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

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Comparison: the factor of selectivity

The process of comparison has a basic structure. First, there must be a point of commonality that allows for the comparison of two or more objects. Notably, the very term ‘comparison’ contains this idea, deriving from the Latin elements com, ‘with,’ and par, ‘equal.’ But comparison does not have to be limited to seeing commonalities. It can also perceive difference with respect to some aspect of what is otherwise in common. In everyday terms, for example, one can compare new houses (= the common factor) with regard to price (= the chosen criterion or aspect of difference). Likewise, one could compare religions (= the broad common factor) with regard to their population size, or their types of authority, or their views on gender; or compare purification rites with regard to their specific methods of removing impurity. The history of the comparative study of religion is the history and application of what its scholars have taken these common factors and these criteria of difference to be. Whether similarities or differences are emphasized will depend on the purposes at hand.

Comparison in itself is an activity, and not a theory or ideology, but it has been a tool of many different theories and hence employed for a range of interpretive or historical purposes. Consider two different ‘comparative’ approaches to the biblical story of creation. For the believer, to whom the account may present itself as the unique, authoritative Word of God, any comparison with other ‘origins’ accounts might be to show the superiority of Genesis. In that case, the ancient Babylonian account of creation, the Enuma Elish, could be shown to represent a more primitive ‘polytheistic’ idea of the world, compared to the Bible’s ostensibly ‘pure’ monotheism. The scenarios in the Enuma Elish that describe many gods and goddesses generating offspring and having to fend off chaos, would be picked out to contrast unfavorably with the Genesis version of one supreme god who is in charge of creation from the beginning and has no equals. But for those interested in goddess mythologies, the Genesis story has been presented quite differently. Here the biblical account has been viewed as a latter-day, patriarchal version of mythologies that once honored a primal goddess with her sacred tree and companion serpent. In this comparative sequence, the Hebrew account has been construed as a story that demoted the power of the goddess – who in Genesis becomes the very human Eve, the source of man’s fall, and the prototype of female subservience to males.

While the present article focuses mainly on academic, secular comparativism, rather than on matters of inter-religious relationships where ‘truth’ is typically the concern, the traditional role of religious approaches has been so pervasive that it requires some preliminary attention.

Religious forms of comparison

For those approaching comparison with religious motivation, their own beliefs are understandably used as a standard of interpretation. Historical Christian versions of comparative endeavors provide a range of examples of this. Here the rest of the world and its religions are all seen through the filters of patterns and prototypes set forth in the Bible. Here the overall motif is to demonstrate the superiority of Christianity.

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Examples of Christian ‘comparative religion’

Christian theologians needed to account for the existence of other religions and their gods, and traditional strategies included a whole spectrum of negative and positive interpretations that may be summarized briefly.

Demonic origins

Who or what were these ‘pagan’ gods that received so much devotion? Perhaps they were not really gods at all but demons seeking their own worshippers? How were missionaries to explain the presence of sculpted ‘crosses’ in Mayan temples that pre-dated the arrival of Christianity? Such overt parallels were easily seen as the mocking work of Satan, understood to be aping or imitating the true religion.

Historical diffusion

A second Christian strategy of explanation was the idea of ‘historical’ diffusion. Insofar as nonbiblical religions appeared to have anything truly religious about them, like the belief in a creator god, this could be explained as having been ultimately derived from the original pure monotheism of the biblical patriarchs. Likewise, where there was ‘idolatrous’ religion, such as the worship of forces of nature, this could be interpreted as a historical ‘degeneration’ from that same once pure source. Thus, any religious expression could be seen in terms of a unified theory of historical diffusion which assumed that all religions, as all cultures, could be traced to and from the survivors of the Great Flood. Sometimes etymologies were relied on to explain the transmission of these ‘survivals’ or ‘remnants’ of the patriarchal times. For example, the Hindu god Brahma was understood as a latter-day historical transformation of the biblical name, ‘Abraham.’ On other occasions, the idea of travel contact, perhaps via the lost tribes of Israel, was used to explain how religions like those of the Native Americans were able to obtain their ideas about a creator god.

Allegorical truthsÂ

A third mode of Christian comparison was to view other religions as containing symbols of Christian truths. Christians were already used to the idea that the Hebrew Bible contained images and events that allegorically prefigured the coming of the Christian messiah. Ancient Hebraic sacrifices, for example, were interpreted as symbolizing the sacrifice of Christ. Likewise, deities of other religions could be seen as representing attributes of the true God – for example, the goddess Athena was interpreted as pointing to God’s ‘wisdom.’

Natural vs. revealed religionÂ

Christians also developed the idea of natural vs. revealed religion. This is the notion that all humans, by being made in the divine image, have a natural potential to know God. Such endowment could therefore account for the presence of other religions. Yet, while all humans have access to a basic knowledge of God, ‘revealed’ knowledge was God’s full revelation through Christ to the biblical communities. In comparison, Christ could naturally be seen as the fulfillment of the innate yearnings of other religious peoples, and Christianity would be understood as religion in its highest, most complete, and universal form.

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Dialogue

From modern theology has come the idea of ‘dialogue’ between religions. This means adopting a ‘listening’ stance toward others, and not merely a dogmatic, prejudging position that stereotypes others. For example, a statement of the Roman Catholic Church (from the Second Vatican Council, 1962–1965), urged its members to appreciate the presence of ‘the holy’ in other traditions, and also established a permanent commission to study the other faiths and explore their meaning through open dialogue. Wilfrid Cantwell Smith (1916– 2000), an influential comparativist and specialist in Islam, emphasized that the comparative study of religion needs to responsibly describe the living qualities of other peoples’ faiths in a way that those other persons themselves would be able to recognize as their own position.

Universalism

In contrast to Christian comparisons, there is another religious approach that may be termed universalism. This affirms that all religions refer to the same underlying spiritual reality, but do so through different cultural forms and languages. Just as water is water, regardless of what it is called, so, in universalistic thinking, God is God, regardless of name. Even in the world of ancient Greece, there was a well-known doctrine of ‘the equivalence of the gods.’ Thus, the fifth-century bc Greek historian Herodotus reported that the gods of Egypt were basically Egyptian names for Greek divinities: Ammon was but another name for Zeus, Horus was the same as Apollo, and Isis was taken as equivalent to the goddess Demeter.

Universalism became highly developed in classical Stoicism and during the European Renaissance, and was later fostered by the Romantic, Transcendentalist, and New Age movements. It has been a basic premise of many Asian and mystical traditions. In the Far East, Buddhists commonly interpreted native Chinese and Japanese gods as ‘manifestations’ of cosmic buddhas. Buddhas were the ‘originals,’ and the local gods were their ‘appearances.’

Universalism has variants. For some, it is motivated by a sense that all humans are basically alike. Many find a common set of precepts undergirding the world’s religions, such as the need to honor a divine being and assume ethical responsibility. Some look for common affirmations about peace or nonviolence. Still others understand the universal basis of religion in terms of a core spiritual experience or revelation of the divine. In that outlook, institutional and doctrinal differences are merely seen as the secondary, outward elaborations of a shared, intuitive sense of the ‘wholly other’ mystery that grounds all life.

The rise of comparative religion as an academic field

Interpreting and comparing religions evolves along with expanding knowledge of other cultures. One can only compare what lies within one’s horizon of information. One can only study ‘others’ on the basis of the kind of knowledge of other cultures that is available at the time. In the Hebrew Bible, for example, references to other religions are always citations of other Near Eastern religions, not of Chinese, Japanese, or Indian religion. As recently as the early nineteenth century, Western Christendom still basically classified all religion into only four kinds, namely the three biblical monotheisms (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) and all others, lumped together as ‘idolatry,’ or ‘paganism,’ a derogatory term referring to those who supposedly worshipped false gods. Accounts brought back by missionaries and travelers continued to support the stereotype of the benighted state of non-Western or non-biblical peoples.

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By the mid to late nineteenth century, however, the comparative study of religion, by that name, was being put forth as a modern academic field of knowledge. Several developments made this possible. One was the expanding knowledge of Asian religions, particularly through access to translations of their scriptures. A second was the emerging knowledge of pre-literate cultures, produced partly by the new field of anthropology. A third was a new idea of history, namely that the whole of human culture had undergone a long evolution from primitive origins (in contrast to the biblical account of human origins). And a fourth was the general trend toward classifying and mapping the data of the world’s various subject matters. Together, these factors created a broad, new canvas for the study of religion.

The most influential nineteenth-century advocate of comparative religion was F. Max Müller (1823–1900). A native of Germany and then scholar at Oxford University from age 23, Müller was an authority on Sanskrit, the classical religious language of India. He edited an important 50-volume translation series termed The Sacred Books of the East. He urged that the study of religion should no longer be limited to the religions of the Mediterranean and that the great civilizational religions of the East, and their scriptures, should be taken seriously. Asian religions were to be brought into a horizon of respectful comparability with biblical religions. Here the older, parochial Western view of religious history as a simple contest of biblical vs. pagan traditions was to become obsolete.

Along these lines, more accurate histories of religion were produced. These replaced the previous provincial notions that all human languages derive from Hebrew, that all cultures and religions were traceable to the family of Noah, and that the dating of scriptures – whether biblical or nonbiblical – should be taken at face value.

Müller and others held that comparative religion is to any one religion as comparative philology is to the study of any particular language, and as comparative anatomy is to the anatomy of any one species. As the life sciences made progress through application of this method, so too would religious inquiry. The study of one religion would throw light on the study of another. Müller liked to apply to religion what the poet Goethe said of language: ‘he who knows one … knows none.’ In addition, Müller also outlined a broad program and methodology of comparative study. This included principles like gaining knowledge of others through their own writings, grouping religions according to their regional, linguistic contexts, and avoiding the common distortion of comparing the positive aspects of one religion with the Ânegative aspects of another (Müller 1872).

Toward an academic comparativism

In principle, though not always in practice, academic comparativism does not presuppose the value or truth of any one religion, but sets out to investigate religion as a patterned phenomenon of human culture and behavior. The rise of comparativism as a concern of the human sciences required in the first place that all religion would be studied by the same criteria. No religion would be privileged. No religious version of history would be used as normative. While all religions professed their own ancestral accounts of the past, the new, panhuman, naturalistic worldview now showed quite a different story of origins – a long, complex evolution of culture that did not coincide with the self-interested accounts of the various world scriptures. Religion

– once the norm in terms of which all history and culture was perceived – now itself became an object to be interpreted in terms of wider patterns of human history.

Again, one source of this new knowledge was so-called primitive cultures, and anthropologists looked to these to find the origin of the fundamental structures of religious

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belief and practice and to identify universal laws about their evolution. The English scholar Edward B. Tylor (1832–1917) found ‘belief in spiritual beings’ (which he worked into a theory he called ‘animism’) to originate in the experience of dreams and of deceased relatives, and thence to evolve into forms of polytheism and monotheism. Others focused on the universal role of ‘power’ or mana (Melanesian term for supernatural force) in religions. The influential French sociologist Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) advocated that the source and structuring principle of religious life was ‘the totemic principle.’ In this theory, sacred objects were maintained as sacred because they symbolized each group’s own social identity and tradition. Arnold van Gennep’s classic, Rites of Passage (original French edition, 1908), showed the universality of ritual patterns by which social and life-cycle transitions were performed, and became part of the currency of comparative thinking. An influential application of comparativism to biblical religion was W. Robertson Smith’s The Religion of the Semites (1889). Smith located ancient Hebrew practices in terms of common ‘primitive’ categories of totemic communion, sacrificial rites, sacred places, and taboos. The suggestion that biblical religion could be seen in such contexts was a scandal to many in his day.

The best known of these pre-modern comparativists was James G. Frazer (1854–1941), particularly through his book, The Golden Bough, first published in two volumes in 1890, and later to grow to twelve volumes. The Golden Bough was a vast compendium of examples of ritual, myth, and religion, organized by patterns and themes, and presented as an instance of comparative method. Frazer made extensive use of sources from primitive and folk cultures. The work began by citing an obscure Roman rite about the practice of succession to the priesthood of the goddess Diana, an institution that appeared to involve a ritual killing of the old priest by a new priest who would then assume the office. As a way of throwing comparative light on this, Frazer marshaled extensive illustrations from around the world that addressed the theme and subthemes of the ritual renewal of life, thus providing a universal context to the original Roman example. The Golden Bough became a study of the transcultural themes of sacred kingship, rites of succession, seasonal renewal festivals, mythologies of dying and rising gods, rites of scapegoating and expulsion, various forms of sympathetic and ‘contagious’ magic, and substitutionary ritual deaths, among other topics. Frazer thought that these showed the patterned way that the premodern human mind worked – a kind of archaeology of mentality. He held that once these universal patternings were understood, then many otherwise obscure or unusual cultural practices and beliefs – including many of those found in the Bible – would become more intelligible.

Psychologists Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) and C.G. Jung (1875–1961) also began to interpret religious patternings as expressions of the way the human psyche works. In particular, Jung correlated stages of the development of the human ego/self with what he took to be the equivalence of those stages expressed in the projection and history of mythological symbols. Hence certain psychological patterns or ‘archetypes’ could be found in religion – expressed, for example, in images of a primal paradise, a Great Mother, the journey of the ‘hero,’ or the reconciling ‘union of opposites.’ ‘God-images’ were understood to represent various features of the ‘archetype of the self,’ in all its stages. The writings of Joseph Campbell (1904–1987)

– including the classic, The Hero with a Thousand Faces – would bring much of this approach into the public domain.

If recurring religious representations and practices appear independently in different cultures, with no explanation for their resemblances in terms of historical influence, then that might suggest that the parallels express something common to the human condition. But what? What is it that the patternings of religious life ultimately express? What are they