Материал: The Routledge Companion to the Study of Religion by John Hinnells
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De Veritate (1624), and restated with variations ever since, ‘natural religion’ of this kind was passionately anti-ecclesiastical and contemptuous of rites and rituals, doctrines and dogmas, which it dismissed as ‘priestcraft’. Its adherents long found access to faculties of theology/ divinity practically impossible, but they were able to exercise an indirect influence on the study of religion from elsewhere in the academy.
The nineteenth century
Betweeen 1801 and 1901 the Western world passed through a time of unprecedented intellectual change. At the dawn of the century, Napoleon, having failed to conquer Egypt, was on the point of trying to impose his will on Europe; the formality of what Tom Paine called ‘The Age of Reason’ had begun to lose ground to those who valued the spontaneous more than the coolly calculated, and the natural more than the artificial. The Romantic movement (as it came to be called) left its mark on literature, music (where Beethoven and Berlioz were the greatest romantics of all) – and on both the practice and the study of religion. It did not begin in 1801. Romanticism had been years in the preparation among those for whom the dry categories of order for order’s sake had no appeal.
Where the practice of religion in the West was concerned, little in 1801 differed greatly from what it had been a century earlier, except perhaps the new factor of Protestant revivalism which had begun with the Wesleys in England in the 1730s, and which in the nineteenth century was to lead to the Protestant missionary movement, and indirectly to the making available of vast quantities of material (of unequal value, naturally) for scholars to work on. Otherwise there were Protestants, Catholics and freethinkers; outside, there were Jews, Muslims and assorted pagans, about whom little was known other than by rumour and hearsay. A massive work like William Hurd’s New Universal History of the Religious Rites, Ceremonies and Customs of the Whole World (1788) is instructive in this regard, representing as it does what the educated but non-specialist reader might find of religious interest in the foundation year of the New South Wales penal colony. It was not the only compilation of its kind: the putting together of encyclopaedias was common enough in the eighteenth century. But it is instructive in its concentration on ‘rites, ceremonies and customs’, on the externals of religion in the non-Christian world. Often it was wildly inaccurate, sometimes to the modern reader (of whom I suspect I may be the only one) reminiscent of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. In those days the heathen were expected to perform bizarre rituals and carry out abominable sacrifices in the name of their idols – the Bible said so! What else there might be behind the rituals, very few in the West knew.
The tide was about to turn, however. China, the West knew after a fashion. Before, almost until the end of the eighteenth century, India was a mystery within an enigma within a locked box. The Muslim north was known in part. Its official language was Persian before it was English; and it was through the medium of Persian that the West first gained a limited access to, first, Hindu laws (Halhed, A Code of Gentoo Laws, 1776, collected in Sanskrit, translated into Persian, then retranslated into English), and later, a number of Upanishads, this time from Sanskrit to Persian to Latin. Then in 1785 there appeared Charles Wilkins’ translation of the Bhagavadgita, followed four years later by William Jones’ translation of Kalidasa’s play Sakuntala (1789), both this time directly from Sanskrit to English. No ‘temple of doom’ here. Instead, an India heavy with the scent of jasmine and sandalwood and a home, not of grotesque ceremonies but of timeless wisdom.
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In the early years of the nineteenth century, while the fearsome figure of Napoleon was rampaging around Europe, India was coming to serve Europe and America as a landscape of the mind, and an antidote to the crass materialism that had emerged in the wake of the industrial revolution. This was not the ‘real’ India at all, but it served its purpose. And when it transpired that there was more to Indian thought than caste, cow-worship and suttee, India grasped and held the romantic imagination. One thing, however, was lacking: knowledge of Hindusm’s most ancient scriptures, known collectively as the Veda (meaning knowledge), of which the oldest part, a collection of over a thousand ritual texts, was the Rigveda. Long kept secret from outsiders, its Sanskrit text was finally published, at the East India Company’s expense, between 1849 and 1862, under the editorship of a German scholar working in Oxford, Friedrich Max Müller (1823–1900).
Müller was a pivotal figure in the study of religion in the West during the second half of the nineteenth century. He belonged firmly within the orbit of German Romanticism (his father wrote the poems set to music by Schubert as Die schöne Müllerin and Winterreise); he was a good friend of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and is said to have been a fine pianist. In religious terms he was (for want of a better word) a broad-church liberal Christian. One thing he was not: he was not a Darwinian.
Between 1801 and 1860 the raw material on which the study of religion is based multiplied at an extraordinary rate. What most of all captured the attention of a broader public was that involving the ‘truth’ of the Bible, and especially its chronology. We have no need to go into detail, though we may need to remind ourselves that in these years (before 1860), the study of religion sorted into two separate compartments: that which related to the world of the Bible (Egypt, Mesopotamia, Canaan, Iran, Greece and Rome); and that which did not (the rest), with Islam somewhere in between.
The Victorian anthropologists
Those who persist in believing ‘the Victorian Age’ to have been a time of smug self-satisfaction in matters of religion, delude themselves. For one thing, it was a very long period of time, and little of what was taken for granted in the 1830s still held good in 1900. No doubt there were smug and self-satisfied individuals, then as always, human nature being what it is. But with regard to religion, the second half of the nineteenth century saw practically everything called into question, somewhere, by someone. Then, as later, the chief focus of controversy was the word of the Bible: was it, or was it not, ‘true’ and therefore infallible, or at least authoritative? And if not, what leg has faith left to stand on?
On the negative side, some controversialists quite clearly said and wrote what they did chiefly to challenge the authority of the Church. The world could not have been created as described in Genesis, in 4004 bc. There had never been an Adam and Eve, a flood, a parting of the Red Sea. Further on, there had been no Virgin Birth, no Resurrection – the existence of Jesus himself was at least doubtful, and so on.
There was nothing new about this, battles having been fought over precisely this territory since the days of Lord Herbert of Cherbury and the deists in the early seventeenth century. But a blanket condemnation of ‘miracles’ and the supernatural was one thing; proposing a plausible alternative was another matter entirely. Before the middle years of the nineteenth century, though there was no shortage of fresh material, there was no comprehensive method with which to treat it, once one had abandoned the hard-and-fast ‘truth-versus-falsehood’ categories of Christian tradition. Evolution filled that gap from the 1880s on.
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Say ‘evolution’ and one thinks at once of Charles Darwin and his epoch-making book On the Origin of Species (1859). Darwin had very little to say directly about religion, either for or against (Ellegård 1958). Some of his contemporaries were however less cautious. The most widely read of those writing in English was the popular philosopher Herbert Spencer (1820–1904), who took Darwin’s biological theory and made it into a universal explanation of life on earth and its social institutions – government, language, literature, science, art and of course religion. All these things began with simple forms: homo sapiens had evolved out of something prior to and simpler than man (exactly what, no one knew, though the hunt for ‘fossil man’ was pursued with diligence); religion had therefore evolved out of something cruder than Hymns Ancient and Modern. What that ‘something’ might be, no one could possibly know (Trompf 1990). Conjecture was inevitable. Of the various theories put forward in the late nineteenth century, that labelled ‘animism’ has stood the test of time better than most. The term was launched by the Oxford anthropologist E. B. Tylor, in his important book Primitive Culture (1871), who declared that religion began with ‘a belief in Spiritual Beings’, prompted by reflection on the phenomena of dream and death. Suppose that I dream about my father, who died in 1957 (I do, as it happens): is that evidence that he is still alive in some other order of being? If majorities count, most of the world’s population has always believed so. There is then at least some reason to inscribe ‘animism’ on religion’s birth certificate, as indeed those wanting religion without revelation urged.
But might there perhaps be some even earlier stage, less explicit than animism? Tylor’s successor at Oxford, R. R. Marett, thought there was, and called it ‘pre-animism’, without dreams and reflections on the mystery of death, but with a sense of the uncanny and of supernatural power (Polynesian/Melanesian mana). Marett’s book The Threshold of Religion (1909) set out the arguments.
A quite different attack on the animistic theory came from the Scottish man of letters Andrew Lang (1844–1912), who had begun as a classicist and specialist on Homer, was for a time a disciple of Tylor, but in the end struck out on his own. From his Tylorian years comes his first anthropological book, Custom and Myth (1884). Myth, Ritual and Religion (1887) marks a transition, and his mature position was stated in The Making of Religion (1898). Lang’s final argument was that there was no way in which animism was capable of evolving into ethical monotheism. Again and again the anthropological evidence had recorded belief in ‘high gods’ – conceptions of a Supreme Being, divine rulers and creators – which the evolutionists had simply chosen to ignore or dismiss as proof of ‘the missionaries’ tampering with the evidence. Lang tried to let the evidence speak for itself. He never claimed to have cracked the code, merely that ‘… alongside of their magic, ghosts, worshipful stones … most of the very most backward races have a very much better God than many races a good deal higher in civilization …’ (Sharpe 1986: 63).
Lang was a public figure only in what he wrote. Having resigned his Oxford fellowship on his marriage, he held no farther academic position, living entirely by his pen. His versatility was extraordinary – historian, novelist, minor poet, psychic researcher, biographer, translator of Homer: he was sometimes ironical and often inaccurate, but never dull. His anthropological investigations were undertaken almost in his spare time, though he once confessed that given the opportunity, he might have devoted more time to anthropology. As it was, his hints and suggestions proved extremely fruitful. When he died in 1912, the Austrian ethnologist Wilhelm Schmidt had just published the first volume of his massive work Der Ursprung der Gottesidee (in the end twelve volumes in all), in which Lang’s ‘high gods’ were taken very Âseriously indeed.
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Another celebrated Scottish anthropologist to leave his mark on the study of religion was James George Frazer (1854–1951), still remembered as the tireless and unworldly author of The Golden Bough (1922), a compendium of practically everything sorting under what was then called ‘primitive’ religion, including folklore (domestic anthropology). For many years now, Frazer has been branded the archetypal ‘armchair anthropologist’, all of whose material was second-hand, having been raked together by casual observers whose motives were variable and whose accuracy was open to question. The criticism was justified up to a point, but Frazer did what he could to verify his sources, and was well aware of the risks he was running. In any case, the task of pulling together the growing bodies of evidence concerning archaic and vernacular religions needed to be undertaken by someone.
Frazer might well have become the first professor of comparative religion in the UK. In 1904 he was approached with a view to taking up such a post at the University of Manchester, but in the end declined, on the grounds that he was not a fit and proper person to instruct young men preparing for the Christian ministry. One wonders what might have become of the study of religion at Manchester, had Frazer’s scruples been overcome!
The history of religion school
Between about 1890 and the outbreak of the First world War in 1914, a prominent position in Protestant religious scholarship was occupied by a group of fairly young biblical scholars, most of them Germans, known collectively as die Religionsgeschichtliche Schule (the history of religion (not ‘religions’) school). Their leaders were Wilhelm Bousset on the New Testament and Hermann Gunkel on the Old Testament side, and their chief theorist was Ernst Troeltsch (1865–1923), who, almost alone of the group, is still read today, thanks largely to his book Die Absolutheit des Christentums und die Religionsgeschichte (1902, belated Eng. tr. The Absoluteness of Christianity and the History of Religions, 1971). The principles of the movement were threefold: first, to focus on religion rather than on theology; second, to concentrate on popular expressions of religion rather than on high-level statements about religon; and thirdly, to examine closely the environment of the Old and New Testments, rather than merely treating them as the free-floating (and divinely inspired) texts of orthodox tradition. The productivity of the young men making up the movement was remarkable, though relatively little of their work found its way into English. The trouble was that, like the Deists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, they were generally political radicals, socialists and populists at a time and in a country where socialism was held to be only one step removed from treason.
To the members of the school, the world or scholarship nevertheless owes a great deal, for liberating the study of the Bible from its dogmatic straitjacket, for opening up the worlds of ‘later Judaism’ and the Hellenistic mystery religions, and for demonstrating that conspicuous piety is no substitute for sound scholarship where the study of religion is concerned. Special mention may be made of their work on the religious traditions of ancient Iran, Egypt and Mesopotamia. Iran was important mainly because of the towering figure of the prophet Zoroaster/Zarathustra (perhaps c.1200 bce), whose teachings seemed to anticipate those of the Judaeo-Christian tradition at a number of points, in particular eschatology (death, judgement and the future life). Also, there were myriad points of contact between Iran and India. There emerged a new label, ‘Indo-European’, as an alternative to ‘Aryan’ as a blanket term for everything from the languages of north India to those of northern Europe. (The sinister overtones of ‘Aryan’ as the equivalent of ‘non-Jewish’ came later.)
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Other advances that were registered toward the end of the nineteenth century in the academic study of religion concerned Egypt and Mesopotamia, thanks in both cases to the decipherment of what had previously been unreadable scripts, hieroglyphic and cuneiform respectively. We cannot go into details, but in both cases sober history and wild surmise combined. In Egypt’s case, speculation went all the way from the bizarre theories of the Mormons (invented before the hieroglyphs had been deciphered) to the Egyptian origins of monotheism, which Sigmund Freud wrote about and may even have believed in, and the universal diffusionism of the Australian Grafton Elliot Smith, which claimed Egypt as the cradle of the whole of western civilization. A controversial expression of what came to be called ‘pan-Babylonism’ was a series of lectures on ‘Babylon and the Bible’ (Babel und Bibel), delivered in Berlin by Friedrich Delitzsch in 1902–5, which claimed that everything of value in the Old Testament was copied from Babylonian sources – the creation and flood narratives, the Sabbath, the notion of sin and much more.
The ‘father’ of the history of religion school (as distinct from its propagandists) had been the great historian Adolf (von) Harnack (1851–1930). In 1901 Harnack, also lecturing in Berlin, had argued against the widening of the theological curriculum to include non-biblical religions, chiefly on the grounds that the result would be dilettantism and superficiality. If comparative religion were to be taught at the universities, it should be in faculties of arts/ humanities, and not under the aegis of theology. (Eventually, this was more or less what happened.) A somewhat different point of view was that of the Swedish scholar Nathan Söderblom (1866–1931), who argued in his Uppsala inaugural lecture of 1901 that there should be no artificial barrier between biblical religion and the rest, and that comparative religion (religionshistoria) should be an essential part of the theological curriculum. Three years later comparative religion in fact became an integral though subordinate part of the theological programme of the University of Manchester.
The trouble, though, was that often, the advocates of Religionsgeschichte (comparative religion) were at best indifferent and at worst hostile to theology as the churches understood it and the faculties taught it. And of course vice versa. Hence in most universities the study of ‘other religions’ came to be scattered around departments of history, anthropology, classics, Semitic studies and the like, and kept separate from theology. So it remained until the onset of ‘the religious studies movement’ in the 1960s.
Psychology and the mystics
The years around the turn of the nineteenth to twentieth century saw the emergence of many new ‘sciences’, among them ‘the science of religion’. Within that science there were soon sub-sciences, of which the psychology of religion and the sociology of religion were the most significant. If two books were to be picked out as foundation documents of these subsciences, they might well be William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience (1977) on the psychological side, and Émile Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1915) on the sociological, though neither marks an absolute beginning. The difference between them is easily stated. Whereas the psychology of religion was, to begin with, concerned only with the individual’s mental processes as they relate to religion, the sociology of religion saw (and still sees) religion as a collective, social phenomenon.
In both cases the formative years were the 1890s. This has nothing to do with the character of religion itself, which has always involved individuals and societies in equal measure. In psychology’s case, the initial question concerned the mechanism by which the individual