expansion.
A great amount of the work of scholars in the field has been devoted
to exploring particular histories—piecing together, for instance, the
history of Gnosticism (a Hellenistic-Christian heretical sect that
emphasized dualism) or of early Buddhism. In principle, Christianity is
considered from the same point of view, but much significant work has
also been comparative and structural. This can range from the attempt to
establish rather particular comparisons, such as Otto’s comparison (in
his Mysticism East and West) of the medieval German mystic Meister
Eckehart and the medieval Hindu philosopher Śaṅkara, to a systematic
typology, as in Religion in Essence and Manifestation by the Dutch
historian of religion Gerardus van der Leeuw.
There have been many significant scholars in the history and
phenomenology of religion since Max Müller. Rudolf Otto (1869–1937) made
a profound impression on the scholarly world with the publication of The
Idea of the Holy (in its German edition of 1917), which showed the
influence of Schleiermacher, Marett, Edmund Husserl, and the
Neo-Kantianism of Jakob Fries (1773–1843). More important than the
philosophical side of his enterprise, however, was the excellent
delineation of a central experience and sentiment and the elucidation of
the concept of the Holy. The central experience Otto refers to is the
numinous (Latin numen, “spirit”) in which the Other (i.e., the
transcendent) appears as a mysterium tremendum et fascinans—that is, a
mystery before which man both trembles and is fascinated, is both
repelled and attracted. Thus, God can appear both as wrathful or awe
inspiring, on the one hand, and as gracious and lovable, on the other.
The sense of the numinous, according to Otto, is sui generis, though it
may have psychological analogies, and it gives an access to reality,
which is categorized as holy. Otto stresses what he calls the
nonrational character of the numinous, but he does not deny that
rational attributes may be applied to God (or the gods or other numinous
powers), such as goodness and personality. The impact of Otto’s work,
however, does not depend on the now rather curious Neo-Kantian scheme
into which he presses his data. Not all scholars would agree that the
numinous is universal as a central element in religion, as Otto seems to
have supposed: early Jainism and Theravāda Buddhism, for example, have
other central values. Otto’s treatment of mysticism, which is central to
Buddhism, wavers somewhat, and the notions of the “wholly Other” and of
the tremendum do not easily apply to the experience of Nirvāṇa (the
state of bliss) or to other deliverances of the contemplative mystical
consciousness.
Friedrich Heiler (1892–1967), like Otto a professor at Marburg
(Germany), was a strong proponent of the phenomenological and
comparative method, as in his major work on prayer. Heiler, however,
went beyond the scientific study of religion in attempting to promote
interreligious fellowship, partly through the Religiöser Menschheitsbund
(Union of Religious Persons), which he helped to found. Heiler believed
in the essential unity of religions—a recurring theme in various guises
in the period, though open to question because of the widely apparent
divergences between prophetic and other religions, such as Theravāda
Buddhism and Jainism, which do not believe in a supreme personal being.
The phenomenologist of religion who probably has had the greatest
influence after Otto, partly because he is fairly explicit about method,
is Gerardus van der Leeuw (1890–1950), who was somewhat influenced by
the French anthropologist Lucien Lévy-Bruhl (1857–1939) and his notion
of prelogical mentality, which he applied to primitive cultures to
distinguish them from civilized cultures. Van der Leeuw emphasized power
as being the basic religious conception. His major work, Religion in
Essence and Manifestation, is an ambitious and wide-ranging typology of
religious phenomena, including the kinds of sacrifice, types of holy
men, categories of religious experience, and other types of religious
phenomena. The work has been criticized, however, as being unhistorical.
Partly because of his philosophical presuppositions, borrowed chiefly
from Husserl, van der Leeuw held the disputable doctrine that
Phenomenology knows nothing of the historical development of religion:
it picks out timeless essences of religious phenomena. Apparently it is
not necessary, however, to hold this doctrine, since one could as well
classify types of religious change (i.e., temporal sequences), as indeed
Max Weber attempted to do. Classificatory and historical techniques and
conclusions are not incompatible, however. Thus, the work of Nathan
Söderblom, who, as well as being a historian of religions, was prominent
in the ecumenical movement, combined the two aspects in his Living God.
Basic aims and methods » History and phenomenology of religion » The
“Chicago school”
The phenomenological method was brought to the United States primarily
by the German-American historian of religions Joachim Wach (1898–1955),
who established Religionswissenschaft (Science of Religion) in Chicago
and was thus the founder of the modern “Chicago school” (though his
successor, Mircea Eliade, has a rather different slant). Wach was
concerned with emphasizing three aspects of religion—the theoretical (or
mental; i.e., religious ideas and images), the practical (or
behavioral), and the institutional (or social); and because of his
concern for the study of religious experience, he interested himself in
the sociology of religion, attempting to indicate how religious values
tended to shape the institutions that expressed them. Wach, however, was
not committed to a religious neutralism in his use of the idea of a
“science of religion.” For him, Religionswissenschaft deepens the sense
of the numinous and strengthens, rather than paralyzes, religious
impulses.
Mircea Eliade (1907– ), a Romanian scholar who emigrated to the
United States after World War II, has had a wide influence, partly
because of his substantive studies on yoga (a Hindu meditation
technique) and on shamanism (both these major works are now regarded as
classical studies of their subjects) and partly because of his later
writings, which attempt to synthesize data from a wide variety of
cultures. The synthesis incorporates a theory of myth and history.
Eliade was also a founder of the journal History of Religions, which
expresses the “Chicago school” viewpoint. Eliade has been somewhat
influenced by Jung, both in his psychological interpretations of certain
religious experiences (such as those attained in the practice of yoga)
and more importantly in his attempt to give an interpretation in depth
to the mythic material over which he ranges so widely. He also affirms
strongly the importance of the history of religions in the intellectual
world and is thus concerned to emphasize its unique and positive role in
providing a “creative hermeneutics” (critical interpretive method) of
man’s religious and existential condition. Two important elements in the
theory of Eliade are, first, that the distinction between the sacred and
the profane is fundamental to religious thinking and is to be
interpreted existentially (the symbols of religion are, typically,
profane in literal interpretation but are of cosmic significance when
viewed as signs of the sacred); and, second, that archaic religion is to
be contrasted with the linear, historical view of the world. The latter
essentially comes from biblical religion; the former viewpoint tends to
treat time cyclically and mythically—referring to foundational events,
such as the creation, the beginning of the human race, and the Fall of
man, on to illud tempus (the sacred primordial time), which is
re-enacted in the repetitions of the ritual and in the retelling of the
myth. Though Christianity has contained archaic elements, in essence it
is linear and historical. Thus, faith in Christianity involves a kind of
fall from archaic timelessness, and secularization—in which the overt
symbolism of religion is driven underground into the unconscious—is a
second fall. Eliade is not very explicit about his meaning beyond this
point. Not only is he concerned with descriptive phenomenology, in which
context his analysis of the religious functions of time and space is
most illuminating, but also with a kind of metaphysical speculation (as
exemplified in his idea of the “fall”).
Basic aims and methods » History and phenomenology of religion » Other
studies and emphases
Though not always giving a detailed account of the correlation between
myth and ritual, Eliade is indebted to the so-called myth and ritual
school, which has influenced thinking in the history of religions and
which was important in the 1930s, especially in the interpretation of
Middle Eastern mythology. Thus, the Enuma elish, the Babylonian creation
epic, was discovered to be no mere set of stories but rather a mythic
drama re-enacted every year at the spring festival, at which time the
foundation of the world is ritually renewed. More generally, it was seen
that for a wide range of sacred stories it was important to discover the
ritual context. The most influential statement of the school’s position
is to be found in Myth and Ritual (1933), edited by the English biblical
scholar and Orientalist Samuel Hooke.
Meanwhile, the categorization of types of religion (e.g., as
polytheism, henotheism, or other) continued to stimulate attempts at a
deeper understanding of the emergence of monotheism. To some extent
scholars remained under the influence of the older evolutionism. An
important work in this connection was Dio: Formazione e sviluppo del
monoteismo nella storia delle religioni (“God: Formation and Development
of Monotheism in the History of Religions”), by the Italian historian of
religion Raffaele Pettazzoni (1883–1959), who emphasized the importance
of the divinized sky in the development of monotheism. He was critical
of the Urmonotheismus of Wilhelm Schmidt, considering that the latter’s
theory of an original monotheism went very far beyond the evidence. At
best, the facts could only support the conclusion that primitive peoples
believed in a supreme celestial being. Pettazzoni, in his concern for
problems of method, was critical of the sharp division between
phenomenology and history. He considered that the former cannot exist
without the historical sciences—e.g., history, philology, and
archaeology—but that it supplies scholars in the latter fields a sense
of the religious significance of what they discover. This point of view
has also been more vigorously espoused by the Swedish scholar Geo
Widengren (1907– ), who has specialized mainly in Iranian religions. The
need to integrate historical and structural studies has caused some
debate in recent years; and there has also been some contrast made
between historical approaches and contemporary sociological and
(essentially theological) dialogical approaches to religion. To some
extent, such debates represent different ideals of scholarship; but it
is difficult to note where the essential incompatibilities lie. For many
scholars, the multidisciplinary way of studying religion is difficult to
comprehend.
Meanwhile, the longstanding interest in the Indo-European group of
religions was given a new impetus in the work of the French comparative
philologist and mythologist Georges Dumézil (1898– ), who broke away
from an etymological (analysis of word derivations) approach and sought
instead the thematic traits of the gods in the mythical material. This
approach, pioneered by others before Dumézil, also was skeptical of the
easy identification of gods with natural forces and emphasized the
sociological functions of the divinities—without, however, holding to a
reductionist theory. Dumézil’s theory was partly stimulated by
discoveries in the Middle East, notably that of Boğazköy (Turkey), which
revealed a similarity between some of the chief gods of the
Indo-European Mitannians and those of the Aryans of the Indian Vedic
tradition. His theory correlated the functions of the gods with the
tripartite division of Indo-European societies—namely the priestly
regal, the nobility, and the producers (agriculturalists, craftsmen).
Though his work has been controversial (there are, for instance, some
difficulties about its application to ancient Greece, despite the fact
that the analysis seems to apply to the threefold division of society
into philosophers, warriors, and producers in Plato’s Republic), there
is no doubt that the search for correlated functions of the kind Dumézil
postulated has been significant in the area of Indo-European mythology.
Dumézil’s work is one example of a thematic, comparative study. The
interest in such studies has grown since World War II. Examples can be
found in the writings of such thinkers as the English scholar S.G.F.
Brandon (1907–71) in his treatment of ideas such as creation and time in
different religions, but with special reference to the ancient Middle
East, and the English Indo-Iranian scholar R.C. Zaehner (1913–74),
notably in his work on mysticism, as in his Mysticism Sacred and
Profane. Zaehner’s was a definitely Christian approach rather than a
scientific-descriptive one; and his concern was to distinguish between
theistic and other forms of mysticism, such as monistic mysticism as
found, according to him, in Yoga, Advaita, and even Theravāda Buddhism.
Apart from the comparative, phenomenological studies, there has also
been a strong growth of historical work in regard to particular
religions. This has been most obvious in Indian religions—in Hinduism
and Buddhism especially. In part, this is the result of a general growth
in non-Christian religions in the post-World War II era and of the need
to come to terms with Asian and African cultures after the demise of
European hegemony.
Problems and directions » Interdisciplinary perspective
The foregoing, a necessarily rather selective account of some of the
principal developments and scholars in the various disciplines related
to the descriptive, analytical study of religion, emphasizes the
artificiality of some of the divisions between traditional disciplines.
Thus, Dumézil’s work could as easily fall under sociology or
anthropology as under the history of religions; and there are obvious
connections between philosophy and sociology in, for example, Marxist
interpretations of religion. Again, the description and typology of
religious experience belong as much to psychology as to the
phenomenology of religion, and the analysis of the nature of symbolism
requires a variety of disciplinary approaches. To some extent, the study
of religion has suffered from the barriers between disciplines, and this
fact is increasingly recognized in the formulations, notably in the
United States, of the idea of religion as a subject that should be
institutionalized in a university department or program in which
historians, phenomenologists, and members of other disciplines work
together. There are some, however, who consider that there are dangers
in such an arrangement; thus Eliade prefers to work rather tightly
within the framework of the history of religions, concerned lest the
social sciences overwhelm and distract the interpreter of religious
meanings. Similarly, the theological tradition in the West remains
powerfully operative (quite legitimately) in regard to the articulation
of the Christian faith and sometimes resists any attempt to treat
Christianity itself in the manner dictated by the history and
phenomenology of religion. Thus, the history of religions and the
comparative study of religion still tend to mean in practice “the study
of religions other than Judaism and Christianity.” Educational and
social pressures have arisen, however, within a secularistic,
increasingly pluralistic society and (in effect) a shrunken world,
increasing the tendency toward apluralism in the study of religion that
expands the viewpoints of traditional faculties and departments of
theology, both in universities and theological seminaries.
Problems and directions » Cross-cultural perspective
A further problem about the multidisciplinary study of religion is that
little has been done to explore the problem of the people to whom
religions are interpreted—the clientele for the subject. Hitherto, the
main assumption has been that the study is for Westerners, though a
number of distinguished Asian and African scholars are working in the
field. Until recently, owing to the unequal cultural and political
relationship between Western and non-Western religions, however, some of
the most vital contributions have been primarily attempts to articulate
(for the new apologetic situation) the old traditions. This has been a
main concern of scholars of Asian religions such as Sarvepalli
Radhakrishnan, T.R.V. Murti, and K.N. Jayatilleke. The prospect is,
however, that an intellectual community will be the clientele of the
subject. To this extent the study of religions will most likely involve,
as it does already to some extent, a complex dialogue between religions.
Another problem is the need to elucidate the basis of a dynamic
typology of religion in which phenomenology and history are properly
brought together. The tendency toward a rift between the historians and
phenomenologists is unnecessary and causes harm to the pursuit of the
subject.
Meanwhile, some emergent tendencies within the various disciplines
can be perceived. There is an increased concern in anthropological
theory for the content of religious symbolism, such as in the work of
the English anthropologist Mary Douglas; and the sociology of religion
is, in a sense, returning to the method of Max Weber in stressing the
comparison of cultures. The important development of Oriental and
African studies since World War II has made this task easier—American
sociologists have, for example, examined in some detail Japanese culture
and religion. The interest in symbolism and mythology coincides with
developments in the philosophy of religion, which, under the influence
of Wittgenstein (in his later, more open phase), is concerned with
explicating different functions of language. One area of the study of
religion that is seriously underdeveloped at the present time—other than
in respect to the psychoanalytic approaches—is the psychology of
religion, although current interest in mysticism and other forms of
religious experience has stimulated the collection and interpretation of
data. One of the difficult problems to be solved is the extent to which
cultural conditioning exerts an influence on the actual content of such
experience.
In many ways the present position promises well for an expanding
multidisciplinary approach to problems in the study of religion.
Historians of religion are recognizing some of the contributions to be
made by modern sociology, and sociologists—partly because of the
development of the sociology of knowledge—have become more aware of the
need for accounting for the particular systems of meaning in religion.
An area that may very well exhibit the new synthesis is the study of new
religious movements.
After a period of relative unconcern, Christian theology is
increasingly aware of the challenge of other religious beliefs, so that
there are greater impulses toward blending Christian and other
studies—often kept rather artificially apart, though biblical studies,
especially Old Testament studies, have usually been quite closely
related to the history of the relevant religions of the ancient Middle
East.
Meanwhile, in a number of Western countries (chiefly in Europe, but
also to some extent in the United States), the study of religion on a
pluralistic and multidisciplinary basis is being increasingly viewed as
an important element in the education of secondary school students.
This, together with the popularity of the subject in universities, may
ensure that the study of religion will increase in significance.
Ninian Smart
Ed.
