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

Chapter 2

The study of religion in historical perspective

Eric J. Sharpe

Motive, material, method

The academic study of anything requires that those involved should consider at least three questions: why, what and how? The first demands that we examine our motive; the second makes us consider our material – what do we accept as admissible evidence? The third, and most difficult, level of inquiry is concerned with method: how do we deal with the material we have at hand? How do we organize it, and with what end in view (‘motive’ again)? A century ago, it was not uncommon to speak in this connection of ‘the science of religion’ (German: Religionswissenschaft) – a form of words no longer current in English. What has been identified as the foundation document carried the title Introduction to the Science of Religion (Friedrich Max Müller 1873). According to Müller, such a science of religion was to be ‘based on an impartial and truly scientific comparison of all, or at all events, of the most important religions of mankind’ (1873: 34). It was, then, to be impartial and scientific by the standards of the age and based on the best material available at the time.

The history of the study of religion since the Enlightenment can never be told in full. There is simply too much of it, and it is subdivided in too many ways: by period, by geographical and cultural area and by the ‘disciplines’ cherished by most academics. The one history can be described as being made up of many smaller histories – for instance the history of the study of everything from Animism and Anabaptism to Zoroastrianism and Zen Buddhism. The field may be divided by subject matter; along national lines; depending on where in the world the tradition of study has been pursued; in relation to events in world and local history; and so on, virtually ad infinitum. No one can cover the whole of the area.

The words ‘the study of religion’ obviously convey different meanings to different people. For most of human history and in most cultures, they would have conveyed no meaning at all. To ‘study’ in the sense of standing back to take a coolly uncommitted view of anything, was not unknown in the ancient world, but it was uncommon, being cultivated by ‘philosophers’ – lovers of wisdom – but hardly elsewhere. Similarly, where what we call ‘religion’ is concerned: gods, goddesses, spirits, demons, ghosts and the rest, people knew and generally respected them (along with what it was hoped was the right way to please, or at least not to offend them); ‘religion’ they did not.

These supernatural beings – who were they? In the ancient world, they were envisaged in human terms: a hierarchy reaching all the way from a royal family down through nobles and artisans to mischief-makers: imps and demons of the sort who spread disease and curdle milk. There were the ghosts of the departed, still in many ways close at hand and with their

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remains buried nearby. (The unburied tended to turn into peculiarly nasty ghosts.) Sun, moon and stars watched; storms rampaged; forests and mountains brooded; powerful animals marked out their territories. ‘Power’ was perhaps the key to the world as archaic man saw it – power of heat over cold, light over darkness, life over death – and those who knew how to control that power became themselves powerful.

The process must have begun at some point in time, somewhere in the world, but we have no way of knowing when or where that point might have been (absolute origins of anything are always out of reach). When our records, such as they are, begin – numerical dates are worse than useless in such matters – we are already able to sense the presence of something or someone like a proto-shaman: at one and the same time a ruler and a servant of the spirits, a controller of rituals and an interpreter of laws and customs. From what we know of later shamanism, it would seem that such persons were servants of their respective societies by virtue of their knowledge of the spirit-world and their ability to establish and maintain contact with it. Shamanism ‘proper’ belongs in the context of hunter-gatherer societies, and as the structure of human societies changed, so too did the function of mediation between the tangible, everyday world and the unseen forces that were believed to control it.

The shaman was chosen and prepared for his (or in some cases, her) work, by aptitude, discipline and application, and by initiation – a pattern that survived most tenaciously in the trade guilds and those of the learned professions, which (untypically in the modern West) treasured their own past. In more complex societies – that of the agriculturalists and fisherfolk in their settled environments, that of the city-dwellers within their walls, and so on down to our own day and its bizarre preoccupation with economics – the functions of the shaman (serving the people by mediating between one order of being and another) have multiplied and diversified in an intriguing way.

This is not to say that the Pope or the Archbishop of Canterbury, or for that matter the Chief Rabbi or the Dalai Lama, or the Shankaracharya of Puri, are crypto-shamans: merely that their training on the one hand and their functions on the other, are of a kind one recognizes. (How well or how indifferently individuals may fill high offices has no bearing on the question.) Each has a position in an ongoing tradition, and is responsible for its continuation. Here we have the first, and the dominant, sense in which what we call ‘the study of religion’ functions. It is appropriate to call this a discipline in the strictest sense, an apprenticeship in which a pupil (discipulus) is taught by a master (magister) inside the bounds of a system, within the frontiers of which both knew precisely what was to be taught to whom, and why. Since the wellbeing of individuals and societies depended in large measure on the maintenance of what it is perfectly proper to call ‘law and order’, much of what had to be learned was concerned with these concepts and their ramifications.

In many cultures, ‘law’ (in Sanskrit, dharma, in Hebrew, torah and in Latin, religio, even the much misunderstood Australian Aboriginal word ‘dreaming’) and ‘religion’ are almost synonymous. What one supposes began as habit hardened first into custom and eventually into law, on the basis of which boundaries could be set up and wars fought. In the ancient world, no one expected laws, or religions, to be all of one kind. The ‘when in Rome …’ principle was, and often still is, no more than common sense: deities, like humans and animals, were to some extent territorial, and to pay one’s respects to a genius loci was no more than courtesy. Customs differed in much the same way as languages differed, and normally even the learned would know very little of what went on outside the family. ‘Study’ was for the most part concerned only with the family’s (tribe’s, nation’s) traditions, history, sacred

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places and the rituals associated with them. In time, as more of this material was committed to writing, the study of those writings assumed a central place in the student’s apprenticeship: often through memorization and constant repetition and chanting, in a setting in which the student’s submissive obedience was simply taken for granted. This pattern of education is still operative today, though unevenly; generally speaking, Judaism, Islam, the ancient traditions of the East – varieties of Hinduism and Buddhism – have held fast to the method where instruction in the secular West has not.

What did the student make of other peoples’ traditions, their deities, their rituals and their laws? In the ancient world, there were, roughly speaking, three alternatives: to ignore them altogether (the majority view), to observe them as curiosities, without taking them too seriously, and to condemn them as evil. Let us consider the second and third of these.

Greek and Roman ‘philosophers’ and historians were in many cases intrigued by the customs of the various peoples they met around the Mediterranean and as far afield as northern Europe. Perhaps they did not take their own national myths and rituals too seriously. At all events, the Greek and Roman historiographers, beginning with Herodotus (died approx. 420 bce) showed a certain amount of interest in other people’s behaviour where gods and the like were concerned. Berosus and Manetho (both third century bce) wrote about ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, Herodotus having previously written about the Persians. In the second century bce Pausanias compiled an extensive and invaluable account of rituals and places of worship in his native Greece. The Romans for their part made fewer contributions, though special mention may be made of the accounts of the customs of the Celtic and Germanic tribes contained in ‘war reports’ like Caesar’s De bello Gallico and Tacitus’ Germania. Such writings as these (and there were many more) were compiled as information and entertainment, and to some extent propaganda: not as systematic accounts of anything. Tacitus ‘studied’ Celtic and Germanic tribes because they were troublesome to the Roman legions, and that was all.

The Hebraic attitude to such things could not have been more different. Israel knew all about ‘the nations’ and their deities, and trusted none of them. To the extent that other people’s religion appears in the Hebrew Scriptures/Old Testament, it does so under a black cloud. Egypt and Mesopotamia – oppression. Canaan – apostasy. Persia – a brief glimpse of light. Rome – more oppression, this time apparently terminal, as the Temple was laid waste and the people scattered. Understanding? What was there to understand, except that the gods of the nations were impostors, small-time crooks, perhaps not without local influence, but entirely incapable of any act of creation. Least of all could they create a world, as Yahweh had done. They were mere ‘idols’, man-made and powerless. It is all summed up in two verses, ‘For all the gods of the peoples are idols; but the Lord made the heavens’ (Ps. 96:5); and ‘The gods who did not make the heavens and the earth shall perish from the earth and from under the heavens’ (Jer. 10:11).

There was the additional frightening possibility that ‘idols’ were nests of ‘evil spirits’ – unseen vermin whose existence was never properly explained, but whose malevolence no one in the ancient world seriously have doubted.

We find a partial relaxation of this uncompromising attitude in respect of the worship of natural phenomena – sun, moon and stars. These were at least God’s creations, and not manmade objects, and may therefore be admired for the sake of their Creator, to whom ideally they ought to point the way. Human beings, however, are incorrigibly obtuse, and go off in pursuit of ‘idols’ even so. A classical statement of this attitude is to be found in Paul’s Letter to the Romans (1:20–23):

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Ever since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made … [but to no avail] Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man or birds or animals or reptiles …

All of this carried over into early Christianity, later Judaism and later still, Islam. There is one God, who has created, and will ultimately judge, the world; he has made his will known to humanity through his servants the Prophets, though his power may be recognized in what he has created. To ‘study’ in this connection was to know and obey the will of God, as set forth in successive writings – historical records, prophecies, hymns, statutes and apocalyptic, visionary writings. We have no need to enter into further details, except to point out that in Judaism the heart of the matter is the Law (Torah) itself, in Christianity the person and work of Jesus Christ, and in Islam again the Law, as revealed afresh to Muhammad; in all three traditions, the dividing line between truth and falsehood was sharply marked (in some modern versions of Judaism and especially Christianity, it has grown less so, modernism and Islam meanwhile remaining largely irreconcilable).

All this stands out in sharp contrast to the spirit of detached inquiry we find in Greek philosophy. Where the Classical cultures had philosophers, the Judaeo-Christian-Muslim tradition had prophets and their disciples, whose business was less to inquire than to obey. The tension between them has been felt repeatedly in Western religious and intellectual history, and it is well that we recognize where it all began. On the one side there are the conservatives, who love and respect tradition and continuity; on the other there are the inquirers, the radicals, the freethinkers (or however else fashion may label them). The terminology is constantly changing, but today’s alternatives would seem to be ‘fundamentalist’ (meaning conservative) and ‘pluralist’ (which may mean anything, but is obviously antifundamentalist).

What of the Orient in all this? Here we must be brief, but in the Hindu and Buddhist traditions, to ‘study religion’ has always meant to place oneself under spiritual guidance, either by private arrangement with a guru, or as a member of a community of monks or nuns. In either case, the disciple’s relationship to a guru has always been paramount: to be accepted as a disciple, or a novice, is to be prepared to show unquestioning obedience to the guru in everything, however trivial or apparently unreasonable. Not until you have made your submission in faith (Sanskrit: shraddha) to a teacher, can you begin to be taught. What is to be taught, it is entirely up to the guru to decide. The process of teaching and learning is strictly one-way, from the guru to the disciple, whose role is generally limited to the asking of respectful questions and absorbing the teacher’s answers, either in writing or (more often) by memorization – a method still common enough in our own day, despite repeated attempts to discourage it.

We who live in the age of information, with every conceivable fact instantly available to anyone capable of pressing the right computer keys in the right order, find it hard to imagine a time when very little was known about our world and its inhabitants, and what little was known, had to be fitted into existing paradigms. At the end of the first millennium, the West divided religion into four categories, and only four: Christendom, Jewry, Islam and ‘paganism’– an omnium gatherum for everything that did not sort under the first three. As to the study of religion, one studied within the framework of one’s own tradition. To be sure, there was a certain curiosity value in other people’s customs: travellers’ tales have never lacked an audience, and although the genre invited exaggeration and a concentration on

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the previously unknown and the bizarre, world literature between the fifth and the fifteenth centuries (the ‘dark ages’ of Western culture) was full of fresh information concerning people’s beliefs and customs, myths and rituals.

In his fascinating book The Discoverers (1983) Daniel Boorstin wrote that:

The world we now view from the literate West – the vistas of time, the land and the seas, the heavenly bodies and our own bodies, the plants and animals, history and human societies past and present – had to be opened for us by countless Columbuses …

(p. xv)

Discoveries are not inventions. One discovers what is already there to be discovered; one invents what is not already there. Discovery is in a sense the archaeology of ideas, the finding afresh of what, somewhere and at some time, was once common knowledge but which the world has since forgotten. But having discovered, one has to find some way of incorporating the new information into one’s existing frames of reference. In the Christian West, that meant in practice sorting each new wave of information into the categories set forth in the Bible, with occasional footnotes supplied by ‘the ancients’. There were true and false gods and goddesses; there was the sin of idolatry; there were sacrifices offered to ‘demons’ and various related abominations. This was the only viable principle of measurement: by reference to the (so far) unquestioned and unquestionable data of revelation, as stated in Holy Writ and interpreted by the Holy Church. Not until the advent of evolutionary theory toward the end of the nineteenth century did the would-be student of religion have an alternative method to fall back upon.

‘Discoveries’ came thick and fast, once navigation had become a tolerably exact business, and exploration by sea (as distinct from the overland treks of antiquity) developed. Judaism and Islam were already known, though little understood – in Islam’s case, against a background of fear fuelled by the Crusades. The Enlightenment (German, Aufklärung) was more interested in China and its (apparently) rational approach to religion than in alternative monotheism or pagan superstitions. Most of the Enlightenment’s information about China came directly from the reports of Jesuit missionaries, among whom the first was Matteo Ricci (1552–1610), who idealized Chinese ‘religion’ as a system without ‘priestcraft’ (the bugbear of the Age of Reason), but in possession of high moral virtues. At much the same time other Jesuits were writing about the indigenous peoples of north America in similar terms; the phrase ‘the noble savage’ seems to have been coined by John Dryden (1631–1700) in his Conquest of Granada (1670), the point being that virtue can and does flourish beyond the boundaries of Western urban civilization. The ‘noble savage’ was (or seemed to be) the antithesis of modern urban man – an image which has since proved remarkably resilient.

What manner of religion might ‘the noble savage’ have known and observed? On this point, the unorthodox Western intelligentsia in the seventeenth and especially the eighteenth century were of one mind. Ruling out supernatural revelation and its (supposed) manifestations as a matter of principle, but retaining a core of belief in a divine moral order, there was proposed a system of basic religion, resting on five ‘common notions’: that there is a God, a supreme power; that this power is to be worshipped; that the good order or disposition of the human faculties is the best part of divine worship; that vices and crimes must be eliminated through sorrow and repentance; and that there is a future life, in which virtue will be rewarded and vice punished. This was ‘natural religion’, later known as ‘deism’. First formulated in the early seventeenth century by Lord Herbert of Cherbury (1583–1648) in his