Материал: The Routledge Companion to the Study of Religion by John Hinnells

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comes to experience sensations and feelings that he or she identifies as supernatural, and the consequences to which this may lead. The old alternatives had been divine inspiration on the one hand, and demonic deception on the other (speaking here in Judaeo-Christian terms). But suppose there were nothing supernatural involved. What then?

Interestingly enough, a number of the first psychologists of religion were Americans. Religious individualism was endemic in nineteenth-century America, especially among the heirs of the Enlightenment, such as Emerson and the New England Transcendentalists. ‘Individualism … was common enough in the Europe of the nineteenth century; in America, it was part of the very air men breathed’ (Nisbet 1965: 4). This was due in part to the importance of the individual ‘conversion experience’ as the major criterion by which the genuineness of religion was judged. Sectarian extremism was also common, some parts of America even coming to resemble a menagerie of frequently warring sects. Add to this the impact of phenomena as diverse as exploration, industrialization, migration, half-understood Darwinism and not least the Civil War, and it is not hard to grasp the fascinated energy with which intellectuals tackled religious questions. Here an important book was Andrew Dickson White’s A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1955). White, the first President of Cornell University, was writing too early to incorporate psychology into his account; he was not irreligious, but was passionately opposed to the imposition of ‘theological’ limits on free enquiry.

The first psychologists of religion in America are all but forgotten today – Granville Stanley Hall, James H. Leuba and Edwin D. Starbuck among them. Starbuck is worth a special mention as the first to work with questionnaires as a means of gathering material. How do you find out what people experience as ‘religion’? Simple: ask them! The results of his enquiries took shape in his book The Psychology of Religion (1899). Starbuck also taught a course in the psychology of religion at Harvard in 1894–5. The major emphasis of his questionnaires was on ‘religious experience’ in general, and the experience of conversion in particular. The method as such was deeply flawed, but won approval as a means of breaking away from the crude choice between divine Âinspiration and demonic deception as explanations of ‘the conversion experience’.

Starbuck’s material was used (and duly acknowledged) by his Harvard teacher William James in preparation for the lectures delivered in Scotland and published in 1977 as The Varieties of Religious Experience – one of the few religious classics of the twentieth century. William James, (1842–1910), the elder brother of the novelist Henry James, came of Swedenborgian stock, though his personal religion was an undogmatic theism. He trained as a doctor, but never practised medicine. Then he became fascinated by the infant science of psychology, and for years worked on his one and only book, The Principles of Psychology (1890) – all his later publications were tidied-up lectures, Varieties being his unquestioned masterpiece.

James was writing (or rather, speaking) as what he called a ‘radical empiricist’, a pragmatist who was convinced that where religion was concerned, judgement is possible only on a basis of the results to which it leads – religion is what religion does, not what it claims to be able to do. He drew a famous distinction between two religious temperaments: that of the ‘healthyminded’ – positive, optimistic, relatively unconcerned with the problem of evil – and that of ‘the sick soul’ – obsessed with the sense of its own unworthiness, inadequacy and (in Christian terms) sin. ‘Let sanguine healthymindedness do its best with its strange power of living in the moment and ignoring and forgetting, still the evil background is really there to be thought of, and the skull will grin in at the banquet’ (James 1977: 140).

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James also anticipated in Varieties what in the 1960s was to become one of the bugbears of the study of religion, by introducing the subject of artificially induced ‘religious’ experience through drugs, even going so far as to experiment himself with nitrous oxide (‘laughing gas’) and to suggest that if there should be supernatural revelation, the ‘neurotic’ temperament might be better able to receive it than the well-adjusted.

There were major flaws in James’ approach to his subject, and this may be the time to mention them briefly. One was entirely deliberate, namely, his exclusion of religion’s social dimension from his inquiry: ‘religion’ he limited to ‘the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine’ (James 1977: 31). How far individuals feel, act and experience because of the environment in which they live, with all its precedents, images, taboos, expectations and the rest, he does not discuss. More important was the assumption, shared by all those who have ever used questionnaire material, that the individual actually knows, fully consciously, what he or she believes and why – and this is not always safe, as Freud and Jung were shortly to show.

Lectures XVI and XVII in Varieties, James devoted to the subject of ‘Mysticism’, which we might perhaps characterize as religious experience at its most intensive. Wisely, he did not attempt to define this notoriously slippery word, but identified ‘ineffability’, ‘noetic quality’ (the quality of self-authenticating knowledge), ‘transiency’ and ‘passivity’ as a ‘mystical group’ of states of consciousness (James 1977: 380–2). Whether mysticism is therefore to be welcomed or avoided had long been disputed territory. Mystik had long been regarded by theologians (especially those of the Catholic tradition) as something entirely positive, a mark of divine favour; Mysticismus was the word used by German-speaking rationalists to denote irrationality and delusion in religion, in practically the same sense as ‘enthusiasm’. The English language was in the unfortunate position of having only one word to cover both senses. Either way, ‘mysticism’ came in the years around the turn of the century to serve as a catch-all term for all that sorted under the categories of visions, voices, trances and what today we call ‘altered states of consciousness’; but also to label religious intensity. At the back of all this was what was the mystic’s desire to achieve oneness with the Ultimate Reality – or alternatively, a mental disorder of some kind, depending on one’s presuppositions.

One cannot ‘study’ mystics, except to the extent that they are prepared to write or speak about their experiences. There was however no lack of such material, and beginning in the years around the turn of the century there appeared a number of significant works on the subject. The first of these was W. R. Inge’s Christian Mysticism (1899), followed by, among others, James’ Varieties, Nathan Söderblom’s Uppenbarelsereligion (The Religion of Revelation, 1903, which drew the important distinction between theistic and non-theistic expressions of religious faith), Friedrich von Hügel’s massive The Mystical Element of Religion (1908), Rufus Jones’ Studies in Mystical Religion (1909) and Evelyn Underhill’s Mysticism (1940). At the end of this line we may perhaps place J. B. Pratt’s The Religious Consciousness (1920). It is perhaps worth noting that the last four authors mentioned were Roman Catholic, Quaker, uneasy Anglican and Unitarian respectively: clearly religious experience bore no particular relation to Christian denominationalism. Pratt’s horizon was however wider: he had a lively interest in India, writing with regard to Buddhism that he had ‘… tried to enable the reader to understand a little how it feels to be a Buddhist’ (Sharpe 1986: 115f. emphasis in original).

It was slightly ironical that Pratt’s book should have been called The Religious Consciousness, since by the time it appeared, Freud, Jung and their respective bands of followers had most effectively called in question the very idea of consciousness as a decisive factor in human

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conduct. The new psychologists, wrote Sir John Adams in 1929, ‘… know exactly what they want and are quite clear about the way they propose to attain it. There is a lion in their path; they want that lion killed and decently buried. This lion is Consciousness …’ (Sharpe 1986: 197). The Freudians, the Jungians and the rest of the psychoanalytical establishment did not pretend to scholarship in the area of religion, and some of their ventures into the field were quite bizarre; their profession was medicine, after all. But whereas Freud and his followers treated religion as part of the problem where mental health was concerned, the Jungians took a more positive view of religious mythology and symbolism. The psychoanalytical cause became fashionable in the years following the insanity of the First World War, not least in America, and cast a long shadow.

As an example, we may quote the case of the American anthropologist Margaret Mead (1902–1978), author of the celebrated Coming of Age in Samoa (1928), which proved, entirely to its author’s satisfaction, that adolescence can be practically pain-free, once the sexual restraints imposed by society have been relaxed. Mead was a protegée of Franz Boas, a determined Freudian. Margaret Mead was no more than 23 when she did the field-work on which her book was based, and many years later one of her chief Samoan informants confessed that the girls who had supplied her with material had been pulling her leg (Freeman 1983). It did not matter. Her teacher Franz Boas wrote that: ‘The results of her painstaking investigation confirm the suspicion long held by anthropologists, that much of what we ascribe to human nature is no more than a reaction to the restraints put upon us by civilisation’ (Mead 1928: viii). ‘Field-work’ was of the essence, no matter how poorly equipped the investigator – an attitude which passed in the course of time to the study of religion .

Psychoanalysis aside, other issues divided students of religion in the early years of the twentieth century. Another relatively new science was the science of sociology – collective, rather than individual human behaviour. A key concept in this connection was ‘holiness/ sacredness’ (the adjectives ‘sacred’ and ‘holy’ are generally interchangeable; ‘the sacred’ and ‘the holy’ are on the other hand abstractions).

There were two alternatives: on the psychological (and often the theological) side, what was up for investigation was ‘what the individual does with his/her own solitariness’; on the sociological side, what communities do under the heading of ‘religion’. At the time when William James was most influential, there was a strong current of thought flowing in precisely the opposite direction: toward the assessment of religion’s social functions, past and present. Out of the second of these there emerged the sociology of religion, which over the years was to assume a more and more dominant role as an academic sub-discipline.

One can do sociology in two different but connected ways. First, as an evolutionary science. Although Darwin was first and foremost a biologist, it was not long before his admirers applied the evolutionary model to (among much else) the development of human societies. Here the prophetic voice was that of the popular philosopher Herbert Spencer (1820–1904), whose First Principles (1862) argued that ‘the law of organic evolution is the law of all evolution’ in every field of human activity, and not just in biology: ‘this same advance from the simple to the complex, through successive differentiations, holds uniformly’ (Spencer 1862: 148). Spencer held that the simplest, and therefore the earliest, form of religion had been the worship (or at least fear) of the dead, especially those who had been powerful during their lifetimes: ‘The rudimentary form of all religion is the propitiation of dead ancestors …’ (Spencer 1901). This ‘ghost theory’ (as it came to be called) has the merit of sometimes being at least partly true. Examples are not hard to come by. But it leaves out too much to serve as a general theory of the origin of religion.

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Shortly before Spencer’s death, there had been published a centenary edition of an influential book by the German theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834), Über die Religion: Reden an die Gebildeten unter ihren Verachtern (1799; Eng. tr. On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers, 1893). It was important on two counts: first, because it argued that the only way to study religion adequately is not in terms of the bloodless intellectual abstractions of ‘natural religion’ (which is in actual fact neither natural nor religion), but in and through the religious beliefs and practices of actual living human beings – a point made many years earlier by Charles de Brosses, but taken insufficiently seriously since. And second, because to Schleiermacher, the heart of religion was to be found, not in rules and regulations, hierarchies, hassocks and hymnbooks, but in the individual’s experience of (or sense ofâ) and dependence upon a power infinitely greater than his own. The reissue of Schleiermacher’s Über die Religion in 1899 could not have come at a more opportune moment. Darwinism was all very well; the rule of law was an efficient sergeant-major in an unruly world, but left little room for creative individuality. It was however Schleiermacher’s editor who made the greater long-term impression.

Rudolf Otto (1869–1937) was a philosopher and theologian by training and temperament, with Indology as another area of interest and expertise. Today however he tends to be remembered for only one book, Das Heilige (1917; Eng. tr. The Idea of the Holy, 1923), which argued that what is essential in religion is the individual’s experience of ‘the holy’, even at one point requesting that the reader who has had no such experience to read no further! But experience of what, precisely? Trying to explain, Otto coined the word ‘numinous’ (das Numinose), a sense of the presence of a numen (deity, supernatural being). This in its turn gives rise to a perception, or apprehension, of a mysterium which is both tremendum (scary) and fascinans (intriguing).

The words ‘holy’ and ‘sacred’ are adjectives, which need to be related to someone or something if they are to make sense, and are not easily turned into nouns (‘holy scripture’, ‘holy mountain’, ‘holy day’, ‘sacred cow’, ‘sacred site’ make sense as the abstract nouns ‘the holy’ and ‘the sacred’ do not.

A few years before the appearance of Otto’s book there appeared in France Émile Durkheim’s Les Formes Élémentaires de la Vie Religieuse (1912; Eng. tr. The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, 1915). Here we have the opposite argument: that (put crudely) religion is a social phenomenon, resting not on the individual’s feeling-states but on the needs of the community. Families, tribes and nations set up symbols of their own collective identity – from totem poles to national flags – which are ‘sacred’ through their associations.

On this view, every human community invents its own sacred symbols. The supernatural does not enter into it, the closest approximation being ‘power’ (the Melanesian/Polynesian mana and similar power-words, which Durkheim mistakenly believed to be impersonal, but which always turn out to be associated with spiritual beings who possess them). It is therefore the community which decrees what is, and what is not, ‘sacred’ in its own cultural terms.

The phenomenology of religion

Between the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 and the end of the second in 1945, the study of religion in the West became fragmented. The old idealism had been shattered in the trenches of the battlefield, and in 1920, religion itself, let alone the study of religion, seemed to have no future worth speaking of. On the Christian theological front, the tradition of scholarship was maintained by a very few idealists in the face of growing opposition from the

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disciples of Karl Barth, Emil Brunner and the other ‘dialectical’ theologians, in whose eyes ‘religion’ was as dust and ashes compared to the Gospel, and who declined to study it further. The conservatives were what they had always been: intent on doing battle with ‘the world’ on as many fronts as possible. Meanwhile, the anthropologists, Orientalists, philologists and the rest cultivated their respective gardens.

Comparative religion had been trying to compare religions as totalities, as systems, as competing solutions of the world’s problems. This was unsound. Religions are totalities only in the pages of textbooks, and what believers actually believe, and how they believe, may bear little resemblance to what they are supposed to believe and do. The student, intent on examining religions and writing their histories, was faced with an impossible task. One alternative was to divide the field functionally, by themes and characteristics, and to attempt on that basis limited comparisons: prayer with prayer, sacrifice with sacrifice, images of deity with images of deity. In all this it was important to examine, not what the textbooks say, but what is actually there to be observed, the phenomena involved in the business of religion. The point had been made by Charles de Brosses in the 1760s and by Friedrich Schleiermacher in 1799: that the student of religion must concentrate, not on what people might do, ought to do or what the textbooks say they are supposed to do, but on what they actually do, and the ways in which they actually behave. But people do, and have done, so many things. How can anyone grasp the field as a whole?

It was with an eye to resolving this difficulty that the term ‘the phenomenology of religion’ was pressed into service. As we have said, limited comparisons were still possible, provided that they were based on either reliable information or careful observation. However, in the early years of the twentieth century, ‘phenomenology’ acquired another set of meanings, having to do less with the material than the mind-set of the observer. The name of the philosopher Edmund Husserl is often mentioned in this connection, though his contribution to the study of religion was at best indirect. ‘Philosophical’ phenomenology aimed at the elimination of subÂjectivity (and hence dogmatic bias) from the inquirer’s process of thought. As such, the ideal was and is unattainable, and it was unfortunate that for a time in the 1970s, a few phenomenological catch-words (epoché, the suspension of judgment, and eidetic vision, the gift of seeing things as wholes, as well as ‘phenomenology’ itselfâ) found their way into the vocabulary of the study of religion. In the inter-war years, the trend was best represented by the Dutch scholar Gerardus van der Leeuw (1890–1950), author of Phänomenologie der Religion (1933; Eng. tr. Religion in Essence and Manifestation, 1938).

Practically all the first phenomenologists of religion were Protestant Christian theologians

– Chantepie de la Saussaye, Nathan Söderblom, Rudolf Otto, Edvard Lehmann, William Brede Kristensen (‘… there exists no other religious reality than the faith of the believers …’) and C. Jouco Bleeker. An exception was the Âenigmatic German scholar Friedrich Heiler, whose chaotic book Erscheinungsformen und Wesen der Religion (1961) rounded off the series. In all these cases, phenomenology was a religious as much as a scholarly exercise. Those making up the between-the-wars generation of scholars we now call phenomenologists were deeply committed to the principle that the causes of sound learning and sound religion were not two causes, but one. The enemies of sound learning were all too often captive to unsound religion – unsound because (among other things) unhistorical and therefore almost inevitably authoritarian. Faced with such a configuration, one may distance oneself altogether from religious praxis; or one may try to bring the religious community (that is, the faculties of theology) round to one’s way of thinking. Most opted for the first of these alternatives; the very few who chose the latter, though they won a few battles, ultimately lost the war – not