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

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patterns of? The human psyche? Social bonding? Political power? Gender empowerments? Varying environments? Social class? Are there stages of development that religious history goes through, and do the stages of the development of society and consciousness explain the varieties of religion? All of these trajectories of explanation utilized, indeed, required, comparative data. All have served as frameworks for pursuing and organizing the crosscultural study of religion. Here, then, comparison ultimately involves more than description. It is guided by issues of explanation, too, and becomes a testing ground for theories of human behavior.

Inventories, taxonomies, phenomenologies

In late nineteenth-century Europe, the general ‘science of religion’ included two principal components: historical and phenomenological. The latter referred mainly to a description of types and forms of religious experience. Its task was to collate and organize all the data of religious history into groupings or classes of religious expressions – that is, to identify an overall taxonomy or anatomy of religious life. This was an inventorial enterprise that resulted in encyclopedic catalogues illustrating all the common forms of religion. An example was the influential work of P.D. Chantepie de la Saussaye published in 1887 (in German) and translated as Manual of the Science of Religion. Chantepie classed kinds of religious ‘phenomena’ together, along with subclasses. For example, the class, ‘objects of veneration,’ included stones, trees, animals, sky, earth, sun, moon, fire, ancestors, saints, heroes, and gods. He grouped together ‘practices’ under rubrics like divination, sacrifice, prayer, sacred dance and music, processions, rites of purification, sacred times and places, and described categories such as priests (and other religious specialists), scriptures, types of religious communities, myths, and theologies. Chantepie illustrated each category with examples from different cultures, and summarized the research that had been done on it. What naturalists like Linnaeus had done for the botanical world was now to be done for religion. The religious world had to be mapped, and its many species, here its ‘classes of phenomena,’ named and typed.

The phenomenology of religion tradition also went beyond just mapping. It began to look for an understanding of how religious forms function in the worlds of the adherents. Two major figures that developed this were Gerardus van der Leeuw in his Religion in Essence and Manifestation (German original, 1933), and Mircea Eliade. Van der Leeuw’s book, which described religion as a relationship to an ‘other power,’ focused on some 106 patterns of religious life. For each one he tried to bring out the essential religious values, structure, and meanings connected with it.

Mircea Eliade’s comparative patterns

The best-known comparative religion scholar of the last generation was the Rumanianborn Mircea Eliade (1907–1986), who came to the University of Chicago in 1956. Eliade’s interest was in the recurring patterns and symbolisms by which religious cultures construct and inhabit their particular kinds of ‘worlds,’ through the language of myth and ritual. Such systems are structured, for the insider, by the belief in a sacred dimension to life, which makes them different from the nonreligious worlds which lack that factor. Eliade used the term hierophany, which literally means ‘a manifestation of the sacred,’ to refer to any object or form believed to convey spiritual power and value. Examples include trees, places, hunting,

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eating, one’s country, personal gods, cosmic gods, or yogic techniques that aim at liberation from the human condition. Moreover, ‘To many a mystic,’ Eliade writes, ‘the integrated quality of the cosmos is itself a hierophany’ (Eliade 1958: 459). Some particularly distinctive comparative ‘modalities of the sacred’ as interpreted by Eliade include the following:

Sacred space

All humans have the experience of space, but religious cultures endow special places as gateways or connectors to the world of the sacred. Religious systems orient life around certain fixed points that form a site of communication with the gods. The sites may be natural, provided by the environment, like certain rivers or mountains, or they may be human constructions like shrines and temples. Sometimes these linkages are explicitly understood to connect heaven and earth, the above and the below. Around such an axis, or ‘Centre of the World,’ the rest of the world, the ordinary world, rises up and receives its value. A grandscale example would be the great shrine at Mecca, the Ka’ba, the spiritual point on earth that Muslims believe God ordained as a bond with humanity. But local altars may also comprise an axis mundi (world axis), too.

The history of religion will show innumerable ‘centers of the world,’ each of which is absolute for the respective believers. Eliade’s point is that this kind of language should not be judged literally or geographically, but as illustrative of a common religious way of structuring one’s world through concentrative, centripetal points of focus (objects, places, mountains, shrines). That is, because a ‘world’ is relative to a people, these centers are not superstitious beliefs, but examples of a way the mind orients itself in space. Traditional Christian beliefs that placed Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulcher (the traditional site of the tomb of Christ) at the center of the world and world maps, or the equivalent claims in other traditions, may be then understood in this wider comparative context. In Eliadean usage, such comparative perspective on sacred space gives context, dimensionality and universal humanity to any particular version of religious places and orientations.

Mythic time

A related religious pattern featured in Eliade’s work is ‘sacred time.’ These are ritual or festival occasions when believers step into the revered ‘Great Time’ of the founders and gods. Religious cultures see themselves in terms of their own foundational sacred histories

– accounts of primal, originary times when the world was created by the actions of the great beings of the past. However, it is not just past, chronological time. It is time that always underlies present time, and can be accessed periodically and reenacted through ritual ‘openings’. In this way, one’s world is renewed and re-empowered.

Sacrality of nature

Eliade held that for homo religiosus (‘religious man’) sacrality is often revealed through the very structures of nature. These include patterns connected with the infinity and transcendence of the sky, the fecundity of the earth, the power of the sun, the waxing and waning cycle of the moon and of life and death, the durability of stones, and the solubility and creativity of water. As such, these ‘systems of symbolism’ form connections with various religious motifs. Examples are the association of creator deities with the sky, goddesses with earth and moon,

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and baptismal rebirth with water. These and other complexes are described at length in Eliade’s Patterns in Comparative Religion (first French edition 1949).

Eliade’s approach, which he referred to as the ‘History of Religions,’ provided a set of comparative categories that cut across the particular religious traditions. At the same time, for Eliade the study of religion was a study in human creativity, on the analogy that religions are complex symbolic universes like great works of art. Studying these ‘creations,’ he thought, would have a culturally de-provincializing and rejuvenating effect.

In most respects Eliade’s work is representative of both the strengths and weaknesses of traditional academic comparative religion. Many of the contemporary critiques of comparativism are critiques of Eliadeanism, and typically include the charge that crosscultural categories illegitimately override significant cultural contexts and differences. This and other issues will be addressed next.

Issues and critiques

Comparativism is not without its problems and critics. Especially when it claims crosscultural patterns, it can indulge in superficial parallels, false analogies, misleading associations, egregious stereotyping, and wholly unscientific or imaginative projections. As well, many historians believe that the best way to study religion is to avoid the application of abstract, generic concepts, with their preestablished meanings, and to build a knowledge of a particular religious tradition on its own terms, through its own primary sources. Critics of comparativism therefore often claim that it is always the specific, not the general, that is ‘the real,’ and that religious phenomena are indelibly embedded in unique sociocultural settings and hence are incomparable. The ‘same’ theme – such as ritual ablution or sacred space – may have different meanings and functions in different historical contexts. The distinctiveness of religious cultures, in this sense, would seem to remain elusively off the comparative grid. Briefly, here is a summary of these and other critical issues.

Comparativism as suppressing difference

Perhaps the most common criticism of cross-cultural categorizations is that they suppress or conceal significant difference, giving the illusion of homogeneity by making the expressions of other cultures conform to the concepts used by the scholar. The comparativist’s concepts, the critic maintains, are themselves cultural, for example, European or Christian. Other societies are then reduced to instances of Euro-Christian classifications. Vague and dubious resemblances are abstracted from rich diversity, and the representation of others is limited to only those points which illustrate the scholar’s own vocabulary. If a Westerner sets out to compare different ideas of ‘God’ around the world, he already has a standard of what to look for and it may be inadequate to describing non-Western representations of the superhuman.

A major advocate of the need for more rigorous contextual analysis in the comparative enterprise is the University of Chicago scholar, Jonathan Z. Smith. Many of his works (Smith 1982, 1987, 1990, 2004) challenge traditional categories and methods of comparison. To take one instance, Smith critiques Eliade’s interpretation of the sacred ‘pole’ of a certain aboriginal Australian tribe. Eliade had maintained that the pole represented a kind of world axis that could nevertheless be carried from place to place. This portable link with the world above would allow the tribe to remain ‘in its universe.’ Smith’s careful examination of the evidence showed that Eliade had superimposed the notion of a ‘World Center’ onto a culture

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which had very different notions of space and no notions of ritual linkages with a world above. The world axis idea, Smith pointed out, belonged to other kinds of cultures, like those of ancient Near Eastern city states, where political power was highly centralized and manifest in temples linking the human and the gods. But the Australian notion of space and environment lacked these elements. Smith concluded that ‘The “Center” is not a secure pattern to which data may be brought as illustrative; it is a dubious notion that will have to be established anew on the basis of detailed comparative endeavors’ (Smith 1987: 17).

Comparativism not only has been accused of inaccuracy of representation, but has been charged with political arrogance: appropriating ‘others’ to one’s worldview and depriving them of their own voices. So-called cross-cultural thought can thus become a form of colonialist ideology – a means of extending one’s own values over all and at the same time suppressing the ‘subjectivity’ of those who differ. According to this criticism, comparativism amounts to a kind of conceptual imperialism exercised by one culture, class, or gender over others.

So-called postmodern thinking challenges the notion of objectivity and maintains that comparative accounts are grounded in ideologies and used for the scholar’s own theoretical purposes. Thus, what the comparativist takes as patterns ‘out there,’ should really be seen as strategies for manipulating data for subjective or cultural goals.

Comparativism as untheoretical

There is also the charge that the generalizations of comparative religion lack scientific value. Anyone, for example, can make claims about the existence of certain patterns, but it could be argued that this is just another form of mythmaking, fiction, metaphor, play. What, in contrast, is the scientific basis of comparison? Are its claims verifiable by evidence and falsification? For example, what social or historical conditions explain the differences and similarities contained in the comparison? Anthropologists, for their part, have a long scholarly tradition of comparative analysis – including statistical analysis – of cross-cultural topics (like kinship), with attention to complex variables and co-variables (cf. Naroll and Cohen 1970: 581–1008); and sociologists of religion have comparable analyses of new religious movements. But, it is charged, comparative religion scholarship has yet to incorporate and apply the canons of empirical and analytical methods (Martin 2000). A ‘strong program’ of comparative study would have ‘scientific consequentiality’ because it would advance evidence that can be falsified or tested; the act of placing a particular phenomenon as a member of a comparative ‘class’ would have to be defensible and shown to be necessary, much as particular languages could be shown to be logical instances of a certain language family (cf. Ivan Strenski, ‘The Only Kind of Comparison Worth Doing,’ in Idinopulos 2006: 271–292). Recent applications of cognitive and evolutionary models to the comparative study of religion point to more rigorous models of evidence and determination of variables (cf. Whitehouse 2004).

Regional comparison

Many would want to limit comparison to historically contiguous cultures, where there are already some common structural features and values. Exponents contrast that with what is taken to be the dubious practice of comparison between unrelated cultures or religions. The first. regional type, is based on a degree of historical genealogy in the form of continuity, diffusion, or contact.

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Some elements of contemporary comparativism

The critiques have meant that the methods and process of cross-cultural concept formation have had to be qualified and defined in more careful ways. Hence, the post-Eliadean phase of comparativism has seen emergent articulations and emphases that in some ways address and remediate the problems just listed (Smith 1982, 1987, 1990; Poole 1986; Martin et al. 1996; Doniger 1998; Martin 2000; Patton and Ray 2000; Numen 2001; Braun 2004; Idinopulos et al. 2006). The following summarizes some of the elements and affirmations found in contemporary comparativism.

First, as mentioned above and as will be shown in the next sections, is that comparison is not only a matter of describing commonality, but a tool that may be used either to find similarity or difference. Insofar as comparison can also be used to highlight particulars, it is less subject to the above criticisms. Patterns are then not simply reductions to common types, as though forcing all differences into stereotypic boxes and erasing all particularity, but also have the effect of calling attention to differences, variations or innovations relative to the common theme. Arguably, you cannot have difference or distinctive attributes without some point of commonality in relation to which something is then different or distinctive.

Second,‘common factors’ or patterns can be understood as matters to be tested rather than assumed or taken for granted. As such, a comparative pattern would be like a hypothesis to be explored or a question to be asked in relation to each of its supposed cultural examples (cf. Neville 2001, for a thorough review of this). Counter-evidence would be examined, complexity acknowledged. The cultural bias of the pattern would be taken into account. Thematic inquiry – like the use of any concept that might guide a historian’s work – would then amount to a starting point for the complexities of research, leading toward areas of unforeseen possibilities, rather than an ideological gridwork imposed on history once and for all. Certainly comparative analysis is not a substitute for historical analysis. They go together.

Third, comparison can and should be clearly based on defined aspects of that which is compared. By focusing on and controlling the exact point of analogy, the comparativist understands that the objects may be quite incomparable in other respects and for other purposes. Because two or more things do not appear ‘the same’ on the surface, or as wholes, does not mean that they are not comparable in some ways (cf. Poole 1986). There is folk wisdom to the phrase, ‘You can’t compare apples and oranges,’ because on the surface and as a whole, they are not ‘the same,’ yet they are comparable in some aspects: both belong to the class ‘fruit,’ both are edible, both are round and similar in size, and so forth. Proper comparison does not equate similarity with identity. Moreover, comparativists then must stipulate not only which feature of the data they are comparing, but also for what purpose (cf. Smith 1982, 2004; Carter 1998). Some outstanding, exemplary case studies illustrate this (Holdrege 1996, comparing Hinduism and Rabbinic Judaism, and Jones 2000, comparing sacred architectures).

Fourth, another qualifier is that ‘cross-cultural’ does not necessarily mean universal. A comparative pattern can be widespread, general, a matter of resemblance, or a ‘nearuniversal’ (a familiar anthropological concept), without being universal. A cross-cultural pattern does not need to appear in all cultures, but only needs to recur in relation to certain types or conditions of culture and religious systems. For example, not all religions have shamans, priests, savior figures, animal sacrifices, or scriptures. But the ones that do have certain recurrent social patterns in common.

Fifth, comparison may legitimately proceed by the use of clear cultural norms or prototypes, as long as the terms and purpose of comparison are understood. For example, one could take