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

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religion in some continental philosophy at the end of the twentieth century often exhibits characteristics similar to Scheler’s phenomenological orientation.

W. Brede Kristensen

Much of the field has been dominated by a Dutch tradition of phenomenology of religion. Kristensen (1867–1953), who opposes evolutionist and positivist approaches to religion, attempts to understand religious documents in terms of religious values proper to the religious phenomena. Phenomenology of religion attempts to understand religious phenomena by classifying them into groups according to the essential characteristics of the religion. Similar to Otto, van der Leeuw, and Eliade, Kristensen considers the sacred or holy as the central transcendent object or essence around which religious material is organized. Kristensen attempts to integrate historical knowledge of facts with phenomenological ‘empathy’ and ‘feeling’ for the data in order to grasp ‘inner meaning’ and religious values in texts.

Descriptive phenomenology, the medium whereby philosophy and history of religion interact, seeks the ‘meaning’ of religious phenomena. This is ‘the meaning that the religious phenomena have for the believers themselves.’ Phenomenology does not end with classification of phenomena according to their meaning, but always involves ‘understanding.’ In order to achieve phenomenological understanding, scholars must avoid imposing their own value judgments on experiences of believers and must accept the faith of believers as sole ‘religious reality.’ The focus of phenomenology is the description and understanding of how believers understand their own faith.

Rudolf Otto Â

Two interdependent methodological contributions made by Rudolf Otto (1869–1937) deserve emphasis: his experiential approach, which involves the phenomenological description of the universal, essential structure of religious experience, and his antireductionism, which respects the unique, irreducible, ‘numinous’ quality of all religious experience.

In Das Heilige (translated as The Idea of the Holy), Otto presents what may be the bestknown phenomenological account of religious experience. Otto describes the universal ‘numinous’ element as a unique a priori category of meaning and value. By numen and numinous, Otto means the concept of ‘the holy’ minus its moral and rational aspects. This constitutes the universal essence of religious experience. Since the unique nonrational experience cannot be defined or conceptualized, symbolic and analogical descriptions are meant to evoke within the reader the numinous experience that can be reawakened or recognized by means of our innate sense of the numinous.

Otto formulates a universal phenomenological structure of religious experience for distinguishing religious phenomena by their numinous aspect and for organizing and analyzing specific religious manifestations. He points to our sui generis religious experience of ‘creature feeling’ of absolute dependence in the experiential presence of the holy, the ‘wholly other’ that is qualitatively unique and transcendent.

Insistence on the unique a priori quality of religious experience points to Otto’s antireductionist, autonomous, numinous approach. Otto rejects the one-sidedly intellectualistic and rationalistic bias of most interpretations and the reduction of religious phenomena to the interpretive schema of linguistic analysis, anthropology, sociology, psychology, and historicist approaches.

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Various interpreters have criticized Otto’s phenomenological approach for being too narrowly conceived. According to these critics, Otto’s approach focuses on nonrational aspects of certain mystical and other ‘extreme’ experiences, but it is not sufficiently comprehensive to interpret the diversity and complexity of religious data, nor is it sufficiently concerned with the specific historical and cultural forms of religious phenomena. Critics also object to the a priori nature of Otto’s project and influences of personal, Christian, theological, and apologetic intentions on his phenomenology.

Gerardus van der Leeuw

In his Comparative Religion, Eric J. Sharpe writes that ‘between 1925 and 1950, the phenomenology of religion was associated almost exclusively with the name of the Dutch scholar Gerardus van der Leeuw (1890–1950), and with his book Phänomenologie der Religion.’ In Phänomenologie der Religion (translated as Religion in Essence and Manifestation), van der Leeuw defines assumptions, concepts, and stages of his phenomenological approach. Focusing on phenomenological bracketing and empathy and influenced by Wilhelm Dilthey’s formulations on hermeneutics and ‘understanding’ (Verstehen), van der Leeuw emphasizes the need to respect the specific intentionality of religious phenomena and to describe the phenomenon as ‘what appears into view.’ The phenomenon is given in the mutual relations between subject and object; that is, its ‘entire essence’ is given in its appearance to someone.

Van der Leeuw proposes a complex phenomenological-psychological method of systematic introspection. This involves ‘the interpolation of the phenomenon into our lives’ as necessary for understanding religious phenomena. Phenomenology must be combined with historical research, which provides phenomenologists with sufficient data. Van der Leeuw’s emphasizes the religious aspect of ‘power’ as the basis of every religious form and as defining what is religious. Phenomenology describes how humans have religious experiences in relating to such extraordinary power, and how ‘all understanding rests upon self-surrendering love.’ Van der Leeuw considered himself a theologian and asserted that phenomenology of religion leads to both anthropology and theology.

Critics, while often expressing admiration for Religion in Essence and Manifestation as an extraordinary collection of religious data, offer many objections to van der Leeuw’s phenomenology of religion: His phenomenological approach is based on numerous Christian theological and metaphysical assumptions and value judgments; it is often too subjective and highly speculative; and it neglects the historical and cultural context of religious phenomena.

C. Jouco Bleeker Â

Bleeker (1898–1983) distinguished three types of phenomenology of religion: descriptive phenomenologythatrestrictsitselftosystematizationofreligiousphenomena,typologicalphenomenology that formulates different types of religion, and the specific sense of phenomenology that investigates the essential structures and meanings of religious phenomena. In terms of this specific sense, phenomenology of religion has a double meaning: it is an independent science that creates monographs, such as van der Leeuw’s Religion in Essence and Manifestation and Eliade’s Patterns in Comparative Religion, but it is also a scholarly method that utilizes such principles as the phenomenological epoché and eidetic vision. Although Bleeker frequently used technical terms borrowed from Husserl and philosophical phenomenology, he claimed that they were used by phenomenology of religion in only a figurative sense.

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According to Bleeker, phenomenology of religion combines a critical attitude and concern for accurate descriptions with a sense of empathy for phenomena. It is an empirical science without philosophical aspirations, and it should distinguish its activities from those of philosophical phenomenology and of anthropology. Phenomenology of religion systematizes historical facts in order to understand their religious meaning.

Bleeker analyzes phenomenology of religion as inquiry into three dimensions of religious phenomena: theoria, logos, and entelecheia. The theoria of phenomena discloses the essence and significance of the empirical facts. The logos of phenomena provides a sense of objectivity by showing that hidden structures ‘are built up according to strict inner laws’ and that religion ‘always possesses a certain structure with an inner logic.’ The entelecheia of phenomena reveals the dynamics and development of religious life as ‘an invincible, creative and selfregenerating force.’

Mircea Eliade

As one of the major interpreters of religion, symbol, and myth, the Romanian Eliade (1907– 1986) submits that religion ‘refers to the experience of the sacred.’ The phenomenologist works with historical documents expressing hierophanies, or manifestations of the sacred, and attempts to decipher the existential situation and religious meaning expressed through the data. The sacred and the profane express ‘two modes of being in the world,’ and religion always entails the attempt of religious beings to transcend the relative, historical, temporal, ‘profane’ world by experiencing a ‘superhuman’ sacred world of transcendent values.

Eliade’s phenomenology of religion includes morphological studies of different kinds of religious symbolism; interpretations of the structure and function of myth, with the cosmogonic and other creation myths functioning as exemplary models; treatments of rituals, such as those of initiation, as reenacting sacred mythic models; structural analysis of sacred space, sacred time, and sacred history; and studies of different types of religious experience, such as yoga, shamanism, alchemy, and other ‘archaic’ phenomena.

Key methodological principles underlying Eliade’s phenomenological approach are, first, his assumption of the ‘irreducibility of the sacred,’ a form of phenomenological epoché. Only an antireductionist method, using a religious frame of reference or ‘scale’ of interpretation, does not distort the specific, irreducible religious intentionality expressed in the data.

Second, Eliade’s emphasis on the ‘dialectic of the sacred’, as universal structure of sacralization, provides essential criteria for distinguishing religious from nonreligious phenomena. For example, there is always a sacred-profane dichotomy, and the sacred, expressing transcendent structures and meanings, paradoxically limits itself by incarnating itself in something ordinarily finite, temporal, and historical.

Third, Eliade formulates structural systems of religious symbols that constitute the hermeneutical framework underlying his phenomenology of religion. These symbols are ‘multivalent’ and through their ‘function of unification’ form autonomous, universal, coherent symbolic systems that provide the phenomenological framework for Eliade’s interpretation of religious meaning.

Although Eliade was extremely influential, many scholars ignore or are hostile to his history and phenomenology of religion. The most frequent criticism is that Eliade is methodologically uncritical, often presenting sweeping generalizations and nonhistorical essences not based upon specific historical and empirical data. Critics charge that his

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approach is influenced by various normative judgments and an assumed ontological position that is partial to a religious, antihistorical, antimodern mode of being and to certain Eastern and archaic phenomena.

Ninian Smart

Born in Cambridge, England to Scottish parents, Smart (1927–2001) had a major impact on religious studies. Phenomenology, for Smart, is the best way to study religion and avoids two dominant approaches: (1) ethnocentric, normative, especially Christian, theological approaches in the study of religion; and (2) normative philosophical approaches with their exclusive focus on belief and conceptual analysis to the exclusion of other dimensions of religious phenomena.

Smart emphasized many points that became easily recognizable and widely accepted in phenomenology of religion and other approaches to religious phenomena. He emphasized suspension of one’s own value judgments, a ‘methodological agnosticism’ regarding religious truth claims, and the need for phenomenological empathy in understanding and describing religious phenomena of others. He endorsed a liberal, humanistic, phenomenological approach that upholds pluralism and diversity and recognizes that religion expresses many dimensions of human experience. Such an approach is ‘polymethodic,’ multiperspectival, comparative, and cross-cultural. The phenomenologist of religion needs to take seriously the contextual nature of diverse religious phenomena; to ask questions, engage in critical dialogue, and maintain an open-ended investigation of religion; and to recognize that religions express complex, multidimensional, interconnected worldviews.

Characteristics of phenomenology of religion

The following features, some already mentioned, characterize much of phenomenology of religion: a comparative, systematic, empirical, historical, descriptive discipline and approach; antireductionist claims and its autonomous nature; adoption of philosophical phenomenological notions of intentionality and epoché; insistence on empathy, sympathetic understanding, and religious commitment; and claim to provide insight into essential structures and meanings.

Comparative and systematic approach

There is widespread agreement that phenomenology of religion is a very general, comparative approach concerned with classifying and systematizing religious phenomena. Phenomenologists are able to gain insight into essential structures and meanings only after comparing a large number of Âdocuments expressing a great diversity of religious phenomena.

Empirical approach

Most phenomenologists of religion insist that they use an empirical approach that is free from a priori assumptions and judgments. Such an empirical approach, often described as ‘scientific’ and ‘objective,’ begins by collecting religious documents and then goes on to describe just what the data reveal. A frequent attack on phenomenology of religion is that it is not empirically based and is therefore arbitrary, subjective, and unscientific. Critics charge

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that the universal structures and meanings are not found in the empirical data and are not subject to empirical tests of verification.

Historical approach

Phenomenologists of religion usually maintain not only that their approach must cooperate with and complement historical research but also that phenomenology of religion is profoundly historical. Phenomenologists must be aware of the specific historical, cultural, and socioeconomic contexts within which religious phenomena appear. Critics charge that phenomenology of religion is not historical, both in terms of a nonhistorical phenomenological method and the primacy it grants to nonhistorical and nontemporal universal structures.

Descriptive approach

Almost all phenomenologists of religion today do not restrict themselves to mere description of religious phenomena. Phenomenologists go beyond the severe methodological restrictions of descriptive phenomenology. And yet phenomenologists invariably regard their phenomenology of religion as descriptive, using a descriptive approach and providing descriptive classifications, typologies, and structures.

Antireductionism

Phenomenologists oppose reductionism, which imposes preconceptions and judgments on phenomena, in order to deal with phenomena as phenomena and to provide more accurate descriptions of just what phenomena reveal. Phenomenology of religion insists that investigators approach religious data as phenomena that are fundamentally and irreducibly religious. Otto, Eliade, and others criticize the reductions of religious data to fit nonreligious perspectives, such as those of sociology, psychology, or economics. Such reductionisms, it is argued, destroy the irreducibly religious intentionality of religious phenomena.

A utonomy Â

Directly related to this antireductionist claim is the identification of phenomenology of religion as an autonomous discipline and approach. If there are certain irreducible modes by which religious phenomena are given, then one must utilize a specific method of understanding commensurate with the religious nature of the subject matter. Phenomenology of religion is autonomous but not self-sufficient. It depends heavily on historical research and on data supplied by philology, ethnology, psychology, sociology, and other approaches. But it must always integrate the contributions of other approaches within its own unique phenomenological perspective.

Intentionality

Phenomenology analyzes acts of consciousness as consciousness of something and claims that meaning is given in the intentionality of the structure. For Otto, the a priori structure of religious consciousness is consciousness of its intended ‘numinous object.’ Van der Leeuw’s phenomenological-psychological technique and Eliade’s dialectic of the sacred are methods