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Religion
종교 탐방
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The Study and Classification of Religion
종교의 연구와 분류
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1 Introduction
2 The descriptive study of essence and content
3 The classification of forms and phenomena
4 Bibliography |
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The history of mankind has shown the
pervasive influences of religion,
and thus the study of religion, involving the attempt to understand its
significance, its origins, and its myriad forms, has become increasingly
important in modern times. Broadly speaking, the study of religion comprehends
two aspects: assembling information and interpreting systematically the material
gathered in order to elicit its meaning. The first aspect involves the
psychological and historical study of religious life and must be supplemented by
such auxiliary disciplines as archaeology, ethnology, philology, literary
history, and other similar disciplines. The facts of religious history and
insight into the development of the historical religious communities are the
foundation of all else in the study of religion. Beyond the historical basis
lies the task of seeing the entirety of human religious experience from a
unified or systematic point of view. The student of religions attempts not only
to know the variety of beliefs and practices of homo religiosus ("religious man"), but also to understand
the structure, nature, and dynamics of religious experience. The student of
religion attempts to discover principles that operate throughout religious
life--on the analogy of a sociologist seeking the laws of human social
behaviour--to find out whether there are also laws that operate in the religious
sphere. Only with the attempt to discern the system and structure binding
together the differentiated historical richness of religion does a true science
of religion, or Religionswissenschaft, begin. |
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The 19th century saw the rise of the
study of religion in the modern sense, in which the techniques of historical
enquiry, the philological sciences, literary criticism, psychology,
anthropology, sociology, and other disciplines were brought to bear on the task
of estimating the history, origins, and functions of religion. Rarely, however,
has there been unanimity among scholars about the nature of the subject, partly
because assumptions about the revealed nature of the Christian (or other)
religion or assumptions about the falsity of religion become entangled with
questions concerning the historical and other facts of religion. Thus, the
subject has, throughout its history, contained elements of controversy. (see
also revelation) |
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An acceptable definition of religion
itself is difficult to attain. Attempts have been made to find an essential
ingredient in all religions (e.g., the
numinous, or spiritual, experience; the contrast between the sacred and the
profane; belief in gods or in God), so that an "essence" of religion
can be described. But objections have been brought against such attempts, either
because the rich variety of men's religions makes it possible to find
counterexamples or because the element cited as essential is in some religions
peripheral. The gods play a very 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 they may not by universal. The
occurrence of the rituals of
worship is typical, but there are cases, however, in which such rituals are not
central. Thus, one of the tasks of a student of religion is to gather together
an inventory of types of religious phenomena. |
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The fact that there is dispute over the
possibility of finding an essence of religion means that there is likewise a
problem about speaking of the study of religion or of religions, for it is
misleading to think of religion as something that "runs through"
religions. This brings to light one of the major questions of method in the
study of the subject. In practice, a religion is a particular system, or a set
of systems, in which doctrines, myths, rituals, sentiments, institutions, and
other similar elements are interconnected. Thus, in order to understand a given
belief that occurs in such a system, it is necessary to look at its particular
context--that is, other beliefs held in the system, rituals, and other aspects.
Belief in the lordship of Christ in the early Christian Church, for example, has
to be seen in the context of a belief in the Creator and of the sacramental life
of the community. This systematic character of a religion has been referred to
by the 20th-century Dutch theologian Hendrik Kraemer as
"totalitarian"; but a better term would be "organic." Thus,
there arises the problem of whether or not one belief or practice embedded in an
organic system can properly be compared to a similar item in another organic
system. To put the matter in another way, every religion has its unique
properties, and attempts to make interreligious comparisons may hide these
unique aspects. Most students of religion agree, however, that valid comparisons
are possible, though they are difficult to make. Indeed, one can see the very
uniqueness of a religion through comparison, which includes a contrast. The
importance of setting religions side by side is why the study of religions is
sometimes referred to as the "comparative study of religion"--though a
number of scholars prefer not to use this phrase, partly because some
comparative work in the past has incorporated value judgments about other
religions. (see also Christianity) |
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But even if an inventory of types of
belief and practices can be gathered--so as to provide a typical profile of what
counts as religion--the absence of a tight definition means that there will
always be a number of cases about which it is difficult to decide. Thus, some
ideologies, such as Soviet Marxism, Maoism, and Fascism, may have analogies to
religion. Certain attempts at an essentialist definition of religion, such as
that of the German-American theologian Paul
Tillich (1886-1965), who defined religion in terms of man's ultimate
concern, would leave the way open to count these ideologies as proper objects of
the study of religion. Tillich, incidentally, calls them
"quasi-religions." Though there is no consensus on this point among
scholars, it is not unreasonable to hold that the frontier between traditional
religions and modern ideologies represents one part of the field to be studied. |
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Discussion about religion has been
complicated further by the attempt of some Christian theologians, notably Karl
Barth (1886-1968), to draw a distinction between the Gospel
(the proclamation peculiar to Christianity) and religion. 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 is found in the work of Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, and others.
The distinction attempts to draw a line between the transcendent, as it reveals
itself to men, and religion, as a human product involved in the response to
revelation. The difficulty of the distinction consists chiefly in a denial that
God (e.g., Yahweh or Christ) as the object of man's response is a
"religious" being (i.e., God
is transcendent, not "religious" in the sense of being a part of the
human product), and thus the question about revelation as a religious fact needs
to be answered. This account of religion, however, incorporates a theory about
it, which is characteristic of a number of definitions of religion and creates a
difficulty in that the field--namely, the study of religion--is being defined in
terms of a theory within it. |
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There are, however, doubts about how far
there can be neutrality and objectivity in the study of religion. Is it possible
indeed 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 means. 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 that
there is no obvious "objective" test in 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 not only concerned with
individual responses but also with communal ones. In any case, very often he is
confronted only with texts describing beliefs and stories, so that he needs to
infer the inner sentiments that these both evoke and express. The adherent of a faith
is no doubt authoritative as to his own experience, but he is not necessarily so
in regard to the communal significance of the rites and institutions in which he
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.
Consequently, the study of religion has strong similarities to, and indeed
overlaps with, anthropology. General agreement upon scholarly methods, however,
does not exist, partly because different scholars have come to the study of
religion from different disciplines and points of view--such as history,
theology, philosophy of religion, and sociology. (see also
religious experience) |
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The other sense of the subjectivity of
religion is properly a matter for philosophy of religion and theology
(Christian and otherwise). The study of religion can roughly be divided between
descriptive and historical inquiries, on the one hand, and normative inquiries,
on the other. The latter primarily concern the truth of religious claims, the
acceptability of religious values, and other such normative aspects; the former,
only indirectly involved with the normative elements of religion, are primarily
concerned with its history, structure, and similar descriptive elements. 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 one speaks nowadays of the study of
religion is the descriptive sense. |
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The attempt to be descriptive about
religious beliefs and practices, without judging them to be valuable or
otherwise, is often considered to involve epoche--that
is, the suspension of belief and the "bracketing" of the phenomena
under investigation. The idea of epoche 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. |
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In this context 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 these beliefs and
attitudes. Thus, the bracketing means forgetting about one's own beliefs that
might endorse or conflict with what is being investigated. Second, phenomenology
of religion refers to the attempt to devise a typology of religious
phenomena--to classify religious activities, beliefs, and institutions. |
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To some extent the emphasis on neutral
description arises in modern times as a reaction against "committed"
accounts of religion, which were for long the norm and still exist where
religion is treated from a theological point of view. The Christian theologian,
for example, may see a particular historical process as providential or as
providing significance for Christian living. This is a legitimate perspective
from the standpoint of faith. But the historical process itself has to be
investigated in the first instance "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--i.e., to accept 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. |
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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 implied by bracketing. Scholars
generally agree, however, that the pursuit of objectivity is desirable, provided
this does not involve sacrificing a sense of the inner aspect of religion. Thus,
the stress on the distinction between the descriptive and normative approaches
is becoming more frequent among scholars of religion. |
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The study of religion may thus be
characterized as concerned with man's religious behaviour in relation to the
transcendent, to God or the gods, and whatever else is regarded as sacred or
holy, and as a study that attempts to be faithful both to the outer and inner
facts. Its present-day concern is predominantly descriptive and explanatory and
hence embraces such various disciplines as history, sociology, anthropology,
psychology, and archaeology. Traditionally, however, the study has been more
oriented toward truth claims in religion--these being properly the concern of
theology and philosophy of religion. Needless to say, there are different sorts
of theology, related to the different religious traditions, such as Christian,
Muslim, and Buddhist. But insofar as the theologian expresses and articulates a
tradition, he belongs to it and thus is part of the subject matter studied by
the student of religion. |
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No single history of the study of
religion exists since the major cultural traditions (Europe, the Middle East,
India, China) have been mutually independent over long periods. The primary
impulse that prompts many to study religion, however, happens to be the Western
one, especially because other cultural traditions utilized categories other than
that denoted in the Western concept of "religion." On the whole, in
the ancient world and in the Middle Ages the various approaches to religion grew
out of attempts to criticize or 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 the nonnormative
(descriptive-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 accounts here of the history of the subject take it up to
the modern period and then consider the various disciplines connected with
religion in detail--i.e., in relation
to their development since the 19th century. (see also apologetics) |
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One of the earliest attempts to
systematize the seemingly conflicting Greek myths
and thereby bring order into this rather chaotic Greek tradition was the Theogonyof the Greek poet Hesiod
(flourished c. 800 BC), 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 (e.g., Thales,
Heracleitus, and Anaximander)
led to a more critical and, to some extent, rationalistic treatment of the gods.
Thus, Thales (6th century BC) and Heracleitus (flourished c.
500 BC) 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 BC that Thales believed that everything was filled with the
gods. Anaximander (6th century BC) 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, transcending even the gods.
Heracleitus refers to the controlling principle as logos, or reason, though the philosopher, poet, and religious
reformer Xenophanes (6th-5th
centuries BC) 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 BC by the philosopher Plato.
More conservatively, the poet Theagenes
(6th century BC) 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
BC). Criticism of the ancient Greek tradition was reinforced by the reports of
travellers as Greek culture penetrated widely into various other cultures. The
Greek historian Herodotus (5th
century BC) 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). (see also
Greek religion) |
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The plurality of cults and gods also
induced skepticism, as with the Sophist Protagoras (c. 481-411 BC), who was driven from Athens because of his impiety in
questioning the existence of the gods. Prodicus of Ceos (5th century BC) gave a
rationalistic explanation of the origin of deities that foreshadowed Euhemerism
(see below Later attempts to study
religion), and another Sophist, Critias
(5th century BC), considered that religion was invented to frighten men into
adhering to morality and justice. Plato
was not averse to providing new myths to perform this alleged function--as is
seen in his conception of the "noble lie" (i.e.,
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). |
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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, while the
philosopher Epicurus (341-270
BC) was skeptical of religion as ordinarily understood and practiced, though he
did not deny that there were gods who, however, had no transactions with men. Of
considerable influence was Euhemerus
(c. 330-c.
260 BC), who gave his name to the doctrine called Euhemerism,
namely, that the gods are divinized men. Though Euhemerus' own argument was
based largely upon fantasy, there are certainly some examples, both in Greek
religion (e.g., the god Heracles) and
elsewhere, of the tendency to make men into gods, but it is obviously not
universal. (see also anthropomorphism) |
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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 BC) owed much to Epicurus. The eclectic thinker and politician Cicero
(106-43 BC), in his De natura deorum ("Concerning
the Nature of the Gods"), criticized Stoic, Epicurean, and later Platonic
ideas about religion, but the book remains, however, 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
types 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 attempt to synthesize 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.
Such an account could help to explain some underlying similarities between the
Judeo-Christian tradition and certain aspects of Greco-Roman paganism. In this
view there is the germ of an evolutionary account of religion. On the whole,
however, the theories of religion in the ancient world were naturalistic and
rationalist in emphasis. (see also Roman
religion) |
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One of the earliest attempts to
systematize the seemingly conflicting Greek myths
and thereby bring order into this rather chaotic Greek tradition was the Theogonyof the Greek poet Hesiod
(flourished c. 800 BC), 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 (e.g., Thales,
Heracleitus, and Anaximander)
led to a more critical and, to some extent, rationalistic treatment of the gods.
Thus, Thales (6th century BC) and Heracleitus (flourished c.
500 BC) 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 BC that Thales believed that everything was filled with the
gods. Anaximander (6th century BC) 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, transcending even the gods.
Heracleitus refers to the controlling principle as logos, or reason, though the philosopher, poet, and religious
reformer Xenophanes (6th-5th
centuries BC) 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 BC by the philosopher Plato.
More conservatively, the poet Theagenes
(6th century BC) 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
BC). Criticism of the ancient Greek tradition was reinforced by the reports of
travellers as Greek culture penetrated widely into various other cultures. The
Greek historian Herodotus (5th
century BC) 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). (see also
Greek religion) |
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|
The plurality of cults and gods also
induced skepticism, as with the Sophist Protagoras (c. 481-411 BC), who was driven from Athens because of his impiety in
questioning the existence of the gods. Prodicus of Ceos (5th century BC) gave a
rationalistic explanation of the origin of deities that foreshadowed Euhemerism
(see below Later attempts to study
religion), and another Sophist, Critias
(5th century BC), considered that religion was invented to frighten men into
adhering to morality and justice. Plato
was not averse to providing new myths to perform this alleged function--as is
seen in his conception of the "noble lie" (i.e.,
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). |
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|
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, while the
philosopher Epicurus (341-270
BC) was skeptical of religion as ordinarily understood and practiced, though he
did not deny that there were gods who, however, had no transactions with men. Of
considerable influence was Euhemerus
(c. 330-c.
260 BC), who gave his name to the doctrine called Euhemerism,
namely, that the gods are divinized men. Though Euhemerus' own argument was
based largely upon fantasy, there are certainly some examples, both in Greek
religion (e.g., the god Heracles) and
elsewhere, of the tendency to make men into gods, but it is obviously not
universal. (see also anthropomorphism) |
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|
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 BC) owed much to Epicurus. The eclectic thinker and politician Cicero
(106-43 BC), in his De natura deorum ("Concerning
the Nature of the Gods"), criticized Stoic, Epicurean, and later Platonic
ideas about religion, but the book remains, however, 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
types 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 attempt to synthesize 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.
Such an account could help to explain some underlying similarities between the
Judeo-Christian tradition and certain aspects of Greco-Roman paganism. In this
view there is the germ of an evolutionary account of religion. On the whole,
however, the theories of religion in the ancient world were naturalistic and
rationalist in emphasis. (see also Roman
religion) |
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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 (1668-1774), who suggested that Greek religion passed through
various stages: the divinization of nature, then of those powers that man had
come to control (such as fire and crops), then of institutions (such as
marriage), and finally the process of humanizing the gods, as in the works of
Homer. The English philosopher David
Hume (1711-76) gave another account in his Natural
History of Religionwhich
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 19th- and 20th-century Christian
theologians. |
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The Rationalism of the period often
involved a rejection both of paganism and dogmatic Christianity in the name of
"natural religion." This natural religion, also called Deism, was the
intellectual counterpart of 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 BC). |
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The culmination of 18th-century
Rationalism was found in the works of the German philosopher Immanuel
Kant (1724-1804), but it was a rationalism modified to leave room for
religion, which he based essentially on ethics. He held that all men in their
awareness of the categorical
imperative (i.e., the notion that one must act as though what one does can
become the universal law for mankind) and reverence for it 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, as in
earlier centuries, the concern for the problems of religions other than those of
the Judeo-Christian tradition largely in terms of the paganism of the ancient
world. In this connection, 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
foreshadowed later attempts to use comparative material in the elucidation of
Greek myths. The French abbé Bergier (1718-90) explained primitive
religions by means of a belief in spirits arising from a variety of
psychological causes, which thus was a precursor of animism (a belief in souls
in persons or certain natural objects). |
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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 and more
significant for the understanding of human language and thought 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). The latter's self-confidence, in supposing that his
philosophy represented the culmination of the history of philosophy, may amuse
present-day scholars in view of the fact that many changes have occurred in
philosophical enquiry since his day. 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), both in 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, it inspired attempts to make sense of the multitude of
historical data, so that 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 or developmental. (see also
history, philosophy of) |
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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 which religion has a place beside science in attempting to refer
to the unknown, and unknowable, Absolute. Evolutionary accounts were much
boosted in the latter part of the 19th century by the new theory of biological
evolution and had a marked effect both on history of religions and anthropology. |
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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 men, a thesis that was to be taken up in various ways by, among
others, Marx, Freud, and Barth. |
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These various movements were
supplemented by the growth of scientific history, archaeology, anthropology, and
other sciences, which increased comparative knowledge of civilizations and
cultures. The major figures and trends in the relevant disciplines are dealt
with below. |
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Though 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 a notably different atmosphere in comparison with
preceding periods, and the stage was set for a more complex and mutual attempt
to understand the history and nature of religion. |
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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. |
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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 sangha
(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. |
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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. |
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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 Rgveda 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 Upanisads
(philosophical treatises). |
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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 Pali (an
ancient Indian language), which, through the work of such scholars as the
English Orientalist T.W. Rhys Davids (1843-1922) and of the Pali Text
Society, which he founded, had a remarkable impact in revealing to the West the
full range of Theravadin (southern Buddhist) religious literature; it
tended to make Western scholars look upon the Theravada as the earlier,
"purer" form of Buddhism; but the editing of early Mahayana
("Greater Vehicle," or northern Buddhist) texts and the recognition of
the different strata in the Pali 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 Mahayana
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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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 Islam.
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. |
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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
Bogazköy (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. |
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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. (see also
prehistoric religion) |
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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), Borobudur (Indonesia), Ellora
and Ajanta (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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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). |
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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 Boughis 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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. (see also
functionalism) |
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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. |
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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 Bronislaw
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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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 ). |
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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 ). |
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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. |
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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 Islam,
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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. (see also mysticism) |
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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 Islamic 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. |
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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 Taboohe 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). |
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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
Theravada 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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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 DespisersHe 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. |
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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 Shankara.
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. |
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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 | | | |
