THE FUTURE OF THE STUDY OF RELIGION
NUMEN BOOK SERIES STUDIES IN THE HISTORY OF RELIGIONS edited by W.J. HANEGRAAFF P...
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THE FUTURE OF THE STUDY OF RELIGION
NUMEN BOOK SERIES STUDIES IN THE HISTORY OF RELIGIONS edited by W.J. HANEGRAAFF P. PRATAP KUMAR
advisory board P. Antes, M. Despland, RI.J. Hackett, M. Abumalham Mas, A.W. Geertz, G. ter Haar, G.L. Lease, M.N. Getui, I.S. Gilhus, P. Morris, J.K. Olupona, E. Thomassen, A. Tsukimoto, A.T. Wasim
VOLUME CIII
THE FUTURE OF THE STUDY OF RELIGION proceedings of congress 2000 EDITED BY
SLAVICA JAKELI2 and LORI PEARSON
BRILL LEIDEN • BOSTON 2004
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Congress 2000: the Future of the Study of Religion (2000 : Boston, Mass.) The future of the study of religion : proceedings of Congress 2000 / edited by Slavica Jakelic and Lori Pearson. p. cm. — (Numen book series. Studies in the history of religions ; v. 103) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 90-04-12317-2 (alk. paper) 1. Religion—Study and teaching—Congresses. 2. Religions—Study and teaching—Congresses. I. Jakelic, Slavica. II. Pearson, Lori. III. Title. IV. Studies in the history of religions ; 103. BL41.C585 2004 200’.71—dc22
2003070873
ISSN 0169-8834 ISBN 90 04 12317 2 © Copyright 2004 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands Photograph on cover by J. Varsoke All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Brill provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910 Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. printed in the netherlands
In memory of our teacher, mentor, and friend, John Clayton (1943–2003)
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CONTENTS Acknowledgements ......................................................................
ix
Introduction: Whither the Study of Religion? ........................ S JÆ L P
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The Stubborn Persistence of Religion: Some Post-Secular Reflections .............................................................................. F W G The Stubborn Persistence of Debates about Religion: A Response to Friedrich Wilhelm Graf .............................. P B The Study of Religions in the Twentieth Century ................ H G. K The History of Religions and the Study of Religions: A Response to Hans Kippenberg ........................................ C S Difference and Coherence in the Worldwide Study of Religions ............................................................................ M P Response to Michael Pye .......................................................... R C N
23 43 47 65
77 97
Globalization and the Future Study of Religion .................... 103 B S. T Response to Bryan Turner ........................................................ 139 A B. S The Proper Object of the Study of Religion: Why It Is Better to Know Some of the Questions Than All of the Answers ................................................................ 145 I S Problems, Questions, and Curiosities: A Response to Ivan Strenski .......................................................................... 173 E A. C
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Diversity and the Study of Mysticism ...................................... 189 S T. K Response to Steven Katz .......................................................... 211 F X. C Engendering the Study of Religion .......................................... 217 E A. C Agency and Evidence in Feminist Studies of Religion: A Response to Elizabeth Clark ............................................ 243 A H Detraditionalizing the Study of Religion .................................. 251 P H Response to Paul Heelas .......................................................... 273 A B Retraditionalizing the Study of Religion: The Conflict of the Faculties: Theology and the Economy of the Sciences .................................................................................. 279 J M Theology or Religious Studies? The Future of Religious Studies: A Response to John Milbank ................................ 295 P M Ernst Troeltsch and the Future of the Study of Religion ...... 301 T R Response to Trutz Rendtorff .................................................... 315 S C Appendix: Congress 2000 Parallel Sessions and Panels .................. 321 Index ............................................................................................ 325
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS We would like to thank all who participated in the conference, “Congress 2000: The Future of the Study of Religion,” held in Boston, Massachusetts, in September 2000. This book was inspired by their contributions and perspectives on questions facing the field of religious studies today. Acknowledgement is gratefully made to the American Society of Church History and to the editors of the journal Church History for permission to reprint (in a revised form and under a new title) the essay by Elizabeth A. Clark, ‘Women, Gender, and the Study of Christian History,’ Church History 70/3 (2001): 395–426. We also thank The Continuum International Publishing Group for permission to reprint (under a revised title) John Milbank’s essay, ‘The Conflict of the Faculties: Theology and the Economy of the Sciences,’ in Faithfulness and Fortitude, ed. Mark T. Nation and Samuel Wells (T & T Clark, 2000), 39–57. We owe a great debt of gratitude to our editors at Brill Academic Publishers, Mattie Kuiper and Willy de Gijzel, for their patience and guidance throughout the creation and production of this volume. We also express our thanks to Sarah Coakley for her leadership along with John Clayton in the convening of Congress 2000, and for her assistance with editorial matters related to this volume. Most of all, we wish to remember with gratitude our mentor and teacher, John Clayton (1943–2003). Just as our work on this book was completed, we received the news of his premature death. In the future of the study of religion, John Clayton will surely be remembered for his scholarship and for his leadership in countless collaborative projects and professional organizations. We in the present will remember him also for his devotion to students, his talent as mentor, his intellectual openness, his generosity and warmth, and above all, for his indomitable will to make things happen with charm, style, and good humor. John Clayton’s vision was behind the genesis of this project, and his support and guidance behind its completion. This book is dedicated to him. Slavica JakeliÆ and Lori Pearson
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INTRODUCTION: WHITHER THE STUDY OF RELIGION? Slavica JakeliÆ and Lori Pearson At the beginning of a new millennium the interest in and appeal to religion in various dimensions of global and local cultures is greater than ever. The rise in religious adherence and innovation in societies around the world reveals the limitations of the secularization thesis that framed much of twentieth-century reflection on religion. An increased awareness of religious pluralism and diversity spawns lively questions, collaborations, and tensions among religious practitioners and policy makers alike. The complex and contested role of religion in international politics draws attention to the need for new and deeper understanding of religions and their relation to economic, social, political, and cultural forms and dynamics. Today the study of religion, too, is an object of engagement and debate. In recent decades the field of religious studies has been enriched and challenged by a wide range of novel perspectives, redefined concerns, and altered tasks. New methodologies have opened up previously unexplored terrains and overlooked histories, while new agendas have emerged from the complexities of religious life and expression in a postcolonial and globalized world. In the face of these challenges and developments, how should religious studies proceed and what shape should it take? Complex quandaries and questions unite and divide scholars attempting to circumscribe the discipline. Comparative frameworks prove useful for understanding religions in a globalized world, and even for drawing broad connections among religions in all their diversity. At the same time, postcolonial and postmodern insights problematize comparative studies, exposing the western (and Christian) provenance of the very concept ‘religion’ and underscoring the integrity of each particular religious phenomenon. New developments on the religious scene (such as new spiritualities or recovered histories and traditions) challenge the competency of prevailing methodologies and classification schemes. For some scholars, such developments demand a radical change in the character of the discipline; for others, the history of the field
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continues to have much to offer in understanding phenomena that often seem new, but (within a longer and more historical view) are shown not to be so. A host of questions also probes the possible and proper relations among the various sub-disciplines and methodological orientations in the field. Can and should scholars in the social scientific, historical, theological, and philosophical study of religion collaboratively direct their efforts toward common ends? Some demand such joint efforts, arguing that scholars of religion have an important contribution to make in shaping the role of religion in everyday social life and international politics. Others argue that the various methodologies are incompatible, or that one inevitably distorts the integrity of the other. Still others suggest that scholars of religion ought not contribute to but merely observe religions. The papers gathered in this volume were first presented at Congress 2000: The Future of the Study of Religion, a conference held in Boston, Massachusetts in September 2000 and co-sponsored by Boston and Harvard Universities and the international Ernst-Troeltsch-Gesellschaft. Congress 2000 brought together competing voices in the study of religion for conversation and debate on the proper objects, methods, and goals for religious studies in the twenty-first century. Scholars from Europe, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, and Malaysia presented a variety of proposals for the shape of the discipline and offered diverse perspectives on questions facing the field today. Four major concerns can be discerned behind the various proposals and questions debated at Congress 2000 and presented in this book: the place and status of normative judgments in the academic study of religion; the proper relation between theology and religious studies; the revision and formation of new methodologies and areas of inquiry in the twenty-first century; and the adequacy of the methods, questions, and tools of the field for theorizing and engaging religion in its contemporary forms and expressions. I. Subjectivity and Objectivity in the Study of Religion: The ‘Problem’ of Normative Subtexts Friedrich Wilhelm Graf opens the volume with the provocative claim that scholars of religion cannot and should not avoid addressing normative issues. Locating current debates in the field in relation to
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those of previous centuries since the eighteenth century, Graf argues that controversies concerning the nature of the study of religion and its place in the university have always been—and continue to be— deeply intertwined with normative concerns about the shape of modern society and the role of religion within it. Further, these debates have always involved efforts at self-legitimation, whether on the part of theologians who wished to defend their (erstwhile) hegemony or on the part of ‘scientists of religion’ who sought increased cultural authority. Because these debates are inevitably self-referential, Graf encourages today’s scholars of religion to cultivate a healthy skepticism about their own perspectives and assumptions. In addition to these common tendencies, today’s scholars of religion also share with their modern forebears a host of unresolved quandaries and conceptual aporias. Despite current insights into the problems and blind spots of earlier methods and theories in the study of religion, and despite new and important methodologies for understanding and interpreting religion in a variety of places, Graf asserts that “we have no solution for the problems which arise from the historicization or deconstructionist relativization of our knowledge.” Scholars of religion struggle to grasp and describe with any authority the “inner perspective of those under observation.” No one has yet found a way to “analyze living religion or write religious history without concepts which imply exclusions or have a normative content (conscious or not).” Further, there is no consensus concerning how to adjudicate among competing perspectives on religion and religious practices. Not surprisingly, then, Graf argues that new developments in the field (such as deconstructionist methodologies) have not necessarily brought today’s scholars of religion any closer to solving many of the problems that also aggravated scholars in the nineteenth century and earlier; such developments and methodologies, in fact, are not always as new as they first seem. Graf sees dangers in two contemporary trends which allow scholars of religion to avoid grappling with normative conflicts. First, the move toward a radical constructivism in its strongest expressions reduces everything to a text. Second, scholars who choose to appeal to a strictly social scientific approach to religious studies avoid normative questions. Both trends excuse scholars from the difficult and pressing task of reflecting on religion’s role and use in a variety of political, economic, social, and cultural contexts today. For Graf, as scholars of religion pursue their respective interests and goals, they
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should also be willing to participate in efforts to arrive at criteria for adjudicating among the many and often competing appeals to religion in contemporary life. Here Graf echoes what Ernst Troeltsch once argued in response to William James’s approach to analyzing religious phenomena: “One cannot simply sidestep the question of the truth of religious claims.” In his response, Peter Berger registers his agreement with Graf ’s claim that new methods in the field are often neither new nor improved in comparison with earlier approaches. Current postmodern claims, for example, parallel those made by historicists at the beginning of the twentieth century; French deconstructionists therefore bring contemporary scholars no closer to resolutions about normative questions than did their German ‘predecessors’ one century ago. Berger also concurs with Graf ’s insistence that truth questions not be avoided in the study of religion, but with one significant qualification. Graf suggests that normative engagement is the role of all scholars of religion (even though the theologian may perform this task more frequently and more overtly than others in the field). Berger, however, recognizes a sharper split between theology and religious studies. Thus, while theologians qua theologians certainly concern themselves with value judgments, ‘scientists of religion’ engage in work that will never result in clear normative statements concerning values. Nevertheless, Berger suggests that as citizens scientists of religion can and should make constructive contributions to the resolution of conflicts over religion in public life today. Ivan Strenski’s essay on the proper object of religious studies rests on a position related to but distinct from both Graf ’s and Berger’s conceptions of the connection between religious studies and normative questions. Adopting Karl Popper’s definition of a science as that which pursues problems, Strenski argues that the study of religion should be focused on what he calls “problems of religion.” Such a focus, claims Strenski, is critical for the intellectual viability and longevity of religion as a discipline. For Strenski, identifying problems of religion guarantees the distinctiveness of religious studies as a legitimate and independent area of study (and therefore of religion as an autonomous phenomenon). While clearly part of culture and intertwined with other dimensions of social life, religion is nevertheless “distinctive enough” to warrant its own discourse and syllabus of problems that could not as successfully be investigated by other disciplines. Thus, it is not sufficient simply to present data about
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religion; instead, religion itself must be problematized, and that is the task of religious studies. Strenski’s conception of the study of religion also distinguishes it clearly from theology. He argues that scholars of religion study religion but do not ‘do’ religion. For these scholars, “nothing is at stake” in what happens within or is decided by religious communities. Thus, the purpose of religion as a science is not, as Strenski puts it, to create, destroy, foster, fight, applaud, or criticize religion. Instead, the discipline is simply motivated by intrinsic, innocent, and disinterested curiosity about important questions concerning the nature and forms of religion and religious life. Here the differences between Strenski’s and Graf ’s positions become clear. For Graf, there is an inevitably normative dimension of all inquiry; insofar as queries into religion and definitions of religion are always bound up with normative concerns about the authority of religion or its place in relation to some feature of society, scholars of religion then have an obligation to applaud or criticize religion and the uses to which it is put in a global society. For Strenski, on the other hand, the real problems of religion are at a much more general level that does not intersect directly with what he calls problems for religion, or those controversial issues over which participants of religious communities debate. Strenski thus offers an initial list of questions and problems that the study of religion should pursue— problems that foster lively engagement and nurture a community of discourse among scholars in the field. Such problems, in the end, are self-justifying: the questions are more important than the answers. Elizabeth Castelli responds to Strenski’s proposals by questioning the fruitfulness and plausibility of curiosity that is ‘innocent.’ Instead of a ‘disinterested’ scientific preoccupation with abstract and general problems of religion, Castelli proposes that scholars of religion employ a method of “intentional interestedness.” While there may be some benefits to maintaining a distinction between academic and other modes of engaging religion, ultimately the costs of making an intractable division between insider/outsider, practitioner/scholar, and theologian/scientist of religion, in Castelli’s view, are too high. Further, she argues, appeals to such divisions are often illusory. Castelli and Strenski therefore categorize the work of Sydney Parkinson, the illustrator who documented the scientific discoveries made during the voyage of Captain Cook, in two different ways. For Strenski, Parkinson is a model of scientific curiosity whose innocence can be contrasted
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with the ulterior motives of Captain Cook. For Castelli, Parkinson is not innocent: his scientific scholarship should be understood as part of a colonial story that needs to be replaced by a postcolonial one. Rejecting Strenski’s split between scholar and practitioner of religion, Castelli endorses what she calls “border-blurring” methods and objects of inquiry in the study of religion. This means that Castelli also resists Strenski’s appeal to abstract categories of religion (such as those articulated by Ninian Smart, whom Strenski acknowledges) that (in her view) determine what is ‘religion’ beforehand, instead of beginning with the particularities of experience and practice. Castelli endorses projects that bring together many different voices and perspectives on religion and that therefore resist both false claims to neutrality and simplistic identity politics. Instead, projects such as these help demonstrate that “the most engaging future [for the study of religion] resides in a broad, inclusive, risk-taking, and border-blurring conversation.” II. Theology and/or Religious Studies? The ‘problem’ of normative subtexts in the study of religion—that is, the question of whether scholars should welcome or avoid engagement with the ‘subjective’ aspect of religions—carries on also in conversations about the relationship between religious studies and theology. John Milbank argues for the primacy and dominance of theology in the study of religion. Milbank claims that theology should be the foundation for religious studies insofar as theology alone can provide a firm defense against and counter-attack to secular denials of the legitimacy of religion as an independent discipline and department in the university. For Milbank, secular disciplines and understandings of knowledge and truth are nihilistic because they sever their objects from God— conducting their investigations regardless of whether their object may or may not be related to, grounded in, or expressive of God. As such, these secular disciplines deal only with appearances and conventions, and are in fact “about nothing.” Theology, on the other hand, when understood legitimately, rests on an ontology wherein all objects participate in God, and therefore theology alone is “about something.” Milbank argues that the current dominant versions of theology and religious studies, however, are also basically secular and nihilistic, and therefore also need re-conceptualization.
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Milbank outlines four developments that helped create the current situation of secular religious studies: (1) the invention (by Christian theology itself, first and foremost by Duns Scotus) of a non-theological way of knowing, wherein one can analyze being apart from God; (2) the secularization of theology, so that theology is no longer an “event of divine disclosure” but a second-order reflection on various and intermittent data (such as miraculous events); (3) the creation of a new conception of the state and its relation to religion, causing religion to become a private attitude which is still very useful to the state for its own task of maintaining order; and (4) the rise of a conception of ritual activity, which presumes that there are discrete religious phenomena and strange actions that can be analyzed. Together these four dimensions of modern western history account for the current condition in which religious and theological studies find themselves—that is, secular, nihilistic, groundless, and indefensible in the face of attacks and challenges from other secular disciplines. For Milbank, the solution is to be found in a reinstatement of Christian theology’s hegemony not only in the field of religion but also presumably in the entire university. It alone can provide a solid self-justification of theological and religious inquiry, as well as an alternative to nihilism. Paul Morris suggests that Milbank’s account of religious studies as a modern science veers dangerously close to caricature. The large majority of scholars in such fields are well aware of the complicated and problematic origin and history of their disciplines and few blindly embrace or employ their tools with no critical self-consciousness about that history and its attendant assumptions about the nature and task of religion. Nevertheless, Morris affirms the value of Milbank’s alternative history of secularity insofar as it does the work that Morris sees as so valuable in both religious and theological studies today: that is, it fosters important questions about (and critiques of ) the prevailing structures and thought-forms of modern (and postmodern) society. In fact, Morris argues that Christian theologians like Milbank and scholars of contemporary religion like himself share many areas of common interest and concern. Both seek to understand better and to offer religious (or theological) critiques of the modern state, capitalism, liberalism, and even secularity. At the same time, however, such scholars appear to part company over issues of pluralism and questions about the predominance of Christian studies in the study
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of religion. Here Morris suggests that Milbank’s counter narrative of the emergence of modern religious and theological studies silences equally compelling historical narratives that might come from those of different religious traditions or ideological orientations. Further, Morris urges Milbank to give a more adequate and robust account of his sources of authority, just as he demands the same of his colleagues in religious studies. Thus for Morris the tension between religious and theological studies can be fruitful, and therefore he sides neither with Milbank who wishes to relegate the study of religion to the margins of Christian theology nor with a hypothetical social scientist of religion who might eschew any connection to or conversation with committed theologians or practitioners of religious traditions. The narratives of neither should be so totalizing as to rule out mutual enrichment as scholars of all persuasions seek to achieve greater understanding of the history and possible future of religious beliefs, practices, and social forms and their complex relations to cultural, political, and economic forces and structures in our world today. Michael Pye shares Milbank and Morris’s questions about the premises of the study of religions, but differs from them in advocating the study of religion as a “coherent discipline in its own right.” This study of religions, Pye claims, is neither religiously motivated nor scientifically orthodox, but is an academic discipline that possesses certain methodological and theoretical qualifications not significantly conditioned by cultural differences. The very history of the term ‘religion’ has taught scholars of religion that in different societies and cultures ‘religion’ may have different meanings and alternatives; hence, the central term of the study of religion may be the source of its problematization. Nevertheless, Pye contends that such particularity does not necessitate giving up on the scientific approach to religion or on the plausibility of the coherent and unified study of religions. Despite the acknowledgment of the rich cultural differences in the manifestations of religious phenomena all over the world, and despite the rise in scholars’ awareness about the diversity and complexities in the historical and sociological manifestations of religions, Pye declares, there is no identity crisis in the study of religions. Pye argues that the unity of the scientific study of religions is assured through a recognizable field of socio-cultural and historical
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data that may be studied via interdisciplinary interchange of historical, philological, and social scientific methods. At the same time, Pye promotes the differentiated yet worldwide perspective of the theoretical analysis of religious phenomena. He suggests that the focus of the study of religions should not be on the divergent cultural or linguistic frameworks within which ‘religion’ is or is not manifested, but on the underlying elements of religious expressions. While specific to historical and social contexts—from Latin America, the USA, Europe, to East Asia—these elements of religious life may be elucidated, characterized, analyzed, and explained as parameters within different ‘models of religion,’ which as systematized notions of particular religious scenes allow for the coherent worldwide point of view as well as inform the theoretical contents of the study of religions. Robert Neville problematizes Pye’s idea about the ‘proper’ and ‘known methods’ of the study of religion, and the taken-for-grantedness of the theoretical and methodological determinations of data with which Pye defines the sphere of religious phenomena and circumscribes the study of religion as a discipline. As Neville explains, the study of religions is more complicated in the methodological and theoretical sense than Pye recognizes: the instrumentarium of the social sciences and historical investigation have had to be sensitized to what is considered as a religious dimension of the world around us, while the respective disciplines and their methodologies are furthermore changing when employed for the study of religion. Thus, Neville contends, the study of religions cannot be organized around non-negotiable positivistic discourse and cannot reach its coherence “by virtue of a canon of methods.” On the contrary, the responsible theoretical approach to religion includes not only social sciences and history but philosophy as well. Neville particularly responds to the omission of theology from the study of religions on the premise of its normativeness. Aware of the ways in which theological agendas were limiting for the study of religions in the past, Neville nevertheless maintains that if the study of religions avoids religious claims to truths, which are located precisely in theological thinking, it will unavoidably miss one of the constitutive elements of religious phenomena. Instead of expelling theology as a whole from the study of religion it is necessary to rethink its place; instead of discarding religious motivations in the study of religions, their potential in explaining things religious should be acknowledged.
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Æ III. Methodological Questions in the Study of Religion
It is hardly disputable that the type of methodological approach one uses for the study of religion shapes the form and the results of the analysis. Further, different methodologies can construct a different picture of the same or similar phenomena. Several contributors to this volume employ such insights as they bear on the shape of gender and women’s studies, the comparison and contextualization of various forms of mysticism, and the assessment of conceptual models for the examination of religious phenomena such as secularization. In recent decades the study of religion has been broadened and challenged in new ways by scholars who have turned their attention to women and gender as objects of inquiry and categories for analysis. Elizabeth Clark charts some of the debates and developments in the relatively new fields of women’s and gender studies in religion, pointing to the ways they have contributed to the study of religion generally and indicating what direction historical studies of women and gender should take in the future. Where a majority of historians in these areas tend to fall into two major ‘camps’—social history (adopted primarily by advocates of women’s studies) or literary criticism (associated with those engaged in gender studies)—Clark argues that both approaches should be combined in future studies of women and gender in religion. Investigations into the lives and conditions of historical women on the one hand, and the meaning and function of the category of gender in ideological systems on the other, can together provide important enhancements and challenges to historical knowledge about women in particular and religions in general. Clark highlights a few examples of the ways historians in both women’s studies and gender studies have challenged and contributed to historiography in the field of religion generally. By focusing on ‘real women’ and the material conditions that have shaped their lives historically, the field of women’s studies in religion has challenged historical periodization, categories of historical analysis, and theories of social change. When women are the focus of historical study, for example, major historical periods begin to look different, and alternative standards for periodization come to view. In Christian history, for example, a focus on women makes periods such as the Gregorian Reform, the Reformation, and the Renaissance appear no longer to be eras of progress and major social change—at least not with respect
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to gender relations and the conditions of women’s lives. Studies of women and the ways they have been hindered or empowered to action by certain institutions and overlapping social arrangements expand and complicate historical understanding and knowledge. The field of gender studies in religion has made important contributions to the history of religion by focusing on ideological and symbolic systems especially as they bear on the construction of sexual difference and of categories such as ‘woman,’ ‘femininity,’ and, increasingly, ‘man.’ Clark argues that the gender studies approach (which, in her division, focuses less on cause and more on meaning, less on material conditions and more on discourse) is particularly indispensable for fields such as early Christian history, wherein scholars deal primarily with literary and rhetorical texts. Here the task is to explore how ‘woman’ is constructed by patristic authors or to analyze how ‘female’ becomes a rhetorical code for something else. In the end, however, historical scholarship in religion (including that which focuses on women and gender) will be best served by keeping social-historical and ideological-critical approaches in tandem. Clark therefore suggests that today’s scholars of religion should seek to move beyond the divisions that often separate women’s studies and gender studies. Amy Hollywood supports Clark’s call for cooperation between the two basic approaches to historical scholarship on women, gender, and religion, but problematizes some of the ways these two methods are often distinguished or placed in conflict. The issue of historical agency provides a helpful example. Many (social) historians argue that the gender-studies focus on discourse and ideology denies agency to historical women, who are then simply (and inevitably) determined by dominant symbol systems. Hollywood makes several observations that question this claim. First, social historians themselves often struggle to maintain women’s agency when economic factors and other related material conditions become better explanations of social change than gender. Further, gender theorists do not generally use gender as an explanatory mechanism, but rather as a tool for new descriptive and analytic observations about the past and present. Finally, an analysis of the ideological construction of gender does not erase or obviate women’s agency but rather renders it more subtle and complicated. Hollywood therefore argues that gender studies and women’s studies cannot easily or fruitfully be divided according to the issue of
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agency. The problem actually lies in an overdrawn split between agency on the one hand and determination or victimization on the other. To do justice to women’s roles in the history of religion, and to attain a more sophisticated understanding of the history of religious developments and phenomena in general, scholars of religion should employ more complicated understandings of agency and historical evidence. Hollywood therefore challenges whether women’s studies and gender studies can be divided as cleanly as Clark suggests; if they cannot easily be distinguished, then perhaps the need to combine both approaches in the future is even more realizable and more necessary than Clark perceives. Stephen Katz and Francis Clooney discuss the relation between comparative and contextual analyses in the study of religions. Specifically, they touch on the relationship between universal and specific, shared and distinctive elements of religious traditions in one area of religious studies—the study of mysticism. The main principle in Katz’s study of mysticism is epistemological in character: he underlines that, like all other human experiences, mystical experiences are necessarily mediated. That is, they are shaped by pre-experiential models existing within each religion and within each mystical tradition. In the circle of those who have mystical experiences, who elaborate on or write about such experiences, or who read about them, Katz points out, stands one common element: interpretive structures that involve complex epistemological processes. Katz accordingly argues that the study of mysticism ought always to occur within the contextual framework of specific religious traditions. The latter includes each tradition’s distinctive ontologies, models of prototypical individuals, conceptions of the role of teachers, and assertions about the place of ‘elite’ religious communities, as well as its sacred scriptures and corpus of mystical literature. In order to show “a clear causal connection between the religious and social structure one brings to experience and the nature of one’s actual religious experience,” Katz gives a number of examples in which the contextual variables distinguish the contents of one mystical tradition from another, and of one mystical experience from another. In addition to underscoring the centrality of particular sacred scriptures for the development of each particular mystical tradition, or the ways in which specific mystical models define the norms and ideals of these traditions, Katz shows how the ontologies of Judaism and Bud-
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dhism provide the pre-experiential models for the meanings of the two principal events in Jewish mysticism and Buddhist mystical experience—devekuth and nirvana. While the first, Katz explains, is a result of the purification and freeing of one’s soul, the latter is a result of the annihilation of one’s soul. Thus, distinctive ontologies lead to distinctive mystical ideas and aims. Katz maintains that, while the contextualization of mysticism is pivotal for its study in any particular case (due to the very nature of mystical experiences as mediated), it is even more important when the analysis is comparative, that is, when it is constructed outside the total context of one mystical tradition, and when it results in cross-cultural typologies of mystical experiences. Katz sees such typologies as a reduction of the complexities and phenomenological integrity of mystical experiences. He cautions against comparisons that do not acknowledge the nuances in the contents of specific mystical concepts and claims. Francis Clooney sees Katz’s intellectual concerns around the ‘context-free’ study of mysticism as justified. Clooney seconds Katz’s admonitions against overgeneralizations of mystical experiences, pointing to scholarship about mysticism and postmodern insights that substantiate Katz’s critique. Nevertheless, Clooney argues for the necessity and importance of careful generalizations because they enable an understanding of mysticism across the borders of religious traditions. He furthermore justifies the possibility of generalizations about mystical experiences by alluding to the integral force of the theological claims of mystics who contributed to the body of mystical literature. In relation to scriptural tradition, these works not only participate in the re-shaping of the mystics’ own religious traditions, but have a life of their own and thus create a platform for general comparative approaches. Most importantly, Clooney argues, given the increasing encounters among different mystical traditions today and the need to sustain the future of the study of mysticism, generalizations about mystical experiences are becoming more analytically plausible as well as desirable. What we need in the study of religion, Clooney concludes, is not the abolishment of generalizations but a clarification of their rules. Paul Heelas makes an explicit invitation to rethink the place of certain methods and theoretical assumptions in the study of religion.
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Heelas declares that the traditional study of religion needs detraditionalization because traditional religion itself is undergoing detraditionalization. Heelas offers a simple argument: in the face of new phenomena of ‘life spirituality’ or ‘immanent experience,’ occurring both in non-traditional and in more traditional religious communities, the current study of religion must be methodologically and theoretically reexamined so that it can answer new questions raised by these new developments. Heelas’ claim resembles but is not to be equated with postmodern and postcolonial requests for change in the methods and objects of the study of religion. His argument is not organized within such paradigms but rather around empirical data which suggest that the western part of the world is not moving towards secularization but is instead undergoing a spiritual revolution. We witness today, Heelas argues, the shift from religion towards spirituality, from the Godcentered beliefs affirmed by and organized around institutional authority towards the experience of the divine in life here and now. While religion is outside of the person, spirituality is interior and immanent; while the former refers to transcendence, the latter refers to life, and is particularly embodied in the contents and manifestations of New Age ‘spiritualities of life.’ In Sweden, the USA, and Britain, for example, the predominance belongs to non-traditional believers—those who “believe in something”—and not to atheists and agnostics. Even those who remain within traditional types of organized religious communities have shifted their beliefs from a focus on ‘God as personal’ to ‘God as Spirit or Life Force,’ or from an emphasis on the external contents of tradition to those more ‘internal’ elements such as the presence of the Holy Spirit in the daily life of some Christian believers. Spirituality, Heelas asserts, is thriving both inside and outside of institutionalized forms of religions. The agenda of religious studies in contemporary western societies, therefore, should not focus solely on the problems related to secularization but also on the sacralization of life, especially since the rising western ‘spirituality of life’ is a serious challenge to the plausibility of the secularization theory (and on the very soil in which this theory was born). Ann Braude recognizes the pertinence of Heelas’s challenge to the attention that religious studies gives to traditional forms of religiosity, but she also questions the arguments that lead to Heelas’s thesis. Braude is not quite convinced that the western ‘spirituality of life’
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is a signifier of some dramatic and unprecedented religious change. Moreover, although she does not protest the idea that the study of religions needs some methodological and theoretical adjustments in the contemporary world, she is concerned with the ways in which these adjustments may affect the study of religions in the past. Expressing her hope that religious studies can be “detraditionalized without being dehistoricized,” Braude maintains that students of religions can learn about current religious communities and trends that underscore the ‘spirituality of life’ from the knowledge they have about non-traditional communities of earlier historical periods. In the past, the success of ‘non-mainstream’ religious communities depended not on the novelty of their spiritual contents—contents that often contradicted the existing dominant beliefs and religious institutions—but rather on the ability of these communities to perpetuate themselves, that is, to become institutionalized. According to Braude, the unavoidable institutionalization of successful experiential religious communities in the past suggests that we must leave a space for the possibility that the New Age movement and the general turn to the self in contemporary spirituality is only a passing and not a permanent feature of the religious scene today. IV. The Changing Landscape of the Study of Religion The essays discussed in the previous section demonstrate that it is impossible to separate fully the methodological concerns of religious studies from the manner and world in which religions develop and change. Several contributors to this volume explore whether and in what way the study of religion should adjust its methods and categories to address the needs and circumstances of various contemporary contexts and phenomena. Hans Kippenberg examines the link between the methodology of religious studies and the history of religions. He argues that current methodologies construe history as a mere construction and therefore underestimate its formative influence on the present. Kippenberg gives an overview of the developments in the study of religion from the historical school, the post-World War I antihistoricism and phenomenology of Rudolf Otto and Mircea Eliade, to the antiphenomenological and anti-functionalist propositions for the study of religions embodied in Clifford Geertz’s work on ‘Religion as a Cultural
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System.’ Discussing the transformation of Ernst Troeltsch’s concepts of sects and mysticism over time—the change of their contents and their appellations—Kippenberg demonstrates that history is not only the locus in which the notions of the study of religion are employed but is also the endless source for redefining these notions themselves. He notes that already the founders of religious studies were aware of the created or—to use the term of a more recent provenance— ‘invented’ character of the notions they employed for the study of religion. For them, this knowledge did not imply that the past was irrelevant for the present. On the contrary, the ‘invented’ notions were supposed to reveal and not to conceal the role of the past in the present. Emile Durkheim and Max Weber understood their categories as those “of the observer and imposed from the outside on native material,” yet they thought of their explanations as a way to understand the present and not as an invention of the past. Moreover, Durkheim and Weber thought that religious history (and, specifically, historical developments in Christianity) was the key to explaining “the internal subjective side of modern social practices”: modern individualism and the spirit of capitalism. Kippenberg explains how, in accordance with Durkheim and Weber’s thesis that the world of modernity still rests on religion, Troeltsch pointed to the relevance of Protestantism (and specifically of Protestant individualism) for the emergence of modernity. However, as Kippenberg notes, the current emphasis in religious studies is not on the link between the past and present, but on the break between them. An examination of broad trends in recent scholarship reveals that the concerns of cultural studies have come to govern the field of religious studies: there is now virtually no distinction between facts and words and ‘evidence’ and ‘invention.’ Further, many scholars claim that neither ‘tradition’ nor ‘history’ are separate notions in the study of religious phenomena. Rather, as J. Z. Smith declares, religion is a product of history as such. Christoph Schwöbel begins his comments by attending to Kippenberg’s main theme—the gradual disappearance of ‘history’ from the study of religions. Schwöbel then points out that the disclosure of the revisions of Troeltsch’s categories of sects and mysticism in religious studies actually demonstrates an active relationship between the history of religions (what the manifestations of religions are at any point) and the very study of religions. Schwöbel suggests that,
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if the history of the study of religions is part of the history of religions themselves, and if religious studies develops together with religions, then the study of religions as we do it today is also a part of the history of religions, and we, the contemporary students of religions, are its participants. Schwöbel underlines that students of religions should inquire more into the relationship between the history of religions and the history of religious studies at any particular period in the twentieth century, and into the ways in which religious studies did and could influence the world of religions. But, he cautions, although observers and the observed in the study of religions are intertwined, the latter do not simply mirror or influence the former. The perspectival character of religious studies—the fact that the “study of religions does not have a stand-point outside the world of religions”—does not imply that one should not or cannot strive towards Weber’s ‘value-free science,’ but rather that we can only approximate this Weberian ideal. In approximating the ideal, the circumvention of the perspectival nature of religious studies can be reached neither through absolute objectivism, nor through universal constructivism. In its denial of the conditioned nature of the categories used in empirical study, absolute objectivism does not become science but a form of scientism. Occurring in the context in which the notion of truth does not exist, universal constructivism is ultimately reduced to a perspectivism in which “the debate between different perspectives . . . becomes simply a struggle for power.” Thus, Schwöbel argues, one can come close to the Weberian ideal solely by admitting the sources that condition her. The more transparent students of religions are about their own ideological, cultural, or religious commitments, the more they will analyze religions critically, take religious differences seriously, and in respecting “the ‘otherness’ of other religions,” take responsibility for shaping religious situations in their own day. The future role of religious studies in the context of accelerated globalization is the subject of Bryan Turner and Adam Seligman’s contributions. Turner views globalization as the process that increases the “fragmentation of values” as well as the “decline of cultural authority” and plausibility structures, thus intensifying relativism as the “fate of our time.” Following in the footsteps of Weber and Troeltsch’s historicism, and of Weber and Friedrich Nietzsche’s ethical pessimism, Turner identifies two potential roles for the study of
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religion in the global world: religious studies as cultural studies, and religious studies as a platform for defining the premises of human rights. Turner suggests that the globalization of the world is a process tied up with the coexistence of diverse phenomena—from the hybridization of cultures to new possible patterns of locality, from globalism to nationalism, diversification to homogenization. These complexities notwithstanding, Turner argues that globalization inevitably leads towards the neutralization and weakening of identities and group memberships, and in the religious sphere to a critical overlapping between the religious realm and the cultural sphere. In the context of global secularization, Turner declares, religious studies “might be simply the study of religious cultures and their hybridization.” However, Turner also sees a constructive potential of religious studies for advancing the possibility of social solidarity in the globalized world. He writes that the incommensurability of human values and the multiplication of social worlds reinforce postmodern relativism and the lack of social solidarity in the global world. Turner envisions that the ethical content for global solidarity could be drawn from precisely those thin identities and cool loyalties founded on selfreflective irony towards one’s own cultural group and from the awareness of the shared vulnerability and interdependence of human beings. Turner calls this ethical stance “cosmopolitan virtue,” and considers it a product of globalization and a possible solution for the problem of global solidarity. Precisely in the global world, Turner writes, the frailty of human beings and the precariousness of human institutions is more obvious; hence, interdependence is more apparent as well. Turner argues that insofar as religions seem universally to grasp the frailty of human beings, the role of religious studies in a global age is not only to contribute to cultural studies, but also to provide constructive educational tools for comprehending the human condition. Such tools would advance attentiveness to human vulnerability and underscore its role in the creation of new patterns of global solidarity. The role of religious studies is therefore pedagogical, and as such may weaken “complacent relativism” by defining cosmopolitan virtue as the premise of globally advocated human rights. Adam Seligman does not dispute Turner’s descriptive analysis of the complex character of globalization with the concomitant existence of local and global, diversification and homogenization pro-
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cesses. Unlike Turner, however, Seligman proposes that identities in the globalized world are not becoming weaker but more complicated. Concerned in particular with Turner’s treatment of the relation between religion and human rights, Seligman recognizes the importance of Turner’s examination of ethical relativism and the possibilities of religions and religious studies contributing productively to the realm of human rights. But, as Seligman points out, Turner’s discourse about the universality of cosmopolitan virtue based on the shared (global) view of human frailty is problematic in a world in which the perceptions of (and religious approaches to) human frailty differ radically. Equally open to discussion, Seligman continues, is Turner’s claim about the universality of the concept of human rights. This universal conception has at least three problems: (1) it strives towards one—liberal and western—tradition of human rights; (2) it treats the individual as the primary agent; and (3) it asserts the general application of religion in promoting a cosmopolitan stance towards the ‘other.’ But religious traditions at the origin of human rights, Seligman warns, are not so simply universalistic, and the individuals they establish at the heart of their social expressions are not autonomous but heteronomous creatures. What we are facing today in general and in the religious sphere in particular is pluralism at its peak, and the key to handling it, Seligman claims, is not (only) irony but “epistemological modesty.” Trutz Rendtorff closes the volume by bringing the work of Troeltsch in conversation with the changing landscape of the study of religion today. While many of the specifics of Troeltsch’s proposals and claims will no longer stand up to current insights in the field, nevertheless, one hallmark of Troeltsch’s intellectual program remains highly relevant: that is, his tendency to engage historical and methodological questions in the study of religion with an eye to practical interests about the shape of religion and society now and in the future. Rendtorff argues that the study of religion should not be separated from theology as if the former could or should somehow be objective and utterly distinct from what Rendtorff calls “naïve religion” (or the lived expressions of faith communities). In fact, Rendtorff reminds readers that since its inception, the academic study of religion has been bound up with practical interests and commitments. Instead of exacerbating the contemporary split between theology and religious studies, scholars in the study of religion should make productive
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and constructive contributions to ‘lived religion’ and ethics today. By articulating correctives to what he sees as the sometimes extreme expressions of naïve religion, and by examining theologies in the plural, scholars of religious studies can help religion itself be a more productive and intelligent contributor to the shaping of cultures. Rendtorff also suggests that the field of religious studies can and should be directed toward the solution of contemporary problems and challenges such as globalization, the ecological crisis, and the possibilities and dangers of new developments in genetics. Sarah Coakley applauds Rendtorff ’s insistence on a necessarily practical task for the study of religion, but differs on what this task ought to be and how it should be carried out. Specifically, she rejects Rendtorff ’s proposal that academic theology and religious studies be directed toward “disciplining,” or providing correctives to, ‘naïve’ expressions of religion. Who determines what is ‘naïve,’ she asks, and according to which (and whose) criteria does one judge and correct it? Coakley suggests that several of Rendtorff ’s proposals assume a supervisory and regulatory role for academicians of religion that is both untenable in most social contexts and undesirable because of its hegemonic overtones. Instead of outlining political programs, Coakley suggests that scholars of religion explore connections between academic reflection and ascetic practice, which may be an important resource in the important and pressing contemporary task of understanding and recognizing otherness in a postmodern world. A ‘New’ Agenda for Religious Studies? The example of Troeltsch demonstrates both the gap and the continuity between the methods, concerns, assumptions, and goals of the field in the late-nineteenth century, on the one hand, and those of the early twenty-first century, on the other. Like today’s scholars of religion, Troeltsch struggled with the relation between the ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ aspects of religious inquiry, underscored the diversity of religious phenomena, questioned and adjusted categories and concepts employed to organize data, exposed the normative subtexts of competing accounts of religious traditions and histories, and reflected on the implications of historical periodization (proposing new and controversial models for organizing the history of Christianity and for identifying the beginning of the modern period, for
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example). Yet not withstanding such anticipations of current concerns, today’s scholars also move well beyond Troeltsch and other influential shapers of the discipline in numerous and even dramatic ways. Postcolonial and other discourses disrupt prevailing and longstanding categories and assumptions about the nature of religious ideas and practices; gender theorists redefine the historical object and challenge traditional historical narratives; comparativists raise new questions about the possibilities of generalization and the fruitfulness of inherited categories, to name only a few recent developments. This continuity and discontinuity suggests that the heritage of the ‘founders’ of the study of religions is something that, while clearly in need of revision and critique, should not be completely discharged, but rather engaged for its wisdom and interrogated for its blindness. The essays in this book implicitly or explicitly engage a question that has been present in religious studies from its inception: that of the common theoretical and methodological elements of the discipline. For many scholars, the task is to demonstrate the autonomous and unified character of the field, while recognizing and exploring the differences and nuances in social scientific, philosophical, and humanistic approaches to the study of religion. Amidst the competing visions of the field offered in this book, some shared concerns and principles can be ventured. It is important to appreciate and acknowledge the normative expressions and truth claims of religious traditions without ignoring the theoretical and methodological achievements of the scientific study of religions. It is vital to study the particularities of religious traditions in their textual, historical, and ritualistic integrity while continuing to build (in a cautious and disciplined manner) comparative frameworks that enable some degree of generalization or cross-fertilization. It is necessary to employ new models for probing the history of religious traditions while continuing to explore the possibilities and limitations of previous methods. It is critical to develop new methods and categories that can accommodate new developments in the nature, practice, and boundaries of religion in a globalized and postmodern world without overlooking the resources of the past for understanding such phenomena. The future of the field will depend on the continuation of dialogue and debate over these and other questions concerning religion
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and the study of religion in the twenty-first century. Together scholars and practitioners must seek to develop and retrieve new and established tools that can challenge, expand, and correct the various methods for engaging and understanding religion today and in the future.
THE STUBBORN PERSISTENCE OF RELIGION: SOME POST-SECULAR REFLECTIONS Friedrich Wilhelm Graf In the spring of 1904 Ernst Troeltsch attended an English language course at the Berlitz School in Berlin to prepare himself for his trip to the ‘World Congress of Arts and Sciences’ in St. Louis.1 He intensively studied the then leading representatives of North American religious studies. Aside from authors such as James H. Leuba, George A. Coe, and Edwin D. Starbuck, Troeltsch read above all William James, whose Varieties he reviewed for the Deutsche Literaturzeitung.2 His interest in James’s empirical psychology of religion was primarily motivated by the problems within normative philosophy. As is well known, James rejected every general concept or definition of religion as well as all philosophical speculation concerning the truth of religious claims. The sole aim of his analysis was to determine the distinctiveness of the religious consciousness, that is to say, religion’s differentia specifica vis-à-vis other phenomena of consciousness. Troeltsch regarded this psychologism as deficient. In his lecture Psychologie und Erkenntnistheorie in der Religionswissenschaft, which he delivered in St. Louis on September 21, 1904 to scholars from all over the world, Troeltsch expressed deep respect for the realistic phenomenological descriptions of his Harvard colleague.3 In the same breath, however, he articulated his fundamental criticism of James’s approach, arguing that one cannot simply sidestep the question of the truth of religious claims.
Cf. Hans Rollmann, ‘Ernst Troeltsch in Amerika: Die Reise zum Weltkongreß der Wissenschaften nach St. Louis (1904),’ in Ernst Troeltsch zwischen Heidelberg und Berlin, ed. Horst Renz, Troeltsch-Studien, vol. 2 (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2001), 88–117. 2 Ernst Troeltsch, review of The Varieties of Religious Experience, by William James, Deutsche Literaturzeitung 25, no. 49 (December 10, 1904): 3021–27. 3 Cf. Troeltsch, Psychologie und Erkenntnistheorie in der Religionswissenschaft: Eine Untersuchung über die Bedeutung der Kantischen Religionslehre für die heutige Religionswissenschaft, 2nd ed. (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1922). 1
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“It is impossible,” he wrote, “to stop at a purely empirical psychology; it is not only a matter of given facts, but also about the cognitive content of these facts. Empiricism alone cannot answer this question; the question as to truth content is always a question of validity. And the question of validity can only be resolved by way of logical and general conceptual investigations.”4 Troeltsch’s North American audience apparently received this message with irritation and skepticism. Even after his move to Berlin in 1915, Troeltsch would refer to this incident in his lectures on Religionsphilosophie, reporting how “the Americans had looked at him somewhat amazed.” He would then go on to entertain his students with recollections of the discussion following his St. Louis address. When one American respondent quipped that logical and general conceptual investigations “were the high boots with which one walked in Europe,” Troeltsch allegedly replied with the clever, if condescending, retort: “But we Europeans could not go barefoot like the empiricists on the other side of the ocean.”5 Far be it from me to compare myself with a theologian of Troeltsch’s standing. And I also know that such metaphors of the metaphysical boots of Europeans and the bare feet of American scholars of religion, which were embarrassing even a hundred years ago, cannot do justice to the current situation of discourse. On the contrary, at present scholars of religion in the United States are conducting methodological debates far more intensively and with greater differentiation than their German colleagues. Indeed, the postmodern discussions on orientalism and occidentalism, new historicism and meta-history, constructivism and deconstructionism, as well as ‘writing culture’ and new comparativism, continue to play only a secondary role within Germany’s scholarship on religion. This notwithstanding, I would like to risk Ernst Troeltsch’s provocative strategy and, as a German Protestant theologian, interfere in the controversies taking place with pronounced intensity in English-speaking religious studies since the 1980s.6 Cf. ibid., 18. Cf. the lecture notes of Gertrud von le Fort, ‘Religionsphilosophie,’ Winter semester 1915/1916 (Ernst-Troeltsch-Forschungsstelle, University of Munich). 6 Anglo-American scholarship has recently witnessed a spate of monographs discussing the concept of religion. See, for example, Russell T. McCutcheon, Manufacturing Religion: The Discourse on Sui Generis Religion and the Politics of Nostalgia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Benson Saler, Conceptualizing Religion: Immanent Anthro4 5
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Allow me, first of all, to emphasize the particularity of my perspective. In spite of all efforts to secure methodological distance and clarify terminology, academic interpreters of religion remain formatively influenced by their own specific religious, intellectual, and cultural socialization. When dealing with the topic of religion, subjective elements inevitably creep in. I am a theologian strongly shaped by the traditions of German liberal Kulturprotestantismus along the lines of Schleiermacher, Harnack, and Troeltsch. As an intellectual historian, I have studied the partly Jewish, partly liberal-Protestant classics of the historische Kulturwissenschaften around 1900, such as the works of Georg Simmel, Max Weber, Ernst Cassirer, and Aby Warburg. In the crisis-ridden years from 1880 to 1930, these authors endeavored to formulate the conceptual foundations of a theory of culture which could do justice to the constructive character of all human cognitive activity. Following the critical insight that all objects of our knowledge are constructs of subjective perception, they rejected the ‘ontic’ independence, that is to say, reification of the terms society, structure, order, development, process, social system and religion, branding such a viewpoint as dogmatic. Instead, they developed concepts of cultural practice which would take into account the inherent meaning of the respective worldviews and subjective intentions of acting subjects. The particular merits of these pioneering theories set forth by Simmel, Weber, Cassirer, and Warburg lay in the perspective of no longer treating religious ideas about the world and concepts of value as epiphenomena of praxis or as an isolated area of culture. In short, religious belief was taken seriously, seen as an elementary source of orientation co-determining all aspects of cultural life. They were equally interested in the normative conflicts between religious belief and modern occidental rationalism as in the possible historical connections between certain religious traditions and society’s modernization, in other words, investigating religion as a specific source of modernity in its own right. I would now like to expound my post-secular reflections in three stages, the first of which shall require the most exposition and is entitled ‘Radical Historicism, or: Modernity Has Always Been Postmodern.’ pologists, Transcendent Natives, and Unbounded Categories (Leiden/New York/Cologne: E. J. Brill, 1993); Gavin Flood, Beyond Phenomenology: Rethinking the Study of Religion (London/ New York: Cassell, 1999).
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I. Radical Historicism, or: Modernity Has Always Been Postmodern
The scientific study of religion is a product of the European Enlightenment. Although the term historia religionis dates as far back as the sixteenth century, strictly speaking it was not until the seventeenth century that academic theologians of different Christian denominations began to write their own historiae religionum, which mostly involved the comparative portrayal of the three monotheistic religions.7 In the eighteenth century, theologians, cultural historians, and philosophers then began to publish histories of religious parties, philosophies of religion, and books on the science of religion or religious studies. Finally, in the nineteenth century, we find the coinage of such terms as the sociology of religion, psychology of religion, phenomenology of religion, and theology of religion. The history of these academic nomenclatures—a thorough examination of which remains a desideratum—clearly shows that, since the eighteenth century, the academic interpretation of religion has been decisively shaped by competitive camps, disciplinary differentiation, and methodological pluralization. As early as 1770 we find the rise of the Streit der Fakultäten—as Kant put it—which revolved around the question as to which academic discipline was primarily responsible for interpreting matters of religious concern. And this trend lasted until well into the early twentieth century where academic discourse on religion continued to be determined by such entrenched power struggles between theologians and interpreters of religion in other faculties. While theologians belonging to denominationally bound faculties sought (as a rule) to preserve their old monopoly or at least substantiate their pretensions to hegemony in these quarrels over interpretative authority, non-theological researchers of religions strove to increase their cultural capital by promulgating their supposedly objective approach and commending themselves as liberators from all forms of theological dogmatism. All too readily in the past, the fascinating histories of these academic Kulturkämpfe have been told as narratives of progress with the plot of a Whig history, namely, as an advance from theological darkness to the dawn of religious science. However, these success stories only 7 Cf. D. Kemper, ‘Religionsgeschichte I,’ in Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, ed. J. Ritter and K. Gründer (Basel: 1992), 731–33; F. W. Graf and A. Reuter, ‘Religion, History of,’ in International Encyclopedia of Social and Behavioral Sciences, vol. 19, ed. Neil J. Smelser (Amsterdam/New York: Elsevier, 2001), 13071–77.
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served the function of self-legitimation within an academic struggle for power. Other narratives are more persuasive. From within and without theology, the scholarly interpretation of religion has been characterized by normative terminology, missionary impetus, culturalcritical complaints about the modern age and (neo-)romantic hopes of re-enchanting a world no longer under the spell of occidental rationalism.8 Since 1800, the history of academic interpretations of religion can be described as a history of the power fantasies of intellectuals, seeking to liberate the oppressed, to stylize their nation as God’s chosen people, to reform society, or to deliver whomever from whatever. For the most part, the scholarly examination of religion was about establishing a new all-binding sense of direction and communal refuge to counteract the fragmentation of society, the anonymity of the individual, and pluralization of ‘values.’ Virtually all political ideologies of the modern age found the backing of prominent experts on religion. After 1890, representatives of the academic field of religion throughout Europe propagated ‘new religions’ and played to the gallery as prophetic harbingers of a religious revival.9 Scholars of religion have always been markedly susceptible to ideologies and, in their debates on methodology, strongly molded by the fashionable academic jargon of their day. Only very rarely have they been sceptical of themselves or shown critical detachment from their own academic activities. This still holds for the present-day: even today’s postmodern critics of ‘master narratives’ readily articulate their criticism in totalizing terminology and with great pathos. In the last twenty years many scholars of religion have complained about the lack of unity, heated internal controversies, and sometimes very aggressive criticism of postmodern ‘partisans’ within their academic field. These complaints have to be put into their historical context. Since the birth of the modern cultural sciences in the late eighteenth century, religion has been a highly contested object of scholarly inquiry and the power struggles within this field of study particularly intense. This mirrors the high cultural and political relevance of religion. Analogous to other academic fields, the science 8 Cf. Hans G. Kippenberg, Die Entdeckung der Religionsgeschichte: Religionswissenschaft und Moderne (Munich: Verlag C. H. Beck, 1997). 9 Cf. Friedrich Wilhelm Graf, Die Wiederkehr der Götter: Religion in der modernen Kultur (Munich: Verlag C. H. Beck, 2004); Frank Simon-Ritz, Die Organisation einer Weltanschauung: Die freigeistige Bewegung im Wilhelminischen Deutschland (Gütersloh: Chr. Kaiser, 1997).
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of religion has been formatively shaped by a diversity of feuds between competitive suppliers of religious goods and services. Shamans, priests, prophets, and religious virtuosi of all kinds quarrel over shares in the open market of world interpretations and ideologies. These battles have, of course, only fueled the interpretive controversies within the field of religion. Under the conditions of modern religious pluralism it would be naïve to expect homogeneity, stability, and unity within academic discourse. This extreme fragmentation of research interests corresponds to the individualization of religious lifestyles; indeed, the eclecticism, which a number of more recent studies of religion reveal, bears a telling resemblance to the techniques of bricolage which many modern devotees use to assemble their own private religious cosmos from the spectrum of divergent religious traditions. The renewed hope cherished by some scholars of religion of being able to reinstate a unified paradigm and generally binding terminology is the academic counterpart to an authoritarian dogmatism which many critical scholars of religion would readily associate with old ecclesiasticism or religious ‘fundamentalism.’ In view of the many overlapping areas which merge with other areas of scholarship, however, this pluralism of theories, schools, methods, and terms within religious studies is undoubtedly here to stay. Since the late seventeenth century, scholars of all confessions have claimed to be able to describe the histories of religion from a ‘purely historical’ perspective.10 The intention behind this historical-critical method was to destroy the old dogmatically sketched portraits of history. In the main, religious historiography was conceived as an emancipatory science directed at facilitating a new climate of tolerance. Its aim was to promote mutual understanding through the historical relativization of all positive religions. In England and France, priority was given to an allegedly rational criticism of religious faith, that is to say, to attempting to found a post-Christian, new, and truly humane religion sociale or civil religion.11 Despite the ferocity of their Kulturkämpfe, on closer examination the differences between the critical rationalists and enlightened defenders of religion, or between the theological and non-theological interpreters of religion, were in fact marginal. From the late eighteenth to early twentieth century, Cf. Graf and Reuter, ‘History of Religion’ (loc. cit. n. 7). Cf. Terence R. Wright, The Religion of Humanity: The Impact of Comtean Positivism on Victorian Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 10 11
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all parties were armed with a unified concept of religion, teleological concepts of religious history, normative semantics for distinguishing between good (as a rule: one’s own) and bad religion, as well as a monolithic concept of reason which afforded one’s own position a general universal validity, regardless of its defining historical or cultural particularity. All academic analysts of religion understood themselves, therefore, as policemen of rational discourse: they were intent on overcoming all superstition in favor of a religion of reason, ousting mythos in the name of logos and transforming the old dogmatic faith of the church into a moral religion of humanity. Even in the historical-critical description of archaic or foreign religious cultures, these scientists of religion were primarily concerned with reforming their own religious culture, in the sense of rationalizing popular belief. The new, supposedly strictly historical portraits of religious traditions or ‘purely rational’ concepts of the essence of religion were, for this reason, no less dogmatic or normative than the old denominational portrayals of religion. Essentially, this discourse on religion which aimed at rational enlightenment continued to rely on scholarly fables and mythical presumptions, and—as Maurice Olender has shown in the field of philology—was shaped by racism and gender exclusions.12 From the late eighteenth century onwards, scholars of religion and numerous theologians began to assimilate the new historical mode of thought and collaborated in staging what Troeltsch called the modern intellectual revolution of historicism.13 This new mode of thought also led to the historicization of the various approaches within historiography and the processes of cognition as such. At the same time, however, scholars also discussed the consequences of relativism and resultant problems of such an extensive historicization. Rigorous historical thought threatens to undermine all truth claims and time-honored cultural values. And this, in turn, means: if all human actions, linguistic expressions, and religious representations
12 Cf. Maurice Olender, Die Sprachen des Paradieses: Religion, Philologie und Rassentheorie im 19. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 1995). 13 Cf. Ernst Troeltsch, Der Historismus und seine Probleme, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 3 (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1922); Friedrich Wilhelm Graf, ed., Ernst Troeltschs Historismus, Troeltsch-Studien, vol. 11 (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2000); Michael Murrmann-Kahl, Die entzauberte Heilsgeschichte: Der Historismus erobert die Theologie (Gütersloh: Mohn, 1992).
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are culturally specific, and all forms of cultural and intellectual achievement are historically particular, then the process of historicization itself is also open to historical qualification. Recent developments in the humanities have strengthened our recognition of the constructive character of thought and the cultural relativity involved in interpreting ourselves and others. This insight into the hidden agendas, implied axioms, and concealed cultural meanings behind many historical portraits and interpretations of religion has generated both fascinating and innovative perspectives since the 1970s. However, I would not subscribe to the viewpoint that the critical analyses of Foucault or Derrida, Said or Hayden White afford us insights into a fundamentally new situation. Of course, we now know much more about the various linguistic techniques and conceptual strategies with which we depict other or foreign cultures. Indeed, today we have a very precise understanding of the reflective mechanisms at work behind our representations of others and how we inexorably portray ourselves therein. Nonetheless, whoever has read Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason will not be entirely surprised by the more recent linguistic criticism of essentialism or by the deconstruction of antiquated historical portraits. Certainly, in postmodern language games scholars bid farewell to the old autonomous subject and formulate a radical criticism of the first Enlightenment using the arguments of the second Enlightenment, as modeled by Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, or Freud. Nevertheless, in their attempts to dismantle the tenets of the first Enlightenment (that is, its idea of progress, hypostasization of thought, rational reductionism, masquerades of historically contingent rationality types as ‘reason as such,’ and other diverse monomyths), exponents of this third, postmodern enlightenment remain structurally attached to the same aporias of critical reflection they ascribe to the master thinkers of the eighteenth and nineteenth century. The message of deconstructionism is: there is nothing that cannot be deconstructed. This however must also apply to twentieth-century deconstructionism itself. And it is precisely here, on this point, that the assimilation of postmodern thought patterns within religious studies, ethnology, anthropology, and other cultural sciences reveals elements of dogmatism. One is quick to deconstruct traditional models of interpretation, but reluctant to take one’s own line of argumentation to its logical conclusion. Very quickly, many of the new ‘enlighteners’ have proved to be academic shamans when faced with themselves.
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Today it is particularly popular amongst students of religion to attack older, normative concepts of religion. In the postmodern fight against age-old monomyths, the general, abstract terms of comprehensive typologies are condemned as terrorism against the individual. We like to present ourselves as self-critical: before our fieldwork we conduct ‘insider-outsider debates’14 and stress the ‘poetics and politics of ethnology.’15 In our historical work we try to be politically correct and take care not to use any stereotypes which could be construed as a form of orientalism, racism, sexism, or speciesism. Yet, for all this, we interpreters of religion in the early twenty-first century pay a high price. Although justified, our criticism of the diverse dogmatisms in the history of religious studies encourages the autosuggestive belief of not being confronted with those aporias which we clearly see in classical scholarship. Time and again, we generate fathers to commit patricide, in the hope of freeing ourselves of their problems. In reality, however, we have no solution for the problems which arise from the historicization or deconstructionist relativization of our knowledge. Of course, we are proud of having relinquished our talk of ‘noble savages,’ ‘oriental debauchery,’ ‘primitive peoples,’ or philosophically barefoot American empiricists. And we know that collective identities are constructs of tradition—that national differences are never of an essential nature or ‘given’ (a priori). But even when the utmost care is taken to be methodologically sensitive, we still lack the analytical instruments or concepts which guarantee that our descriptions—as external observations—are congruent with the inner perspective of those under observation. Every one of us is bound by his or her specific standpoint, has his or her particular and inescapable perspective; no-one can analyze living religion or write religious history without concepts which imply exclusions or have a normative content (conscious or not). Many of the new, supposedly value-free terms, which anthropologists, ethnologists, or other social scientists working in the academic field of religion at present recommend only mirror a naïve belief that they can resolve the systematic problems involved in the formation of concepts through a morally motivated partisanship with 14 Cf. Russell T. McCutcheon, ed., The Insider/Outsider Problem in the Study of Religion: A Reader (London/New York: Cassell, 1999). 15 Cf. James Clifford and George E. Marcus, eds., Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986).
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victims, marginalized groups, and persons suffering exclusion or discrimination of whatever kind. In the current debates on religion and capitalistic globalization, it is often demanded that the ‘authenticity’ of other or foreign cultures be given due respect and attention at the grass-roots level. With reference to the new ethnological buzzword, ‘local people(s),’ Talal Asad has quite rightly pointed out that what we are witnessing here is merely an extrapolation of such old, but expired terms as ‘primitive,’ ‘tribal,’ ‘simple,’ or ‘preliterate.’16 Indeed, one can sharpen Asad’s criticism: who commands the authority of definition, holds the power to make such distinctions as ‘global’ and ‘local,’ ‘above’ and ‘below,’ ‘center’ and ‘periphery,’ ‘identity’ and ‘difference’? If all our concepts are culturally situated, then so too is our reflection on the perspectival relativity of ideas. In consequence, there are no generally valid grounds for privileging in advance any one fixed or particular perspective rather than another. As a sign of the postmodern protest, it has become fashionable for scholars of religion to abstain from using all general concepts of religion. We have learned that ‘religion,’ ‘religions,’ and ‘religiousness,’ together with their compounds, are only European constructs which have emerged from the context of Christianity’s history and which say more about the history of academically coping with ‘otherness’ than about some given ‘object’ of the social world. Nevertheless, we need general terms in order to structure what Pierre Bourdieu has termed the religious field and to demarcate this field from others.17 In the long run, one cannot pursue research into religion without developing some concept(s) of the latter. This does not mean that we must revert to old normative terms and patterns of substantialist classification. Nor am I petitioning for a functionalistic concept of religion which can be used everywhere. However, we can only describe that which is culturally individual when we possess more general terms which allow us to grasp the differentia specifica of the particular. Such concepts must be open to cultural differences and relationally structured to accommodate and be capable of determining the highly variable borders between the religious field and
16 Cf. Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore/London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), esp. 256ff. 17 Cf. Pierre Bourdieu, ‘Genèse et structure du champ religieux,’ Revue française de sociologie 12 (1971): 295–334; idem, ‘Le champ religieux dans le champ de manipulation symbolique,’ in Les nouveaux clercs (Geneva: Labor et fides, 1985), 255–261.
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other cultural fields. The aim of these concepts is not to hypostasize—is not an ontology in the sense of an essentialist dogmatism. All concepts have the character of a working hypothesis and it is paramount that we bear in mind the fragility of their relational nature. In order to stem the reification of general terms, it would be helpful to develop new strategies of historicization in our scholarly practice. In comparison with the intellectual history of other academic fields, religious studies continues to suffer from considerable deficiencies in historical self-investigation. We know very little about the changes in religious semantics since the eighteenth century, for example, about the coinage of neologisms, the shifting connotations of inherited religious terms, and the many controversies surrounding the meaning of central religious symbols and metaphors. An intensification of Begriffsgeschichte is also needed with respect to the terms with which academics have endeavored to criticize, defend, classify, and purify religion. Karl-Heinz Kohl and Astrid Reuter have brought to light the variability of the leitmotivs that have shaped the history of ethnological research into religion, and consequently call for new research into the ‘history of motifs.’18 In short, only through intensified historicization can we deepen our insight into the relativity and provisional character of our concepts; only in this way can we heighten our awareness of the absence of a universal godlike vantage point or indeed any perspective which could bridge the gap between the insider and outsider, the observer and those under observation. II. Secret Parochialism, or: Observing the Observers! In 1966, Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann published their classic The Social Construction of Reality. While this work has been a great success in the academic world, its influence in the meantime is not unproblematic. As is well known, books are not only written by their authors, but also by their readers. Above all in the U.S., The Social Construction of Reality has promoted a trend which now affects all scholarly journals in religion: the language of a—more or 18 Cf. Karl-Heinz Kohl, Abwehr und Verlangen (Frankfurt/New York: Edition Qumran im Campus Verlag, 1987), 3ff.; Astrid Reuter, ‘Die Intellektuellen, die brasilianische Identität und der Candomblé: Zur Motivgeschichte der afro-brasilianischen Religionsforschung,’ Kea: Zeitschrift für Kulturwissenschaften 12 (1999): 91–111.
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less—radical constructivism. In conjunction with Eric Hobsbawm’s dictum, ‘the inventing of traditions,’19 and Hayden White’s ‘metahistory,’20 The Social Construction of Reality has fostered the belief that participants of a collective, such as religious communities, or individuals are entirely free to generate their own values, to give their world a meaning in an act of symbolic creatio ex nihilo. Take, for example, the Journal of Religion. In the first issue of this year (2000) we find reviews of such books as Constructing Early Christian Families: Family as Social Reality and Metaphor; The Artful Universe: An Introduction to the Vedic Religious Imagination; and Heritage and Hellenism: The Reinvention of Jewish Tradition.21 What concerns me here are the central concepts of this new approach to religion: construction, imagination, invention. If taken seriously, these terms not only advance the theory that language is the central constitutive condition of social reality, but that society or history as such is nothing other than language or text. This is a reductionist approach which merely provokes new dogmatisms. I would like to elucidate this point using the example of Hayden White and his influence on the debates about a new orientation within religious studies. As is well known, White sought to construe history as a series of plots, each of which is shaped by a rhetorical pattern or narrative.22 The historian is completely free in his or her choice of narrative, and every individual history can be told in a number of very different ways. The concept ‘history’ is qualified in radically subjective terms, disintegrates into a plurality of representations, is aestheticized into an art of storytelling. The relinquishment of a regulative idea of scientific objectivity cannot be consistently carried through, however. With the traditional techniques of critical philology, many of White’s attempts to reconstruct the narrative plots in classic historical texts can be shown to be contradictory and false. In an essay on ‘Historical Emplotment and the Problem of Truth,’ which appeared in 1992, White was forced to retreat: with reference to the Shoah, he admitted that the destruction of European Jews cannot be represented by way of ‘plots’ which differ funda19 Cf. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 20 Cf. Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973). 21 Cf. Journal of Religion 80 (2000): 120ff., 163ff. 22 Cf. White, Metahistory (loc. cit. n. 20).
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mentally from each other.23 Roger Chartier has quite rightly pointed out that with this admission White tacitly revised all his basic assumptions. The assumption of past facts implies or presupposes an objective historical reality; as a result, he can no longer agree with Roland Barthes’s position that facts have only a linguistic existence. If there are historical facts, an historian must be able to state the criteria that enable him or her to decide whether a certain historical discourse (which is, of course, represented by way of linguistically mediated evidence) does justice to the past.24 One must aim at improving one’s linguistic tools, even if it is not possible to guarantee a congruence between signifier and signified. Derrida’s deconstructionism houses structurally analogous problems. In the most radical variants of deconstructionism, we find the rigorous dissolution of every conceivable context into a pure text. Even the circumstances and conditions of a text are construed as a text. History is made up of countless textual Chinese boxes; historical research becomes a literary science, a game of intertextuality. This dismantling of the context serves the purpose of enforcing ‘pure construction.’ Behind the backs of these deconstructionist agents, however, we find the very opposite taking place, as can be exemplified by the latest literature within religious studies in the U.S. If everything is mere text and the reader infinitely free in his or her interpretation, history can be used for all intents and purposes. Paradoxically, the other side of radical constructivism is very often a new form of substantialism which allows various groups to employ history for their own identity needs. This phenomenon can be described as a new parochialism. Certain collective protagonists or social groups invent their own past toward the end of presenting themselves as homogeneously acting subjects with a strong identity in the present. Analogous to the way in which Catholic historians rendered Rome the center of religious history in the past or how Protestant teleological narratives have portrayed Protestantism as the culmination of 23 Cf. White, ‘Historical Emplotment and the Problem of Truth,’ in Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution,” ed. Saul Friedlander (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 37–53. 24 Cf. Roger Chartier, Au bord de la falaise: L’histoire entre certitude et inquiétude (Paris: A. Michel, 1998), 87–125; also see Egon Flaig, ‘Kinderkrankheiten der Neuen Kulturgeschichte,’ in Auf der Suche nach der verlorenen Wahrheit: Zum Grundlagenstreit in der Geschichtswissenschaft, ed. Rainer Maria Kiesow/Dieter Simon (Frankfurt am Main: Campus-Verlag, 2000), 26–47.
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Christianity’s history, today feminist historians, for example, rewrite history as the memoria of the repression of women. Ethnic groups, sexual minorities, and marginalized people of whatever kind—all are rewriting and adapting the past to preserve their own specific history, often to the exclusion of others. Feminist historiography written by and for women, gay history written by and for homosexuals (and in dissociation from straight people), studies on specific ethnic groups being carried out by the their own academic representatives— such an exploitation of the historical universe merely repeats the patterns of old denominational histories or the national historiography in nineteenth-century Europe. Once the distinction between scientific historical research and ‘cultural memory’ or ‘memorial culture’25 has been done away with, new monolithic portrayals of the past can proliferate: the history of Islam then belongs exclusively to Muslims and that of Orthodox Judaism becomes the sole property of Orthodox Jews. They alone have access to the inner perspective and can decipher—through ‘aggressive reading’—the true concrete meaning of their cultural symbols.26 This hermeneutics of suspicion is always fueled by the impetus to establish an identity which—although a construct—is conceived of as having always existed, i.e. as being essentialistically given, whether gay identity, black identity, or Protestant identity. Scholars of religion are particularly tempted to go to the colorful market of religious meanings and, by means of constructivist rhetoric, offer consumers essentialist myths of identity. For each clientele they reformulate narratives of oppression, of emancipation from old dependencies, of the true self and the strength gained by ‘coming out.’ In disputes surrounding identity politics they formulate religious lifestyle clusters for groups which define themselves as victims because the wounds of history can be transformed into political capital. Although scholars of religion who concentrate on such issues of identity see themselves as agents within the academic field, they operate at the same time on religious and political terrain, adopting the role of an expert in their clientele’s power struggles. This reveals a
25 Cf. Yosef Hayim Yerusahalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1982). 26 Cf., for example, Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, eds., The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (London/New York: Routledge, 1989); idem, eds., The Postcolonial Studies Reader (London/New York: Routledge, 1995).
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new type of intellectual with particular clarity: prominent pioneers of this new discourse polemicize against abstractness, generality, and universality in the name of ‘the concrete, the specific, the particular.’ They define themselves from the perspective of the victim and seek to cater for the latter’s needs by offering strong identities in their narratives of suffering. With respect to their academic status, however, they are ‘movement intellectuals’ who enjoy all the privileges of symbolic analysts. Here we find a pertinent illustration of a great temptation within religious studies: the intention is not to interpret religion with analytical detachment, but to adapt it to the profile of one’s clientele. Such researchers of religion are themselves agents in the religious field. Lately, a number of fascinating studies have appeared which examine the religious preconceptions behind the classic theories in religious studies. We learn that James Cowles Prichard, one of the founders of British anthropology, criticized the theory of race with the religious objection that such talk of races conflicts with the descent of all human beings from ‘our’ biblical ancestors.27 Erich Fromm’s lectures on Psychoanalysis and Religion, delivered in Princeton in 1949, reflect Fromm’s own religious neurosis of having been the nephew of a rabbi, but never one himself.28 Mary Douglas focused her investigations on ritual because she opposed the libertine zeitgeist and was deeply fascinated by Catholic authority and order.29 This list of examples could be lengthened without difficulty. Suffice to say that in their patterns of description, many academic interpreters of religion are quite obviously shaped by their religious beliefs, hopes, and wishes, including a longing for the shelter of a new order. Here, once again, we find modern religious studies lending itself to interpretation as a part of the religious history of the modern age; here, once again, we find a fusion of academic and religious interests.
27 Cf. H. F. Augstein, James Cowles Prichard’s Anthropology: Remaking the Science of Man in Early Nineteenth Century Britain (Amsterdam/Atlanta: Rodopi, 1999), 68ff., 143ff. 28 Cf. Svante Lundgren, Fight Against Idols: Erich Fromm on Religion, Judaism and the Bible (Frankfurt/Berlin/Bern: P. Lang, 1998). 29 Cf. Richard Fardon, Mary Douglas: An Intellectual Biography (London/New York: Routledge, 1999), 241ff.
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III. Players on the Field of Politics, or: the Implicit Partisanship of Scholars of Religion
Since the 1980s, academics worldwide have shown a heightened interest in the subject of religion. Never before have so many intellectuals dedicated themselves to the task of interpreting religion. Even a large number of sociologists, who once adhered to modernization theories and prognosticated the end of religion, now feel obliged to offer explanations for the renaissance of religion and the very different guises of its stubborn persistence from one society to the next. Slowly, but irrevocably, the classic modernization theories of the 1950s, together with their canonized approach to religion and the modern age, are losing persuasive power. The new academic interest in religion mirrors the expansion of the religious field in many societies. This religious field has open borders which can only be demarcated by debate and processes of exchange. The tensions, once dramatized by Max Weber, among competitive spheres of value within modernity’s differentiated society are in the meantime mostly obsolete. Today, we find a perpetuation of the old cultural battles in only a few specific religious milieus and, as a sign of capitalist globalization, a joint venture between the ‘hard’ economic rationality and a ‘soft’ form of religiousness. On the whole, the religious field seems to be spreading into the conflict-ridden processes of social modernization. The religious histories of the modern age are shaped by a multifaceted differentiation of religious merchandise. The many forms of faith which were once ordered chronologically into teleological narratives in order to provide a certain denomination with the monopoly now largely exist synchronously, beside one another. It is precisely this quality that characterises the stubborn persistence of religion today. Old professional ‘servants of religion,’ as they were termed in Germany in the seventeenth century,30 find themselves competing with new religious specialists: television evangelists who gather their congregations in talk shows; proponents of alternative medicine offering holistic cures; masseurs who claim they can generate a unity between mind, body, and soul using tantric massages; psychotherapists who 30 Cf. Friedrich Wilhelm Graf, ‘Protestantische Theologie und die Formierung der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft,’ in Profile des neuzeitlichen Protestantismus, ed. idem (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus Gerd Mohn, 1990), 1: 11–54.
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by way of incarnation therapies hope to lead the alienated self back to its origins in an earlier life; change managers seeking to bring about new corporate cultures by motivating employees to work on themselves; the large number of priests heading new ‘blood and soil’ cults, who—in the belief that political stability and power depend on unification of race and territory—propagate hard ethnic identities using religious symbolism; and, not least, the many other experts of an ‘experience industry’ who offer their services as a gateway to cosmic consciousness or the true self. Above all in the United States, but increasingly so in European societies as well, these territorial battles in the religious field are determined by ‘utilitarian individualism’ (Robert Bellah) which in the name of maximal benefit to the individual allows explicitly religious wares to be combined with a range of other services for strengthening one’s alienated self. Kabbalah, sexual therapy, emotional alchemy, workouts in a fitness studio—all rolled into one. It is precisely this pluralization of the religious market, together with its competitiveness and the ‘heretical imperative,’ as Peter L. Berger calls it, which has contributed to the general persistence of religion.31 The widespread talk of religion’s de-institutionalization is only partially true because within the field of religion we can discern parallel processes propelling the erosion of old institutions and the construction of new ones. One is reminded here of the conflictridden pluralization of Christianity in early modern Europe where the open rivalry between the different Christian denominations led to a strategy of outbidding one’s competitor, first and foremost in the form of ethical rigorism. The vying Christian confessions fought against each other as if in a contest of ethical superiority, to the end of morally molding their devotees to the bottom of their hearts. We can interpret the hybridity or open borders of the religious field as an expression of religion’s strength. Many believers no longer regard the relationship between scientific rationality and religion as one of conflict but as an opportunity to integrate the former into a new religious worldview. The diverse New Age religions, for example, have been able to win over many a follower of technical intelligence in virtue of the incorporation of scientific elements into their
31 Cf. Peter L. Berger, The Heretical Imperative: Contemporary Possibilities of Religious Affirmation (Garden City/New York: Anchor Press, 1980).
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esoteric speculations on the cosmos. Here the religious field is spreading into a territory which was once the camp of its ardent opponent. In turn, we find representatives of modern psychology drawing on religious semantics; F. Varela, for instance, uses Buddhism’s Middle Way as the paradigm for a new cognitive technique and many constructivists have employed the Christian symbol of the tree of knowledge in new master narratives which retell the creation of the world as a cognitive process.32 The influence of religious language can be found in other areas, such as medicine, the sports industry, the educational system, and politics. Troeltsch already spoke of the diverse connections between religious and non-religious elements of life in 1913: That which is ‘purely religious’ exists only for the theorist and for the few, deeply sensitive souls. On the market of life, there is no interest which would not be protected and strengthened through a connection with religion.33
In this respect, the religious field demonstrates a great deal of openness. In numerous societies, we find an increasing overlap with the political field. Many of the new forms of nationalism, which aggravate the political conflicts in the Third World (above all in Africa), the former USSR, and Balkans, make use of religious semantics and myths in order to furnish the imagined community of their respective nation with an aura of higher factuality. Here, religious language serves the purpose of asserting new artificially constructed borders as essentially given, of generating the pretense of an essentialism. The appearance of new religious nationalisms and political millenarianisms confronts scholars of religion with a particularly challenging intellectual problem, especially from a methodological point of view. In his Inside Terrorism, published in 1998, Bruce Hoffman has highlighted the extremely high propensity to violence of religiously motivated terrorists.34 The belief of having been called upon
32 Cf. Francisco J. Varela et al., The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991); idem and Humberto R. Maturana, The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding (Boston: New Science Library, 1987). 33 Cf. Ernst Troeltsch, ‘Religion,’ in Das Jahr 1913: Ein Gesamtbild der Kulturentwicklung, ed. D. Sarason (Leipzig/Berlin: B. G. Teubner, 1913), 533–49, here 534. 34 Cf. Bruce Hoffman, Inside Terrorism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998).
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by God or other higher powers to combat a virtually countless number of enemies (i.e. all dissenters) strengthens the readiness of religious activists to sacrifice their lives as martyrs and, in doing so, to fortify the homogeneity of their religious community. Yigal Amir’s justification for his assassination of Yitzhak Rabin can be read as a classic testimony of faith: “I regret nothing, I acted alone and on orders from God.” Religiously motivated violence has increased significantly since 1980. This worldwide phenomenon is only one example of the many new conflicts between religion and political order. The tensions between a universally conceived right to religious freedom, on the one hand, and the positive law of the state, on the other, must be dealt with through a continual commitment to social negotiations. The internal pluralization of the religious field requires the provision of legal arrangements for a peaceful coexistence in our public lives. The expansion of the religious field has generated a number of new juridical problems. Certainly, the right of religious freedom embraces the right to be principally different, but does this mean that in the name of one’s faith one should be allowed to consume illegal drugs? Should the state protect the freedom of religious assembly, even if aggressive forms of religious nationalism or anti-Semitic ideologies, for example, are propagated at such gatherings? These are the very conflicts which seem to strengthen hard forms of religion. ‘Hard religions’ demand a great deal of their followers, but also offer them strong identities. They profit from conflict with other social groups, in particular from conflict with political institutions, because antagonism has a mobilizing effect, concretizing symbolic borders. At the moment we see two trends in religious studies: a postmodern constructivism, which de facto produces many new essentialisms, and an attitude among social scientists which neutralizes all normative questions by explaining them away as subjective, individual, or private matters. It is not only religious communities which play an important role in shaping public life, but scholars of religion too. Of course they are free to define themselves as writers or as artists engaged in their own particular kind of textual construction, and are at liberty to withdraw from the social negotiations on the borders of the religious field. However, by not being willing to comment on the normative conflicts, for instance, between religion and law, they only encourage a dangerous totalization of religious issues. If scholars of religion are not capable of naming the criteria
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for differentiating between the religious and non-religious fields, how can we prevent religious language from being exploited ubiquitously for all possible intents and purposes? In conclusion, I would like once again to call to mind Troeltsch’s trip to the United States. While I have no intention of pulling on any long boots manufactured in Europe, I would prefer not to go barefoot. Because a German Protestant theologian can very quickly find himself walking on thin ice in North American religious discourse, it is always a good idea to have some form of footwear. By the time Troeltsch had reached Boston, he was no longer wearing his metaphysical boots and had put on some light ironical slippers. At an evening meal with colleagues from Harvard’s Divinity School, he shocked his American company with his—I quote—“brusque judgements” (schroffe Urteile) on the behavior of his international colleagues in St. Louis and characterized the congress as an academic circus. Later he apologized for this comment in a letter to Harvard’s Hugo Münsterberg, the main organizer of the congress.35 Nonetheless, the image of an academic circus does convey a touch of proto-postmodern irony. For, even today, the field of postmodern discourse on religion quite often resembles an academic circus in which the different theoretical acrobats vie with one another to perform the most masterly feat of deconstruction work. Frequently, the theologian is only given the role of the clown who, with the ballast of his heavy metaphysical boots, stumbles clumsily across the circus ring between acts. Should he accept this part? At least the clown is sometimes allowed to express views which would elsewhere disrupt the show.
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Cf. Rollmann, ‘Ernst Troeltsch in Amerika’ (loc. cit. n. 1), 116.
THE STUBBORN PERSISTENCE OF DEBATES ABOUT RELIGION: A RESPONSE TO FRIEDRICH WILHELM GRAF Peter Berger I would like to offer a sociologist’s footnote to Friedrich Wilhelm Graf ’s paper, the title of which, in my view, is somewhat misleading. The paper is not so much about the stubbornness of religion as about the stubbornness of debates in the scholarly study of religion. As Graf rightly states, the modern has always been postmodern. In other words, the problems raised in recent years by so-called postmodern theorists replicate previous debates, notably those triggered by the historical sciences before World War I (the so-called ‘historicism’ that preoccupied Ernst Troeltsch) and by the psychological and social sciences in the 1920s and 1930s. In the earlier debates, the protagonists wrote, as it were, with a German accent, which has now been replaced by a French accent, but this has not necessarily raised the intellectual level, although it has increased the obscure quality of the translations into English prose. Common to all these theoretical approaches is a profound experience of relativity, which challenges any claims to what Troeltsch called ‘absoluteness’ in religion as much as in other normative definitions of reality. One could say that all these approaches amount to a gigantic footnote to Paschal’s seminal insight that what is truth on one side of the Pyranees is error on the other. Consequently, there emerges a profound epistemological problem, namely, the problem of finding a secure standpoint from which the relativizing theorist is to make his statements. For the postmodernists, the problem is how to avoid applying to themselves the deconstructionist methodology with which they demolish the intellectual constructions of others. But, as Graf put it felicitously, every deconstructionist can be deconstructed. Not surprisingly, the exercise is typically avoided since no gander wants to admit that what is good for the goose is good for himself. Given current sensibilities, let me emphasize that this reluctance is shared by theorists of all possible genders. To put this
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point in my own language, the problem is how to define an epistemologically privileged status for oneself and to deny it for everyone else. The history of Marxism provides an ironic commentary on this problem. Marx himself ascribed the epistemological privilege to the proletariat, which alone, because of its unique social location, was supposed to be free of the false consciousness afflicting all other classes. Unfortunately, the proletariat, by and large, refused to have the consciousness ascribed to it by the theory. There followed the search for the vanguard of the proletariat, which Lenin ingeniously identified with the Bolshevik Party; Rosa Luxemburg with what was then called the colonial peoples, later baptized as the Third World; and Antonio Gramsci with certain segments of the intelligentsia, which explains why so many intellectuals are fond of Antonio Gramsci. More recently, different epistemological elites were located among various groups defined as oppressed or marginalized. Each of these definitions remains extremely vulnerable and likely to be empirically falsified. The problem refuses to go away, unless one posits some sort of standpoint from which objective statements are deemed to be possible, which, let me quickly say, is my own view. The sociology of knowledge, beginning with the works of Max Scheler and Karl Mannheim, tried to deal with the problem, as did Thomas Luckmann and I in our book The Social Construction of Reality, to which Graf kindly refers. He is quite right in suspecting that we have been embarrassed by some of the uses to which this book has been put. The difference between Luckmann and myself and many of those who call themselves constructivists today can be described rather simply. We said that all human reality is socially constructed and interpreted. They say that all interpretations are equally valid, and some of them add that there is no reality at all outside the interpretations. The first proposition is an invitation to epistemological solipsism. The second corresponds to the clinical concept of schizophrenia, which means that one is no longer able to distinguish between the outside world and one’s own fantasies. This, by the way, is how Jürgen Habermas described his radical critics in the late 1960s. Accordingly, there are no objective statements about the human world; there are only narratives, and there is no way of calling one narrative more true than another. Graf ’s reference to the Holocaust is particularly graphic in this connection. What we have here is an epistemology in which the stark facts of this historical event disap-
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pear, in principle giving the same cognitive status to the Holocaust deniers as to anyone else in the area of Holocaust studies. By what criteria is one to repudiate the Nazi narrative of the period in question? It is telling that the Holocaust deniers also claim the status of the oppressed, as they see it, being oppressed by the academic guardians of political correctness. It is appropriate here to quote a sort of premature postmodernist theorist, the late propaganda minister of the Third Reich, Joseph Goebbels, who wrote at one point, “Truth is what serves the German people.” Needless to say, these methodological considerations apply not only to the field of religious studies, but to any discipline in the human sciences. The big no-no here is so-called essentialism. Not only is there no essential religious tradition, no essence of Christianity (a la Adolf von Harnack), no essential Islam, no essential Buddhism, and so on, but there is actually no phenomenon that can be meaningfully called ‘religion.’ Graf correctly puts his finger here on a practical problem. How is one to conceive of an intellectual discipline that deals with something that, strictly speaking, does not exist? What is commonly called religion, or Christianity and so on, dissolves into a near endless series of narratives—a sort of quasi-Leibnizian universe of monads that cannot be integrated into any comprehensive order of interpretation. The study of religion then becomes a set of selective readings of texts that have no independent existence outside the mind of the reader. The particular reading is typically selected by criteria based on the politics of identity and supposedly reflects the perspective of this or that oppressed group. There has been a sovereign disregard here of what has always been the foundational principle of the historian and of any practitioner of the human sciences: the act of carefully, methodically listening to what others, past or present, have to say. Max Weber called this act Verstehen, which presupposed the capacity to put one’s own interests aside as one tries to understand the other. As against this, instead of listening, one pronounces. The moral quality of this methodology is aptly contained in a joke. The anthropologist is interviewing a tribal chieftan. After ten minutes, the anthropologist says, “That’s enough of your story, let me tell you mine.” In scholarship, this is a sure recipe for incommunication, and the criterion of oppressed status bestowing epistemological privilege invariably breaks down. Not only does it happen more often than not that the group defined as oppressed understands
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itself in different terms—that is the problem that bewitched Marxism— there is also the underlying question of who decides which group is oppressed or marginalized. In America today, alas, there is hardly a group that does not see itself as being, in some sense, oppressed. Scholarly debates then turn into contests between competing groupings of victims. Toward the end of his paper, Graf points out that there are political implications to these scholarly aberrations. There is an affinity between incommunication and fanaticism. Graf proposes that scholars of religion should assist the search for common ground in public discourse. It is not clear from his paper whether he agrees with Troeltsch that the scholarly study of religion can lead to normative statements about what Troeltsch called das Geltende. If so, I disagree. I am an unrepentantly orthodox Weberian, and I insist on a sharp dividing line between Religionswissenschaft and theology, or between social science and politics. But I do agree that as a citizen, the scholar of religion has distinctive resources to contribute to tolerance and communication between contending groups. This presupposes, however, the capacity to listen to the stories of others and to desist from endlessly retelling one’s own story. Thus, the arcane methodological disputes of academics have significant moral and political implications, as Weber understood very well when he defended his position on value-free science against what he called the ‘prophets of the lecture hall.’ I particularly like Graf ’s concluding remarks on the theologian as a clown in the academic circus. The clown is a modern embodiment of a much older figure, that of the holy fool. In this role, the theologian is a witness to the fact that, in the end, all religion is concerned with truth.
THE STUDY OF RELIGIONS IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY Hans G. Kippenberg
The modern man is in general, even with the best will, unable to give religious ideas a significance for culture and national character which they deserve. Max Weber1
The Vanishing of ‘History’ from Religious Studies At the end of the old and the brink of the new century two volumes appeared that aimed at establishing basic notions in religious studies. Critical Terms for Religious Studies edited by Mark C. Taylor2 organized the field by notions—some of them old acquaintances, others newcomers—from ‘belief ’ to ‘writing.’ Each article, we are told, analyzes the theoretical value of any of these notions “in a particular religious tradition.”3 Looking more closely at the notions one is struck by the absence not only of ‘tradition,’ in spite of the sentence quoted, but also of ‘history,’ as if the past has lost its power over the present and our thinking finally acquired that independence enlightened philosophers had dreamed of. A similar observation holds true for the volume Guide to the Study of Religion, by Willi Braun and Russell T. McCutcheon.4 Thirty-one essays deal with crucial notions brought under the three rubrics ‘Description-Explanation-Location.’ Tradition shows up only briefly as ‘invention of tradition’ in the essay on ‘colonialism,’ and as ‘history of religions’ in the essay on ‘Romanticism.’
1 Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904/5); trans. Talcott Parsons (1930); introduction by A. Giddens (London/New York: Routledge, 1997), 183. 2 Mark C. Taylor, ed., Critical Terms for Religious Studies (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 3 Ibid., 18. 4 Willi Braun and Russell T. McCutcheon, eds., Guide to the Study of Religion (London/New York: Cassell, 2000).
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The reason for the omission of ‘history’ in both volumes is easy to grasp. In his preface to Critical Terms, Taylor argued, relying on Jonathan Z. Smith, that the notion ‘religion’ is not a universal phenomenon, but rather the product of a complex Western history. “There is no data for religion. Religion is solely the creation of the scholar’s study,” J. Z. Smith posited years ago.5 Smith contributed to Taylor’s volume a fine essay titled ‘Religion, Religions, Religious,’ tracing step by step how the use and understanding of the Western term ‘religion’ has been expanding since the sixteenth century and becoming a category imposed from the outside on native cultures, though nevertheless regarded as something universal and natural to everybody.6 The analysis of Smith and Taylor is in line with a major issue in cultural studies today: the break between facts and words, between the past and the present. Evidence cannot be clearly distinguished from representation. Taylor conceived of the dilemma in terms of ‘invention.’ “The investigators create—sometimes unknowingly—the objects and truths they profess to discover. Some critics claim that, appearances to the contrary withstanding, religion is a modern Western invention.”7 ‘Invention’ is a misleading notion, as becomes evident when we turn to the essay on ‘modernity’ by Gustavo Benavides in Critical Terms.8 Benavides conceives of modernity as a self-conscious distancing from the past—a break that is self-referential and does not lead to the disappearance of past religions, but to their “reflexive ordering and reordering.”9 Benavides acknowledges that the issue of ‘representation’ is crucial to contemporary religious studies. The past is a result of the scholar’s construction to Benavides as well, but he adds an important restriction. Modern culture implies a reflexive break with the past as well as a continuation by reordering it. To indicate the presence of the past one needs more notions than ‘invention’ alone, which obscures the degree to which the present depends on the past. Jonathan Z. Smith, Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 1982), xi. 6 Critical Terms, 269. 7 Critical Terms, 7. That the plurality of definitions in academic religious studies can also be dealt with as case of pragmatics, is the common denominator in Jan G. Platvoet and Arie L. Molendijk, eds., The Pragmatics of Defining Religion: Contexts, Concepts and Contests (Leiden: Brill, 1999). 8 ‘Modernity,’ in Taylor, Critical Terms, 186–204. 9 Critical Terms, 189. 5
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This understanding of modernity is supported by the genealogy of the notion ‘modernity’ itself.10 The notion can be traced back to a quarrel in the seventeenth century triggered by the claim that modern culture, especially modern science and art, was superior to ancient culture. After some intellectual skirmishes, the adversaries agreed that a distinction between science and art should be made. In art, there could be no measurable and undoubted progress as in science. Art must be judged by the criteria of its own time, which is why ancient and modern art each possessed its own right to exist in the framework of its day. The effect of this genealogy on the understanding of modernity is fundamental: it is an age in which the cultural split between knowledge and art can no longer be mended. The modern age is constituted by a “rift with the present.”11 In the course of the subsequent centuries other areas of culture joined the realm of art: first morals, then religions. They too were considered not as superseded by progress, but constituting a realm of their own, despite all progress in science and technology. When scholars in the nineteenth century reconstructed the religious history of the past, they claimed to disclose world-views and morals still relevant to the modern age. The history of rationality was not the entire history of humankind. Looking back from the end of the twentieth century with its emphasis on ‘invention,’ to its beginning, we recognize a tremendous change in the evaluation of religious history. Around 1900 the past was regarded as a lasting power, tacitly determining present life and not eliminated by the Enlightenment’s critique of religion. Accordingly, the task of the student of religion was conceived differently than today—turning past data into notions explaining present constraints and restrictions.12 This task was an active one. It is wrong to assume that scholars at that time believed naively in facts as independent of their scholarly representation. On the contrary, critical epistemology dominated historical studies at that time. Students of religions too 10 Hans Robert Jauß, ‘Antiqui/moderni (Querelle des Anciens et Modernes),’ in Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, vol. 1 (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1971), 410–14. 11 Hans Robert Jauß, ‘Literarische Tradition und gegenwärtiges Bewußtsein der Modernität,’ in Jauß, Literaturgeschichte als Provokation, 5th ed. (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1974), 1–66; here: 49. 12 H. G. Kippenberg, ‘Explaining Modern Facts by Past Religions: The Study of Religions in Europe Around the Year 1900,’ in Man, Meaning, and Mystery: One Hundred Years of History of Religions in Norway. The Heritage of W. Brede Kristensen, ed. Sigurd Hjelde (Leiden: Brill, 2000), 3–17.
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subscribed to the critical principle that historical notions are invented by scholars. But, this conviction did not imply that the past had lost its hold on the present. Instead, the historian invented notions in order to disclose the power of the past. This assumption seems to have disappeared from scholarly discussion during course of the century. To Begin With: Religions from Survival to a Lasting Power In religious studies, the century started with a scholarly bombshell that in a few years overturned the entire field. In 1899, Robert Ranulph Marett (1866–1943), a professor of philosophy at Oxford, accepted an invitation by the British Anthropological Society to enliven their meeting at Dover with a paper. He did so with a presentation on ‘Pre-animistic Religion,’ published in 1900.13 In it he mounted a deadly attack against Tylor’s animism. According to Tylor, animism constituted an early mode of thought, explaining natural events by the activity of spiritual beings. In the course of time this primitive reasoning was replaced by science, but not entirely. It survived in civilized society as the notion of an immaterial personal soul—a concept that from time to time comes up vigorously in revivals. “One of these revivals is the great modern Spiritualistic movement.”14 ‘Survival’ in Tylor’s Primitive Culture 15 functioned as a category indicating a continuity of primitive religion in fully developed civilization.16 Marett dismissed Tylor’s theory. Animism was “too narrow, because too intellectualistic. Religion involves more than thought, namely feeling and will as well.”17 Likewise, the notion of 13 R. R. Marett, ‘Pre-animistic Religion’ (1900), in R. R. Marett, The Threshold of Religion, 2nd ed. (London: Methuen, 1914), 1–28. 14 E. B. Tylor, ‘On the Survival of Savage Thought in Modern Civilization,’ in Proceedings of the Royal Institution of Great Britain 5 (1866–69): 522–35; here: 524; G. W. Stocking, Jr., ‘Animism in Theory and Practice: E. B. Tylor’s unpublished “Notes on Spiritualism”,’ Man 6 (1971): 88–104. 15 E. B. Tylor, Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art, and Custom, 2 vols. (London: J. Murray, 1871); reprint The Origin of Culture (vol. 1), Religion in Primitive Culture (vol. 2), (New York: Harper, 1958). 16 M. T. Hodgen, The Doctrine of Survivals: A Chapter in the History of Scientific Method in the Study of Man (London: Allenson, 1936), 38; H. G. Kippenberg, ‘Survivals: Conceiving of Religious History in an Age of Development,’ in Religion in the Making: The Emergence of the Sciences of Religion, ed. A. L. Molendijk and P. Pels (Leiden: Brill, 1998), 297–312. 17 Marett, ‘Pre-animistic Religion,’ 1.
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‘survival’ appeared to Marett misleading. “The student of survivals must beware lest he embark on a wild-goose chase in search of an original meaning that never was.”18 An experience of power lies at the root of all religions, in the past as well as in the present. Not an intellectual need but a primordial experience of power is the matrix generating religious phenomena. Most students of religions immediately embarked on the new paradigm and adopted the so-called ‘dynamism’ or ‘pre-animism’ as a superior tool for analyzing religious data. Years later, in his autobiography, Marett still marvelled at his tremendous success. If he had delivered his paper at Oxford, nobody would have cared. “I suspect . . . that what thrilled Dover might have fallen flat nearer home.” And he added: “Be this so or not, at any rate I received from outside a much-needed stimulus.”19 “No less a person than the great Wilhelm Wundt of Leipzig . . . condescended in his Völkerpsychologie to give prominence to my brand-new ‘präanimistische Hypothese’.” “This was in itself enough to secure me for all time a line, perhaps a whole footnote, in the text-book of every industrious compiler,” he added ironically.20 In 1904 the French scholars Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss published an ‘Essay on Magic,’ in which they arrived at roughly the same position, without knowing Marett.21 “I had the almost unfair advantage of priority,” he commented. “Both of us undoubtedly hit the same bird, and theirs was the heavier shot; but I fired first.”22 Apparently the new paradigm had been in the air for a while already. Religious Genealogies of Modern Practices One year before the meeting in Dover, the French social scientist Émile Durkheim wrote in a preface to the second volume of his journal L’Année Sociologique (1898) that he expected the readers to be surprised regarding the priority the editors had given to religious
18 R. R. Marett, ‘The Interpretation of Survivals,’ in Psychology and Folklore (London: Methuen, 1920), 120–42; here: 127. 19 Marett, A Jerseyman at Oxford (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1941), 158. 20 Ibid., 159. 21 H. Hubert and M. Mauss, ‘Esquisse d’une théorie générale de la magie,’ L’Année Sociologique 7 (1904): 1–146. 22 Marett, Jerseyman, 161.
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studies. Durkheim felt obliged to explain their decision. Religions were the seed from which nearly all other social phenomena were derived; they had given birth to diverse manifestations of the collective life.23 Durkheim was engaged with the relation between social cohesion and rising individualism. In his 1893 study The Division of Labor in Society, he wondered: “Why does the individual, while becoming more autonomous, depend more upon society? How can he be at once more individual and more solidary?”24 He returned to that issue in 1898, in an article in favor of Dreyfus. Here, Durkheim defended the intellectuals from the charge of acting against the wellbeing of the nation. Individualism, he argued, must be distinguished from egoism. It derives from Kant, Rousseau, and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and considers the human person as something sacred. “The rights of the person are placed above the State.”25 Individualism is distinct from anarchy. In fact, it is the only system of beliefs that can ensure the moral unity of the country.26 The intellectual who defends the right of the individual, defends at the same time the vital interests of society.27 Durkheim traced this individualism to religious history. Though personally a Jew, a fact affecting his scholarly work,28 he emphasized the Christian roots of individualism. Christianity had taught that the moral value of actions must be measured in accordance with the intention of the actor. “The very center of the moral life was thus transferred from outside to within and the individual was set up as the sovereign judge of his own conduct having no other accounts to render than those to himself and to his God.”29 Not so long ago religions appeared to edu-
23 “En tête des ces analyses, on trouvera, cette année comme l’an dernier, celles qui concernent la sociologie religieuse. On s’est étonné de l’espèce de primauté que nous avons ainsi accordée à cette sorte de phénomènes; mais c’est qu’ils sont le germe d’où tous les autres—ou, tout au moins, presque tous les autres—sont dérivés. La religion contient en elle, dès le principe, mais à l’état confus, tous les éléments qui . . . ont donné naissance aux diverses manifestations de la vie collective,” É. Durkheim, Journal Sociologique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1969), 13. 24 E. Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society (New York: Free Press, 1984), 37. 25 E. Durkheim, ‘Individualism and the Intellectuals,’ in Durkheim on Religion: A Selection of Readings with Bibliographies and Introductory Remarks, W. S. F. Pickering, ed. (London: Routledge, 1975), 59–73; here: 62. 26 Ibid., 66. 27 Ibid., 69. 28 I. Strenski, Durkheim and the Jews of France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). 29 Durkheim, ‘Individualism and the Intellectuals,’ 68.
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cated people as definitely superseded by modern civilization, not more than survivors of an unenlightened past. Durkheim reversed that view, at least epistemologically: in order to understand contemporary data, he argued, a social scientist has to study religious history.30 Decades later Marcel Mauss, nephew of Durkheim, took up the thread again. In his seminal essay, ‘A Category of the Human Mind: The Notion of Person, the Notion of Self,’ Mauss traced the Western concept of the person to Greek thought, Roman legal thinking, and Christian metaphysics.31 Max Weber similarly changed the direction of social research in his famous study on The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904/5). Weber was not the first who recognized the connection between Protestantism and capitalism. He was well aware that the “greater relative participation of Protestants in the ownership of capital, in management, and the upper ranks of labour in great modern industrial and commercial enterprises” was known and secure.32 The question was how to explain that fact. In 1902, Werner Sombart indicated the main difficulty: “The fact that Protestantism, particularly in its Calvinist and Quaker variety, essentially promoted the development of capitalism is as well known as that it still needs to be established. Yet if anyone would object that the Protestant system of religion was ultimately much more an effect than a cause of the modern capitalist spirit, it will be hard to show him the error of his view except with an empirical proof of concrete historical connections.”33 30 A comprehensive and still basic study of Durkheim’s sociology of religion by W. S. F. Pickering, Durkheim’s Sociology of Religion: Themes and Theories (London: Routledge, 1984). 31 Marcel Mauss, ‘Une categorie de l’esprit humain: la notion de personne, celle de “moi,” un plan de travail,’ Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 68 (1938): 263–81; English translation: ‘A Category of the Human Mind: The Notion of Person, the Notion of Self,’ in The Category of the Person: Anthropology, Philosophy, History, ed. Michael Carrither, Steven Collins and Steven Lukes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 1–25; Louis Dumont, Essais sur l’Individualisme: Une perspective anthropologique sur l’idéologie moderne (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1983); Richard A. Shweder and Robert A. LeVine, eds., Culture Theory: Essays on Mind, Self, and Emotion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), in the tradition of George Herbert Mead; Hans G. Kippenberg, Yme B. Kuiper and Andy F. Sanders, eds., Concepts of Person in Religion and Thought (Berlin/New York: Mouton/de Gruyter, 1990); Albert Baumgarten (with Jan Assmann and Guy G. Stroumsa), ed., Self, Soul & Body in Religious Experience (Leiden: Brill, 1998). 32 Weber, The Protestant Ethic, 35. 33 W. Sombart, Der moderne Kapitalismus, vol. 1, Die Genesis des Kapitalismus (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1902), 380–81.
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What Sombart considered proof, Weber tried to realize two years later. Impending capitalism needed the support of an internal power, an ethos, because it first had to bring down a powerful opponent— traditionalism. A man does not ‘by nature’ wish to earn more and more money, but simply to live as he is accustomed to live and to earn as much as is necessary for that purpose. Wherever modern capitalism has begun its work of increasing the productivity of human labour by increasing its intensity, it has encountered the immensely stubborn resistance of this leading trait of pre-capitalistic labour.34
This dogged resistance, which Weber almost ascribed to human nature, did not fade away by itself. It was broken by religion. Weber realized, just as Durkheim did, that his view was not selfevident, as the quotation in the beginning of this essays shows.35 Both scholars, Durkheim and Weber, were fully aware that the notions they used, religion included, were categories of the observer and imposed from the outside on native material. But they did not assume that the past they were constructing had the status of fiction merely. Both adopted Marett’s pre-animism and regarded the history of religions as a matrix generating practical attitudes to the world still effective today. For both authors the modern world still depended on the religions. When we turn to the first meeting of German sociologists in Frankfurt in 1910 and their debates, we encounter the same perspective. Theologian Ernst Troeltsch gave a paper on an item that seems terribly boring —‘Stoic-Christian Natural Law and Modern Secular Natural Law’36—but which, in fact, elicited a stormy debate.37 Troeltsch’s paper addressed the fact that Christianity had been institutionalized by three distinct social forms: ‘church,’ ‘sect,’ and ‘mysticism,’ each establishing its own guiding principle for dealing with Weber, The Protestant Ethic, 60. H. Lehmann and G. Roth, eds., Weber’s Protestant Ethic: Origins, Evidence, Contexts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 36 Ernst Troeltsch, ‘Das stoisch-christliche Naturrecht und das moderne profane Naturrecht,’ in Verhandlungen des Ersten Deutschen Soziologentages vom 19.–22. Oktober 1910 in Frankfurt a.M. (Tübingen: Mohr/Siebeck, 1911), 166–92. The paper was also published separately in the Historische Zeitschrift 106 (1911): 237–67. Compare Arie L. Molendijk, Zwischen Theologie und Soziologie: Ernst Troeltschs Typen der christlichen Gemeinschaftsbildung: Kirche, Sekte, Mystik (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 1996). 37 The minutes were published in Verhandlungen des Ersten Deutschen Soziologentages, 192–214. 34
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the natural laws of the world. The ‘church’ regarded the natural laws as necessarily different from the perfect law of Christ, and did not expect the laity to act according to the latter. The ‘sect,’ in contrast, recognized one law only, that of unconditional brotherliness, and therefore created a fundamental tension between the believer and the natural world. And finally, ‘mysticism,’ which took the divine light to be inside the believer, established an individualism independent of any institutions. According to Troeltsch, then, these three social forms represented three different concepts of a Christian attitude to the world and its laws, all three forms being genuinely Christian and having an impact on secular culture. In an earlier article on ‘The Significance of Protestantism for the Rise of the Modern World,’38 Troeltsch had argued that the modern world was a continuation of the pre-modern one particularly with respect to individualism, which—far from being the outcome of the emancipation from tradition—had its roots in religious history. In the subsequent debate no less than Max Weber, Georg Simmel, Ferdinand Tönnies, Eberhard Gothein, Martin Buber, and Hermann Kantorowicz took the floor. Georg Simmel and Martin Buber doubted that mysticism was a social category at all. They regarded it as a purely psychological one, which constituted genuine subjectivity. Weber defended the claim of Troeltsch that mysticism was a genuine social form of Christianity. At the same time, he rejected Troeltsch’s thesis that only the church, and not the sects, could establish Christianity as a truly popular religion. The case of the United States, Weber argued, hints to an opposite conclusion: exclusivity did not prevent sects from becoming popular. “It is precisely because religion has, in fact, taken the form of the sect that religion has become so popular.”39 In spite of sharp disagreements among the social scientists who participated in the debate, we easily recognize that they shared a 38 ‘Die Bedeutung des Protestantismus für die Entstehung der modernen Welt,’ Historische Zeitschrift 97 (1906): 1–66. Later published separately in revised form as Die Bedeutung des Protestantismus für die Entstehung der modernen Welt (Munich/Berlin: Oldenbourg, 1911). 39 “Gerade, weil der religiöse Typus dort faktisch der Sektentypus ist, ist die Religion dort Volkssache, und weil dieser Sektentypus nicht universal, sondern exklusiv ist, und weil exklusiv, seinen Anhängern innerlich und äußerlich ganz bestimmte Vorzüge bietet, darum ist dort die Stätte des Universalismus der effektiven Zugehörigkeit zu religiösen Gemeinschaften” (Verhandlungen, 201; reprinted in M. Weber, Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Soziologie und Sozialpolitik (Tübingen: Mohr/Siebeck, 1924), 468–69.
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common assumption which is no longer self-evident today: that religious history is the key to the internal subjective side of modern social practices, as individualism and economic ethos. In the USA, William James in his Varieties of Religious Experience (1901) studied data from a similar point of view. The sources he presented as witnesses of experiences of the uncanny, served to shed light on the capability of human beings to expand their awareness and to recognize that they are inhabiting an ‘unseen’ world. James’s reflection may appear poor in the eyes of a German professor of theology, as F. W. Graf points out in this volume, and adherents of a scientific materialism may judge likewise. However, social scientists with an interest in the logic of modern practices apparently had a different view, at that time at least. They were keenly interested in notions and methods capable of disclosing data and values from the past that were still underlying modern practices.40 Disconnecting Religion and Modern Practices After the First World War and due to it, anti-historicism spread in religious studies and the social sciences. The influential works of Rudolf Otto (1869–1937),41 and later of Mircea Eliade (1907–1986), for decades severed the link between the study of religions and the study of modern practices. In addition, the rise of functionalism in the social sciences, privileging functions above beliefs, had the same effect.42 Functionalism and phenomenology became rivals in religious studies.43 The impact of this change of paradigm in religious studies is easy to observe in the entries on sects and mysticism in the consecutive editions of the German encyclopaedia Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart (RGG ). In the entry ‘sects’ in the first edition (and in the second as well) Walther Köhler pointed to the contemporary sta40 A crucial concept became ‘value,’ recently analyzed by Hans Joas in a superb study The Genesis of Values (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). 41 R. Otto, The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and its Relation to the Rational (London/New York: Oxford University Press, 1958), 13. 42 V. Krech, ‘From Historicism to Functionalism: The Rise of Scientific Approaches to Religions around 1900 and their Socio-Cultural Context,’ Numen 47 (2000): 244–65. 43 Hans G. Kippenberg, ‘Rivalry among Scholars of Religions: The Crisis of Historicism and the Formation of Paradigms in the History of Religions,’ in Historical Reflections 20 (1994): 377–402.
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tistical increase of sects and explained it as an inevitable reaction to the institution of the church and its accommodation to the world.44 Here we still recognize—though in a watered-down form—the concept of Ernst Troeltsch. In the third edition the focus of the entry has narrowed even further. Now Christian sects are presented as marginal, disturbing the unity of the church. There is no word about the sect being a social form of its own, with a different but genuinely Christian attitude to the world. The entry ‘mysticism’ presents a similar case. In the first edition of the RGG, published in 1910, a special subsection entitled ‘New Mysticism’45 addressed attempts at the time to reassess mysticism in terms of a non-rational relation to nature. The author stressed that the recent movement was inspired by Friedrich Schleiermacher, by the natural philosophy of G. T. Fechner, and by Buddhism. Mysticism was bound to a specific understanding of nature, and not only to a notion of the individual: the Divine reveals itself in the gorgeous veil of nature. Adherents of this form of religion relied on mystical texts published by Eugen Diederichs, bearing witness to an ancient religious tradition and speaking to an inner experience that revealed the human self ’s divine essence, higher than any authority. The aim of the movement was to empower the individual to resist rationality and materialism.46 The ‘New Mysticism’ subentry reappeared in the second edition in 1930. The author celebrated Rainer Maria Rilke’s Stundenbuch (1906) as the perfection of a new mysticism,47 yet avoided any allusion to the cultural and political significance that mysticism had acquired in Germany at the end of 1920s. The ‘New Mysticism’ subentry reappeared in the third edition in 1960, but now referred to the revival of mysticism around 1900! When the phenomenology of Otto and Eliade came under severe criticism, the underlying separation of actions and beliefs was challenged too. Clifford Geertz’s essay, ‘Religion as a Cultural System,’ 44 Köhler, ‘Sekten: I. Dogmengeschichtlich,’ in RGG, vol. 5 (Tübingen: Mohr/ Siebeck, 1913), 569–75. 45 W. Hoffmann, ‘Mystik’: III. ‘Neue Mystik,’ RGG, vol. 4 (Tübingen: Mohr/Siebeck, 1913), 608–12. 46 Gangolf Hübinger, ‘Kulturkritik und Kulturpolitik des Eugen-Diederichs-Verlags im Wilhelminismus: Auswege aus der Krise der Moderne?’, in Umstrittene Moderne, ed. H. Renz and F. W. Graf, Troeltsch-Studien 4 (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 1987), 92–114; Gangolf Hübinger, ed., Versammlungsort moderner Geister: Der Eugen Diederichs Verlag—Aufbruch ins Jahrhundert der Extreme (Munich: Diederichs, 1996). 47 RGG, vol. 4 (Tübingen: Mohr/Siebeck, 1930), 358.
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was particularly effective in its critique of phenomenology.48 Published in 1965, it attempted to overcome not only phenomenology but also its competing paradigm in religious studies—functionalism. Geertz construed religion as neither dependent on social functions, nor on individual experience. He avoided the pitfalls of these options by introducing the linguistic turn into religious studies, and proposed the study of religion as world-views interrelated with the practical ethos of people. According to Geertz, religion is not a function of the social order, but it shapes it. The consequence was a new awareness for the public dimension of religious beliefs. “Culture is public because meaning is.”49 Sects and Their Return as Fundamentalisms: The Concept of the Future In the 1970s and 1980s Troeltsch’s ‘sects’ became popular again, supporting Weber’s assumption that sects are actually able to establish a truly popular Christianity. But the media used a different term for these movements and groups—‘fundamentalism.’ It was coined already in the USA in the 1920s, and conveyed the message that ‘fundamentalists’ were backward and uneducated Christians, not belonging to the modern world. The amazing public career of the notion ‘fundamentalism’ was a challenge to the academic community. Historians of religion who were scrutinizing the term soon realized its biased character. Surely, the practice of defining genuine Christianity in terms of ‘fundamental’ doctrines was part of the groups involved.50 But the notion wrongly emphasized doctrine at the expense of an apocalyptical expectation. In fact it was millenarianism, as E. R. Sandeen observed already in 1970, “which gave life and shape to the Fundamentalist movement.”51
48 Clifford Geertz, ‘Religion as a Cultural System,’ in Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 87–125. 49 C. Geertz, ‘Thick description,’ in Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, 3–30; here: 12. 50 In 1910 the General Assembly of the Presbyterians adopted a five point declaration, containing the following essential doctrines: “the inerrancy of Scripture, the virgin birth of Christ, the atonement of Christ, the resurrection of Christ and the miracle-working power of Christ,” in Ernest R. Sandeen, The Roots of Fundamentalism: British and American Millenarianism 1800–1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 250–251. There were other declarations with more than five items. 51 Ibid., xv.
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Though there were good reasons to avoid the notion of ‘fundamentalism,’ scholars like Bruce B. Lawrence or Martin Riesebrodt stuck to it. What Catherine Bell wrote about ritual holds true for the notion of ‘fundamentalism’ too: “To try to discard the term ‘ritual’ just when scholars have been successful in popularizing its use would imply a desire for esoteric categories accessible only to cognoscenti.”52 It appeared more reasonable to fix the notion of ‘fundamentalism’ than to replace it by ‘sect.’ The specific meaning that ‘fundamentalism’ acquired in public discourses had to be part of the analysis. Replacing it by ‘sects’ would obscure that dimension. As recent studies have demonstrated, the ‘fundamentalist’ view of history was a part of the renewal of apocalypticism in the modern age.53 In reaction to the failure of the French Revolution and the concomitant loss of faith in the power of reason, apocalypticism flourished again. American Protestants taught that the millennium would begin with a sudden rapture of the true believers. Afterwards, the great tribulation would come, together with the ascendancy of the Antichrist. Pre-millennialism, as this sequence of eschatological events is called, has enjoyed wide acceptance in the USA even until today.54 The reappraisal of apocalypticism was not restricted to religious groups. In his stimulating 1949 work, Meaning in History, Karl Löwith traced the secular belief in progress to biblical eschatology,55 a thesis contradicted by Hans Blumenberg.56 According to Blumenberg, apocalypticism and belief in progress have different roots. The former derives from the rise of science and technology, conceiving of Catherine Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 6–7. 53 David S. Katz and Richard H. Popkin, Messianic Revolution: Radical Religious Politics to the End of the Second Millennium (New York: Hill and Wang, 1999). 54 P. Boyer, When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992); S. D. O’Leary, Arguing the Apocalypse: A Theory of Millennial Rhetoric (New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); T. Robbins and S. J. Palmer, eds., Millennium, Messiahs, and Mayhem: Contemporary Apocalyptic Movements (New York/London: Routledge, 1997). Evidence for the popularity is Hal Lindsey and C. C. Carlson’s, The Late Planet Earth (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1970), which took the threat of a nuclear war and the restoration of Israel as fulfilment of biblical prophecies. By 1990 no less than 28 million copies had been sold. 55 Karl Löwith, Meaning in History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 1949. 56 Hans Blumenberg, Die Legitimität der Neuzeit (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1966), 25–42. Malcolm Bull deals with the debate in his introduction to Apocalypse Theory and the Ends of the World (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 1–17. 52
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future times as an open space to be gradually filled by predictable developments; the latter in contrast has its roots in a quest for meaning in life, conceiving of the future as a fulfilment of a promised redemption. The religious expectations of a millennium cannot be replaced by a secular belief in progress. The German historian Lucian Hölscher argued that in modern culture the concept of the future has become twofold.57 Since modern culture is more than secular progress alone, the quest for meaning keeps a firm place in it in the form of apocalypticism.58 An international research project directed by Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby has given a twist to that coexistence and studied ‘fundamentalist’ movements as a challenge to modern belief in rationality. These movements unfolding in Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Hinduism share one common feature: ‘fighting back’ against the growing power of secularism.59 To understand their place in the modern world, Bruce Lawrence introduces the distinction between ‘modernity’ and ‘modernism.’ ‘Modernity,’ according to him, is the emergence of a new index of human life shaped by increasing bureaucratization and rationalization as well as technical capacities and global exchange. “Modernism,” on the other hand, “is the search for individual autonomy driven by a set of socially encoded values emphasizing change over continuity; quantity over quality; efficient production, power, and profit over sympathy for traditional values or vocations, in both the public and private spheres.”60 According 57 Lucian Hölscher, Weltgericht oder Revolution: Protestantische und sozialistische Zukunftsvorstellungen im deutschen Kaiserreich (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1989), 32–34; 23. Hölscher presented his thesis more fully in Die Entdeckung der Zukunft (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1999). 58 Marty characterized fundamentalists as people that, perceiving the threats of the modern world, engage in retrieving certain fundamentals, select them according to their scandalous character, form an exclusive movement, support a dualistic world view, regard relativism and pluralism as their enemies, reject the idea of progress and belief in an imminent end of history. 59 The project has resulted in five volumes edited by Marty and Appleby and published by University of Chicago Press: Fundamentalisms Observed, vol. 1, 1991; Fundamentalisms and Society, vol. 2, 1993; Fundamentalisms and the State, vol. 3, 1993; Accounting for Fundamentalisms, vol. 4, 1994; Fundamentalisms Comprehended, vol. 5, 1995. The editors have also published some of the results in a small paperback entitled The Glory and the Power: The Fundamentalist Challenge to the Modern World (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992). In the first volume the editors very briefly introduce “fighting back” as the crucial metaphor of all contributions (ix–x). 60 Bruce B. Lawrence, Defenders of God. The Fundamentalist Revolt against the Modern Age (San Francisco: Harper, 1989), 27.
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to this view, fundamentalists participate in modernity but resist paying tribute to the spirit of modernism. Martin Riesebrodt explained that resistance in his sociological study Pious Passion.61 In the United States, he argued, fundamentalists belong mainly to the white Protestant Anglo-Saxon middle class, which was once proud of its particular ethos—hard work without enjoying life. When this ethos lost its high status, the Protestant group disintegrated into factions, each with different visions of the future: liberal Protestants trusting in a gradual transition from the present world to the kingdom of God through improving social conditions, fundamentalists rejecting any optimistic conception of the future. In the latter view, the rise of modern society was necessarily accompanied by an apostasy from Christian ethics and would inevitably end in disaster. Fundamentalists thus offered their pre-millenarian scenario as a challenge to a liberal belief in progress. Mysticism and Its Return as Esotericism: The Concept of Nature In the 1960s mysticism began to take the same route. People in the West started tapping heterodox and pagan traditions to achieve a new kind of religiosity, one that involved Goddess worship, magic, witchcraft, astrology, and prophecy. The ideas were spread through bookstores, therapies, seminars, and music. Since most groups did not have prior ties to a church, sociologists of religion referred to them as ‘cults’ to be distinguished from ‘sects.’62 The notion of ‘cult’ is particularly intriguing, since it has its roots in a kind of ‘cultural translation’ of Troeltsch’s third category ‘mysticism.’63 While Troeltsch
61 Martin Riesebrodt, Fundamentalismus als patriarchalische Protestbewegung: Amerikanische Protestanten (1910–28) und Iranische Schiiten (1961–1979) im Vergleich (Tübingen: Mohr/ Siebeck, 1990); English translation: Pious Passion: The Emergence of Modern Fundamentalism in the United States and Iran (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). 62 “When a sect breaks away from a church, it takes with it the label ‘religion.’ But cults are not born with the religious label attached,” in Rodney Stark and William Sims Bainbridge, The Future of Religion: Secularization, Revival, and Cult Formation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 34. 63 Colin Campbell, ‘The Cult, the Cultic Milieu and Secularization,’ in Sociological Yearbook of Religion in Britain 5 (1972): 119–36; cf. Hubert Knoblauch, ‘Das unsichtbare Zeitalter: “New Age,” privatisierte Religion und kultisches Milieu,’ in Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie 41 (1989): 504–25; here: 511–13; Hubert Knoblauch, Die Welt der Wünschelrutengänger und Pendler: Erkundungen einer verborgenen Wirklichkeit (Frankfurt/New York: Campus, 1991), 29–30.
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conceived of mysticism as a statement of genuine individuality, rejecting both community and rationality, American scholars severed the link between the rejection of community and that of rational culture. As a consequence, Troeltsch’s notion of ‘mysticism’ disintegrated into personal mystical religion on the one hand, and deviant religious groups—‘cults’—on the other. The difference between ‘sects’ and ‘cults’ created a new problem: What are the guiding ideas or principles of a ‘cult’? The English scholar Colin Campbell was one of the first to suggest an answer. According to him, ‘cults’ show a tendency to be ephemeral and highly unstable. New ones are being born just as fast as the old ones die. There is a continual process of cult formation and collapse which parallels the high turnover of membership at the individual level. Clearly, therefore, cults must exist within a milieu which, if not conducive to the maintenance of individual cults, is clearly highly conducive to the spawning of cults in general.64
The milieu of cults is thus accorded a greater importance than the guiding ideas of the various individual cults. One significant element of this milieu was the ‘New Age.’ It drew much scholarly attention in the years 1994–96, with the appearance of the three monographs that analyzed this elusive phenomenon. It resembled ‘fundamentalism’ insofar as the ‘New Age’ was also a fashionable label spread by the media. A German scholar, Christoph Bochinger, traced the popular label to publishing houses, showing how many distinct phenomena it subsumed.65 Finally, Paul Heelas, in his New Age Movement, sought to reduce the variety of beliefs and practices that ‘New Age’ represented by claiming the existence of a kind of guiding idea behind them all—a concept of the human self transcending the power of tradition.66 ‘Detraditionalization’ became the key notion in his approach.67 From this point of view the ‘New Age’ was a distinct modern phenomenon, liberating the human self from the power of tradition—a tradition dividing mind and matter, subject and object, Campbell, ‘The Cult, the Cultic Milieu and Secularization,’ 121–22. Christoph Bochinger, “New Age” und moderne Religion: Religionswissenschaftliche Analysen, 2nd ed. (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 1995). 66 Paul Heelas, The New Age Movement: The Celebration of the Self and the Sacralization of Modernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996). 67 It also became the title of a collection of essays of well-known scholars of religious and social studies, Detraditionalization: Critical Reflections on Authority and Identity, ed. Paul Heelas, Scott Lash and Paul Morris (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996). 64
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individual and nature. In short, ‘New Age’ accelerated the fall of traditional man. Though Heelas’s interpretation is highly tempting, it leaves one basic element unexplained: where does the notion of the self transcending the power of tradition come from? It is a disadvantage that Heelas ignored the substantial studies, starting with Troeltsch and Durkheim, which traced the modern concept of the self to religious origins.68 Doubts about ‘New Age’ as ‘detraditionalization’ were lent an additional credence when ‘New Age’ was linked to the history of esotericism. Antoine Faivre presented ‘esotericism’ as a philosophy of nature, having a long tradition that originated in ancient culture, particularly in Alexandrian Hermetism, and that was handed down to Western culture. Faivre conceived of it as a particular “form of thought”69 assuming correspondences between all parts of the universe.70 The Dutch scholar Wouter Hanegraaff took the logical next step and described ‘New Age’ as the latest offshoot of that tradition.71 What at first sight appeared to be a label subsuming rather diverse elements, from this point of view displayed much more coherence. ‘New Age’ propagated an anti-mechanical concept of nature. This interpretation readily explained why ‘New Age’ had benefited from modern theoretical physics and biology. They too have considered cosmos and life as systems that, like a bicycle rider, have to keep restoring their balance. Matter and spirit cannot be separated,72 a version of nature similar to that referred to as mysticism around 1900. Conclusion Most students of religions around 1900 realized that they were constructing religious history. The point of difference between the scholars then and now comes to light when one turns to the status of See above footnote, 31. Antoine Faivre, Access to Western Esotericism (New York: SUNY, 1994), 10–15. 70 Ibid., 12. 71 “The term ‘New Age Science’ is actually a misnomer: its real domain is not natural science, but philosophy of nature,” Wouter J. Hanegraaff, New Age Religion and Western Culture: Esotericism in the Mirror of Secular Thought (Leiden: Brill, 1996), 64. 72 Hubert Knoblauch, ‘“New Paradigm” oder “Neues Zeitalter”? Fritjof Capras moralisches Unternehmen und die “New-Age-Bewegung”,’ in Religion und Kultur, ed. J. Bergmann, A. Hahn and T. Luckmann (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1993), 249–70. 68 69
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past religions in the modern age. Wonderfully clear in this regard is an idea by Georg Simmel. He argued that Kant’s critique of pure reason has succeeded in rendering the power of nature into subjective categories of the human mind. Nature becomes subdued to the subject. We need, Simmel added, a similar critical reflection on history in order to turn its tacit power into categories of our mind.73 Simmel’s idea helps clarify the crucial difference in theory between scholars at the beginning and at the end of the twentieth century. Scholars at the beginning of the century suspected religion to be a lasting power in the modern world. They wanted to know more about the past in order to understand present constraints. Modern humankind can be trapped in religious traditions, unable to escape from them. In the apt words of Ernst Troeltsch, “Spiritual powers can rule, even if they are contested.”74 A similar idea is a stranger in the academy of today.
73 Georg Simmel, Die Probleme der Geschichtsphilosophie (1907), ed. Guy Oakes and Kurt Röttgers, vol. 9 of Georg Simmel, Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1997), 229–30. 74 Troeltsch, Die Bedeutung, 22.
THE HISTORY OF RELIGIONS AND THE STUDY OF RELIGIONS: A RESPONSE TO HANS KIPPENBERG Christoph Schwöbel In his essay Hans Kippenberg has offered a comparison between some of the major tendencies and trends in the study of religions at the beginning of the twentieth century, with some of the main emphases at the end of the century. As is to be expected from the author of Die Entdeckung der Religionsgeschichte, Kippenberg focuses on the notions of ‘religion,’ ‘history,’ and ‘tradition.’ The astonishing result at which he arrives is summarized in the heading of the first section of his paper: ‘The vanishing of “history” from religious studies.’ While the discovery of the history of religions and all that it implied for the understanding of modern society was the uniting theme of many different strands of the study of religion in the latter half of the nineteenth and much of the early part of the twentieth century, religious studies at the end of the twentieth century seems to have abandoned the historical analysis of religious traditions as the highway for studying the religions. The reasons for this are clearly indicated by Kippenberg: if religion is understood from a constructivist perspective, so that the student of religion proclaims (with Jonathan Z. Smith) that ‘There is no data for religion; religion is solely the creation of the scholar’s study,’ and therefore concludes (with Mark C. Taylor) that ‘religion is a modern Western invention,’ then it seems futile to look for a history of religions or to try to delineate the developments of religious traditions. The history of religions turns into the history of the study of religions, which is not a history of discovery but a history of invention. In his comparison of the beginnings of the study of religions in the twentieth century with the stage that it has reached at the end of the century, Kippenberg points to the role that the understanding of religious traditions plays in the interpretation of the present situation. Understanding the history of religion is in this way perceived as a necessary prerequisite of understanding one’s own situation. Religious traditions both point to the roots of central aspects
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of modernity (as Kippenberg shows with reference to Emile Durkheim and Max Weber), and confront modernity with aspects of their own situation, which they all too often attempt to eliminate from their self-descriptions. Kippenberg’s view on the later stages of the history of the study of religions is particularly revealing. Both with regard to ‘Sects and their Return as Fundamentalisms,’ and with regard ‘Mysticism and its Return as Esotericism,’ he shows that the categories which Ernst Troeltsch employed to analyze the interaction between the institutional forms of Christianity and the social formations of the West are filled with new content through new developments in the religious situation of the times. This points to an interaction between the study of religions and the historical reality of religions at any given moment in time. Following these observations, I would like to make four suggestions concerning the interpretation of the study of religions in the twentieth century and outline some of the implications this has for the practice of religious studies in the twenty-first century. 1. The history of the study of religions in the twentieth century can only be properly understood as part of the history of religions in the twentieth century. If one looks back on the history of religious studies in the last century, it seems that it has many connections to the religious situations of the times. The study of religions is not an independent enterprise that can remain at a safe distance from the history of religions; rather, it is in a state (or, more precisely, in the flux) of constant interplay with the actual religious situation of the times. It would be a worthwhile enterprise to investigate the exact nature of the interplay between the history of religious studies and the history of religions. Such a study would likely show that such an interplay exists in all the phases that religious studies went through in the twentieth century. The first phase, which begins in the nineteenth century with Max Müller’s edition of Sacred Texts of the East (1897ff.), claims a new objectivity in promoting the philological approach as the highway to the study of religions. In spite of the attention that Müller gave to the particular lines of development in different religious traditions, carefully traced on the basis of the interpretation of their sacred texts, there remains a clear commitment to finding a development
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that leads to Christianity as the high point of religious development. The particularities of religious traditions documented in the specific character of their languages remain within the grasp of a fundamental unity of religious history. The search for the primordial state of religion to which all religious can be traced, be it Tylor’s animism, or Marett’s pre-animism, is motivated by the desire to uncover the hidden logic of religious evolution. All these interpretive strategies are conducted from a vantage point that naturally assumes that the convictions the researcher holds represent the final stage in a unified process of development. The ‘otherness’ of the beginnings of religion loses its alien character by being interpreted as a stage in a long line of development. The ‘history-of-religions-school,’ which is commonly regarded as the second phase in the story of the growth of religious studies, no longer starts from the presupposition that all religious phenomena form a part of one evolutionary process. However, the relative superiority of the religious commitments of the researchers still governs their employment of the methods of criticism, analogy, and correlation. This tacit conviction is presupposed in the researchers’ devotion to the facts of the now overwhelming riches of newly discovered texts, as well as archeological and anthropological evidence. The continuity may not be located in particular theological views, but may be based in beliefs about the underlying unity of history or the uniting band of similar and essentially identical psychological orientations. Nevertheless, it is quietly supposed that all the different facts one finds and all the different values one investigates belong to one (though highly differentiated) universe of meaning, even though this may only be accessible through subjective value judgments and the patient exploration of historical research. The emphasis changes in the third phase, signaled by the names of such scholars as Nathan Söderblom, Rudolf Otto, and Joachim Wach. It is no longer presupposed that the concept of God provides the unity for the diverse world of religious phenomena. The experiential character of the orientation towards ‘holiness,’ or the ‘numinous,’ is seen as disclosing the true core of religion. The center and the focus of religion is perceived in the religious moment of the breakthrough of the ‘holy.’ It is this experience that offers access to ‘understanding’ religion. The unity of a cultural universe—clearly presupposed in the evolutionary schemes of the first phase and in the interplay of analogies and correlations comprehended in the
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unitary grasp of the historical method in the second phase—is now abandoned and unity is instead located in the religious experience itself. It is difficult to escape the impression that the experience of the cultural disruption of the First World War and the feeling of standing ‘between the times’ informed much of the description of the primordial religious experience. The shattering of the external world of meaning could be related to an understanding of religion which situated the religious Urerlebnis in being grasped by the mysterium tremendum et fascinans. It seems plausible to relate the fourth phase in the development of religious studies, with its sudden recognition of the Eurocentric character of the modes of perception and the categories of interpretation that had been employed in the history of the study of religion, to the renaissance of religions in the guise of global religious pluralism. The religious revolution in Iran had a decisive significance for creating awareness of this new situation. It quickly destroyed the assumption, highly popular even within religious studies, that secularization is a global, unitary, and irreversible tendency of turning what had once belonged to religion over to other spheres of life. The renaissance of religion demonstrated that processes of secularization could function as a fertile breeding-ground for many forms of post-secular religion. Post-secular religion in its many forms—from the ‘fundamentalisms’ of different traditions to the potent cocktails of esoteric religion mixed from the ingredients of many different traditions—not only documented the power that (contrary to many predictions) still resided in religions, but also challenged secular nonreligious ways of interpreting religion. The renaissance of religion did not bring back religion as a unitary phenomenon but as a bewildering diversity of religious pluralism. Used as a descriptive term, religious pluralism indicates the situation in which a plurality of basic orientations laying a comprehensive claim on the way their followers structure their lives exist in a situation of co-existence and competition.1 It seems evident that this pluralistic religious situation, which dominates the cultures of big cities all over the world, is reflected in the multiple-choice of methodological strategies advocated within religious studies today.
1 Cf. my article ‘Pluralismus II. Systematisch-theologisch,’ in Theologische Realenzyklopädie XXVI (1996): 724–739.
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The interplay between the history of religious studies and the history of religions in the twentieth century shows clearly that religious studies cannot withdraw from the world of religious history to a vantage point unaffected by the dynamics of religious history. If it wants to study the religions of the world, religious studies will become affected by the world of religions. However, this is by no means a one-way street where religious studies merely reflects the religious situation of the times. To what extent has religious studies shaped the world of religions? To what extent have oriental studies within religious studies contributed to the reconstitution of oriental religions? In what way have cultural images of ‘orientalism’ also created a corresponding image of ‘occidentalism’? To what extent was the reconstitution of Neo-Hinduism influenced by theosophical ideas from the West, once the Theosophical Society had moved its headquarters to Madras? Would shamanism exist as it exists, let alone in the Western world, if it had not been recorded and documented by eager anthropologists? The recognition that the history of religious studies in the twentieth century can only be properly understood as part of the history of religions in the twentieth century leads to a second suggestion: 2. Because of its involvement in the history of religion, religious studies is irreducibly perspectival: The study of religions does not have a stand-point outside the world of religions. One lesson to be learned from the history of religious studies in the twentieth century is that there is no neutral vantage point from which religions can be investigated. All our knowledge of religions, indeed all our knowledge, is ineluctably bound to the specific perspective from which we view the world. Many scholars in the field of religious studies have been eager to point out that all our perspectives of interpretation are historically and culturally conditioned and in this sense relative. It seems that one has to take this view a step further in order to relativize relativism. This would mean that all our perspectives of interpretation of anything there is are not only culturally and historically conditioned, but also religiously or ideologically conditioned. These religious or ideological commitments necessarily imply ontological commitment about the nature of reality, about our constitution as personal agents and patients, observers and interpreters, within that reality and about our interaction with other persons.
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The history and philosophy of science can provide a useful parallel here. Its course in the twentieth century demonstrates quite clearly that even the question of what constitutes a scientific problem and what could be seen as its solution builds on pre-scientific assumptions that are value-laden and charged with fundamental assumptions about reality. In order to function as our orientation in the world, our views of reality are based on an ‘ultimate concern’ (as Paul Tillich would have said), which determines not only our possibilities of action, but also our goals and norms of action. Paradoxically, we can only approximate Max Weber’s ideal of a ‘value-free science’ if we do not pretend that there are no values or no pre-scientific basic orientations in the way we do science, and if we try to disclose these commitments and so make them accessible to public debate. Only in this way can we see how our pre-scientific basic orientations, including our religious or ideological commitments, shape what we see as fact, evidence, proof, and so forth. If we cannot ultimately divorce our religious and ideological commitments from our scientific activity, as indeed we cannot, if they shape our whole view of reality, we should make our scientific investigations transparent for the way they are shaped by these commitments. This demand for transparency can take up much of Weber’s valid interests in arguing for a ‘value-free’ scientific investigation, because only that which has been made transparent can be methodologically controlled. What was, and is, wrong with the Kathederpropheten, the prophets of the lecture-hall, is not that they had and have religious and ideological beliefs and commitments, but that they did not disclose these beliefs and commitments for what they are, but rather tried to sell them as science or scholarship. Only those commitments which are disclosed can be methodologically assessed and controlled in terms of their influence on scholarly investigations. There are two ways in which some theoreticians of religious studies have tried to evade the insight of the necessary perspectival nature of all scholarly inquiry into the religions. One is the ideal of absolute objectivity, which is most often associated with the alleged neutrality of empirical research—data are always objective and neutral. With regard to this view, it helps to be reminded that what counts as data is always dependent on the scheme of categories employed, which is not a result of empirical research but already presupposed in all empirical research. Since such a scheme of categories concerns the conditions of the possibility of counting something as real, data
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are always related to the fundamental beliefs and convictions of a view of reality. The emphasis on objectivity in some strands of religious studies comes from its attempt to emancipate itself from the presuppositions of Christian doctrine, which were still very much in evidence in the work of scholars of the generation of Nathan Söderblom or Rudolf Otto. It is correct that the categories presupposed in empirical research are not necessarily those of the Christian faith, and it is surely right that the investigation of religions has for a long time been dominated by the attempt to perceive them in a framework of interpretation developed in a Christian context. But this should not disguise the fact that such interpretive categories are always at work regardless of the tradition or intellectual standpoint from which the categories are derived. All too often this kind of objectivism is not a science but a thinly disguised version of scientism, which should not be a part of the scientific character of religious studies because it is one of the objects of its inquiry. The other way in which the perspective-bound character of all inquiry is denied is found in the position of universal constructivism that is much en vogue in the postmodern situation. Contrary to the creed of the objectivists, the position of universal constructivism maintains that there is no data, that all is a constructive interpretation. In this way the difference between the interpretandum and the interpretatio is systematically eliminated. All we are left with is a tangle of constructive interpretations, a total perspectivism. However, these constructive perspectives are no longer perspectives on anything; they just stand in relation to one another. Where the notion of truth as adaequatio rei et intellectus, or, more precisely, adaequatio intellectus ad rem, is eliminated from the perspective of religious studies, the debate between different perspectives becomes simply a struggle for power. In spite of all that one can criticize in different phenomenological approaches to the religions, their big advantage is that they presuppose that reality itself as it is constitutive for the view of reality of religious believers presents itself through the religious phenomena. For phenomenologists, the reality of religions constitutes religious perspectives on reality. Therefore, the study of religion is never concerned with invention but always with the reconstruction of the reality that appears in and through the religious phenomena against the background of the ontological commitments present in the perspectives of the students of religions.
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Perspectivism is not enough. The perspectives of religious studies must be understood as perspectives on reality: they never have the character of pure inventions but are based on a view of reality which is focused in the religious and ideological beliefs and convictions of the students of religious studies. Because of this ‘realist’ claim that underlies the perspective-bound character of the inquiry of religious studies, the latter can become sensitive to the way in which religious believers structure their lives through the realities of their religions. In view of the perspective-bound character of inquiry into the religions which must be defended against the twofold traps of objectivism and constructivism we can make a third suggestion, which is made plausible by the review of the study of religions in the twentieth century: 3. The more students of religious studies are aware of their own religious and ideological commitments, the more they will be able to take religious differences seriously and to respect the ‘otherness’ of other religions. Understanding the religions is one of the recurring themes in the history of the study of religion in the twentieth century. Marett’s protest against the intellectualism and functionalism of early evolutionary schemes is a protest against what he understood as a misunderstanding of the nature of religion. Much of the on-going popularity of Rudolf Otto’s views on The Holy, especially in the English-speaking world, is due to the fact that he seemed to offer a way of making accessible the experiential core of religions. It is perhaps in the work of Joachim Wach that one may found the most consistent attempt at dealing with the question of understanding religion. Of the many problems connected with the question of understanding the religions, two are perhaps the most persistent. One is the relationship between the past and the present, the question that fueled all inquiries into the religious genealogies of modern social formations in the spirit of Durkheim and Weber; the other is the uneasy relationship between religion as a universal phenomenon and the particular self-interpretations of religions. Understanding presupposes that there is a solution to these problems: understanding the present always means taking the present as a historical phenomenon and viewing it in terms of its memories and expectations. Furthermore,
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every act of understanding is never directed towards the pure universal or the simple particulars, but always combines the two in varying combinations. How does the problem of understanding present itself if we see the history of religious studies as part of the history of religions, and if we see all inquiry into religion as bound to perspectives of interpretation, which are themselves religious or ideological? The first aspect of understanding the religions that comes to mind is the fact that understanding cannot abstract itself from the dynamics of religious history. If the study of religions is part of the history of religions, the observers are at the same time participants in that process. There is no escape to a vantage point above the religions and ideologies. The perspective of the interpreter is always a perspective from within, influenced by the dynamics of the history of religions and, in turn, influencing that dynamic. This makes it necessary that students of religion disclose their own religious and ideological commitments, and it means that the study of religions must in some way be confessional. This is the ultimate heresy for the view of religious studies as a discipline defined by its religious and ideological neutrality. The reason for the rejection of the confessional character of religious studies consists in the assumption that a confessional perspective is the logical opposite of a critical perspective. And, if there is one thing all students of religious studies agree upon, it is their common creed of the necessity of being critical. But, is the assumption about the conflict between being confessional and being critical accurate? In a religious sense, a confession of faith is a way of relating to the object of faith in such a way that those who confess their faith become responsible before the object of faith and worship. Confessional standpoints, therefore, have a built-in capacity for self-relativization. This, I suggest, is the basis for being critical and self-critical. Only those who can be confessional about their ultimate concerns can also be critical and self-critical with regard to their responsibility before their ultimate concern. The second aspect of understanding the religions crucial here is the understanding of ‘otherness.’ Respecting the ‘otherness’ of the other implies not seeing the other as a mere element of a universal category, but respecting the particularity of the other. In the process of understanding this can only be made possible if I see my own perspective not as that of the keeper of all universal categories, but as a particular perspective with its particular beliefs and commitments.
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Declaring this perspective—and be it in a confessional way—not only makes me sensitive to the particular perspectives of others, but also makes me available as an other for the other. Respecting differences is based on this process of making one’s own difference available to the interpretation of the other. Understanding is thus based on the mutuality of understanding, which is rooted in declaring one’s commitments and so encouraging others to declare their commitments by making my commitments publicly contestable. However, these differences only matter in the sense of becoming accessible to mutual interpretation if they are not interpreted in a merely aesthetic way which would turn them into matters of taste. The different perspectives must therefore be understood in a realist sense. They are concerned with what is really real. And, only if I see my own perspective as my way of engaging with reality, a reality which is not constituted by myself but constituted for myself, and only if I make this perspective on reality available to others for their interpretation and criticism, will I be able to see their otherness as an otherness that matters, because it will confront me with claims about reality which are not part of my own view of reality. It is in the mutuality of internal and external perspectives on reality, which is never accessible apart from these perspectives, that understanding is constituted as mutual understanding. If religious studies follows this suggestion, there is no retreat to the safe haven of the ivory tower, because the ivory tower must be exchanged for the marketplace where understanding is only to be gained at the risk of being understood, albeit often in very different ways from those in which one wants to be understood. All this indicates that the study of religions cannot play truant from the classroom of religious pluralism, where the clash of cultures must be dealt with in establishing strategies of peaceful coexistence and cooperation. From this follows a fourth—and urgent— suggestion: 4. If religious studies is part of the history of religions, it must take responsibility for shaping the religious situation of the times. This is perhaps the most important lesson that can be learned from the study of religious studies in the twentieth century. It underlines the significance of Ernst Troeltsch’s claim that the relativizing insights of historicism can only be overcome in the course of attempts at
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forging a new cultural synthesis, based on the concrete perspectives we have in our historical situation. It also gives a new perspective on Rudolf Otto’s attempts to establish the Religiöser Menschheitsbund as a response to the cultural and religious chaos left by the First World War. The contributions that religious studies can make to dealing with the situation of global religious pluralism may be much more modest than the ambitious plans Troeltsch and Otto had in mind. However, the contributions of religious studies will also consist in interpreting the situation of religious pluralism from within, and so exploring the possibilities for a culture of the dialogical difference of religions as the basis from which to develop strategies for contributing to the common good as it appears from the different perspectives of the different religions. The particular location of the study of religions on the boundary between the academy and society at large implies its particular responsibility of making the resources of the academy available to the solution of the problems of religious pluralism in society, in local and regional contexts. In this way the future of the study of religion is inextricably bound up with the future of religions.
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DIFFERENCE AND COHERENCE IN THE WORLDWIDE STUDY OF RELIGIONS Michael Pye Language and Cultural Identity in the Study of Religions It is doubtful, and for this very reason interesting, whether any single person today could present an evenly balanced account of the study of religions in a truly global perspective. This is not only because of the huge quantity of relevant materials. In spite of vastly increased communication and the political and economic pressure for globalization, the major cultural and linguistic regions of the world in many ways remain stubbornly independent and different. Rather than trying to give a country-by-country tour, therefore, and an unfairly abbreviated list of specialists in the study of religions to be found in them, I intend to emphasize the significance of the diversity of models of religion which are deeply lodged in some of the cultural regions of the world. At the same time I will argue that, in spite of their difference, these are related, or could be related, to a contemporary study of religions that is internationally coherent. That is to say, while cultural difference is interesting, and important, this does not mean that the study of religions can or should be just arbitrary. If it is to be scientific, though the word sits uneasily in an English sentence about the humanities, then the study of religions must display certain features which are themselves not subject to cultural difference to a significant degree. It is the interplay between the perceived differences and the sought coherence of reflections upon them which gives the study of religions much of its fascination. It will be well to begin by considering the relative independence of the various linguistic worlds in their relation to the study of religions. Even for North America, with its massive scholarly output, it is true to say that not only studies in particular religions but even meta-studies on the history and theory of the subject are often locked into one language world. This is not to deny the excellence of the works themselves, nor to deny that there are exceptions, but simply
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to state an overwhelming cultural fact. It is not surprising therefore that over against this Quebecers often feel the need to assert the value of francophone presentations. The very choice of language to some extent affects the discourse. It is for this very reason that the electronic discussion list Yggdrasill was set up to facilitate exchanges on the study of religions in German.1 In general, the larger a particular cultural region is, the more self-sufficient it can be, and the less urgent it is for the majority of scholars in a given academic field to be open to the osmosis of influences from without. The dominant language foci in Europe are of course English, French, and German. There is a tendency for those in the Nordic countries and the Netherlands to make regular use of English in scholarly writing, though without neglecting their own languages, for those in East European countries to make additional use of German and English, and for those in Italy and Spain to prefer French. Of course there are innumerable other interactions, as when a Polish scholar reads and speaks Italian fluently, or when an Estonian is familiar with Finnish. The point made here however is that a selfsufficient language area, even within multi-lingual Europe, tends to restrict the scholarly discourse or at least to recycle it around the linguistic expectations found within it. Thus the quotation of ‘foreign’ works in the original is often regarded in Britain as being somewhat distasteful. In Germany it is much more acceptable to cite works in English or other languages, but works in German are in fact more likely to be read than works in English, not to speak of those in less widely known languages. But this is only the beginning. There is much more to the study of religions in global perspective than that which can be found in North America and Europe alone. Attention should be directed for example to East Asia, that is in particular to China, Korea and Japan, where a long and complex intellectual history still needs to be taken fully into consideration in identifying the emergence of the contemporary study of religions. Here the importance of the language frame is evident. Is it indeed religion (or religions) which studies of religions in these countries study? In passing, it may be noted that 1 Since the time of writing, the European Association for the Study of Religions has provided a network of six cross-border electronic discussion lists to provide a service for the multi-lingual continent which it represents. Details of these lists: Candide, Dolmen, Most, Synkron, Tonantzin and Yggdrasill, may be found on www.easr.de.
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there is in none of these languages a regular distinction between a singular and plural form of nouns, although, before the reader gets too excited about this, there are various ways of indicating that reference is being made to things, or events, in their plurality. Moreover, the recognition that religions, or teachings, occur in plurality, is not only one of the prime requirements for the emergence of advanced reflection about them, but also one which has been present in East Asia for centuries.2 Various studies taking these matters into account have focused on the term religion and its equivalents, or its alternatives, or its distant relatives, in a variety of cultures. Thus Arabic din, Sanskrit dharma, and so on, are adduced. Usually the argument is that these do not really correspond to western religion, and that the western concept leads to a distorted or inappropriately constructed view of non-western cultural systems. There is some truth in this. However, the fault, like beauty, lies in the eye of the beholder. As has already been argued, for example, by Peter Antes,3 we may recognize that the particular terms have all had their history in the particular cultures and yet still require that the term selected to refer to the field under study be defined accordingly for the purpose.4 Thus studies of religion today, even in the western world, are not beholden to a specific view of religion which would necessarily reflect, for example, the specific characteristics or supposed characteristics of the Christian religion. It is evident to most specialists in the discipline that it is the structures of the systems under study which are determinative, at least as far as the preliminary steps of elucidation and characterization5 are concerned. It is not necessary, indeed it is well known 2 I have argued this in various places since 1973 with increasingly detailed documentation. Cf. in particular the introduction to my translations of the eighteenth century Japanese writer Tominaga Nakamoto (Emerging from Meditation [London: Duckworth, and Honolulu]: University of Hawaii Press, 1990). 3 Peter Antes, ‘Religion, din et dharma dans la perspective d’une recherche comparative,’ in The Notion of ‘Religion’ in Comparative Research (Selected Proceedings of the XVI IAHR Congress), ed. Ugo Bianchi (Rome: l’“Erma” di Bretschneider, 1994), 763–68. 4 Essentially, Kurt Rudolph comes to the same conclusion, ‘Inwieweit ist der Begriff “Religion” eurozentrisch,’ in Bianchi, The Notion of ‘Religion’, 131–39. It is quite impossible here to go into all the studies which have attended to this problem, but attention may be drawn to the selected proceedings of the 16th IAHR Congress (Rome 1990; see Bianchi, The Notion of ‘Religion’ ), which were largely devoted to the question. 5 I usually present a methodological sequence of elucidation, characterization, structural analysis, and functional explanation.
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that is undesirable, to insert a preemptive, normative view of religion into that which is under study. Training oneself to avoid this pitfall is an elementary feature of the discipline of the study of religions (that is, Religionswissenschaft). The question of the terminology therefore, though interesting, has really lost its drama. Indeed, in so far as people continue to assert, erroneously and/or misleadingly, that East Asian terms for religion such as the Japanese shûkyô are loaded with western meanings, they are guilty of a kind of inverted orientalism, which I call westernism.6 The problem arises partly because of the continuing ethnocentricity of many of those who normally write in English, which is indeed the dominant language of globalization processes, and partly, on the other hand, by the very understandable, continuing need to prove identity on the part of articulate representatives of those who are mainly using other important languages, especially Asian ones. The latter seek to establish their own distance by discriminating against selected terminology in their own language, arguing that it is western-derived, or that it bears inappropriate ‘western’ meanings. The standard commentary on the Japanese term shûkyô is a classic case of this deplorable syndrome. It may be agreed that, for a particular period in the nineteenth century, it addressed that which, at that time, at least in the minds of politically alert and active Japanese, demanding westerners supposed religion to be. However, the term has both a pre-history and a post-history. I will not go into the older history of it here.7 As to recent years, it has come to mean hardly more and hardly less than either religion or religions, depending on the context, without necessarily implying a preeminence of scripture and dogma, or of definite personal faith, such as was highlighted in the nineteenth century. All of this does not mean that just any terms in any languages may be regarded as equivalents to religion, or for that matter to other apparently satisfactory words such as the Finnish uskonto, or again to the Dutch term godsdienst. The latter, incidentally, might be regarded as unsatisfactory because of the evident highlighting of particular 6 See my essay ‘Westernism unmasked,’ in Secular Theories of Religion: Current Perspectives, ed. Tim Jensen and Mikael Rothstein (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2000), 211–30. 7 Cf., for example, my own paper at the previously mentioned 16th IAHR Congress, Rome 1990, under the title ‘What is “Religion” in East Asia?’, in Bianchi, The Notion of ‘Religion’, 115–22.
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aspects of religion. Interestingly, the Afrikaans equivalent godsdiens was at some point complemented by religie which has more general connotations. Clearly some words in some languages refer to matters which do not precisely match the area which is addressed by modern studies of religions. Dharma is a good example. But this is no reason for general despair. If we turn to Indonesia, to take another case, we find the word agama. This is of Indian derivation, but it is used also as in the Indonesian plural agama agama, to refer to religions in their plurality. It is used also in compound terms to refer to psychology of religion, sociology of religion, and so on. This usage of agama is not really significantly different from the usage of religion when we speak in English of the study of religions. I conclude at this point therefore that the discussion of this admittedly central terminology, though interesting and indeed necessary, is intrinsically no more important than the poly-linguistic discussion of much other theoretical terminology in the study of religions, which by now has become more urgent. Not only have people become unduly worked up about it, the trend of the discussion has usually been faulty. Nevertheless, there is cultural difference between the major regions of the world, and this difference has important effects on the ways in which religions, religious systems, and religious processes are perceived. Partly it is connected to the vocabulary available in diverse languages, which cannot always immediately be related to internationally recognizable terminology. But it is not only a question of diversity of language. The dominant languages of Latin America, Spanish and Portuguese, have a more or less seamless openness to the traditional intellectual discourses of Europe, and yet the widely presupposed model of religion is not the same as that which is current in Europe, as I will argue in more detail below. On the continent of Africa south of the Sahara, the dominant educational and scholarly languages are French and English, but here too a recognizable model of religion is widely presupposed which has common and distinctive contours. Before taking up these models in detail a few words need to be said about the coherence of the study of religions as a scientific enterprise. A Certain Understanding of the Study of Religions The approach taken here does presuppose a certain understanding of the study of religions, whatever cultural region they are most at
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home in, which may not be shared by all. There is no way around this. I am speaking here of the study of religions as a coherent discipline in its own right. This does not mean that a single autonomous religious principle is presupposed, as by Schleiermacher, Otto, and others. What it does mean is that there is a perceivable field of historical, cultural, and social data which can be studied, which is not the same as just any other field, which can conveniently be denoted by the very general term religion and which requires a particular clustering8 of otherwise known methods for its elucidation, characterization, analysis, and explanation. In this sense, without privileging any particular religious or metaphysical assumptions or assertions, and without excluding the usual interdisciplinary interaction between the social and cultural sciences, the study of religions takes its place as an autonomous discipline among others. Broadly speaking, this perspective is consistent with the center of gravity shared by those who participate in the work of the International Association for the History of Religions (IAHR), and its numerous affiliate associations world-wide.9 Not that this widely based association prescribes a specific scientific orthodoxy. My own understanding of the study of religions, for example, is more tightly formulated than that of some others who have been involved in it in various ways, as may be seen in Ursula King’s review of the proceedings of a small IAHR conference in 1988 entitled Marburg Revisited.10 In gen8 It is the appropriate clustering of the right methods which constitutes the specific discipline of the study of religions, as argued in my paper ‘Methodological integration in the study of religions,’ in Approaching Religion, ed. Tore Ahlbäck (Åbo, Finland: Donner Institute for Research in Religious and Cultural History, 1999) 1: 188–205. 9 A recent account of the work of the IAHR, with special reference to methodological perspectives, may be found in a special issue of Method and Theory in the Study of Religion (vol. 12, no. 1 and 2 [2000]), edited by Armin W. Geertz and Russell T. McCutcheon, and in the editors’ own introductory paper. This is not the place to list all the affiliate associations of the IAHR, which may be found on the appropriate website. Suffice it to note, for example, that the journal just mentioned is the official journal of the North American Association for the Study of Religion, and that the various national associations in the European context have recently found a new, regional coordinatory focus in the European Association for the Study of Religions (cf. www.easr.de). There are national associations of the IAHR all over the world, that is, in various countries such as China, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Mexico, South Africa, and two other important regional associations should be noted, namely those for Latin America and for Africa. 10 In Method and Theory in the Study of Religions 3, no. 1. This volume, edited by myself in 1989, arose out of a concerted attempt by specialists from various countries to consider ‘institutions and strategies in the study of religion,’ taking cultural and indeed political diversity into account.
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eral, however, there has been a widespread perception that the work of the IAHR can at any rate be distinguished from that of not a few other associations which are somehow devoted to religion, especially those with a strongly and religiously programmatic profile, such as the recently revived World’s Parliament of Religions. It is also instructive that the IAHR has had its own internal, clarificatory debates. There was an important moment in 1960 when Friedrich Heiler’s religiously idealistic approach was differentiated from the mainstream within the IAHR of the day, which emphasized the importance of distinguishing historical and comparative studies of religions from theological interactions. That debate also took place in Marburg, and the title Marburg Revisited, mentioned above, was chosen to reflect the fact that a number of senior persons were present on both occasions.11 This is not just gossip; it indicates longitudinal coherence within a recognizable community of international scholarship. Over the last quarter of a century there has been, in IAHR events, an increasing recognition of the importance of the social scientific perspective, leading to the debate, between 1990 and 1995, over a possible change of name which would have replaced the word history by study. This debate ended when the General Assembly in Mexico City voted not to make the change, largely in order to maintain the brand value of the well-known acronym. However the interest aroused demonstrated that the corporate perception of all concerned balanced historical and social-scientific perspectives rather evenly. It is true to say that both of these aspects complement each other to this day in congress programs, as has recently been seen at the 18th world congress in Durban (2000). On the other hand, it remains as clear as ever that the IAHR, while permitting very varied participation in its activities, does not itself stand for or promote any particular religious ideas or programs. In sum, the position taken here is that such an approach to the study of religions, tolerantly and inclusively conceived, and typified by the world-wide membership and programs of the IAHR yet intellectually, of course, by no means restricted to these, is a legitimate 11 Ugo Bianchi, Lauri Honko, Kurt Rudolph, Annemarie Schimmel, Heinrich von Stietencron, Noriyoshi Tamaru, R. J. Zwi Werblowsky, as well as the two Marburg colleagues Hans-Jürgen Greschat and Martin Kraatz. The 1960 debate was documented in the IAHR journal Numen 7 (1960), 215–39, by Zwi Werblowsky, Annemarie Schimmel and C. J. Bleeker.
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and desirable contribution within the academic community. It is characterized by the interaction of historical-philological methods and social-scientific methods. It is the correlation between the field of study, the relevant sources, and the appropriate methods which together form the character of this discipline, just as in other cases such as social anthropology or archaeology. Moreover this understanding of the discipline has become increasingly recognized throughout the world in recent decades, even though the political and social acceptability of the discipline varies from place to place because it is, not surprisingly, affected by the dominant ideological and/or religious culture. While the fundamental motivation is that of scientific enquiry, the study of religions may or may not be regarded as having socially or religiously useful applications, for example by contributing to religious education, to inter-communal relations in pluralist societies, or to the stabilization of activities in the realm of inter-religious dialogue. In these contexts, although the topic is very well worn, it still seems to be necessary to distinguish between scientific and religious activities. The scientific motivation is not in itself religious. This does not mean, on the other hand, that it is necessary to be irreligious in order to study religions. A religious person may wish to undertake a scientifically conceived enquiry into religions. But an exercise in the study of religions is not in itself a religious enquiry. Religious persons may even conclude that the study of religions is in some way helpful for them. Any such functions however presuppose the independent viability of the discipline as such. Without this, the value of any wider educational contributions within society will be lost. There are all kinds of reasons why people may not wish to share this view of the study of religions. At its simplest, the common denominator is that they are mainly interested in, or seeking to carry out, research into something else. Carrying out research into other fields is of course entirely legitimate. People may be interested in philosophical and cultural questions raised by thinkers like Nietzsche, Freud, Bloch, or Habermas. Or they may be Buddhists, Muslims, Christians, Jews, or Sikhs, etc., who wish to work primarily, as academics, on the textual and intellectual sources of their own particular religion. For such specialized clerics the field of study is not religions but rather a circumscribed collection of data which are presumed to bear high religious significance for their own particular religious community. Others may have a programmatic interest in religious or religiously
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related issues, for example in attempts to define a world ethic, in correlations with ecological questions, human rights, and so on. Or they may be social scientists whose main interest is in the analysis of society in general. For these investigators, religion or religions are one factor in the overall development of hypotheses, but not themselves the main object of study. It may seem attractive to think of all these as ‘options’ or ‘approaches,’ and even to collect them up under general phrases such as ‘religious studies’ or even ‘theology and religious studies.’ But then we should ask, ‘options’ or ‘approaches’ about or towards what? We will quickly find that people are looking and running in quite diverse directions, and that a focused academic discipline cannot be identified. Perversely, this situation may then be taken as indicative of an ‘identity crisis’ in the study of religions, when it really has nothing to do with it, being no more than a collective muddle created by various people who themselves, primarily, have no intention of carrying out study of religions to begin with. There are relatively few settings in which the study of religions is clearly established institutionally as a discipline in its own right. At the same time the number of academics who in some sense study religions is very great. Many of them have a primary loyalty to another discipline such as anthropology, sociology, classics, medieval history, a particular branch of oriental studies, and so on. This inevitably means that the clarity of the discipline is often obscured, though with the advantage that interdisciplinarity is often attained through osmosis. This situation may therefore be regarded quite positively. But it should also be seen clearly. The importance of contributions from all these disciplines and others not mentioned here may be seen in the extent to which they figure in bibliographical publications such as Science of Religion.12 Cultural Diversity and Divergent Models of Religion If it is possible to see some convergence regarding the academic study of religions as an enterprise which is itself scientifically and not religiously motivated, where are we left with regard to the diversity of the major cultural regions whose difference was emphasized 12 Published in English since 1976, following a Dutch prototype. By the end of the year 2000 some 16,660 articles had been summarized and indexed.
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in the first section of this paper? Typically, studies of religion in different parts of the globe, while sharing some assumptions about the independent, reflective, and analytical character of our discipline, address above all the situation of religions in those specific parts of the globe, taking account of which religions are particularly important there and whatever social and political questions are current at any one time. It is interesting therefore that there are in fact different underlying models of religion current in the major cultural areas of the world. In this regard, as already argued, it is not of crucial importance to debate the Latin-derived term religion and its intercultural viability or lack of it. Rather, we should get to know the historically conditioned parameters, in any one region, for the perception of the possible subject of study, and the key features of the social and political debate which surround it. Let us briefly consider therefore how the fundamental features of the religious scene are perceived in diverse regions of the world. These perceptions have a tremendous effect on what people regard as the field of study and even on the way in which it is studied. It should be emphasized that such models are themselves sub-scientific. Indeed, they have a more or less unshakeable, memetic quality.13 In Latin America we have an evident juxtaposition of Catholicism on the one hand and pre-conquest religious systems and elements thereof on the other hand. The interaction between these two has provided a classic model for studies of religion in Latin America, whether they have been approached from a religious, i.e., in most cases Catholic, point of view or from an ‘anthropological’ point of view. Sometimes these two run together, a fine example of the genre being Manuel Marzal’s La transformación religiosa peruana.14 At the same time, pre-conquest religions and their continuing remnants, especially in the smaller ethnic groups which were not at first affected greatly by the invasion, have also been the subject of many independent historical and field studies which do not have to be adduced in detail here. Latin American Catholicism, on the other hand, has not been 13 The relation, indeed the tension, between common, memetic models and scientifically differentiated theories of religion is the subject of a related paper delivered at a meeting of the European Association for the Study of Religions in Messina (March 2001), for which separate publication is planned. The term memetic was devised by Dawkins (1976) and unfortunately is easily confused with mimetic. 14 Manuel Marzal, La Transformación Religiosa Peruana (Lima: Pontificia Universidad Catolica del Peru, 1983).
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studied very much as a phenomenon in its own right until recently. Particularly important cults such as that of the Virgin of Guadalupe in Mexico have of course attracted attention, but the main reason for this has been the strength of its non-Catholic functions, as may be seen in a recent study edited by sociologists Paolo Giuriati and Elio Masferrer Kan.15 This model of two main elements, in interaction, has gradually been complemented by two additional factors. First, new religions of varied provenance such as the frequently studied Brazilian Candomblé and Umbanda have rightly attracted attention. Second, and more recently, the picture has been redrawn by the wave of Pentecostalism throughout the continent, which is drowning out the relatively weak impact of earlier protestant missions. This in turn has attracted the interest of sociologists interested in the big picture. Recently, the complete spectrum of the complex religious life of the continent has been establishing itself as the object of study, from a scientific point of view, as is seen in the conferences of the Asociación Latinoamericana para el Estudio de las Religiones.16 Nevertheless it continues to be widely assumed by most researchers, other intellectuals, and significantly also by politicians, that the field of study is constituted by the dominant elements which I have just named, and their interactions. Hinduism and Buddhism, by contrast, are not commonly regarded as part of the Latin American story, even though they are not unknown on that continent. In Europe and in North America, on the other hand, they have come to be a part of the publicly perceived pattern of religious pluralism. Now consider the main parameters in Europe, for they are different. Three main traditions set the basic scene. In the more western countries and regions these are Catholicism and anti-Catholic secularism on the one hand, and Protestantism and post-Protestant secularism on the other hand. In the east the major backdrop is provided by Orthodoxy. Set on this background of three major Christian traditions 15 Paolo Giurati and Elio Masferrer Kan, eds., No temas . . . yo soy tu madre: Un Estudio Socioantropológico de los Peregrinos a la Basílica de Guadalupe (Mexico City: Plaza y Valdés Editores, 1998). For a substantial historical and phenomenological study of the cult see Richard Nebel’s Santa María Tonantzin, Virgen de Guadalupe (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Economica, 1995), but note the name “Santa María Tonantzin”! 16 See, for example, the fascinating range of themes treated at a conference of the association held in Columbia in 1996, in Germán Ferro Medina, ed., Religión y Etnicidad en América Latina, 3 vols. (Santafé de Bogotà: Instituto Colombiano de Antropología, 1997).
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is a web of significant religious pluralism including very diverse forms of Christianity at least in the larger urban areas, a strong presence of Islam, and a regular sprinkling of smaller groups such as Sikhs, Hindus, and others, depending on the country or region. Recently an increased range of post-industrial options is perceived to have been provided by New Age culture and by religions newly adopted from Asia or America. These are the main elements of which ‘religion’ is perceived to consist by those who reflect on it in a European context. Works on religion by sociologists in post-communist times are simply full of these themes.17 This may all seem very obvious to most Europeans, and even somehow ‘right.’ Yet it is remarkable that other religious worlds are almost completely ignored in this picture, for example the world of Latin America, which we have just been thinking about. Also ignored, except by specialists, are the preChristian religions. After all, these are supposed to have been displaced long ago. Their reappearance in New Age culture is very grudgingly perceived. The religions of antiquity are a matter for classicists and archaeologists, and do not form part of the standard model. In educational contexts we may note in some countries the continued study of major religious cultures such as India and Egypt, and of major religions such as Buddhism, Islam, and Judaism, because they are regarded as “world religions.” But this is based on contributions by professional teachers with specialized knowledge. More theoretical categories such as civil religion, or the idea that nationalisms or monarchies can be analyzed as religions, are not regarded in the popular mind as really belonging to the main pattern of religion. Such thoughts lead away again into a different level of reflection. I hesitate to attempt a similar delineation for the United States and Canada, where I have had much less opportunity for first-hand observation either of the field itself or of what scholars do with it. Superficially at least it seems to have more affinity to the pattern seen in Europe than that of Latin America. However, some special features are prominent. First, there is a profound recognition of the respect-worthiness of religious voluntarism and dissent, which can only partly be matched in European countries. Second, there is a stronger concept of civil religion as an immediate ingredient in the 17 See, for example, Irena Borowik and Przemys∑aw Jab∑o…ski, eds. The Future of Religion: East and West (Kraków: Nomos, 1995); Irena Borowik and Grzegorz Babinski, eds. New Religious Phenomena in Central and Eastern Europe (Kraków: Nomos, 1997).
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foundation of the nation, at least in the USA if less in Canada. The development of the concept of civil religion by Robert N. Bellah, especially in The Broken Covenant,18 seems to have been in part an expression of a publicly recognized need, against the background of freedom for religious diversity, for a continuing, if watered-down religious and moral motivation on the part of the general populace. That it also became a transferable, analytic concept, is important, but was perhaps secondary. The continued strength of various evangelical denominations is also striking. The only real parallel in Europe might be found in the life of the so-called “free churches” in Britain, but these have weakened radically since the Second World War. The U.S.A. has also seen a greater propensity to religious innovation than Europe, though nowadays there may not be so much difference in this respect as there used to be. The relative acceptability of innovative movements in the popular model may have been due first to the wider areas available for social and cultural expansion, as for example in Utah, and second, to even more extensive and complex demographic movements caused by immigration. The recognition of significant religious pluralism as a result of the distinctive ethnic minorities from Europe, Asia, and elsewhere is also important. These minorities benefited from the established public recognition of religious diversity, even though the religions in question themselves do not necessarily display dissent or voluntarism as a religious orientation. It is only hesitantly that the at once traditional and innovatory religious culture of North American Indians has seriously been allowed to impinge on the wider consciousness. What does all this add up to, when stated simply? I would suggest that the dominant model in North America is of religious diversity within a dominant Christian and post-Christian culture. However the details are or might be negotiated, it is also not the same as the Latin American model. Turning now to Africa, the time when it was presumed that ‘Africans’ were simply ‘without religion’ altogether is now but dimly remembered. Nowadays a fourfold pattern is widely presupposed consisting firstly of indigenous religions, commonly referred to as African traditional religion; secondly, Christianity in its Roman Catholic and World Council of Churches forms; thirdly, Islam; and fourthly, African independent churches and other religious movements which 18 Robert N. Bellah, The Broken Covenant: American Civil Religion in the Time of Trial, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
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have arisen since the impact of the colonial and missionary period. These are the ever-recurring elements among the subjects chosen for study not only by Africanists in general, but more importantly by specialists on religion working within Africa, by Africans and nonAfricans alike. Of course, there are also scholars here and there who study specific examples of religion which do not fall within these categories, such as the various forms of Hinduism found in KwazuluNatal,19 or who lean towards Buddhist studies, such as Jacobus Krüger who translated the Sutta Nipata into Afrikaans under the title Skep die skip leeg.20 But these are the contributions of scholars who see beyond the edges of the dominant model.21 It remains to be seen how far new programs of religious education, for example, those under development right now in South Africa, will be influenced by the underlying fourfold model of what is important in the field of religion in Africa, and how far concepts such as ‘world religions’ will conspire to introduce and highlight new elements. In each of the continents mentioned so far the continuing presence of Christian theological education and research means that the history of religions preceding and surrounding the Christian tradition continues to receive attention. There is a certain tension between the relative importance of the Jewish and Christian trajectory in the history of religions and the sense that consideration must be given to the study of religions in general. However, even though Islam may be added to the Abrahamic family, especially in Europe because of the demographic pressures, the main religions of Asia still tend to be regarded as ‘other religions,’ with which Christianity might or might not have relations. Amazingly, the phrases ‘other religions,’ and in German fremde Religionen, are still in widespread use, in spite of efforts by a small minority to get rid of them.22
19 See Alleyn Diesel and Patrick Maxwell, Hinduism in Natal: A Brief Guide (Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 1993). 20 See J. S. Krüger, Skep die Skip Leeg, en ander vroeë Boeddhistiese gedigte in vertaling, uit Pali, van die Sutta Nipata (Pretoria: University of South Africa, 1999). 21 For a valiant attempt to turn these edges, see J. S. Krüger’s inspiring title Along Edges: Religion in South Africa: Bushman, Christian, Buddhist (Pretoria: University of South Africa, 1995). 22 In view of the fact that the conference at which this paper was delivered was a meeting of the Ernst Troeltsch Society, I draw attention here to my article entitled ‘Ernst Troeltsch and the End of the Problem about “Other Religions”,’ which appeared in a multi-authored book of Troeltsch studies, Ernst Troeltsch and the Future of Theology, ed. John Clayton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976).
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In order to escape this syndrome let us therefore finally consider the East Asian model or models. A very instructive starting point in this case is the view of religion advanced by the first emperor of the Ming Dynasty in China, who (like Constantine and Asoka) decided that it would be politically expedient to have a policy on religion. Not only that, he composed a short treatise on the subject. Beginning with the already well-established idea of the three teachings, that is, Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism, he also took account of three further elements in the total pattern. These were the rites of the state, the general belief in a network of gods and spirits providing support for the teachings of Buddhism and Daoism, and lastly, teachings which lead people astray and which are therefore to be forbidden.23
EMPEROR (STATE CULT)
Confucianism
Buddhism and Immortalism (Daoism) network of gods and spirits
yang
yin “three teachings” misleading sects
Fig. 1. Religions of China as perceived by the founder of the Ming Dynasty. 23 There is an English translation of this short but fascinating treatise by Romeyn Taylor (‘An Imperial Endorsement of Syncretism: Min T’ai Tsu’s Essay on Three Teachings: Translation and Commentary,’ Ming Studies 16 [1983]: 31–38), and for a discussion of the implications see, for example, my previously mentioned paper, ‘What is “Religion” in East Asia?’
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In various forms this model has persisted in the East Asian states influenced by the Chinese literary, intellectual, and political tradition. One of the main features of the model is that political registration and to a considerable extent control of religions have an established history. This seems to most people in the countries concerned to be quite natural, and may be contrasted, for example, with Brazil, where religious organizations are unregulated. The political importance of this underlying Chinese model has, in turn, an effect on what many scholars in those countries think they are studying. In Japan, for example, most specialists in religion are familiar with the yearbook of statistics and other registration material (Shûkyô Nenkan) published by the Ministry of Education (Monbushô ). It contributes to the determination of their field of study. This is not to deny that their perspective is also influenced by various other considerations of a theoretical kind and by interaction with scholars from other continents. The suspicion with which innovatory sects have been and are viewed in the countries of East Asia arises because of this dominant model. Recent problems relating to Aum Shinrikyô in Japan and to Falungong in China must be understood in this light. In the first case the authorities were slow to investigate Aum Shinrikyô and to check its activities, for fear of contravening the post-war law on religious freedom.24 Liberal though that law is, it nevertheless envisages the registration of religious bodies as ‘religious juridical persons’ (to use the older literal translation), or ‘religious corporations’ (to use a recently favored term). In the aftermath of the criminal acts committed by the leadership of Aum Shinrikyô, the law has been tightened and there are greater possibilities of controlling religious movements which might be publicly regarded as leading people astray. In the case of Falungong, the official Chinese position that it leads the people astray arises less from Communist doctrine, which theoretically regards all religions as a drug for the masses, but rather from the older idea that some religions are relatively acceptable in society while others are disturbing, unpredictable, and probably dangerous for the state. Since Falungong members are led from outside the 24 For a general account of the legal arrangements concerning religion in Japan see my internet article entitled ‘Religion und Recht in Japan: Pluralismus, Toleranz und Konkurrenz,’ Marburg Journal of Religion 6, no. 1 (2001): http://www.uni-marburg.de/religionswissenschaft/journal/mjr/pye.html.
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country (the meditation guru resides in New York), and its members are called upon to meditate, somewhat provocatively, in the Tiananmen Square, which in many minds has become a symbol of political dissent, it is not surprising that the Chinese government has defined it as a superstition which leads the people astray. Other religions, by contrast, have found acceptance in modern China, in an admittedly very strictly regulated system. Currently there are five officially recognized religions, namely Buddhism, Daoism, Islam, Christianity, and Catholicism. Fascinating, at least for outsiders, is the long history of religious innovation in the countries of East Asia. While new movements and organizations have often been regarded with suspicion by the authorities (think also for example of the political trajectory of Cao Dai in Vietnam), there is a widespread assumption that it is natural for new teachers to announce new revelations or spiritual methods. So there has always been a question in the minds of leaders about how such initiatives can be seen to fit in with the current stable pattern, if at all. Apart from the sheer interest of particular cases, the general point being made here is that there are certain firm parameters in those widely shared models which influence and indeed largely determine the studies of religion in particular cultural regions of the world. The details are, of course, another question altogether. The models not only do not exhaust the details, they may not even have room for them. For example, reflecting on my own observations in Mexico, I recently ran up the following list of elements in contemporary Mexican religion: pre-conquest elements, assimilated pre-conquest elements, resurgent pre-conquest elements, reinvented pre-conquest elements, evangelizing Catholicism, architecturally dominant Catholicism, catholic polytheism, Guadalupenismo as a vehicle of pre-conquest elements, Guadalupenismo as Catholic inculturation, Guadalupenismo as Mexican identity (Criollos), Guadalupenismo in fusion with civil religion, secularism (anti-Catholicism), civil religion (including some of the above), amuletism, New Age themes, Charismatic movement.25 Naturally, there might be considerable discussion about these. On the other hand, the really determinative elements of the various models I have 25 For more details on these observations see my article ‘Participation, Observation and Reflection: An Endless Method,’ in Ethnography is a Heavy Rite: Studies of Comparative Religion in Honor of Juha Pentikäinen, ed. Nils G. Holm et al. (Åbo: Åbo Akademis Tryckeri, 2000), 64–79.
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set out above are fewer and simpler. They are rarely up for discussion. They are just there. If they do get to be altered through a shift in relations between the main elements, or by the intrusion of a newcomer element, then it is a matter of considerable social and political interest with possibly far-reaching implications. In other words, new elements threaten to produce a paradigm shift in the dominant perception within the region itself. An example of such a shift has been the recent recognition, in Europe, of the social reality of a plurality of religions from without the Christian tradition. I hope that I have shown that, in taking seriously the cultural diversity of various regions of the world, we are compelled to take account of divergent models of what counts as the field, when people engage in the study of religions. However, this does not mean that the study of religions cannot be and should not be a coherent undertaking in a worldwide perspective, allowing for the collaboration of scholars from within the various cultural regions. Precisely this is desirable to achieve the stabilization both of descriptive terminology and of theoretical analyses. Over against the deep-seated, extremely simple models, which for significant historical reasons are culturally diverse, are to be set two important considerations. The first is the unity of the scientific approach to the study of religions, which was set out in the first part of the paper. The second is the differentiated theoretical analysis of the field, in all its variety, which comes about when specialists begin to attend to it in detail. The elaboration of these perceptions, in all their variegated interest, is part of the shared work of those who are seriously engaged in the study of religions, so that theoretical coherence is to be expected in the long term. Bibliography Antes, Peter. ‘Religion, din et dharma dans la perspective d’une recherche comparative.’ In The Notion of ‘Religion’ in Comparative Research (Selected Proceedings of the XVI IAHR Congress), edited by Ugo Bianchi, 763–768. Rome: l’“Erma” di Bretschneider, 1994. Bellah, Robert N. The Broken Covenant: American Civil Religion in the Time of Trial. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Bianchi, Ugo, ed. The Notion of ‘Religion’ in Comparative Research (Selected Proceedings of the XVI IAHR Congress). Rome: l’“Erma” di Bretschneider, 1994. Borowik, Irena and Grzegorz Babinski, eds. New Religious Phenomena in Central and Eastern Europe. Kraków: Nomos, 1997.
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Borowik, Irena, and Przemys∑aw Jab∑o…ski, eds. The Future of Religion: East and West. Kraków: Nomos, 1995. Clayton, John, ed. Ernst Troeltsch and the Future of Theology. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1976. Diesel, Alleyn and Patrick Maxwell. Hinduism in Natal: A Brief Guide. Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 1993. Ferro Medina, Germán, ed. Religión y Etnicidad en América Latina. 3 vols. Santafé de Bogotà: Instituto Colombiano de Antropología, 1997. Geertz, Armin W. and Russell T. McCutcheon, ‘The Role of Method and Theory in the IAHR.’ Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 12, nos. 1/2 (2000): 3–37. Giurati, Paolo and Elio Masferrer Kan, eds. No temas . . . yo soy tu madre. Un Estudio Socioantropológico de los Peregrinos a la Basílica de Guadalupe. Mexico City: Plaza y Valdés Editores, 1998. González Torres, Yolotl. El Sacrificio Humano entre los Mexicas. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1985. Holm, Nils G. et al., Ethnography is a Heavy Rite: Studies of Comparative Religion in Honor of Juha Pentikäinen. Åbo: Åbo Akademis Tryckeri, 2000. Krüger, J. S. Along Edges: Religion in South Africa: Bushman, Christian, Buddhist. Pretoria: University of South Africa, 1995. ——. Skep die Skip Leeg, en ander vroeë Boeddhistiese gedigte in vertaling, uit Pali, van die Sutta Nipata. Pretoria: University of South Africa, 1999. Marzal, Manuel. La Transformación Religiosa Peruana. Lima: Pontificia Universidad Catolica del Peru, 1983. Nebel, Richard. Santa María Tonantzin Virgen de Guadalupe. Continuidad y Transformación Religiosa en México. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Economica, 1995. Pye, Michael. ‘The End of the Problem about “Other” Religions.’ In Ernst Troeltsch and the Future of Theology, edited by John Clayton, 172–195. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976. ——, ed. Marburg Revisited: Institutions and Strategies in the Study of Religion. Marburg: diagonal-Verlag, 1989. ——. ‘What is “Religion” in East Asia?’ In The Notion of ‘Religion’ in Comparative Research (Selected Proceedings of the XVI IAHR Congress). Edited by Udo Bianchi, 115–22. Rome: l“Erma” di Bretschneider, 1994. ——. ‘Methodological Integration in the Study of Religions.’ In Approaching Religion, edited by Tore Ahlbäck, 1: 188–205. Åbo, Finland: Donner Institute for Research in Religious and Cultural History, 1999. ——. ‘Westernism Unmasked.’ In Secular Theories of Religion: Current Perspectives, edited by Tim Jensen and Mikael Rothstein, 211–30. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2000. ——. ‘Participation, Observation and Reflection: An Endless Method.’ In Ethnography is a Heavy Rite: Studies of Comparative Religion in Honor of Juha Pentikäinen, edited by Nils G. Holm et al., 64–79. Åbo: Åbo Akademis Tryckeri, 2000. ——. ‘Religion und Recht in Japan: Pluralismus, Toleranz und Konkurrenz.’ Marburg Journal of Religion 6, no. 1 (2001): http://www.uni-marburg.de/religionswissenschaft/journal/mjr/pye.html. Rudolph, Kurt. ‘Inwieweit ist der Begriff “Religion“ eurozentrisch?’ In The Notion of ‘Religion’ in Comparative Research (Selected Proceedings of the XVI IAHR Congress), edited by Ugo Bianchi, 131–39. Rome: l“Erma” di Bretschneider, 1994. Taylor, Romeyn. ‘An Imperial Endorsement of Syncretism: Min T’ai Tsu’s Essay on Three Teachings: Translation and Commentary.’ Ming Studies 16 (1983): 31–38. Tominaga, Nakamoto (Pye, M., ed. and trans.). Emerging from Meditation. London: Duckworth, and Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1990.
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RESPONSE TO MICHAEL PYE Robert Cummings Neville Michael Pye has done an exemplary job of laying out some of the contours of the diversity of religions and the religious situations that make them concrete. He shows how differences in situation make for differences in what is important to be studied. His quick review of the different languages employed regionally in studies of religion, with different cultural assumptions attached, is equally exemplary. The exemplary part is that his discussions show how the points about diversity might be multiplied by further examples as cases arise. The force of his argument, however, is that for all the diversity of religions, their situations, and the cultural and linguistic assumptions involved in their study by a genuinely international group of scholars, a central set of approaches “themselves not subject to cultural difference to a significant degree,”1 defines “the study of religions” as a field or discipline. The operative paragraph is this: I am speaking here of the study of religions as a coherent discipline in its own right. This does not mean that a single autonomous religious principle is presupposed, as by Schleiermacher, Otto, and others. What it does mean is that there is a perceivable field of historical, cultural, and social data which can be studied, which is not the same as just any other field, which can conveniently be denoted by the very general term religion and which requires a particular clustering of otherwise known methods for its elucidation, characterization, analysis, and explanation. In this sense, without privileging any particular religious or metaphysical assumptions or assertions, and without excluding the usual interdisciplinary interactions between the social and cultural sciences, the study of religions takes its place as an autonomous discipline among others.2
1 See Michael Pye, ‘Difference and Coherence In the Worldwide Study of Religions’ 77. 2 Ibid., 82.
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In Pye’s view, the proper methods derive from the historical and social sciences, but not from the theological or normative disciplines. I have four points of discussion about this. First, how are we to identify the “perceivable field of historical, cultural and social data which can be studied” as religions? The most common unspoken answer to this question is denotative. Religious data are those studied by: The International Association for the History of Religions (Professor Pye’s favorite), by the University of Chicago, by Mircea Eliade, by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, etc. When spoken, however, this answer is too arbitrary. So many ways exist to divide potential studies that appeal to special programs of study, however generous and innovative, is not sufficient. The notion of ‘data’ itself is problematic. Things can be identified and interpreted in any number of respects. Religious buildings such as temples and pagodas, for instance, can be interpreted in respect to their use by religious communities, their bearing of religious symbols, and so forth. But they can also be interpreted as examples of building crafts, the use of materials, and the principles of architectural engineering that are common with buildings that have no religious uses; the study of electrical building codes for public buildings applies to religious and non-religious buildings indifferently and does not deal differentially with the respects in which some buildings are religious. Few if any ‘data’ or ‘givens’ are religious per se. Rather, there are many things that can be ‘taken’ in their religious dimension. What is the religious dimension of things? What makes things interestingly religious? Without a responsible theoretical answer to this question, the identification of the object of the study of religion is arbitrary. Thankfully we have given up the definition of religions or the definition of the religious dimension of things by means of their theological beliefs. But we need to be alert to other arbitrary biases that include too much or prevent the registering of important material. The only check against arbitrariness I know is to formulate an explicit hypothesis for defining what counts as religion or the religious dimension, to make that hypothesis vulnerable to correction, to put it to all the tests we can think of, and to be very conscious of the ways it guides our study of religion. Even if the hypothesis includes a metaphysical interpretation of what reality is, as for instance in appealing to ultimate reality, the hypothesis is fallible and subject
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to correction. Not to have such an explicit hypothesis, itself being probated as the study of religions proceeds, is to submerge the guiding principles of the study into the murk of unexamined assumptions. A moral to draw from this is that whatever historical and social sciences are involved in the study of religion, the study has a necessary philosophical moment too, perhaps many such. A second moral to draw is that the study of religions ought not be conceived as a positivistic science building on a foundation but as a fallible enterprise whose conclusions are vulnerable to correction not only by data but by reconsideration of their philosophical principles. Second, the ideal of identifying a “particular clustering of otherwise known methods for its elucidation, characterization, analysis, and explanation” is particularly deceptive in the case of the study of religion. To begin with, it is misleading to think ‘otherwise known methods’ are the same when studying religious, political, medical, psychological, and musical phenomena. Don’t most general disciplinary methods adequate themselves to particular subject matters in helpfully specific ways? And didn’t several of the social sciences, for instance anthropology and hermeneutics, arise from the study of what they identified as religious matters? Moreover, the interdisciplinary character of the study of religions affects the ways specific methods are used when interacting with other methods regarding religious topics. The language of ‘otherwise known methods’ suggests a kind of positivistic value-free objectivity built in to the disciplinary methods themselves that is neutral with respect to the subject matter. To the contrary, the methods appropriate for the study of religion by necessity have to be disciplined and adapted until they are sensitive to what is important in religion; politics, physical health, psychological matters, and music might have very different points of importance and value. Methods, like hypotheses defining religion or religiousness, need to be vulnerable to correction regarding whether they pick up on and explain what is important in their subject. They should then be excruciatingly sensitive to religion in ways that might be ludicrous for other topics. Furthermore, the disciplines involved in religious studies are constantly changing. Their boundaries, seemingly so fixed in one period, are transgressed (as we are recently taught to say) just a short time later. New discoveries require new emphases. Methodological assumptions are revised. Since the 1960 discussion to which Pye refers as defining the orientation of the International Association for the History
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of Religions, critical disciplines in literature and the arts have become central to the study of religion and yet were hardly recognized as such in the mid-twentieth century. To think of the study of religion as coherent by virtue of a canon of methods is always to be behind the time and vulnerable to criticism for being dogmatic. My third point concerns an old contested topic: the exclusion of theological reflection and construction from the study of religion. We are rightly thankful to have advanced beyond the definition of religion by means of a theological agenda. How silly it looks in retrospect to have debated whether Buddhism is a religion just because it does not affirm a monotheism! We are similarly blessed to reject the Marxist idea that Confucianism is not a religion because religions are superstitious and Confucianism is not superstitious. Nevertheless, most religions are shaped by profound intentionalities about what is true, good, authentic, and worth orienting life to. Nontheological sciences can describe these intentionalities, pointing out what religious people prize. But from the standpoint of religious people and communities, the important question is whether those intentionalities are right. For the study of religion to fail to engage in the assessment of those intentionalities is for it to be at a distorting distance from religious life itself. Wilfred Cantwell Smith is famous for saying that a necessary test for a religious analysis is whether a religious person of the sort analyzed would affirm the analysis. Religious scholarship that stays at a meta-level or a second-intentional level analyzing first-intentional religious practice and belief has not gotten to the heart of the religious intentionality. To do so would require inquiring with the religious person or community into the truth or falsity of those primary intentions. To treat the religious intentionalities as objects is to miss their character as subjective intentions. Does this mean that the study of religions should include theological analyses of first-intentional religious belief, practice, commitment, authenticity, etc.? Yes. For many if not all religions the ‘religious objects’ intended, e.g. gods, the Dao, are more important than the people being religious, and so crucial points to be studied. The reflective question for the study of religions then is how theology can be undertaken without the bias of one religious perspective that necessarily distorts other religious perspectives. This is a hard problem, but one at the heart of contemporary theology. The needs of the study of religion should put heavy pressure on theologians to develop public, critically vulnerable ways of understanding and engag-
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ing the normative theological questions that pervade religions. To say that the study of religion should avoid the theological questions is self-destructive for the field. These points lead quickly to my last (and fourth) one, namely about whether the study of religion should be religious or religionfree. Several aspects of this question turn on how we should define religion and the methods for its study. Surely there are many elements of religions that can be understood with great distance and objectivity. But other aspects require initiation, for instance, longterm commitment to a religious discipline or yoga. Perhaps such initiation or long-term devotion does not require abandoning the scholar’s previous religion or secular commitments. But it does require participation to the extent that the scholar’s senses, mind, heart, or soul are transformed to discern what ordinary people or faculties miss. Not to embrace this discipline somewhere within the study of religion is arbitrarily to marginalize those religious things that require it for engagement. My conclusion concerning this point is that the emphasis in Pye’s paper on historical and social sciences to the exclusion of theology reflects an outmoded positivism that is not sensitive to all that matters in religions. The ideal of value-free study of religion, which seems to lurk behind his rhetoric and that characterizes some of the leading voices in the study of religion, is an arbitrary bias that distorts the field, however helpful it was at one point as a corrective to the theological dominance of the study of religion.
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GLOBALIZATION AND THE FUTURE STUDY OF RELIGION Bryan S. Turner Introduction In this essay, I analyze religious studies and globalization from the standpoint of the legacy of German historicism, especially of Max Weber and Ernst Troeltsch. In his sociology of religion and the lectures on science and politics as vocations, Weber explored the problems of relativism and historicism for contemporary society, and described a range of intellectual strategies that are not available for an intellectual who wants to take secularization seriously. He did not, however, offer a clear or positive alternative to this fragmentation of values and decline of cultural authority. While these intellectual problems of religion and relativism have been intensified by globalization, Weberian sociology still provides a sharp, if not dramatic, statement of the general problems of perspectivism. In what follows, I provide a more direct and substantive response to this legacy of ethical pessimism from Nietzsche and Weber. The first part of my response accepts relativism as part of the fate of our time, but identifies a weak form of universalism in terms of the emergence of cosmopolitan values in the process of globalization. Relativism may be paradoxically weakened by the growth of the world as a single place. Religious studies in this respect might be simply the study of religious cultures and their hybridization in a global context. There is a parallel between the debate about national membership and cosmopolitanism, and religious fundamentalism and liberal ecumenism. Identity and social membership in a global and hybrid environment will of necessity be thin and neutral. The second part of my discussion outlines a more robust response that assumes a foundational epistemology in order to generate a view of human embodiment as a basis for understanding human rights. The shared vulnerability of our embodiment provides an ontological starting point for rejecting, or at least moderating, the negative
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consequences of relativism, and through this foundational ontology we can recognize religious experience as an expression of a common insecurity and vulnerability. Religious studies can in a global world provide an understanding of human frailty and function as a pedagogical platform, a sentimental education, for what I shall call cosmopolitan virtue.1 In order to sustain this position, it is necessary to provide a challenge to complacent versions of secularism and relativism. If in modern times religion has become merely the equivalent of culture, then religious studies are simply cultural studies. The rise of religious studies charts the emergence of religious institutions as objects of scientific inquiry, and at the same time indicates the incorporation of the religious into everyday cultural practice. Because the distinction between religion and culture was eroded by the rise of modernity, religious identities have become part and parcel of national identity. It is partly for this reason that making the parallel between national identity and religious belonging is a productive comparison. In modern history, the creation of a national identity has been closely associated with “great literature,”2 and national revivals assume a distinctively religious character with their special rituals and myths of restoration. Religious studies therefore tend to assume an importance in describing the peculiarities of a national culture. Modernization involves the creation of ‘religion’ as an ensemble of special institutions as a separate and special area of social activity, but secularization also blurs the distinction between religious and national identities. The evolution of this complex dynamic between religion, national identity, and culture as the national expression of political community was the context within which religious studies developed as a distinct mode of academic inquiry and scholarship in the humanities. Within the university setting, the contemporary study of religion, like the study of modern culture, makes no attempt in principle to assess the value and authenticity of religions (as cultures). The creation of special areas of interest within religious studies, for example ‘religion in primal societies’ or ‘new religious movements,’ indicates a desire to avoid any hierarchical ranking of religions. Similarly, cul1 B. S. Turner, ‘Cosmopolitan Virtue: Loyalty and the City,’ in Democracy, Citizenship and the Global City, ed. E. Isin (London: Routledge, 2000), 129–47. 2 S. M. Corse, Nationalism and Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
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tural studies do not attempt in any formal sense to provide an evaluative interpretation of cultural phenomena. Cultural studies offer a description of the cultural forms of life that exist in modern societies. It is true, if one takes the history of cultural studies in Britain, that the study of culture, emerging out of the controversy surrounding the work of F. R. Leavis, engaged in a normative debate about the possibility of community in an industrial society. This critique of mass culture in the writings of Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart did attempt to provide a sociological account of the erosion of an authentic culture and its destruction by commercialism.3 However, over time the English curriculum became literary studies, and literary studies became cultural studies. Contemporary cultural studies have abandoned any normative overview of society in favor of ‘deconstructing’ cultural messages. The topic of inquiry may be the cultural life forms of a rock star or a baseball player, but no evaluation of these life forms is intended or implied. In this sense, cultural studies are merely a reflection of a social world in which the notion of culture as cultivation has disappeared with the collapse of the high Bildung tradition. This social and historical transition has major implications for the contemporary role of intellectuals and academic institutions in societies where, contrary to the world and values of Mathew Arnold, few educators would regard culture as the best that can be thought in a society. In this sense, ‘the closing of the American mind’4 has been a global process of intellectual erosion in higher education systems. Although this change in the nature and status of culture is a consequence of global changes in the forms of communication in an industrial civilization, the problem is not wholly or exclusively an issue of contemporary society. New forms of electronic communication (that are in turn merely an aspect of globalization) intensify the traditional problem of historicism and the ‘understanding of other cultures.’ Cultural anthropology and the sociology of religion, originally the products of nineteenth-century colonial expansion and secular science, were the conceptual litmus paper of inter-cultural understanding and conflict in the flowering of modernity. The sociology 3 Raymond Williams, Culture and Society 1780–1950 (London: Chatto and Windus, 1958); Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy (London: Chatto & Windows, 1957). 4 Alan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987).
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of religion, especially as it was developed in Weber’s comparative sociology of industrial society, embraced the underlying historicism of German social sciences and humanities. In European sociology, religion was seen to be simply one institution with particular social functions. The processes of secularization and globalization have in fact produced ‘religion’ as a specialized institution (alongside other differentiated institutions such as the family, the market, and the state), and separated religion from other spheres of life. If sociology is the science of institutions, the future of the study of religion might simply become the sociology of religion. The history of this social differentiation can be traced from nineteenth-century historicism to the sociology of religion of Talcott Parsons. Globalization has had contradictory consequences for religion and religious studies. Global secularization threatens to convert religious studies into cultural studies, and globalism intensifies the relativism characteristic of secular societies, because it reinforces cultural differences. Religious studies reflect the diversity and hybridity of the religious situation in global society. As globalization brings about cultural hybridization, globalism multiplies and brings into question the “plausibility structures” that are competing for authority and legitimacy.5 The speed and interactive capacity of electronic communication imposes an endless reflexivity about religious phenomena and subjectively undermines the plausibility of an authoritative, compelling, or final vocabulary of divinity. It may open up new possibilities for reciprocity and understanding through a shared experience of global processes. However, the notion that any religious belief is as good as any other (comfortable relativism) is not, and never has been, convincing. Globalization opens up the possibility of an ethical concern (cosmopolitan virtue) for the authenticity and survival of other cultures, and that recognition of our common frailty and precariousness can provide a foundational ontology to underpin a shared community. From this perspective, the study of religions is an inquiry into what most profoundly defines human frailty and vulnerability in the face of cultural diversity. This intellectual quest is an extension of Weber’s account of a calling to seriousness and Troeltsch’s attempt to go beyond negative historicism. For various reasons, such a view of religious studies (and hence such a view of religion) is intellectually and morally unsatisfactory. 5
Peter Berger, The Social Reality of Religion (London: Faber and Faber, 1969), 151.
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While the intellectual force of (weak) cultural relativism is difficult to deny, complacent relativism has never been satisfactory as a moral or political position. In The Consequences of Pragmatism, Richard Rorty has protested that nobody seriously believes that one belief or philosophy is as good as any other.6 If nobody believes that pushpin is as good as poetry, can one accept that all forms of religious expression are of equal value? Globalization in fact makes both the old relativist historicism and the new relativist postmodernism unsatisfactory for the development of ethical, religious, and ritual systems that are adequate to modern times, or adequate to the perennial problems of human frailty as the principal dimension of the human condition. Because globalization involves both greater cultural communication and conflict through the creation of global information systems and cultural networks, it opens up (as an unintended consequence) the possibility of a new ethical standpoint, namely cosmopolitan virtue. Such a situation is perfectly compatible with the relativist notion that the world is constituted by many cultures and that (some) values are incommensurable. Cosmopolitan virtue assumes however that, given the threat to environment and society by various aspects of globalization, we cannot remain content with either complacent relativism or what Reinhold Niebuhr called “the vague universalism of liberal democracy.”7 Cosmopolitanism, in my sense, promotes stewardship as the obligation side of human rights that arise from experiences of our interconnectedness and dependency in societies where multiculturalism is one facet of the growing hybridity of cultural globalism, namely the experience of the kaleidoscope of conflicting cultures. We can in a preliminary fashion define cultural globalization as the emergence of systematic forms of global communication, creating an increasingly interconnected pattern of global exchanges of culture, resulting in a new hybridization of cultures. These developments are often contradictory with processes of standardization (the McDonaldization of food, mass culture, and popular aesthetics) coexisting with processes of diversity and hybridity (the merging of Asian cultures with Hollywood icons, the spread of dual citizenship and 6 Richard Rorty, The Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982). 7 Reinhold Niebuhr, Nations and Empires (London: Faber and Faber, 1959).
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intermarriage, or the diffusion of a global cuisine). The result of this system of cultural interconnectedness is to reduce the significance and salience of geographical specificity, and to create new opportunities for patterns of proximity and locality. As we will see, there are equally powerful countervailing forces that attempt to assert the importance of local, regional, and national authority over culture and identity. The global system is a peculiar balance of local and global forces that stand in a reactive relationship. Where these global patterns of hybridity come to dominate, there is a paradoxical possibility that globalism constrains cultural relativism through the creation of a ‘global village.’ In ideal typical terms, where cultures become globally interconnected by complex processes of diffusion, it is difficult to see how the traditional problem of anthropological specificity and difference could be fully sustained. Global standardization reduces cultural difference and thus erodes the traditional or strong version of anthropological relativism. However, it is also the case that globalization can increase the sense of culture difference and produce sharp conflicts over ethnicity, religion, and identity. The very processes of globalization in commercial and popular culture result in (often violent) counter movements of national assertion, religious fundamentalism, ethnic cleansing, and national resurgence. There is clear evidence of social and political conflict around ethnicity in the paradoxical struggles over local cultures and identities that are threatened by global processes. In the late twentieth century, the traditional patterns of colonial dominance gave way to postcolonial and global struggles over cultures. The “clash of civilizations” in a global social system forces us to take relativism seriously, not as an intellectual convenience, but as a deeply political problem.8 Despite these conflicts, the spread of human rights legislation and institutions is a decisive measure of globalization as a legal and political force in world politics. In the argument that follows, my intention is to consider cosmopolitan virtue as a set of obligations that parallels the existence of human rights. In the international context of symbolic and physical violence, complacent and comforting relativism is both dangerous and irresponsible. We need to discover new patterns of solidarity, intimacy, and conviviality to counter the growth of ethnic violence, national8 Samuel Huntington, ‘The Clash of Civilizations,’ Foreign Affairs 72, no. 3 (1993): 22–48.
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ism, and racial prejudice. In various attempts to promote the importance of the sociology of the body, I have argued that human vulnerability provides a promising basis for the development of human rights and global patterns of citizenship. The future of religion (and hence the future of religious studies and religious pedagogy) has to be conceptualized in a world of growing cultural uncertainty and conflict. However, it is also the case that we occupy a technological world where communication opens up new opportunities for intercivilizational debate. This viewpoint owes a great deal to the philosophical anthropology of Arnold Gehlen and to the sociological interpretation of Gehlen’s work by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann in The Social Construction of Reality.9 The argument for a common basis for human rights in the notion of vulnerability10 is compatible with the idea of human beings as “dependent rational animals.”11 While Alasdair MacIntyre’s argument that human vulnerability must be regarded as a central assumption of moral discourse is welcome, his current position is not fully grounded in an understanding of the embodiment of human beings as the foundation for a social basis for human rights theory. MacIntyre’s theory is founded on Aristotelian notions of human animality, but fails ultimately to make the connections between embodiment, vulnerability, and rights. His view of vulnerability is of course intended to defend an Aristotelian notion of virtue, but I argue that cosmopolitan virtue is important as an answer to the problems of global precariousness and individual vulnerability. This view of the common characteristics of human vulnerability and dependency offers a basis for a critical response to relativism. From this perspective, religious studies in a global era attempts to seek out the opportunities for inter-civilizational understanding based on an ethic of care and stewardship. The underlying assumption here is that religion is peculiarly well placed to speak to the frailty and vulnerability of human kind. If religion (religio) is that which binds human beings together into a society of shared sentiment, then
9 Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality (London: Allen Lane, 1966). 10 See Bryan S. Turner, ‘Outline of theory of human rights,’ Sociology 27, no. 3 (1993): 489–512; Bryan S. Turner and C. Rojek, Society and Culture (London: Sage, 2001). 11 See A. MacIntyre, Dependent Rational Animals (London: Duckworth, 1999).
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religious studies is a set of disciplines that, through the study of religious experience and institutions, explores the depths of human vulnerability. Such a view of religion has two obvious locations. The first is with Emile Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life12 which, as Parsons correctly noted, argued not so much that the social explains the sacred but rather that the origins of the social are in the sacred. The second is with Barrington Moore’s Reflections on the Causes of Human Misery,13 which argued that human beings are united by ‘the unity of misery’ rather than ‘the diversity of happiness.’ The concept of vulnerability expresses the frailty of human beings in terms of their capacity to be wounded. ‘Vulnerability,’ from vulnus (wound), expresses the openness of human ontology. The frailty of human beings is a function of their openness to a dangerous external world that brings them trauma and destruction. The wound, as a potent religious metaphor of the human condition, provides a corporeal point of human interconnectedness and community that exists behind and beyond cultural arrangements. Globalization has exposed us to new forms of vulnerability, namely to a set of global risks that are products of modernization. The role of religious studies in a global age would be to comprehend the depth of human vulnerability and the possibilities for new patterns of community and responsibility. Such a view of the role of religious studies in a global system would make them central to the theological-political problem of Niebuhr’s Nations and Empires, namely how to reconcile the horizontal connections of community with the vertical force of dominion. This discussion underlines the common connections between the study of religion and the study of society. Sociology as a discipline is primarily an analysis of how society is possible. As the study of fellowship (socius), it explores the bases of human solidarity, and can be regarded as a sustained inquiry into companionship, where the sharing of bread ( pan) creates the foundation of eucharistic communities. To raise the issue of religious education in a global age is to force ourselves to rethink many traditional problems about the nature of religion as such, its universal characteristics, the problems of religious truth, and thus the conventional problem of relativism. I take 12 Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (London: Allen & Unwin, 1954). 13 Barringtone Moore, Reflections on the Causes of Human Misery and upon Certain Proposals to Eliminate Them (London: Allen Lane, 1972).
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the attack on conventional relativism to be a precondition of converting religious studies (back) into a serious analysis of the human condition. In my recent work, I have criticized contemporary sociology as ‘decorative sociology’ because it has turned the study of society into a literary exercise of textual exegesis, and neglected historical and comparative studies in favor of descriptive accounts of media messages or signs.14 One might argue in a similar fashion that the study of religion as a branch of cultural studies is a decorative and not serious exercise. In order to arrive at this critique of contemporary relativism as an inadequate foundation for religious studies, I need to make an extensive detour through globalization theory, cultural studies, and the sociology of religion. From Historicism to Postmodernism The contradictory relationship between knowledge and meaning, between sociological understanding of the world and the disenchantment of the world, structured the central themes of Weber’s sociology, and provided the general context within which he attempted to develop his fundamental perspectives on life orders, personality, and calling. Weber’s relativism was dependent on a reading of Nietzsche, for whom values and truths only have a meaning and relevance from the particular standpoint of the individual or group. It makes no sense to ask in general whether a system of belief is true or meaningful, but only to consider what point it serves in the life of an individual or group. It is for this reason that Nietzsche is associated with both pragmatism and postmodernism.15 A more important question is: does this truth, value, or pattern of activity contribute to the ‘health’ of a group or individual? Is it life affirming or life denying? Beliefs are not reflections or representations of reality, but perspectives that are more or less useful in making people strong and healthy.
14 See C. Rojek and B. S. Turner, ‘Decorative Sociology: Towards a Critique of the Cultural Turn,’ The Sociological Review 48, no. 4 (2000): 629–48; see also Turner, ‘Cosmopolitan Virtue.’ 15 See Richard Rorty, Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998a); Richard Rorty, ‘Pragmatism as Romantic Polytheism,’ in The Revival of Pragmatism: New Essays on Social Thought Law and Culture, ed. M. Dickstein (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1998b), 21–36.
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However, Nietzsche did not argue that any form of life is as valuable as any other, or that we cannot choose between them. Perspectivism understands truth as an effort to know (or a will to truth) and thus as a will to power. A will to knowledge is constituted by the efforts of particular people to live particular forms of life for particular reasons.16 Nietzsche’s value critique was reflexive: it is incumbent on the philosopher or anthropologist to apply this insight to their own work. Perspectivism is not intended to be a comfortable or comforting doctrine that at the end of the day we can believe anything we like. For one thing, Nietzsche saw power as an antagonistic struggle between different modes of life. The point of his philosophy is to make us feel uncomfortable for easy solutions that can, as a collection of platitudes, obscure real attitudes towards life. In fact it was this comforting relativism that Nietzsche saw as part of the sickness of modern society. In the ‘Introductory Discourse’ to Thus Spake Zarathustra, which was published between 1883 and 1885, Nietzsche characterized this form of relativism as the “happiness” of the “most contemptible of all things” for the “Last Men.” These men seek any easy life in which everything is the same. In this final world where all differences have been obliterated, “we have discovered happiness, say the Last Men, and they blink.”17 The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism is a Nietzschean epic. The main point about the Calvinists is precisely that they do not embrace the happiness of the Last Men. It was absolutely clear to Calvinists that men were not, in religious terms, equal. The great majority was already condemned to eternal damnation; only a small and unknown elite of the faithful would pass the final test of redemption. The Reformation doctrines were not concocted to make men feel comfortable in this world.18 This question of values in the history of western development is thus the problem of historicism, namely the view that the meaning and importance of culture can only be understood historically within its specific temporal and spatial setting, that is contextually.19 This historical problem was particularly acute in the case of western 16 A. Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985), 73. 17 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra (London: Dent, 1933), 10. 18 Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1930), 104. 19 C. Antoni, From History to Sociology (London and New York: Routledge, 1998).
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Christianity. If the faith, which has been inherited by the Christian churches in the west, is a specific historical phenomenon that is peculiar to its time and place, how can Christian theology claim any universal authority and relevance for the prophetic message of Jesus Christ? The prophecy of Christ is simply one message, alongside many other claims about the nature of human existence and divinity. In 1902 in The Absoluteness of Christianity and the History of Religions,20 Troeltsch attempted to avoid destructive relativism through the philosophy of history and through individual value judgments. The history of religions pointed to the idea of Christianity as the highest manifestation of religion and offered grounds for individual judgments about value. However, he recognized the limitations of the solution presented by Schleiermacher and Hegel for whom historical apologetics meant that the Christian religion was the absolute realization of the Spirit in history. This apologetic position accepted historical relativism, but argued that the historical evolution of Truth had achieved its final resting place in Christianity. Troeltsch attempted to limit the destructive aspect of relativism by establishing valid intellectual criteria upon which individuals could make informed ethical decisions. Critical reflection and comparative analysis can justify the truth claims of Christian theology. Despite this partial acceptance of historical relativism, Troeltsch recognized that critical reflection could qualify or undermine the naive self-assurance of faith. There was a major cultural and intellectual hiatus between the naive faith of the laity and the comparative understanding of the theologian. The consequence was to make naive confidence in the absoluteness of Christianity untenable; in the language of modern relativism, it precludes confidence in the validity of any “final vocabulary” but at the same time opens up the opportunities of “liberal hope.”21 The Rise of Religious Studies We can treat the rise of religious studies as part of the problem of historicism and thus not dissimilar in kind from the problem of the 20 See Troeltsch, The Absoluteness of Christianity and the History of Religions, trans. David Reid, Introduction by J. L. Adams (Richmond and London: John Knox Press, 1971). 21 Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
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sociology of religion in Weber’s general sociology. The study of religion is the study of the value-problem in western civilization where the authoritative underpinning of religious belief has been eroded by the transformation of religious institutions. There is obviously a close proximity between the background problems of the church-sect typology in Troeltsch’s The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches,22 and Weber’s model of the transformation of authority (tradition-charismabureaucracy) in Economy and Society.23 Both men were concerned with the problem of the decline of religious faith in a period of industrialization and secularization.24 For Weber, the disenchantment of the world precluded both social movements driven by religious charisma and the effervescence of the experience of the holy. For Troeltsch, historicism as the harbinger of modern culture brought into question traditional forms of naive certainty in the absoluteness of Christianity. For Weber, the sociology of religion and for Troeltsch the history of religions presented acute intellectual and ethical dilemmas. The rise of religious studies parallels in many respects the development of the sociology of religion. The sciences of religion, devoted to the study of the structure of religious thought and the modalities of religious experience, were a late academic product of the nineteenth century, more or less coterminous with the science of language. 25 Max Müller gave it the title ‘sciences of religion’ or ‘comparative study of religion’ in 1867, and chairs in the history of religions were created in Geneva in 1873, in Holland in 1876, and France in 1879. Journals on the history and science of religions developed during the early twentieth century with Anthropos in 1905 from Austria, The Review of Religion from the University of Chicago in 1921, Zalmoxis in France from 1938 and Numen: International Review for the History of Religions, which has been published in Leiden since 1954. The sociology and anthropology of religion have a similar history and context. The classic texts of speculative anthropology by Max Müller, William Robertson Smith, Andrew Lang, E. B. Tylor, R. H. Codrington, and James Frazer appeared in the late nineteenth cen22 Ernst Troeltsch, The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches (New York: Macmillan, 1931). 23 Max Weber, Economy and Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978). 24 See H. G. Drescher, Ernest Troeltsch: His Life and Work (London: SCM Press, 1992). 25 M. Eliade and J. M. Kitagawa, eds., The History of Religions: Essays in Methodology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959).
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tury, but the watershed in the rise of anthropological field work and an empirically grounded anthropology was the publication of Baldwin Spencer and F. J. Gillen, The Northern Tribes of Central Australia (1904), and it was this research on tribal religion that produced Durkheim’s sacred/profane dichotomy in 1912 in The Elementary Forms.26 In Germany, the sociology of religion had many intellectual sources including the work of Wilhelm Schmidt and Rudolf Otto on the experience of holiness, and the phenomenology of Joachim Wach. The story of the evolution of the sociology of religion in Weber’s sociology is complex. For some writers, the attempt to understand the economic ethic of the world religions dominated his entire work. The study of the economic ethics of the world religions is the unity of Weberian sociology such that Gesammelte Aufsatze zur Religionssoziologie replaces Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft as the core, authoritative text.27 The various studies of Judaism, Confucianism and Taoism, Hinduism and Buddhism,28 and Islam29 are a series of empirical applications of the theme of religion and economics. A central text in recent interpretations of Weber is the ‘Intermediate Reflections’ (Zwischenbetrachtung) that were translated as ‘Religious Rejections of the World and their Directions.’30 In this famous text, Weber outlined his view of the ‘spheres of life.’ This text is crucial for any sociological answer to the questions: What is the role of the study of religion in a secular age? Is it the study of culture? The ‘Intermediate Reflections’ and ‘Politics as a Vocation’ were concerned to explore the tensions between a religious ethic and various spheres of life, especially the political and economic. These different spheres make demands on both the individual and social levels, and can combine or conflict with each other. This analysis of the spheres of life in the two lectures on politics and science found a more elaborate classification in the ‘Intermediate Reflections’ where Weber identified a wider range of life-spheres or value-spheres: Durkheim, Elementary Forms. F. H. Tenbruck, ‘The Problem of Thematic Unity in the Works of Max Weber,’ British Journal of Sociology 31, no. 3 (September 1980): 317–51. 28 See Max Weber, Ancient Judaism (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1952); The Religion of China (New York: Macmillan, 1951); The Religion of India (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1958). 29 See Bryan S. Turner, Weber and Islam (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974). 30 See in H. H. Gerth and C. W. Mills, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (London: Routledge, 1991), 323–62. 26
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economics, politics, aesthetics, the erotic, the intellectual, and the religious. The different world religions represent different resolutions of the various levels of contradiction between religion and ‘the world.’ One central question for Weber is whether religion is simply a sphere of values or in fact the principle that guarantees or determines the other spheres. Is religion a component of life-spheres (‘the world’), or that source of values that determines the life-spheres of the world? If religion is in tension with the other spheres (as in the notion of religious orientations and their rejection of the world), then Weber’s sociology implies a special status for religion. If religion is simply one institution, then there is no essential conflict. The problem of historicism implied that through the differentiation of the spheres of life with secularization, religion had become a separate institution alongside the other life spheres. The differentiation of the spheres meant that no single coherent meaningful life was possible, and hence a polytheism of values was the ‘fate’ of modern people.31 The attempt to preserve charisma through the cultivation of ‘acosmic brotherhood’ could only be an aristocratic religious response and unlikely to succeed in an age of mass democracies and rationalized bureaucratization of politics. In this Weberian sense, therefore, religious studies is a product of the differentiation of the life-spheres, the disenchantment of reality, and the assimilation of religion by culture. In summary, Weber recognized the ineluctable spread of secularization and the disenchantment of life, but he was not convinced that the happiness of the Last Men was ethically valuable. He also rejected science, because it is unable to tell us for example whether French culture is better than German, and thus it cannot tell us what happiness is, let alone how to achieve it. Weber offered few ‘solutions’ to the secular disruption of the ‘life spheres’ whereby religion had lost authority over the other spheres—economic, political, erotic, aesthetic, and intellectual. He proscribed rather than prescribed various attitudes towards disenchantment. He ruled out a return to the arms of the church or membership of the communities inspired by the teaching of Otto Gross. He was equally hostile to the ‘hygienic’ ethics of Freudianism and the romanticism of the followers of Stefan George, or indeed to any appeal to the comIbid., 357. Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1950). 31 32
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forting notion of Life. Against eudaemonism, Weber summoned the students in Munich who came to hear his lectures to commitment to an ethic of responsibility through the vocations of science and politics in order to face up to the tasks of the day. Despite this apparent ethical neutrality, Leo Strauss is probably correct in claiming that Weber adhered to the assumption that it is possible to create a hierarchy of religions in terms of their inner consistency to a radical this-worldly asceticism.32 Weber may therefore have accepted a hierarchy of values mapped onto a hierarchy of religions with Calvinism and Lutheranism at the top of this chain of radical engagement with the world through the emotional and pietist sects to the Old Testament prophets of Judaism. Islamic prophecy fell below that of Christianity and Judaism, but was more significant than the religions of the Orient, namely Confucianism and Buddhism. Weber’s study of the economic ethics of the world religions implied a hierarchical order of the ethical contents of religious rejections of the world and their consequences. This ‘solution’ has been criticized,33 and any hierarchical arrangement of religion has in recent scholarship been rejected as a species of Orientalism.34 The notion of a clear hierarchy of religious orientations to the world does not fit easily into a global context of religious studies. Weber’s attempts to create a value-free science of society left him poorly equipped to offer specific advice or guidance with respect to desirable ends of action, and the values that underpin the idea of a secular vocation appear to be arbitrary. Eric Voegelin did not accept Weber’s sociology as an adequate grounding for politics, or for the modern study of religions.35 Towards a Definition of Globalization The rise of religious studies as an academic science was simultaneously an effect of the decline of Christianity as a vital religious faith in the West and the exploration of other cultures (and religions) as an aspect of European colonialism. This historical account of the
Turner, Weber and Islam. Edward Said, Orientalism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978). 35 E. Voegelin, The New Science of Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952). 33
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emergence of religious studies and the sociology of religion is relatively well known.36 My task in this paper is somewhat different, namely to understand the problem of religious studies in a context of accelerated globalization. I want to suggest however that the early history of religious studies is connected with globalization insofar as the global order forces us to rethink the problem of historicism— forces us back to the intellectual and religious problems of Troeltsch and Weber. Before I can develop that argument, I need to provide a workable definition of globalization. The theme of globalization has in the last decade established itself as the key topic of contemporary social science. The globalization debate can be seen as originally an aspect of 1960s culture and as an effect of the ‘expressive revolution’ in American society.37 In sociology, globalization was a process creating “the world as a singular system.”38 In comparative religious studies, the growing awareness of global processes added weight to an established critical debate about Orientalism as a paradigm for western research.39 In media theory, the idea of a ‘global village’ was popular in the 1960s. In 1959 in a letter to Edward S. Morgan, Marshall McLuhan wrote about the social effects of the “electronic age” in which “the globe becomes a very small village-like affair.”40 McLuhan went on to make this view of the shrinking globe famous in The Gutenberg Galaxy and Understanding Media.41 Perhaps more relevant to our present concerns was the fact that in 1959 McLuhan was commissioned by the National Association of Educational Broadcasters to provide an approach to the development of a syllabus for teaching on the nature and effects of the modern media in schools in the United States. The Report on the Project in Understanding the New Media was published in 1960 and grew into Understanding the Media. In this report, McLuhan developed
B. S. Turner, ed., Early Sociology of Religion (London: Routledge, 1997). T. Parsons, ‘Religion in Postindustrial America: The Problem of Secularization,’ Social Research 41, no. 2 (1974): 193–225. 38 W. E. Moore, ‘Global Sociology: The World as a Singular System,’ American Journal of Sociology 71 (1966): 475–82. 39 B. S. Turner, Orientalism, Postmodernism and Globalism (London and New York: Routledge, 1994). 40 M. Molinaro, C. McLuhan, and W. Toye, eds., Letters of Marshall McLuhan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 253. 41 M. McLuhan, The Guttenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962); Understanding the Media: The Extension of Man (Toronto: McGraw-Hill, 1964). 36 37
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three critical ideas. First, since messages in the new global order come from everywhere, there is no fixed point of analysis. Secondly, the form of communication determines the consciousness of its apprehension, and finally, since the content of a message is another medium, the medium is the message. We can detect obviously in these three propositions the essential message of J.-F. Lyotard’s definition of postmodern in 1979 as “incredulity towards metanarratives” in his The Postmodern Condition: A Report on knowledge.42 Both McLuhan and Lyotard formed their views on the consequences of global information systems in the context of writing educational reports to major institutions about pedagogy. Globalization theory has gone through three stages of development, following first an emphasis on the economic system, then a focus on culture, and finally a concentration on its political dimensions. There has been much dispute about the historical origins of the concept and the debate, but it is clear that in sociology the early driving force in the development of theories of globalization was a dissatisfaction with the economic assumptions of world-systems theory.43 In economic terms, globalization is often treated as simply another phase of the emergence of a world system, the principal causal mechanisms of which are the economic requirements of transnational corporations. Sociological theories of globalism attempted to establish the independent development of cultural forces contributing to the emergence of the world as a single place. There was equal frustration with the unidimensional aspects of modernization theory and with the theoretical difficulties of civilizational analysis. Early formulations of globalization theory in the 1980s naively assumed either that the process is equivalent to the enforcement of cultural standardization (such as McDonaldization) or that globalism involves processes which inescapably result in Americanization. In early sociological formulations of globalization theory, the ‘convergence thesis’ suggested that the world was converging on a single model of industrial society and that model was indubitably American. The contemporary sociology of globalization argues firstly that standardization is a very unlikely (and certainly an unpromising outcome of the global system), because the global/local dynamic will 42 J.-F. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1984), xxiv. 43 R. Robertson, Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture (London: Sage, 1992).
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tend to produce a shifting and unstable hybridization of cultures, which has been referred to as “glocalization.”44 Secondly, it is focused on the cultural questions of globalization, but it does not ignore political economy. Finally, it explores the cultural complexity of hybridity, glocalism (or “global localization”), postcolonial cultures, and continuing cultural imperialism without adopting either utopian expectations or pessimistic negativity.45 Globalization also brings, often implicitly, into the foreground the role of religion in the politics of global identity. From the point of view of cultural politics, globalization theory has neglected the obvious fact the ‘the world religions’ have been globalizing forces long before the so-called ‘modern period.’ In the medieval period, Islam developed as a world religion, but, given the limitations of technology, transport, and literacy, it could not exercise world hegemony. Islamdom was constituted as an ideal that could never be realized in practice. The same is true for Christianity. With the globalization of communication systems and with the collapse of communism, Islam can for the first time function as a genuinely global religion. Generally speaking, globalization theory, apart from the work of Roland Robertson, has neglected the interaction between world religions and globalization, and the consequences of this cultural dynamic for global politics.46 Behind the issue about globalization, there is a more profound debate about the history and moral standing of modernity and progress. For some sociologists like Niklas Luhmann,47 globalization is the (incidental or unintended) consequence of the structural differentiation of western society, that is, a consequence of structural modernization and institutional upgrading (to use the language of Talcott Parsons). The implication is that the pattern of globalization is general and relatively uniform. The arguments of sociologists like Roland Robertson have by contrast both denied that globalization comes after modernization and emphasized the uneven quality of globality (through the tensions between the local and global) in the notion of ‘glocalization.’ Perhaps the core issue in the debate (which
Ibid. R. Wilson and W. Dissanayake, eds., Global/Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1996). 46 See D. Held et al., Global Transformations (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999). 47 N. Luhmann, ‘The World Society as a Social System,’ in Essays on Self-Reference (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 175–90. 44
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in turn impacts on questions of identity, loyalty, and commitment) is whether globalization produces cultural standardization in terms of a single and uniform global village, or whether globalization through the processes of adaptation and simulation results in cultural hybridity. From a sociological point of view, the contemporary evidence points towards the cultural multiplication and diversification of social worlds rather than homogenization. Furthermore, hybridization better expresses the dominant forms of cultural relations in a global system.48 In turn this multiplication of life-worlds raises a question about the capacity of political systems to recognize and ultimately manage such global diversity within a political framework which requires a certain level of commitment from citizens. The danger is that global formations of political and religious fundamentalism which develop to counter-act will nullify the possibility of cosmopolitan diversity. Perhaps this prospect of inward-directed communalism is the real peril of the clash of civilizations. It is a basic assumption of the argument of this paper in relation to religious studies and relativism that globalization makes the world more rather than less diverse, and that standardization is not a defining characteristic of global processes.49 Religious studies as an area of study is forced to work in a cultural context of hybridity and diversity. Perhaps the more interesting conclusions of the globalization debate for the purposes of this paper are: the contributions from and consequences for religion in a global system have been neglected; the role of the world religions as precursors of globalization has been ignored; commentary on globalization and religion when it occurs at all is often confined to statements about traditional fundamentalism and global secularization; and the principal exception to the problematic absence of religion in the globalization debate is to be found in the work of Niklas Luhmann as elaborated by Peter Beyer in Religion and Globalization.50
48 See M. Albrow, The Global Age: State and Society Beyond Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996). 49 See J. N. Pieterse, ‘Globalization as Hybridization,’ in Global Modernities, ed. M. Featherstone, S. Lash and R. Robertson (London: Sage, 1995), 45–68. 50 P. Beyer, Religion and Globalization (London: Sage, 1994).
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. Modernity, Religion and Globalization: Some Paradoxes
Perhaps the principal paradox of global modernization is the constitution of ‘religion’ as a separate, differentiated, and specialized sector of modern society—a sector that is often thought to refer to, and assumed to manage, the private world of values and activities. Religion in the modern world has been transformed into what troubles individuals, namely what they think is of ultimate concern. Secularization makes ‘religion’ in this sense a special problem of modernity, and thereby places the question of religion more prominently in public discourse. Of course, this specialization of ‘religion’ is not entirely unfamiliar to theological thinking about religio in the sense that it has been common to distinguish between ‘religion’ as a social system and ‘faith’ as an authentic and personal response to divinity. Globalization has involved the export of this predominantly western and modern model of private and individualistic religiosity, and fundamentalist Judaism and Islam are responses to such a development. Fundamentalism attempts to insure the dominance of religion in the public spheres of law, economy, and government, and is thus a response to Weber’s tragic vision of the value spheres. This process of exporting an individualistic version of Latin Christianity, and global reactions to it, has been described by Jacques Derrida as “globalatinization” which he defines as “this strange alliance of Christianity, as the experience of the death of God, and tele-technoscientific capitalism.”51 However, the attempt to impose religion in civil society as a principle of coherence in the name of fundamentalism often has the unintended consequence of raising questions about the status and meaning of traditional values. Fundamentalism has the unintended and unanticipated consequence of exposing traditional values to public inspection with the result that their coherence and authenticity become a critical issue. This unintended ‘detraditionalization’ of values and practices is particularly evident in the Islamic debate about the status of women in Muslim society. The unveiling by secular authorities and the re-veiling of women by religious authorities has ironically exposed ‘woman’ to public debate. 51 J. Derrida, ‘Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of “Religion” at the Limits of Reason Alone,’ in Religion, ed. J. Derrida and G. Vattimo (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998), 13.
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Globalization also makes the relationship between ‘our world’ and ‘their world’ increasingly problematic. The problem of ‘other cultures’ is endemic to the Abrahamic religions. From their inception, Christianity and Islam had to develop notions about an outside world of unbelief, of difference, and of ‘other religions.’ They had also to deal with the presence of secular powers and authorities which were of ‘this world.’ The world religions were early or primitive versions of globalization, and they had to respond to difference and otherness through various discourses of apostasy. In this sense, the problem of Orientalism is generic.52 Orientalist assumptions come immediately into existence with the very commitment to an evangelical orientation to the world. There is therefore an indigenous discourse of difference/otherness that emerged out of the problem of understanding and explaining the presence of cultures that lay outside the sphere of the Chosen People or the Household of Faith or the Church. For much of world history, these different but related religions existed side by side in a state of indifference and ignorance. The paradox of globalization is that, because it compresses time and space by creating the world as a single place, it intensifies the problem of otherness. Precisely because the world becomes a global village through spatial compression, the incommensurability of human values and cultures becomes an issue that cannot be easily ignored or trivialized. The danger is that we are connected together by thin and unsatisfactory global networks, and at the same time the principal solution may be the development of communities that will divide and fragment us.53 The modern problem of other cultures was explored precociously in the comparative essays of Michel Montaigne (1533–1592). Montaigne’s psychological journey of self-understanding required both withdrawal from the world and a reflection on other cultures in order to grasp the meaning of his own world. In order to understand the violence of his own historical period, Montaigne required anthropological insights into other social systems and cultural traditions. We paradoxically need otherness in order to comprehend things near at hand. Perhaps the anthropological experience of strangeness 52 See B. S. Turner, Marx and the End of Orientalism (London: Allen & Unwin, 1978); and Turner, Orientalism. 53 See A. Tourraine, Can We Live Together? Equality and Difference (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000).
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is a necessary stage on the road to a comprehensive awareness of ourselves. Montaigne’s cosmopolitan sympathy with otherness provided him with fruitful foundations for self criticism. In some ideal sense, the presence of cultural and religious differences can through an ecumenical encounter lead to a more skeptical and ironic approach to the values of our own period. It is this ironical distance from the warrior culture of the French nobility that makes Montaigne’s humanism both relevant and attractive to the modern consciousness. Montaigne’s humanism recognized that the presence of otherness is a precondition for self-assessment. Globalization intensifies this experience through the force of cultural hybridity and at the same time threatens to exclude otherness in a common melting pot. Montaigne raised an important problem about boundaries: can cosmopolitan respect for the existence of diverse cultures in fact exist without a sense of otherness? The Question of Orientalism Living in the context of the French religious wars, Montaigne wanted to achieve a moral reform of the French nobility whose warlike ethic prevented political compromise and compassion. Montaigne, who in this respect can be seen an early theorist of civilization,54 argued that the violent ethos of noble life had resulted in the destruction of French society. His question was simply: what is appropriate behavior for a noble class if we are ever to restore peace and civilization? Through an examination of the essays on revenge and clemency, we can see that Montaigne presents an argument which gives priority to ‘humanite’ as the basis for human mercy and sympathy. Humanite moderates vengeance and resentment.55 Montaigne was shocked by the cruelty and violence of his own times, where men had become like beasts; they delight in the torture of others. How can this be regarded as truly noble? Hunting as the principal past-time of the nobility prepares them for a warrior calling in which they will inflict terrible violence on human beings. He drew a parallel between warlike French noblemen, hard-hearted religious zealots, Roman gladi54 See N. Elias, The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978). 55 See D. Quint, Montaigne and the Quality of Mercy: Ethical and Political Themes in the Essais (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1998).
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ators, and Brazilian cannibals. In many respects they all exhibit the virtues of Stoicism, which Montaigne argues have negative consequences. The unyielding behavior of the Stoic warrior rules out compromise and co-operation. Montaigne embraces the softer (feminine) values of mercy, compassion, and tenderness, values that are precursors of cosmopolitan virtue. Montaigne’s overt interest in the cannibals of Brazil was a literary device for analyzing the violence of his own society. This attitude was in fact an important part of the humanistic goal of understanding one’s own society through the study of other societies. Montaigne’s ethics—yielding, forgiveness, clemency, talking it out rather than fighting it through, adopting feminine virtues rather than masculine Stoicism—can make men behave more humanely to one another, and perhaps lead his country men out of their civil war and restore conditions of justice. While Montaigne prepared the foundations for cosmopolitan understanding of other cultures, his ethical position ends in a tension between sympathy and understanding towards the other and the quest for justice. It is this geographic otherness which at the same time defines our subjective inwardness; our being is articulated in a terrain of negativities which are oppositional and, according to Edward Said, permanent and ineluctable. In Culture and Imperialism, Said claims that the modern identity of the West has been defined by its colonies, but these colonies are not merely physical places in a political geography; they also organize the imaginary boundaries and borders of our consciousness by defining our attitudes towards, for example, sexuality and race.56 Within the paradigm of the Protestant Ethic thesis, the aboriginal is defined as somebody who is not only poor and traditional but licentious and lazy. For example, in the evolution of Orientalism, the plays of Shakespeare present a valuable insight into the characterology of such early Oriental figures. In The Tempest, Caliban, modeled on early encounters with the indigenous peoples of the West Indies and North America, is treacherous and dangerous, contrasting as a negative reflection of the purity of Miranda, who is perfect, naïve, and beautiful. Caliban’s sexual desire for “admir’d Miranda” forms part of the moral struggle of the drama under the careful scrutiny of the island’s powerful patriarch.
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E. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993).
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. Cosmopolitan Irony and Virtue
One response to the growth of globalization and cultural hybridity was to embrace the so-called politics of identity in order to develop an ethical view (respect for difference) that is relevant to multiculturalism. Acceptance of cultural differences in multiculturalism does not however provide a basis for common purpose or communal integrity. The problem of cultural fragmentation and loss of solidarity has in recent years resulted in a volume of critical responses that attempt to create some grounds for universalism. Critics of the politics of difference include Todd Gitlin who has accused left-wing politics of a betrayal of the positive values of the Enlightenment.57 A politics of identity ends up as just another particularism, and leaves modern society exposed to ‘culture wars.’ A similar view has been developed by David Hollinger who examines the need for a postethnic moral viewpoint for cosmopolitan America.58 Perhaps the most elegant exposition of cosmopolitanism has come from Martha Nussbaum who attempts to develop a universalism that depends on Kant, but also recognizes the need to acknowledge the new issues raised by multiculturalism.59 Nussbaum clearly has a preference for universality, but she recognizes the need to study other cultures with tolerance and care. ‘Cosmopolitan’ is a ‘citizen of the world’ (kosmou polites) and this type of membership raises an old problem: can a cosmopolitan be a patriot? In modern terms, it raises the issue of whether citizenship can be de-territorialized. There is here an important relationship between the desire for adventure and nostalgia for a homeland—a tension that was expressed in the Odyssey. Skeptics of cosmopolitanism argue that a genuine democracy cannot be without territory, because love of country is a necessary prerequisite for pride in the democratic community. One learns political virtues within a definite spatial context, because respect for democracy cannot be easily divorced from commitment to a place.60 There is a parallel here between adherence to the faith of our forefathers and a global 57 T. Gitlin, Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America is Wracked with Culture Wars (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1995). 58 D. Hollinger, Postethnic America (New York: Basic Books, 1995). 59 M. Nussbaum, For Love of Country: Debating the Limits of Patriotism/Martha C. Nussbaum with Respondents, ed. J. Cohen (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996). 60 See P. J. Deneen, The Odyssey of Political Theory: The Politics of Departure and Return (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000).
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ecumenical regard for other religions: can a committed believer have an ecumenical love of world religions? Can cosmopolitanism survive without otherness? In short, the problem of religious studies in a global society is the problem of borders. Cosmopolitanism does not mean that one does not have a country or a homeland, but that one has to have a certain reflexive distance from that homeland. Cosmopolitan virtue requires Socratic irony, by which one can achieve some distance from the polity. The principal component of cosmopolitan virtue is thus irony, because the understanding of other cultures is assisted by some emotional distance from our local culture. Understanding other cultures presupposes that we could treat our own or local culture as an object of inquiry. As such it also requires reflexivity with respect to both our own cultural context and other cultural values. Such an orientation of irony and reflexivity produces skepticism towards the grand narratives of modern ideologies. Cosmopolitan irony would as a result share much in common with Rorty’s pragmatic, bourgeois liberalism in that tolerance of others must start from a position of some uncertainty as to the ultimate authority of one’s own culture.61 Cosmopolitanism assumes that there is doubt about the validity of any final vocabulary, but cosmopolitan doubt about cultural authority is not equivalent to cultural relativism, especially to what I have termed complacent relativism. Because cosmopolitanism fosters ironic self-reflection, it does not need a strong version of otherness, because its own identity is not shaped in conflict with others. Skepticism and distance from one’s own tradition is associated with an obligation of care and stewardship for other cultures, especially aboriginal cultures arising from an awareness of their precarious condition and hence acceptance of cultural hybridization. This description of cosmopolitan virtue as a set of obligations flowing from the vulnerability of persons and the precariousness of institutions with the globalization of culture is intended to awaken a recognition of the similarities between the prospect and problems of cosmopolitan understanding and an ecumenical commitment to dialogue with other cultures, especially religious cultures. The argument however is not that contemporary cosmopolitanism is simply a return to classical cosmopolitanism or religious universalism. Cosmopolitan irony is generally incompatible with nostalgia, 61
Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism.
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because it recognizes that our modern dilemmas cannot be solved simply by a naive return to origins. Stoical cosmopolitanism62 attempted to come to terms with the cultural diversity of classical times, but contemporary cosmopolitanism is specifically a product of globalization and modernity. Classical cosmopolitanism was a necessary product of Roman imperialism, but contemporary globalization cannot be easily or effectively dominated or orchestrated by a single political power. Although American culture, especially popular and commercial culture, provides much of the content of current globalization, it is also the case that cultural exchange has promoted the prominence of Japanese civilization globally. Similar arguments could be made for Chinese cuisine, alternative medicine, and commerce.63 This view of global cultural exchange thus leads to a more complex and rewarding interpretation of the traditional understanding of Orientalism. Modern cosmopolitanism is a consequence of specific social changes that are associated with globalization. These changes include: the erosion of national sovereignty and the growth of dual and multiple citizenship; the growth of global markets, especially a global labor market and an expansion of migrant labor seeking forms of quasi-citizenship; the growth of multiculturalism and cultural hybridity as a routine form of contemporary political life; and, the globalization of the politics of migrant communities, giving rise to a diasporic culture. These global political communities require ironic membership if the modern world is to escape from the vicious cycle of ethnic conflict and retribution. Modern political communities need to be thin and contemporary identities have to be cool. We can think of political loyalty and social solidarity in terms of a fourfold property space—defined on the one hand by the notion of hot/cool loyalty (following the work of McLuhan), and on the other hand by thick/thin solidarity (following the work of contemporary political theories of difference and justice)—which indicates the depth and strength of the forms of inclusion. This sociological characterization of loyalty and solidarity enables us to develop an ironic theory of loyalty and solidarity in a global society. Thick solidarities effectively describe the type of social involvement that was 62 See L. Hill, ‘The Two Republicae of the Roman Stoics: Can a Cosmopolite Be a Patriot?’ Citizenship Studies 4, no. 1 (2000): 65–80. 63 See A. Ong, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999).
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conceptualized in Durkheim’s idea of “mechanical solidarity.”64 Australian aboriginal totemism was based upon the closed communities of the semi-nomadic life of a hunter-gatherer economy. Their social relations were largely permanent, emotional and solid, and their belief systems were not challenged by external cultures or by secularization. By contrast, modern societies are organized around the market place of anonymous strangers, where these strangers are mobile and disconnected. The distinction between hot/cool loyalties is taken from McLuhan’s analysis of modern communication; for example, the telephone offers a unidimensional communication with high definition. It is a cool medium, whereas the tribal mode of communication of tradition by oral and ritualistic means is hot. This distinction in McLuhan’s theory of the media is deployed in this conclusion to begin to indicate the nature of the cosmopolitan orientation to diversity as a mode of cool and thin commitments. Hot loyalties and thick solidarities prevent the emergence of effective cross-cultural agreements and intimacies. In a period of globalization, traditional systems of inclusion and exclusion have to face the challenge of hybridization, diversity, and heterogeneity. As a result, in a system of global cultures, cosmopolitan citizenship will be characterized by cool loyalties and thin patterns of solidarity.65 Indeed we could argue that the characteristic mode or orientation of the cosmopolitan citizen would in fact be one of Socratic or ironic distance. Given the complexity and the hybridization of modern society, there is no convenient place for real or hot emotions. Intercultural sensitivities and the need to interact constantly with strangers promote irony as the most prized norm of wit and principle of taste. Irony is sensitive to the simulation which is necessary for interaction in multicultural societies. In such a world, ironic distance is functionally compatible with globalized hybridity, because we have all become urban strangers. Urbane ironists, in Rorty’s terms, always hold their views about the social world in doubt, because such views are always subject to revision and reformulation.
Durkheim, Elementary Forms. See F. Dallmayr, ‘Democracy and Postmodernism,’ Human Studies 10, no. 1 (1986); C. Rojek and B. Turner, eds., The Politics of Jean-Francois Lyotard: Justice and Political Theory (London: Routledge, 1998); M. Walzer, Spheres of Justice (New York: Basic Books, 1983); S. K. White, Political Theory and Postmodernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 64
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Their picture of social relations is necessarily provisional or temporary and they are skeptical about grand narratives, because their own ‘final vocabulary’ is always open to further criticism, inspection, and correction. Their ironic views of the world are always ‘for the time being.’ If the cosmopolitan mentality is cool, the social relationships of the ironist will of necessity be thin; indeed email friendships and electronic networks will constitute the new patterns of companionship in a postmodern globe. Ironists are homeless people who are in some sense dislodged from their traditional worlds and find themselves in new situations where old answers no longer work. They are inclined towards reflexivity, because they get the point of hermeneutic anthropology. In this anthropologically reflexive context, the world is a site of contested loyalties and interpretations.66 By describing the intellectual as ironic, it may be taken to mean that the intellectual is indifferent to ethical issues. By cosmopolitan virtue, I do not intend simply to mean moral indifference or vague liberal universalism. The image of the modern intellectual as the revolutionary hero, who is passionately committed to social and political causes, may not be relevant to a fragmented and diverse global culture. Intellectual concern for other cultures might draw upon a different set of metaphors either relating to the hermeneutic understanding of disease or to the psychoanalytic relationship, in which the neutral analyst has to listen carefully to what the other is saying. Moral responses to pain may not require passion but care as a controlled emotional engagement. One could imagine that cosmopolitan virtue would involve a careful engagement with cultural issues such as the protection of so-called primitive cultures and aboriginal communities which are clearly threatened by the globalization of tourism, and responsibility for advocacy in a world of collapsing environments and endangered languages. The cosmopolitan intellectual does not argue that fundamentalism is, in some simple sense, false. The cosmopolite joins rather with local voices to probe and if necessary to problematize debate. The final aspect of this defense of cosmopolitanism is perhaps the most difficult. I wish to draw a distinction between Niebuhr’s critical notion of vague universalism and complacent relativism on the one hand and cosmopolitan irony on the other. While cosmopoli-
66
See Rorty, Contingency.
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tanism is based on a necessary recognition of human diversity and difference, I also want to argue that it is driven by a sense of care and stewardship. Globalization has exposed human communities to a new level of hazard and uncertainty that we can call a “risk society.”67 With globalization, the modernization process is further developed and radicalized, because modern risk has become generic to social change. Risk often falls outside the capacity of individual societies, whose sovereignty is compromised by global change, and risk becomes ‘uninsurable.’ The scale of modern hazard has produced a profound skepticism towards expert opinion and scientific rationalism, and has resulted in powerful social movements that seek through green politics to achieve some regulation of industry, technical change, and scientific experiment. We have moved towards green rights and environmental citizenship that seek protection against environmental pollution through regulation, social legislation, and political audits. Regulatory regimes are important institutions for the enforcement of such rights. I regard cosmopolitan norms of responsibility for the environment as the obligatory manifestation of the notion of a right to survival. Cosmopolitan virtue may be regarded as a weak alternative to a strong theory of cultural relativism. A more important auxiliary argument concerns human frailty and vulnerability. The underlying moral component of this argument is that human frailty provides a foundation for recognizing a common human bond, typically described as ‘the human condition.’ Human beings are embodied, and therefore they are frail and vulnerable. In order to respond to that frailty human beings create institutions to protect them against risk, but these very institutions are also sociologically precarious. Human beings need both social and ontological security, and therefore they need a “sacred canopy,”68 but this sacred canopy can only have force if it is based on an existing foundation of social reciprocity. The dangers of the modern world are that globalization increases our vulnerability (through damage to the natural environment), makes our institutions even more precarious (through an erosion of their sovereignty in the face of global exchanges), and reduces the interconnectedness of social life (by the erosion of the social capital invested
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U. Beck, Risk Society (London: Sage, 1992). P. Berger, The Social Reality of Religion (London: Faber & Faber, 1969).
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in everyday life). Precisely because body, society, and culture are threatened by global risks, we need methods of rebuilding community, solidarity, and inter-communal understanding. The concepts of vulnerability and cosmopolitanism are a modest proposal towards such a project. They are intended to be alternatives to the bleak and tragic view of Weber’s analysis of the differentiation of the lifespheres and at the same time a statement about how religious studies could function in a global era. Cosmopolitan virtue is not designed to make us feel comfortable with diversity. Cosmopolitanism has a relationship to the traditional theme of homelessness in Christian theology and has been a major metaphor of the human condition in Christian thought. Adam and Eve were driven from their home as a consequence of their transgression, and forced to labor in an alien place. It was also clearly significant in Jewish themes of exile and exclusion, and is generally shared by the world religions as an image of the vulnerability of human beings. Homelessness expresses the fundamental spiritual alienation of human beings, given a radical dichotomy between the sacred and the profane. The adventures of Odysseus provide an equally potent image of the tensions between the security of a dwelling place and the moral challenge of the journey. In conclusion, this argument about vulnerability can be defined as a neo-Hobbesian solution to the problem of social contract and in a more elaborate form can help us to re-think the possible role of religious studies in a global world of cultural conflict and division. Because as human beings we are vulnerable, we are dependent upon one another for support in satisfying our needs and securing our lives. Our vulnerability is an important component of our dependency and interconnectedness with other people. We can call this interconnectedness the social world of everyday life. It is the primary subject matter of sociology. Conclusion: A Report on Knowledge There is an interesting parallel between McLuhan’s report (Understanding Media) on the educational consequences of the media to the National Association of Educational Broadcasters in 1959, Lyotard’s report (The Postmodern Condition) on the implications of new technologies for the authority of (scientific) knowledge to the Conseil des Universites
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of the government of Quebec in 1979, and Daniel Bell’s work on The Coming of Post-Industrial Society that grew out of the Commission on the Year 2000.69 These works in different ways recognized the problem of intellectual authority and the legitimacy of knowledge in a world of competing knowledge frameworks and conflicts over expert evidence. I have suggested in this paper that these problems of globalization are still present day representations of relativism as the legacy of German historicism. Nevertheless, new technologies do produce problems that neither Weber nor Troeltsch could have imagined or predicted. Perhaps the main argument of McLuhan was that the print-based knowledge systems of conventional knowledge were being challenged by the electronic media. In particular, he wrote ironically to Claude Bissell, President of the University of Toronto, that the legacy of Cardinal Newman (small tutorials and a college system) was strangely compatible with the new media that favored decentralized forms of education. But generally speaking McLuhan’s vision of technology suggested that book learning, disciplines, and linear patterns of thought would be challenged by the electronic age. We can interpret the question, What is the state of religious studies in a global age?, as an extension of lines of inquiry set up by McLuhan (‘the global village’), Lyotard (‘the postmodern condition’) and Bell (‘postindustrial society’). One obvious issue is that modern knowledge is inevitably interactive and reflexive. Because within a global electronic framework, all individuals, religious groups, and cultures have in principle immediate, continuous, and simultaneous access to knowledge, it is difficult to maintain a distance or difference between the subject and object of knowledge. When a scholar in a North American university publishes an article on some ritual practice in primal society, a member of that primal society may well browse the website on which that article is lodged and through interaction question and challenge the assumptions of the western scholar. Members of other primal societies may visit that website and set off a global debate about the meaning of such ritual practices. In short, an authentic anthropological experience of primitiveness is largely ruled out by these information systems. Such a scholarly world is See H. Kahn and A. J. Wiener, eds., The Year 2000: A Framework for Speculation on the Next Thirty-Three Years (New York: Macmillan, 1967). 69
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very different from the experiences of Max Müller or William Robertson Smith, because electronic communication has removed the time and space that once separated the scholar from the object of study. Globalization rules out isolated and privileged pockets of knowledge, and makes all forms of inquiry interactive. Traditional patterns of hierarchy and knowledge are challenged, and conventional forms of training, discipline, and scholarship cannot be taken for granted. Some patterns of traditional activity (Newman’s college system and tutorial teaching) may fit very well with the new global technology, others not. The large-scale system of Orientalism has become obviously problematic, alongside evolutionary notions of religion from animism to monotheism. Cosmopolitan virtue is a defensible moral position in a global and fragmented culture, and complacent relativism is not the only possible outcome of global culture. In addition, a focus on human vulnerability provides a moral base-line for standards of conduct and intellectual inquiry that can, as it were, make relativism relative. Religious studies in a global context can both express a set of cosmopolitan virtues (care for other cultures, ironic distance from one’s own traditions, concern for the integrity of cultures in a hybrid world, openness to cross-cultural criticism, and so forth), and embrace the underlying ethic of vulnerability and precariousness as an ontological basis for community and sociability. Because there is now widespread acceptance of the relevance of human rights legislation, in principle perhaps we can accept a set of obligations that logically underpin those rights. The notion of ‘cosmopolitan virtue’ is a general description of such cultural and moral obligations. Bibliography Albrow, M. The Global Age: State and Society Beyond Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996. Antoni, C. From History to Sociology. London and New York: Routledge, 1998. Auerbach, E. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953. Beck, U. Risk Society. London: Sage, 1992. Bell, D. The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting. New York: Basic Books, 1973. Berger, P. L. The Social Reality of Religion. London: Faber and Faber, 1969. —— and T. Luckmann. The Social Construction of Reality. London: Allen Lane, 1966. Beyer, P. Religion and Globalization. London: Sage, 1994. Bloom, A. The Closing of the American Mind. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987.
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Corse, S. M. Nationalism and Literature: The Politics of Culture in Canada and the United States. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Dallmayr, F. ‘Democracy and Postmodernism.’ Human Studies 10, no. 1 (1986): 144–67. Deneen, P. J. The Odyssey of Political Theory: The Politics of Departure and Return. New York: Roman & Littlefield, 2000. Derrida, J. ‘Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of “Religion” at the Limits of Reason Alone.’ In Religion, edited by J. Derrida and G. Vattimo, 1–78. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998. Drescher, H.-G. Ernest Troeltsch: His Life and Work. London: SCM Press, 1992. Durkheim, E. The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. London: Allen & Unwin, 1954. Eliade, M. and J. M. Kitagawa, eds. The History of Religions: Essays in Methodology. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1959. Elias, N. The Civilizing Proces: The History of Manners. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978. Gellner, E. Postmodernism, Reason and Religion. London: Routledge, 1992. Gerth, H. H. and C. W. Mills. From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. London: Routledge, 1991. Gitlin, T. Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America is Wracked with Culture Wars. New York: Metropolitan Books, 1995. Held, D., A. McGrew, D. Goldblatt, and J. Perraton. Global Transformations. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999. Hill, L. ‘The Two Republicae of the Roman Stoics: Can a Cosmopolite Be a Patriot?’ Citizenship Studies 4, no. 1 (2000): 65–80. Hoggart, R. The Uses of Literacy. London: Chatto & Windus, 1957. Hollinger, D. Postethnic America. New York: Basic Books, 1995. Huntington, S. ‘The Clash of Civilizations.’ Foreign Affairs 72, no. 3 (1993): 22–48. Kahn, H. and A. J. Wiener, eds. The Year 2000: A Framework for Speculation on the Next Thirty-Three Years. New York: Macmillan, 1967. Luhmann, N. ‘The World Society as a Social System.’ In Essays on Self-Reference, 175–90. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990. Lyotard, J.-F. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1984. MacIntyre, A. Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues. London: Duckworth, 1999. McLuhan, M. The Guttenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962. ——. Understanding the Media: The Extension of Man. Toronto: McGraw-Hill, 1964. Moore, B. Reflections on the Causes of Human Misery and upon Certain Proposals to Eliminate Them. London: Allen Lane, 1972. Moore, W.E. ‘Global Sociology: The World as a Singular System.’ American Journal of Sociology 71 (1966): 475–82. Molinaro, M., C. McLuhan, and W. Toye, eds. Letters of Marshall McLuhan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. Nehamas, A. Nietzsche: Life as Literature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985. Nelson, D. D. National Manhood: Capitalist Citizenship and the Imagined Fraternity of White Men. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1998. Niebuhr, R. Nations and Empires: Recurring Patterns in the Political Order. London: Faber and Faber, 1959. Nietzsche, F. Thus Spake Zarathustra. London: Dent, 1933. Nussbaum, M. For Love of Country: Debating the Limits of Patriotism/Martha C. Nussbaum with Respondents, edited by J. Cohen. Boston: Beacon Press, 1996. Ong, A. Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality. Durham: Duke University Press, 1999.
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Parsons, T. ‘Religion in Postindustrial America: The Problem of Secularization.’ Social Research 41, no. 2 (1974): 193–225. Pieterse, J. N. ’Globalization as Hybridization.’ In Global Modernities, edited by M. Featherstone, S. Lash and R. Robertson, 45–68. London: Sage, 1995. Quint, D. Montaigne and the Quality of Mercy: Ethical and Political Themes In Essais. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998. Robertson, R. Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture. London: Sage, 1992. Rojek, C. and B. S. Turner, eds. The Politics of Jean-Francois Lyotard: Justice and Political Theory. London: Routledge, 1998. ——. ‘Decorative Sociology: Towards a Critique of the Cultural Turn.’ The Sociological Review 48, no. 4 (2000): 629–48. Rorty, R. The Consequences of Pragmatism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982. ——. Contingency, Irony and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. ——. Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998a. ——. ‘Pragmatism as Romantic Polytheism.’ In The Revival of Pragmatism: New Essays on Social Thought Law and Culture, edited by M. Dickstein, 21–36. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1998b. Said, E. W. Orientalism. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978. ——. The World, the Text and the Critic. New York: Pantheon Books, 1983. ——. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993. Spencer, B. and F. J. Gillen. Northern Tribes of Central Australia. London: Routledge/ Thoemmes Press, 1997. Strauss, L. Natural Right and History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1950. Tenbruck, F. H. ‘The problem of thematic unity in the works of Max Weber.’ British Journal of Sociology, Vol. 31, No. 3, Sept., 1980, 317–351. Tourraine, A. Can We Live Together? Equality and Difference. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000. Troeltsch, E. The Absoluteness of Christianity and the History of Religions. Trans. David Reid. Introduction by J. L. Adams. Richmond and London: John Knox Press, 1971. ——. The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches. New York: Macmillan, 1931. Turner, B. S. Weber and Islam: A Critical Study. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974. ——. Marx and the End of Orientalism. London: Allen & Unwin, 1978. ——. Religion and Social Theory. London: Sage, 1983. ——. The Body and Society: Explorations in Social Theory. Oxford: Blackwell, 1984. ——. ‘Outline of theory of human rights.’ Sociology 27, no. 3 (1993): 489–512. ——. Orientalism, Postmodernism and Globalism. London and New York: Routledge, 1994. ——, ed. Early Sociology of Religion. London: Routledge, 1997. ——. ‘Cosmopolitan Virtue: Loyalty and the City.’ In Democracy, Citizenship and the Global City, edited by E. Isin, 129–47. London: Routledge, 2000. ——. and C. Rojek. Society & Culture: Principles of Scarcity and Solidarity. London: Sage, 2001. Voegelin, E. The New Science of Politics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952. Walzer, M. Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Justice. New York: Basic Books, 1983. Weber, M. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1930. ——. The Religion of China. New York: Macmillan, 1951. ——. Ancient Judaism. Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1952. ——. The Religion of India. Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1958.
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——. The Sociology of Religion. London: Methuen, 1966. ——. Economy and Society. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978. White, S. K. Political Theory and Postmodernism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Williams, R. Culture and Society 1780–1950. London: Chatto and Windus, 1958. Wilson, R. and W. Dissanayake, eds., Global/Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1996.
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RESPONSE TO BRYAN TURNER Adam B. Seligman The great Islamicist, Marshall Hodgson, used to warn of the serious distortions resultant from use of the Mercador projection, which privileged the Northern Hemisphere over the Southern and in so doing twisted our understanding of the world, bringing it in line (falsely) with our political and economic prejudices. Similarly, Bryan Turner’s thought provoking paper awakens us to the many hidden assumptions and latent meanings contained in the current catchword of globalization. However, and beyond the descriptive which needs little comment from me, Turner goes on to place on our agenda the idea of a cosmopolitan virtue—presumably one that would make claims in an era and in societies of what he terms “cool loyalties and thin patterns of solidarity.”1 In a world divested of authority, inhabited by strangers, that is by others with whom I cannot assume any shared ‘strong evaluations,’ a position of irony is posited as the basis of a new ethics, one that presents a ‘defensible moral position’ in our global and fragmented culture. The challenge we have to face, as Turner realizes all too well, is how to develop a position of cosmopolitan virtue in the global context. Just what could that mean, with or without irony? It is one thing to maintain an ironic and skeptical distance from the cultural authority of our own traditions, it is something quite different to explain to our children why it is wrong to cheat in school or be a poor sport on the soccer field. Socrates’s own position, we recall, was to prefer death to exile, irony notwithstanding. It is moreover precisely in terms of this type of moral imperative that I have difficulty with the idea of ironic distance and the virtue of loose solidarities. Though Turner does parse out certain aspects of this problem, I would like to put on the table one of the more intractable aspects
1
Bryan S. Turner, ‘Globalization and The Future Study of Religion,’ 129.
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of cosmopolitan virtue in an era of globalization, one that Turner himself brings to our attention: that is the issue of religion and human rights. For surely, whatever else virtue would mean in a global context, it would have to support a position of universal human rights and yet, as I will claim, such a position exists in some tension with religious identities, commitments, and solidarities: that is, with alternative readings of virtue. If, as Turner claims, “in modern times religion has become merely the equivalent of culture,”2 then we surely witness not only a confluence of religious and cultural studies but an abiding tension between the object of these studies as well. For the discourse—and politics—of human rights and that of religion are, after all, framed as rather different epistemic and civilizational projects. No doubt, for many, seeking cultural arguments on the universal and absolute nature of human rights is an almost religious idea. For precisely what makes human rights inviolable and sacrosanct, what removes them from the contingencies of political calculation and decisions based on expediency or conflicts between incommensurate goods, would be a religious basis or foundation. What is absolute must be that which is—or linked to that which is—incontrovertibly Other. If not, the absoluteness will always be only mediate in nature, always only contingent on the play of forces, passions or calculation that make up our lot as human beings. To make an argument for the absoluteness of human rights, as for their universal applicability, beyond the play of ethnic, national, and cultural boundaries and preferences, is to make a claim to a universal truth (akin to those of geometry) whose veracity is independent of any context and material condition. Such claims, in the ethical realm, are seen by many to be religious in nature. However, making absolute and universal claims (religious or otherwise) does often involve us in a stance of intolerance towards local cultures and particular identities that do not necessarily adhere to our universal and absolute beliefs. The history of many religions, not least Christianity, is replete with examples of this intolerance to those others not willing to recognize its own universal truth claims. Such a stance of intolerance is however unacceptable in today’s pluralistic and diverse world. It sits but poorly with cosmopolitan virtue.
2
Ibid., 104.
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Thus we arrive at a contradiction which must be recognized by all those concerned with issues of human rights, with virtue, as well as with a valuation of diverse religious and cultural identities, commitments, and desiderata. All too often Western ideas of the universality of human rights have run aground on the particularity of local practices and prohibitions. The debates in France over the wearing of the foulard in state schools, or in Milton Keynes, England, on separate schools for boys and girls in all-Muslim communities, bear eloquent witness to the complexities of some of these issues. Moreover, it must be acknowledged that certain actions which many in the West see as discriminatory and oppressive are viewed in a very different light by their practitioners. Thus, for example, the case of veiling: in many countries in the Middle East, as well as in Turkey, it is a practice sometimes willingly embraced by women (often the daughters of an earlier generation of secularizing elites) as a protest against the homogenization of culture and life-world represented by western ideas and norms. Issues revolving around the status of women are only the most visible of an array of problems in this area. The very definition of the public sphere as a neutral arena with open access to all is a similarly contested issue. We may recall the acts of ultra-Orthodox Jews in Jerusalem some years ago who undertook a campaign of fire-bombing bus stations where advertisements offensive to their religious sensibilities were displayed. Indeed, it is not all that clear that the idea of the public arena or public sphere has the same resonance and meanings, let alone legal status, in other cultures as it does in the West (and generally in societies drawing on the Roman legal tradition).3 What is true for the public sphere is true of the community and for the individual social actor. The problems arising from the differing definitions of these core coordinates of social life are, moreover, far from academic. How, for example, does one mediate between the rights of individuals and the rights of groups? This is an issue much debated in Canada, in respect not only of French speakers (and
3 Interesting comparisons can be drawn, for example, between the definition of the res publica in the western legal and political tradition and, in the Jewish tradition, the idea of reshut ha’rabim (public sphere) on the one hand, and that of the pharhesia on the other; see S. Fischer, ‘Reshut Harabim, Parhessia v’shuk (al avodato shel Udi Aloni),’ Studio Art Magazine 37 (October 1992).
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English speakers) in Province Quebec, but of indigenous cultures and their protection. It is, similarly, a central issue in the politics of India, where the Bengalis and Gujaratis ethnicities and Sikh, Khasmiris, and Hindu nations struggle for primacy in the public sphere. These are but a few examples where contradictory injunctions may be ascertained between a purported standard of universal human rights and the very diversity of human rights communities. Sometimes making universal claims does indeed denigrate particular beliefs and local practices. Here are perhaps the limits of both cosmopolitan virtue and of irony as well. Virtues are then, perhaps more firmly Aristotelian, in their embeddedness within specific cultural norms, practices, and epistemic traditions. The rights-based discourse is decidedly not a religious one, though the ethical claims it makes are universal in nature. Indeed, the modern, secular, and democratic idea of rights sits in a very complicated and contradictory relation to its own religious heritage. While rooted, on the one hand, in the traditions of sectarian Protestantism (that is of a very particular Christian tradition defined by beliefs in the innerlight and the privatization of grace), it is equally rooted in the modern natural law tradition (of Pufendorf, Vattel, and Grotius) and, most importantly, in the overcoming of religious identities, commitments, and desiderata as expressed in such documents as La Déclaration des Droits de l’homme et du citoyen and the American Bill of Rights. The process and progress of secularization is critical here, for to great extent most western ideas of universal human rights rest on a secular view of the individual and of the relations between such individuals in a secularized public sphere. (Nineteenth-century debates over the ‘Jewish Question’ revolved precisely around this issue. Its paradigmatic statement was perhaps that of Count Stanislas de Clermont-Tonnerre in 1789 before the French National assembly: “We must refuse everything to the Jews as a nation, and accord everything to the Jews as individuals.”) Moreover, the political and social order in which rights is an organizing category of behavior, reciprocity, and action, in which it organizes the standing of the social actors to one another and regulates the rules of distributive justice and the provision (even definition) of public goods, is not a religious one. The idea of individuals as bearers of something called rights presupposes a very particular understanding and reading of the self essentially as a self-regulating agent. It is a world that values autonomy over heteronomy and envisions
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social actors as self-contained matrixes of desires who direct their own appetites, desires, passions, and interests. This is a vision of an instrumental self as utility maximizer. This view of the autonomous individual as a self-regulating agent makes for a certain politics, or even for a certain philosophical anthropology. The politics it calls forth is, in the final analysis, the politics of liberalism—of a principled articulation of rights over any shared definition of the social good, of the Rawlsian original position, and the public sphere as a more or less neutral arena where individual interests can be maximized without impinging on the rights (i.e., interests) of others. In this regard the United Nation’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 and subsequent Bills of Rights and Covenants may be seen as an extension to the world stage of those three sets of citizenship rights ( judicial, political, and social), extended at different times and to different extent to members of the European national states over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Whether the concrete rights of citizenship which are the products of positive law can in fact be extrapolated onto the international arena in such a manner, is of course the critical issue in advocating a position of universal human rights. And it is here that the religious perspective becomes most important—though ambiguous and complex as well. For while religion does present, or at least purports to, a universal language within which to express fundamental ideas of human worth (from Israelite lessons on the stranger and fellowman, through the Sermon on the Mount to Islamic injunctions on the zakat), it is a language in which (for all the differences between religions) the individual appears very differently than in the modern secular language of the rights of the citizen. The very shared vulnerability of personhood of which Turner speaks is after all articulated differently in different traditions of virtue. For religion is not oriented around the autonomous dictates of a self-regarding and rights-bearing conscience. Rather, it seeks to define the self as constituted by heteronomous dictates—as the experience of transcendence constitutes an authority quite different from that of the State in whose orbit the individual is seen to exist. The world of the sacred and of religious authority is, by definition, a world marked off from the play of negotiation and exchange within which social order is defined. The sacred is that which is ineluctably other, that which cannot be grasped, bartered, or exchanged. Its dictates impose obligations that are simply of a different order of experience,
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that involve totally different domain assumptions than those encompassed by the play of reciprocity and autonomy upon which a regime of rights is based. The binding of Isaac is arguably a religious moment of paradigmatic import. One may look to Kierkegaard for its continuing resonance through the ages and across religious sensibilities. Yet it sits but poorly with a conception of human or individual rights. That a contradiction in sensibilities exists here is self-evident. The definition of the individual as rights-bearing citizen (on the national or international stage) is of a very different nature than the definition of the self within a religious idiom. They present, as noted above, different epistemologies and different contexts, indeed, different definitions of value—and of virtue. Not, however, that one position necessarily trumps the other. One needn’t draw the conclusion that religious obligations necessarily invalidate individual rights nor that human rights necessarily invalidate religious dicta and obligations. As Isaiah Berlin noted long ago, the human condition is one of plural and often irreconcilable goods making equally legitimate demands on us. This is the tragedy of life in the world. Dealing honestly with this plurality is a challenge that all those concerned with both religious dicta and the obligations of virtue or human rights should not shy away from. It is, I believe, the challenge and promise of religious studies as we enter the new century. Dealing with this plurality demands perhaps not, or not only, a stance of irony, but one of an epistemological modesty, an epistemic humility: a stance that one cannot help but assume when faced by the contradictory injunctions of both reason and revelation.
THE PROPER OBJECT OF THE STUDY OF RELIGION: WHY IT IS BETTER TO KNOW SOME OF THE QUESTIONS THAN ALL OF THE ANSWERS1 Ivan Strenski In his 1952 essay, ‘The Nature of Philosophical Problems and their Roots in Science,’ first delivered as the Chairman’s ‘Address to the Philosophy of Science Group of the British Society for the History of the Sciences,’ Karl Popper made a fundamental claim about the nature of any ‘science,’ or what scholars of religion can understand as the nature of any ‘disciplined’ approach to understanding and explaining religion. There, Popper claimed that ‘scientists’ “are not students of some subject matter, but students of problems.”2 I believe that Popper’s promotion of problems to the heart of the quest for knowledge is critical to a mature conception of the study of religion. Such ‘problems of religion’ might include questions like the following: How many religions are there, really? Do religions change in terms of their own internal dynamic, or do they change by virtue of their relation to other cultural systems or religions—say, by imitation or direct opposition? Can religions only be discovered, or can they be invented or deliberately designed? Does it make sense to speak of something not previously a religion or religious subsequently ‘becoming’ a religion? (Kwanzaa, positivism, marxism, maoism). In what follows I shall use Popper’s position on the centrality of problems to the disciplined pursuit of knowledge to argue three related points relative to ‘religious studies’ or the ‘study of religion’ as such a ‘disciplined’ approach to understanding and explaining religion.3
1 James Thurber as cited in John Bartlett, Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, 14th ed. (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1986), 1003b. 2 Karl R. Popper, ‘The Nature of Philosophical Problems and Their Roots in Science,’ in Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge, ed. Karl R. Popper (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969), 67. 3 I also use these terms synonymously and as shorter versions of terms such as ‘academic study of religion’ and ‘religious studies in the university.’
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First, I argue that ‘problems’ are central to any disciplined study (or science), including the study of religion; second, I claim that a grasp of the problems of religion may be critical to the long-term intellectual seriousness and durability of the study of religion; and third, I affirm the related thesis that in focusing on the ‘problems of religion’ we can go a long way in putting behind us that increasingly sterile issue of the definition of religion. Scholars of religion need to develop a syllabus of such ‘problems’ and build the curriculum of the study of religion deliberately and explicitly to include them. My argument can be read as an effort to take seriously once more what in former times was known as the so-called autonomy of religion. Political events of the past decade, especially illuminated by recent writing on religious violence around the globe, have worked to make us all rethink the issue of the distinctiveness of religion. It is by now manifest that many of the salient and most egregious examples of violence in the world today have essentially involved what we know as the traditional religions. Authors like Mark Juergensmeyer and Peter van der Veer have made the case that there is something peculiar, something distinctive enough about what can be called religious violence to warrant considering what its elements of distinctiveness are.4 Van der Veer puts the point plainly in saying “that we should take religious discourse and practice as constitutive of changing social identities, rather than treating them as ideological smoke screens that hide the real clash of material interests and social classes.”5 If religion can be likened to a language, if it can be said to constitute a discourse, it seems at least distinctive enough to warrant spending some time thinking about how and why it is so. In the end, we may conclude that the discourse (or discourses) of religion differs no more from other cultural discourses than dialects or accents of the same language. And, that would be fine. The point is, however, that even if it proves to be merely a dialect or regional accent of some larger whole, religion’s distinctiveness would still be worth weighing and understanding. If we stick with the idea of religion’s being ‘distinctive enough,’ we will not then 4 Mark Juergensmeyer, The New Cold War? Religious Nationalism Confronts the Secular State (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992); Peter Van der Veer, Religious Nationalism: Hindus and Muslims in India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). 5 Van der Veer, Religious Nationalism, ix.
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need to go down the dead-end road which the Eliadean metaphysics of the absolute transcendence of religion from all other ways of life or communities of discourse led us. Even a little difference can go a long way. The religions are in this sense real—as real as nations, unions, or fraternities. They are special modes of social organization that have come more and more to the fore at least since the last decade. They are not simply ideologies or ‘authenticating discourses,’ both of which are far too disembodied to capture the lived-in, historical reality of the religions. To promote the study of problems of religion, however, is not to argue that the study of such problems should occupy us at every or even most moments. There are all sorts of things needing to be done in the study of religion. Yet religious studies becomes intellectually significant and distinctive as a discipline the more religion is explicitly problematized. At the very least, a ‘discourse community’ exists with a recognizable roster of issues, questions, and problems which focuses the conversations of those within or related to this community. Theologians and philosophers of religion have recognized something of the same phenomenon for a long while. To wit, atheists and theists have far more in common—they share the same discourse, although being at opposite ends of the exchange—than either have with those who are utterly indifferent to the issue of divine existence, goodness, and such. Likewise, even those at the extreme ends of issues in the study of religion, such as a fundamental one of whether ‘religion’ is a useful analytic term at all, belong to the same discourse community in ways that those for whom this issue is no problem at all do not. These folk would at least have something to talk about; these folk do not remain mute over such a radical question in the study of religion as the nature of our analytic language. Only people who are members of the same discourse community could care to argue about the definition of religion as much as we do. What matters then is not what side of the debate one takes up, but that one bothers to debate at all. And, that people converse about common problems is, I believe, what Popper had in mind from the very beginning in claiming that a science or ‘discipline’ is defined by its problems. To sharpen the meaning of my proposal, consider a recent example of a successful ethnographic study in religion, Karen McCarthy Brown’s Mama Lola, to which my suggested approach may be usefully
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contrasted.6 While I celebrate this book as a rich source of data about religion, it seems to me to lack the kinds of formally posed questions or problems of which I speak. I am arguing that unless ethnographies such as these directly pose questions—as contrasted with creating controversy—they fall short in themselves in establishing a case for the distinctiveness of the study of religion. Rather, it is the fact that scholars in the study of religion may find problems with what Brown does and says in Mama Lola that testifies to the existence of religious studies as a discipline. It is the fact that such scholars form a community of discourse around Mama Lola, with a certain cluster of questions and problems in mind, that speaks to the reality and vitality of the study of religion as a discipline. It is thus one thing to produce a richly written narrative and ethnography, as I believe Brown does, but another thing entirely to articulate questions or problems about what it is to be in relation with Haitian deities. I believe, therefore, that one will look in vain through the length and breadth of Mama Lola for any questions or problems it explicitly raises! The ‘gods’ and spirits are just taken for granted, so Brown never even broaches the problem—much less answering it— of just what a ‘god’ is? I cannot even find evidence in Mama Lola that the nature of the gods might be problematic! Thus, although Mama Lola may occasion problems in the minds of the readers, it does not formulate the kind of actual problems of religion that I am proposing. My purpose in urging us to consider the importance of identifying the problems of religion as a major object of our concern emerges directly out of optimism about religious studies on this continent. We should think about exploiting our extravagant success as an intellectual and academic endeavor and move ahead to the next step in our growth. Both in terms of the abundance and quality of publications in our field as well as our departmental strengths in colleges and universities across the land, the academic study of religion must be deemed a success. At this point in our collective lives we need to consolidate our positions and lay the intellectual foundations for the future durability and intellectual integrity of the study of religion. Part of this intellectual integrity can, I shall try to show, be
6 Karen McCarthy Brown, Mama Lola (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).
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achieved by paying appropriate attention to what I am calling the problems of religion. I well realize that there are some of us who will not welcome the independent development of the study of religion as an entity either worthy of the name of a ‘discipline’ or with independent academic departmental standing. Some imagine a future in which religious studies is either confounded with (essentially Christian) theology or dissolved into cultural studies. My position may be taken as a deliberate rejection and refutation of these possible, but essentially fatal, futures for religious studies. Here I can only sketch out my arguments against both of these options. My insistence on a sharp, bright line between the academic study of religion and the doing of ‘theology’ so called (actually in almost all cases I know, a thinly disguised form of active Christian theology) rests on some simple principles. First, religious studies is about studying religion, not doing it. Insofar as theology is an active ‘doing’ of religion, it will always differ from the study of religion even though doing a religion will often involve a good deal of ‘the study of religion.’ This would be, in effect, the religious studies part of theological education, and quite properly so. I have nothing whatsoever against such doing of theology. It is simply ‘confessional’ in the best of senses, and thus an activity proper to certain social formations. This leads me to my second point. Theology is at the very least the intellectual expression of the life of a religious community (with apologies for ‘buddhology’ and Buddhist communities, Confucian teaching for Confucian communities, and so on). It is the intellectual interpretation of the life of a religious community within the changing historical contexts in which it finds itself. Catholic liberation theology is just such an example of a response by a religious community to a particular social and economic situation, calling forth a re-reading of the traditions and history of that community. In its turn, Catholic liberation theology with its base communities has had much to do with the making of a distinctive form of religious life. The job of religious studies is not to make a Catholic (or any other kind of ) liberationist religiosity, but rather to learn about and to think about such religious communities as well as their intellectual products, their theologies (or buddhologies), and so on. In the long run, only religious communities can produce ‘real’ theologies. Academic institutions, except for divinity schools, yeshivas, and seminaries produce only academic theology. Should we expect any more from a theology cut
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off from the life of a religious community than we might of music, art, or poetry cut off from real creative communities?7 In this sense, the study of religion does not share in the core conversation of that discourse community called ‘theology,’ and certainly not in any sort of ‘confessional’ theology, any more than it shares the core conversations of the religions themselves. Our problems are not their problems—or if they are, only rarely so. Scholars of religion are just not interested in participating in that conversation, since nothing much is at stake for us in what is decided. Yet of course since we ‘study’ religion, rather than being caretakers or creators of it, whatever is decided by theological discourse communities provides grist for our mill. Theology is after all a conspicuous sort of religious behavior. Therefore, on the whole, one may agree with a claim made in a recent American Academy of Religion presidential address by Margaret Miles that religious studies is a “discursive field, a rich conversation, rather than a single field with identifiable boundaries of content and method.”8 Discourse communities differ, and often significantly. As students of religion, I do not think we really care existentially about what Muslims, Jews, or Christians will need to do to face the challenges of the present day. We have nothing to say in the conversation within each of these religious communities. That is very much their business—the business of insiders. Or, if we do have something to say about their inner conversation, it will be to report on it and to compare it with conversations of different religious communities. As members of the discourse community called ‘religious studies,’ we are not interested, therefore, in trying to articulate a Jewish theology of the modern world, although as students of religion I think we could predict what one would look like. Thus, ‘their’ problem is how to articulate such a theology; ‘our’ problem— and thus a problem of religion—is to understand the rules by which such an articulation or hermeneutic would take place, how it would
7 I am well acquainted with the attempts of good colleagues of mine, such as Delwin Brown, Sheila Davaney, and Linnel Cady at Iliff School of Theology, who believe an academic theology is possible without being at the same time ‘confessional.’ I cannot go into details here, but our discussions will be published in a collective work edited by my Iliff friends. In a word, my suspicions have not been removed by their good efforts and integrity. 8 Margaret Miles, ‘Becoming Answerable for What We See,’ Journal of the American Academy of Religion 68, no. 3 (2000): 475.
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or would not meet resistance and support from various constituent communities within a particular theological discourse community. As for those who want to dissolve religious studies into cultural studies,9 one hardly knows whether to laugh or to cry. This kind of reaction is, at any rate, what a recent obtuse proposal for such a subsuming of religious studies by cultural studies entails. Timothy Fitzgerald’s The Ideology of Religious Studies thus tries to make the case for the reduction of religious studies to cultural studies by the following logic: The way forward for those scholars working within religion departments who do not have a theological agenda but who recognize the phenomena usually described as religion as being fundamentally located within the arena of culture and its symbolic systems is to redescribe and rerepresent their subject matter as the study of institutionalized values in different societies and the relation of those values to power and its legitimation.10
Fitzgerald tells us that he “would be happy to call this humanities or cultural studies . . . [since] when we talk of religion in a non-theological sense, we really mean culture, understood as the study of values, and the interpretation of symbolic systems.”11 What does one say to someone like Fitzgerald—someone who solemnly declares the analytic uselessness of such an obscure and troublesome notion as ‘religion’ only to recommend replacing it with that notoriously clear and distinct idea, ‘culture’?12 Is Fitzgerald having us on, or what? One imagines Fitzgerald turning up for a meal in Los Angeles, New York, or London with their richly diverse restaurant scenes, but turning his nose up at the various selections of the world’s cuisines only to insist on dining at a restaurant which just serves ‘cooking’ or ‘cuisine,’ please. Just what good would it really do to submerge religious studies in cultural studies, any more than it would to dismiss the differences in the world’s cuisines in favor of their common nutritional function (leaving out for the moment the ‘good’ which ever-watchful university bean counters see in axing out 9 Timothy Fitzgerald, The Ideology of Religious Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); Ivan Strenski, ‘On “Religion” and Its Despisers,’ in What Is Religion? Origins, Definitions, and Explanations, ed. Brian C. Wilson and Thomas A. Idinopulos (Leiden: Brill, 1998), 113–32. 10 Fitzgerald, Ideology of Religious Studies, 19–20. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid., 20.
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whatever humanities programs they feel they can get away with)? It is as obvious that religion is part of culture as it is that Sichuan, Glatt, Tex-Mex, or Milanese are kinds of cooking or cuisines. But, so what? Of course, religion, like art, music, cooking, and such, is a part of ‘culture.’ What else would it be—a part of the vegetable or mineral world?! Such a conclusion is truly trivial in the logical sense of the term. The issue is not that anyone would deny it, but rather why anyone would think such an empty claim worth asserting? Would it make any more sense to assume a ‘cultural studies’ person could teach and research Baroque music at the same time as they did Impressionist painting or Ming Dynasty pottery? Art and music are as much parts of culture as religion. Yet, no one would be crass enough to suppose that one could merge the study of art or music in the cultural studies mega-department (unless one conceives cultural studies as a kind of academic ‘Amateur Hour,’ which from recent samples of the genre seems more and more to be the case). Why should we think it any more appropriate to do the same with religion? Such talk sounds at best touchingly naive like that which preceded the establishment of those colorless ‘humanities’ departments that now hang on by sheer force of inertia in our universities. Interdisciplinarity has great merits provided one gets there by way of a traditional discipline. At least the disciplines rest on real social arrangements with their histories and traditions of scholarship. Somehow it does not seem to work simply to declare a field, department, or discipline, and expect it to produce the social relations of the means of the production of scientific knowledge, issuing in solid scholarship. Beginning without any sort of disciplinary definition in the hope that the end result of one’s labors will meet the highest standards of scholarship is just delusory.13 13 I can think of at least one current and prominent example of religious studies work touting its membership in cultural studies: Tomoko Masuzawa’s In Search of Dreamtime. Without getting into a lengthy discussion of this treatment of the quest for the origins of religion in Durkheim, Freud, and Friedrich Max Müller, what this book showcased was a muddle of confused agendas and special pleading. While Masuzawa announces an historical intention, she brushes aside inconvenient historical facts, preferring instead to dwell on style and rhetorical moves more reminiscent of literary analysis. Thus, while she purports to tell us the historical truth of the relation between Max Müller’s study of myth and his Vedic scholarship, she ignores their close relation in the interests of affirming the postmodernist affection for the rhetoric of disjunction and difference. If the facts do not fit the promotion of the postmodernist aesthetic of difference, Masuzawa appears to justify ignoring the facts and trumpeting the theory instead. (Tomoko Masuzawa, In Search of
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Why Problems? But, why should we take problems to be so important for the study of religion? Why, for example, are not beliefs, experiences, theologies, theories, descriptions, or observations more critical for study of religion than problems? The answer, of course, is that while all these are important to the study of religion, problems are arguably of paramount importance—if we are interested in getting at what the distinctive contribution of the study of religion is to the larger domain of the human sciences. Here, Popper’s arguments for the importance of problems in science in general come once more to the fore, as does my earlier mentioned conception of the study of religion as having scientific ambitions, or at the very least a scientific ‘horizon.’ In the academic setting of university higher education, I presume that the study of religion should aim to understand and/or explain religion. The study of religion should be about addressing and exciting our curiosity about religion. Seen from a social angle, religious studies should be devoted in large measure to creating and sustaining a discourse community organized at its most engaging levels around the discussion of the things that scholars of religion find curious about religion, around the things that puzzle us about religion— in other words, around the problems of religion. In saying this, I do not therefore disparage studies of religion which are mainly empirical—observations, quantifications, chronicles, or descriptions of religion—nor do I decry theories of religion. I am only noting that since observations, quantifications, chronicles, and descriptions of religion lack the polemic zest to become foci of an academic study of religion, while theories are subordinate to the problems which they seek to explain, we should look harder at problems for our intellectual ground in the study of religion.14 Thus, I am asserting that religious studies can and ought to have a scientific or explanatory side to it. Indeed, by introducing and emphasizing the notion of the problems of religion, I deliberately seek to enhance the sense in which the study of religion should broadly pursue the goals of understanding and explanation common Dreamtime: The Quest for the Origins of Religion [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993]. For a fuller treatment, see Ivan Strenski, ‘Misreading Max Müller,’ review of In Search of Dreamtime: The Quest for the Origins of Religion, by Tomoko Masuzawa, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 8, no. 3 [1996]: 291–96.) 14 Karl R. Popper, Objective Knowledge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), 181.
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to science in the broad sense. If there is any way to distinguish science from other realms of human activity, I am appealing to what Popper said of the scientific enterprise, namely that in it we become “most conscious of the problems we try to solve.”15 These attempts to solve problems would include interpreting and understanding (I do not distinguish sharply between the so-called human and natural sciences), giving an account of or simply ‘making sense’ of religion in broadly disinterested and testable ways. I am not proposing that we focus on the problems of religion out of broadly theological or ideological interests, and thus I am not trying to promote religious studies for the purpose of creating or destroying, fostering or fighting, or for that matter, applauding or criticizing religion. These things simply are not interesting to those with insatiable curiosities about understanding and explaining the world around them. If it sounds quaint and even naive to make a distinction between science and ideology, perhaps we should reconsider the value of present-day fashions. Although science is often guided and inspired by our beliefs about the world or our interests in power by theory, ideology, or theology, sometimes people are just puzzled, confounded, or curious, and really do not know or care why. After all, creating a theory or an academic discipline, for example, seems a pretty sloppy affair. We may launch out in one direction, only to discover that we do not really arrive there at all. Popper put is this way, someone “who works on a problem can seldom say clearly what his problem is (unless he has found a solution), and even if he can explain his problem, he may mistake it.”16 In support of this, Popper tells us how Johannes Kepler consciously intended to solve the problem of the ‘world order.’ Yet, the problem he actually “solved was the mathematical description of motion in a set of two-body planetary systems.”17 Likewise physicist Erwin Schrödinger, author of the famous Schrödinger wave equation, thought his waves were one thing, when they were actually another, as his contemporary Max Born later showed. This so much shocked Schrödinger that he could never amiably accept Born’s irrefutable conclusion. Thus, Popper notes ironically that Schrödinger “had solved a problem but it was not the one he thought he had solved.”18 15 16 17 18
Ibid., 246. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid.
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As I have argued in several places, early phenomenology of religion in the hands of someone like Cornelis P. Tiele began with avowed, and at least partly sincere, scientific ambitions only to end in theology. Nonetheless, Tiele accomplished a good deal of classificatory work, which, in turn, inspired much of the morphological work of the militantly anti-theological Durkheimians.19 Other founders like Friedrich Max Müller similarly never abandoned their theological and ideological ambitions, even though they contributed greatly to the study of religion as a scientific endeavor by promoting, for example, comparative study of religion.20 At some point, these mixed intentions had to be sorted out, and new motivations had to stimulate the effort. The study of religion as a ‘science’ begins with just this sort of curiosity and the accompanying desire to solve problems in religion. Thus although I believe it can be demonstrated that in certain historical cases the scientific study of religion began with attempts to create, foster, or criticize religion, the study of religion could only become a scientific study when these theological and ideological interests took the form of being concerned with certain problems. At that point, the motivations of the theologically directed scholars along with whatever theological agendas they may have had became irrelevant. For certain purposes, who cares why Jean Bodin, Herbert of Cherbury, or Max Müller were motivated to search for an original or natural religion, as long as they formulated an interesting question or problem? Thus, while the problems of religion may have had theological content and motivations, they nonetheless often eventuated in furthering the scientific enterprise—one which did not require the same theological content and motivations even in spite of themselves. Curiosity happens, and so too does scientific curiosity, or what one might characterize as innocent curiosity. While we often do things for certain deep ideological purposes, this need not always or necessarily be so. A casual read through the history science will turn up perhaps as many ulteriorly motivated types as those purer souls consumed with the desire to poke about 19 Ivan Strenski, ‘Original Phenomenology of Religion, a Theology of Natural Religion,’ in The Comity and Grace of Method, ed. Thomas Ryba (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, in press); Ivan Strenski, Theology and the “First” Theory of Sacrifice (in preparation). 20 Ivan Strenski, ‘The Rise of Ritual and the Hegemony of Myth: Sylvain Lévi, the Durkheimians and Max Müller,’ in Myth and Method, ed. Wendy Doniger and Laurie Patton (Charlottesville: University of Virginia, 1996).
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in the attempt to make sense of the world around them. Captain James Cook clearly set out on his voyages leading to those remarkable encounters with the indigenous folk of the South Pacific with a surfeit of economic, political, and career interests. But, what does one imagine motivated Sydney Parkinson or John Webber, the illustrators of the flora, fauna, and humankind of those great voyages? I am no expert on these gifted men, but I do not believe that their illustrations of the new worlds that confronted them show anything but an absorption in their subject matter approaching a kind of dazzled curiosity or stunned wonder at the otherness before them. Further, while sometimes we assume full-blown or well-formed theories or theoretical positions in making our claims about the religious world, sometimes our thinking lacks the kind of completeness, consistency, or coherence that terms like ‘theory’ and its semantic kin imply. I suspect that much of the time our thought is far more fragmented and ad hoc than really the best material for today’s ideological critique of ideas assumes. What then do I specifically mean by the ‘problems of religion’? But Not These Problems. . . . By problems of religion I refer to questions generated by religion across a range of levels of generality. There are therefore very general problems of religion having to do with the nature of religion as a category (thus ‘categorial’ problems) and quite specific ones having to do with particular features of various religions or kinds of religions (thus, ‘infra-categorial’ problems).21 By ‘problems of religion,’ I therefore do not mean, for instance, the perfectly appropriate, yet literally parochial, first order problems for the religions—the religious difficulties which the various religions incur in the normal or extraordinary course of their ‘lives.’ Thus, from the perspective of its own interests, each of the religions faces problems for itself. Shakers fret about how they might expand their membership in light of their 21 All of these problems will necessarily presuppose some sort of theory of religion lurking in the background, and are therefore not independent of various theories of religion. I therefore do not mean questions primarily bearing on theories about how to be religious in a particular religious context or on general philosophical questions applied to the study religion. My notion of a ‘problem of religion’ therefore excludes a number of alternatives with which it might be confused.
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rule of celibacy; Muslims wonder about the dangers of adaptation to Western liberal society; Roman Catholic feminists wrestle with official resistance to women in the priesthood. Significantly, these problems typically depend in great measure on a point of view in an internal conflict within a religion. For the Roman hierarchy, the issue of women in the priesthood is the routine problem of ecclesiastical discipline. With respect to Muslim fears of adaptation to liberalism, Americans in general have no problem at all, since Americans would not be called upon to change! In this sense, the problems for the religions depend upon one’s frame of reference within a religion. What is a problem for one religious grouping is the “normal routine of things to the other . . . and vice versa.”22 Such a distinction has precedents in other fields besides the study of religion. Corresponding to my distinction between the problems for religion over against problems of religion, Peter Berger distinguishes between what he calls ‘social problems’ and ‘sociological problems.’ A ‘social problem,’ in Berger’s view, is what people speak about when “society does not work the way it is supposed to according to the official interpretations.” On the other hand, a sociological problem is not so much why some things ‘go wrong’ from the viewpoint of the authorities and the management of the social scene, but how the whole system works in the first place, what are its presuppositions and by what means it is held together.23
In this light, Roman Catholic feminists have a problem for themselves to the extent they feel it wrong that they cannot be ordained; similarly, for the Catholic hierarchy things could be said to ‘go wrong’ to the extent that the protests in behalf of women priests create a nuisance or could not be managed. But while both of these are problems for a religion, neither of these strictly speaking qualifies as a problem of religion. Part of what Berger seems to mean is that in the case of these two problems for parties contending about the priesthood within Roman Catholicism, in their present forms neither is of a high enough system-level order of generality to qualify as a problem of religion. Instead, the problem of religion at stake here would need to be something concerning the larger question of the bearing of gender upon positions of power. The problem of religion 22 23
Peter Berger, Invitation to Sociology (London: Penguin, 1963), 50. Ibid., 49.
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here would be, for example, the question of the extent to which religions (or certain kinds of religions) resist or accommodate women in roles of power. Such a question, such a problem of religion, would conform to Berger’s higher order ‘sociological problem,’ since it would, as Berger says, “concern an understanding of the entire social situation, the values and modes of action of both systems, and the way in which the two systems coexist in space and time.”24 ‘Problems of religion’ are therefore difficulties touching on the larger systematic nature of the phenomenon of religion as it is already theorized. By problems of religion I also do not mean so called, but badly named, ‘methodological problems’ of the study of religion. These problems are in a way too broad ( just as the problems afflicting particular religions and denominations were too narrow) to qualify as the problems of religion. A good source of such problems can be found on the pages of a journal like Method and Theory in the Study of Religion.25 While this commendable periodical does from time to time publish material which comes under the rubric of a problem of religion, it more typically consists of articles of such general scope as to be indistinguishable from those appearing in any general philosophy of science journal. ‘Methodology,’ as the term is used in Method and Theory in the Study of Religion and in religious studies broadly, means almost any sort of (lower case) theoretical or critical inquiry. It therefore seems to be just applied epistemology, and sometimes not even applied at that. Thus, while Jeffrey R. Carter’s article in Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, ‘Description Is Not Explanation: A Methodology of Comparison,’ clearly bears on the study of religion, it neither does so particularly nor does it do so in relation to issues central to any or all theories of religion.26 There is no particular reason for an article with that title to appear in a journal of religious studies rather than (for example) in a philosophy journal. By contrast, problems of religion are questions about the nature of the first-order object—religion—itself, not questions about secondorder approaches to the study of religion. They are questions of the highest theoretical import because they are bound up with the way we construct the object, ‘religion,’ based on what we assume religion Ibid., 50. Method and Theory in the Study of Religion (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1989–present). 26 Jeffrey R. Carter, ‘Description Is Not Explanation: A Methodology of Comparison,’ Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 10, no. 2 (1998): 133–4. 24 25
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to be. How we study religion—the so-called methodological questions—only have meaning once we have committed (however minimally and incompletely) to some sense of the nature of this object, ‘religion,’ that we study. This, I maintain, already presumes a set of problems of religion which constitute the study of religion itself. But Don’t We Already Do This? Initially one may be tempted to respond that there is nothing new in what I propose, and that the study of religion is and has always been informed by a syllabus of problems. I would certainly dispute that in religious studies the place of the problems of religion has been explicit or sufficiently well appreciated. From my own experience in the study of religion, reinforced by a survey of the course catalogues of a variety of major departments and programs in the U.S. (Harvard, Princeton, Boston University, University of California, Santa Barbara), I have concluded that ‘problems of religion’ indeed are not central to what we currently do. Catalogue course descriptions clearly do not tell all we need to know about the nature of a course. But, we have to start somewhere. And, in this case, the starting point reveals a good deal about what we are doing in our courses. I am not the first to have observed that a casual survey of our course offerings (restricted for purposes of wider comparison to undergraduate offerings) yields several major categories of courses. These are • the various biblical history and scriptural courses, including the Analects, Vedas, Koran, Talmud, Mishnah, or on major figures therein, such as Muhammad, Jesus, Confucius, Paul, or courses on themes typical of these literatures such as sages, seers, prophets, and rabbis. • ethics courses, e.g. diversity and race, gender and equality, violence, war and peace, ecology and environment, death and dying, as well as biomedical and social ethics courses. (These more than any other courses we offer focus on problems, although problems about the morality of various issues, oftentimes indistinguishable from questions which might just as easily appear in courses offered by the philosophy, sociology, or women’s studies department. The same may be said as well of the philosophy of religion course.) • the religious traditions and comparative study of religions courses, New Age, NRMs (self-explanatory), including surveys of so-called
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‘religious thought’ (also known as history or themes in theology). But, we should also include such courses as Hindu, Jewish, Muslim, and Christian philosophy. • the religious themes and/or phenomena courses, e.g. myth, spirituality, ritual, sacrifice, prayer, sacred, sin, mysticism, prophecy, saint, heaven, hell, and such. • the ‘religion and . . .’ course, e.g. religion and science, . . . and culture, . . . and literature, . . . and politics, or the entire range of courses featuring women and religion. • the method, history of the study of religion, and theory course or courses. While these kinds of courses are at the moment our bread and butter, and are likely so to be for the foreseeable future, not all of them help us as much to guarantee the intellectual viability of our futures as do others. Scripture courses could be (and are) taught within units such as a department of various sorts of literatures, as they are at University of California, San Diego or Berkeley. Or, many of the subjects included therein could be taken on by various area studies units: Hebrew bible and Rabbinics to Jewish studies or Near Eastern studies; Vedas, Puranas, and Hindu epics to South Asian studies; and so on. As I have already alluded, the ethics courses we teach might equally well become the responsibility of the philosophy department, and so on. Religious traditions might also be divided among the area studies programs. ‘Religion and . . .’ courses might be peeled off by almost any department in the humanities or by a college of liberal studies. And, of course, omnivorous departments like history, whose intellectual rationale and commission, as we all know, is to command the study of everything which took place before I just said that, routinely lay claim to all the above! Only the so-called ‘themes’ and method/theory courses would not be so easily digestible by our voracious sister departments and programs. It is worth pausing to consider why this might be so. In the case of ‘themes,’ the claim is implicitly made that myth, spirituality, ritual, sacrifice, prayer, sacred, sin, mysticism, heresy, prophecy, saint, heaven, or hell have something peculiar about them making them typical of ‘religion.’ They are features of what Mark C. Taylor has aptly termed the “constantly shifting cultural a priori” we call ‘religion.’27 To some extent these themes are the elements Mark C. Taylor, Introduction to Critical Terms for Religious Studies, ed. Mark C. Taylor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 17. 27
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out of which ‘religion’ is composed, as it were, just as a typical political science curriculum reflects the conviction that ‘politics’ refers to ideology, democracy, sovereignty, suffrage, liberalism, franchise, revolution, and so on. As for method, history, and theory of religion, one deals with treatments which similarly bear on the content and integrity of the domain, ‘religion.’ What one buys into at least implicitly under the rubrics of method, history, and theory of religion, is that at least the study of religion has a history and an accumulated tradition of ways of studying it whether or not they prove to be distinctive. The idea of the problems of religion carries the same sort of message of distinctiveness. Without going to the unnecessary extreme of claiming the absolute autonomy of religion asserted by our forebears in the discipline, the study of religion can be said to deal with problems which are different enough to be properly or primarily called the problems of religion. What then are some of the specific problems of religion? So Many Problems, So Little Time As to the classes of problems of religion, we can separate out at least two: first, very general or ‘categorial’ problems ones involving the general category of religion and second, those of a more particular or ‘infracategorial’ nature, referring to particular religions. I shall first detail the categorial problems and those of a near general variety. Natural religion and its critics ( Jean Bodin, Herbert of Cherbury)28 • What was the first religion? • How many religions are there, really? • What are the implications of there being many (or really just one) religion(s)? Questions raised by evolution and devolution (Albert Réville, Edward Burnet Tylor, James Frazer, Friedrich Max Müller) • Do religions change? If so, do they change according to any regular principles such as evolution or degeneration? J. Samuel Preus, Explaining Religion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), chaps. 1 and 2. 28
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• Can and ought religions be ranked, and according to what scale of values should this be done? • Do religions change in terms of their own internal dynamic, or do they change in terms of their relation to other cultural systems or religions (e.g. by imitation or direct opposition)? Questions raised by phenomenology and morphology (Cornelis P. Tiele, Gerardus van der Leeuw, Chantepie de la Saussaye) • How many kinds or species of religion are there? And, what are they? • Should Christianity be listed among the ‘religions,’ or is it in a class by itself ? (Chantepie de la Saussaye) • What are the parts of which ‘religions’ are constituted? • Does it make sense to inquire about the chronological origins of religion at all? • Can we explain religion or can we only understand it? If we can only understand it, what procedures should be followed to do so? Questions raised by the critics of the first phenomenologists (Durkheim, Smart) • Do all religions require a belief in god? Afterlife? The supernatural? • What makes a religion simple, or ‘elementary’? What makes it complex? (Durkheim) • Is religion essentially private or essentially social? Modern and postmodern questions Some of the problems which recur in our own time would include the following: • Are people religious by nature? Or, do they need to learn to be religious? • What is religion? What is a religion? How can you tell when you have come upon a religion? • Can religions only be discovered, or can they be invented or deliberately designed? • If so, what are the conditions of a religion’s success or failure? • Does it make sense to speak of something not previously a religion or religious, subsequently ‘becoming’ a religion? (Kwanzaa, positivism, marxism, maoism)
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• Could something purporting to be a religion actually fail at being one? • Does it make sense to speak of ‘fake,’ ‘pseudo-,’ ‘quasi-,’ or ‘inauthentic’ religions? • Are ‘cults,’ ‘sects,’ and similar phenomena ‘religions’? • Is religion good? Is it bad? And, how can we tell the difference? • Are all religions violent? Are they pacific, or indifferent to both options? • Can religion or religions be explained, understood, or just described? • Is belief or membership in a religion necessary for being able to explain, understand, or describe it? • Does religion have a future? If so, what will the religion(s) of the future be? Now let me mention just a few more particular, what we might call ‘infracategorial’ problems of religion. These are problems less of the nature of religion as a category than those which arise within religion. • Do religions having human founders tend to deify them? If so, what are the processes of deification? • How do religions featuring sacrifice see this action bearing on the nature of a deity? Is sacrifice offered to the deity? If so, does it sustain the deity? If it sustains the deity, in what sense is the deity superior to its human devotees? • Do religions featuring meditative practices tend to be more theistic or less so? • Do religions featuring intense ritual life tend to be more hierarchical, while those eschewing ritual more likely to be egalitarian? • Why do religions featuring sacrifice tend to exclude women from sacrifice (Nancy Jay)? • Why did Catholics in the French Wars of Religion tend to seek to destroy the bodies of Protestants, while Protestants tended to prefer desecrating the holy places and objects of Catholics? • Why did many samurai hail from families with Zen Buddhist traditions? • Why were the merchant classes of ancient India often disproportionately Buddhist and Jain? One could go on. Some of the problems of religion which I have listed are frankly seen as (and doubtless are) passé or outmoded, such as the problem
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of what the ‘first’ religion was. At least we can say that they no longer interest today’s scholars. Other problems of religion raise intriguing issues today. Yet even some of the problems which seem obsolete may be worthwhile studying if only as examples of failures, whether failures at solutions, or failures that stem from questions or problems which we later often conclude were badly posed. In tackling the problem of what the ‘first’ religion was, for example, we can learn quite a lot about the difficulties of marking cultural things chronologically. There is much to gain from engaging religion and asking how we study it, from understanding a problem even if we don’t succeed. This is aside, of course, from the interesting methodological issue of whether we are speaking of all these questions assuming the qualification to our inquires and assertions of ‘as a far as we can tell. . . .’ What a healthy tonic to claims made about historical matters a good dose of the humbling hypothetical ‘as a far as we can tell . . .’ would be! As Popper put it, “we learn to understand a problem by trying to solve it, and by failing.” By failing at solving certain problems, we become ‘experts’ at a problem insofar as we can say why certain solutions will not work. Popper argues that this is because “a problem is a difficulty, and understanding a problem consists in finding out that there is a difficulty, and where the difficulty lies.”29 I have indicated that seeking the ‘first’ religion, for example, pushes us to probe more general problems in the study of culture and method at large. Concerning this issue, Popper again has useful things to say. He argues that “those who have wrestled with a problem may be compensated by gaining an understanding of fields far removed from their own.”30 So, while many of the problems I have listed may be those which we have, for one reason or another, failed to solve, it will become evident that it can be the quest to formulate and then solve these problems which has been one of the main intellectual stimuli to the development of the study of religion itself. What I am proposing is that what was once done by the founders of the study of religion should now also be taken up by us in the same spirit of seeking and solving problems of religion. I might add that I have found that this engagement in a problem—even if in our minds 29 Karl R. Popper, ‘The Nature of Philosophical Problems and Their Roots in Science,’ in Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge, ed. Karl R. Popper (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969), 67. 30 Ibid.
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obsolete—works especially well in connection with our students, many of whom think of the study of religion almost exclusively in terms of their own existential quests. By involving students in a problem— even one we have not solved or cannot solve—we draw them into the excitement of our discipline. Exploring a ‘Problem of Religion’: ‘Becoming a Religion’ Finally, let me show how rich the inquiry into a current problem of religion can be by exploring what I call the problem of ‘becoming a religion.’ In brief, the problem in question here is whether and in what ways something not previously identified as a religion can be said to ‘become’ one. This is the flip side of the problem of how something up to that point identified as a religion loses that status. Let me pose the problem of what precisely has transpired in terms of cultural or social ontology when, for example, out of the existence of a few beliefs about the nature of human history and knowledge propounded by Auguste Comte, that which we call ‘positivism’ acquired institutional form, a set of beliefs about the transcendent value of human individuals, a cosmology, an ethical system, and so on? For Comte, there came to be a ‘religion of humanity,’ replete with these dimensions as well as a standard ritual life.31 One answer is that a religion has come to be; what was once a philosophy has ‘become’ a religion. Embracing the title ‘religion,’ the website of the American followers of Comte’s religion of humanity confirm this identification: “To us religion is the creation and pursuit of ideals and the relationship people feel with one another and with the universe. For us religion and theology are not equivalent words but rather theology is only one type of religious expression.”32 31 Under this name, Comte’s ‘religion of humanity’ still lives in Brazil as the Church of Positivism, holding weekly Sunday services like any other ‘church.’ In 1881 the Church of Positivism was established in Brazil. One of its most prominent members, Benjamin Constant Botelho de Magalhães is the acknowledged founder of the Brazilian republic. Witness to the influence of the positivists, the Brazilian flag bears the Comtean slogan, ‘Order and Progress.’ See the following websites related to the Church of Positivism: http://www.arras.com.br/igrposit/english/positiv.html; http://www.multimania.com/clotilde/urls.htm. 32 Website of American branch of Comte’s Religion of Humanity, American Humanist Society, Lloyd and Mary Morain, Humanism as the Next Step (Amherst, NY: Humanist Press, 1998) at http://www.humanist.net/publications/morain/chapter-1.html.
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Alternately, what has happened when Yoga moves from India to the suburbs? In my view we have here the same phenomenon as with positivism, but in reverse: a case of something ceasing to be a ‘religion.’ Thus, obversely, what has been eliminated when Yoga becomes nothing more than another member of the suburban diet and exercise industry? What has transpired when Yoga loses its metaphysical doctrines, its projection of a world of transcendent experiences, its lineages of teachers and the social organizations sustaining them, its doctrinally supported sacred language and its mythical cosmology, its elaborate rituals, or when it retains some of these in corrupted or ignorant form, such as the practice performed by some health and fitness yoga instructors of aping Hindu manners and language? It seems clear that yoga in this context has ceased being a ‘religion.’ In the case of the Church of Positivism, however, I say that a religion has come to be because this institution is marked by all those traits identified by things recognized as ‘religions.’ Here I rely on Ninian Smart’s articulation of a theory of religion as composed of seven dimensions: myths, rituals, doctrines, ethics, social forms and organizations, experiences, and material or aesthetic elements. Although each of these dimensions may exist independently or in relation to other human formations, when they are clustered into an interactive complex we have what is usefully called a ‘religion.’ A religion is defined by its social institutions, actual buildings and physical property, a clergy, a set of sharply defined beliefs, a program of prescribed rituals, and a group of adherents. Perhaps some might want to call this a ‘cultural,’ ‘social,’ or ‘affinity’ group because it has a collective nature organized around certain shared interests. Or, because issues of power arise here as they do in every human group, we might call this a ‘political’ society? Or, because the architecture of the churches tends to a highly refined standard, we might say that this is a society which patronizes art. But, if we are willing to grant any or all of these possible descriptions, why not call it a ‘religion’ too? Why not do so especially when adherents to this church are doing something special, and not other things: they are not primarily doing something economic like an ‘investment club’ might do. They spend their time publicly professing dedication to lofty and perhaps transcendent ideals, not to scanning the Wall Street Journal. Although they do politics, that is to say, although they may endorse candidates or vote as a block
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in elections, they themselves do not enter their church’s name on a ballot. Likewise, this church is not an arts organization: they subordinate the utility of their architectural creations to the purpose of reinforcing the belief and values which they profess rather than making architecture an end in itself. Thus in something like the Church of Positivism we have a special mode of social organization—something with distinguishable functions of ritual worship, personal edification, and spiritual culture and not simply aesthetic, political, or generically social functions. In other words, we have some rather peculiar form of social organization which can interestingly be called ‘religion.’ Focusing then on the ‘problem’ of ‘becoming a religion’ creates synergies with the idea of religion as something that has ‘crystalized’ into a unity of some sort. Thus, while there is no end to our speaking of this or that as ‘religious’ in the adjectival sense, as ‘religionlike,’ or as ‘suggesting aspects of a religion,’ Smart’s view harnessed to the problem of ‘becoming a religion’ suggests that we should only speak of a substantive religion when we can say that a certain level of cultural coherence has occurred. Thus, today among some African Americans the feast or ritual of Kwanzaa is celebrated, much as the Lupercal or Kalends were celebrated in ancient Rome. While recognizing these as festivals, rites, or ceremonies, I would only want to speak of a distinctly African-American ‘religion’ in connection with Kwanzaa if it were compounded with other features or ‘dimensions’ as Smart has outlined. To wit, does a church, order, lineage, or society begin to form around Kwanzaa? Is there a priesthood or other ritual institutionalizations associated with it? Does Kwanzaa call forth dogmas or an ethical code or become the venue of particular kinds of special experiences? If these should begin to happen, we would have the right to speak of Kwanzaa being or becoming a religion. However, on their own, not linked with these other ‘dimensions,’ the festivals and rites of Kwanzaa are just part of the extravagant flourishing of unrooted cultural forms that come and go with the vicissitudes of human history. Seeing religion through the lens of the problems of religion leads us to see it as a human entity which comes into being when diverse or dispersed cultural forms are brought under the command and control of an overarching system. This, in turn, helps make sense of other ‘problems’ of the study of religion, such as why institutionalization is so vital to religion. Theravada Buddhism, for example, is not simply the adherence to the Four Noble Truths or the Eightfold
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Path. The ‘religion’ of Theravada Buddhism is not just a matter of ideas and ethics, as our nineteenth century predecessors felt. It is those together with the institution of the Sangha, the rich yogic experiential life of meditating monks, the cycle of calendrical rites, the veneration of relics and construction of stupas, as well as the cult of the devatas which makes it a religion. Thinking about this ‘problem’ of becoming a religion further suggests that a religion is all of Smart’s seven dimensions taken together with other features in a condition of dynamic interaction. The dimensions of Buddhism, like the ‘texts’ of post-structuralism referring to other texts, ‘refer’ to other dimensions of religion. One dimension takes its meaning and purposes from others within the Buddhist constellation. Rituals such as monastic begging reinforce dogmas of selflessness and detachment. Experiences of emptiness resonate with vows of poverty and material simplicity, with the refined austerity of the shaven head of the bhikkhu, with purity of some of Theravadin architecture such as in the simple white stupas seen everywhere in these countries. Just how these aspects or dimensions become associated at the empirical level is still largely unknown, and is therefore a subject of future research. Indeed, the possible associations of Smart’s dimensions would become the basis for an entirely new set of ‘problems of religion’ as well. How generally, one might ask, can it be established empirically that Smart’s assumption about the correlation made between styles of religious experience and strands of religious doctrine, holds? We can nevertheless begin to get some idea of how and perhaps why this peculiar mode of social organization known as ‘religion’ works by reflecting upon some now well-understood features of the evolution of Christianity. Here, the work of Peter Brown carries much weight.33 The short answer to the question of how the religions behave is that they are a somewhat voracious and imperialist social formation. They habitually ‘accrete’ elements from their environment and subsume them to themselves. Consider sacredness in the ancient world of early Christian Europe as a prime example. There, as indeed it seems today among the devotees of the New Age, sacredness was deployed everywhere. The sun and moon, trees and plants of special kinds, rocks, springs, and mountains—all these 33 Regarding the origin of Catholic cults of relics as replacements for non-Christian nature worship see Peter Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 108–11.
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places where the spiritual imagination of people worked, one locates or finds the sacred. What I suspect the religions tend to do is coopt, concentrate, monopolize, or take command of undisciplined growths of spirituality, and in doing so, link them systematically with other of Smart’s ‘dimensions.’ For these early Latin Catholics discussed by Brown, the sacredness imputed to diverse forms came under the command of the high God. Only He is sacred. Either the worshipers of the sun are wrong in calling the sun sacred, or if it is sacred, it is only so because of the sun’s participation in the ‘One God.’ He then demands certain ethical and ritual behaviors, calls forth architectural forms, and inspires certain experiences—in short is linked to the range of phenomena described in Smart’s ‘dimensions’ of religion. Zest and Community There are two final benefits of approaching religion by way of problems. Doing so injects a certain ‘zest’ into our intellectual lives; it also encourages us to see the study of religion in a novel way: as a communal effort.34 First, the zest: Unlike a religious fact, a simple phenomenon, like one of Mark C. Taylor’s ‘critical terms’ or even a good theory of religion, a ‘problem’ is a kind of intellectual agent provocateur, as its etymology pro-blema, ‘a thing thrown or thrust forward,’ promises. As such, in the best of postmodern fashion it supposes discourse, and contested discourse at that! Second, a focus on problems and the discourse forming around those problems speaks to the way the study of religion assembles a community. In recommending that we order our discipline more around problems, I am calling attention to the essential reference to a discourse community—a community whose members share sufficient common understandings or a common language enabling them to discourse with one another. This discourse will often, I hope, take the form of struggle over a problem. I believe that we cannot really 34 I believe that focusing on problems can be seen to constitute a step beyond the approach highlighting categories or terms, such as have been the bases of such laudable efforts as Jonathan Z. Smith’s HarperCollins Dictionary of Religion (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1995) and Mark C. Taylor’s Critical Terms for Religious Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
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do religious studies unless we have actually wrestled with religious problems to some degree.35 As I have suggested earlier, we cannot really understand religion and the way religious studies came to be if we are content, for example, to sneer at the founders and their (to us) seemingly ignorant or naive questions—the problems of, for example, finding the ‘first’ religion or determining the ‘true’ religion, and such. We only learn when we ask ourselves why the founders thought they were right in asking and answering such questions as they did. We need not credit ourselves with much acumen or wisdom in cleverly pointing out why they were in so many cases obviously wrong. I reaffirm this because behind what I have been proposing is the even deeper conviction that the point of entertaining the problems of religion is self-justifying. The point is not even to solve them, but to wrestle with them. The point is to learn about religion by engaging them, and in engaging them to become expert in certain problems. Surely for us, the benefit in concluding that we will never find the original religion is not to rest with that awareness, but to have learned why such a problem cannot be answered. With such a problem-questing orientation informing our research and teaching, we can be satisfied that although we do not have all the answers about religion, we do have a lot of good questions! Bibliography Berger, Peter. Invitation to Sociology. London: Penguin, 1963. Brown, Karen McCarthy. Mama Lola. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. Carter, Jeffrey R. ‘Description Is Not Explanation: A Methodology of Comparison.’ Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 10, no. 2 (1998): 133–48. Fitzgerald, Timothy. The Ideology of Religious Studies. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Juergensmeyer, Mark. The New Cold War? Religious Nationalism Confronts the Secular State. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992. Masuzawa, Tomoko. In Search of Dreamtime: The Quest for the Origins of Religion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Method and Theory in the Study of Religion. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1989-present. Miles, Margaret. ‘Becoming Answerable for What We See.’ Journal of the American Academy of Religion 68, no. 3 (2000): 471–86. Popper, Karl R. ‘The Nature of Philosophical Problems and Their Roots in Science.’ In Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge, edited by Karl R. Popper, 66–96. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969.
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Popper, Objective Knowledge.
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——. Objective Knowledge. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973. Preus, J. Samuel. Explaining Religion. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987. Smith, Jonathan Z., ed. HarperCollins Dictionary of Religion. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1995. Strenski, Ivan. ‘Original Phenomenology of Religion, a Theology of Natural Religion.’ In The Comity and Grace of Method, edited by Thomas Ryba. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, in press. ——. ‘The Rise of Ritual and the Hegemony of Myth: Sylvain Lévi, the Durkheimians and Max-Müller.’ In Myth and Method, edited by Wendy Doniger and Laurie Patton, 52–81. Charlottesville: University of Virginia, 1996. ——. ‘Misreading Max Müller.’ Review of In Search of Dreamtime: The Quest for the Origins of Religion, by Tomoko Masuzawa. Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 8, no. 3 (1996): 291–96. ——. Theology and the “First” Theory of Sacrifice. In preparation. ——. ‘On “Religion” and Its Despisers.’ In What Is Religion? Origins, Definitions, and Explanations, edited by Brian C. Wilson and Thomas A. Idinopulos, 113–32. Leiden: Brill, 1998. Taylor, Mark C. Introduction to Critical Terms for Religious Studies, edited by Mark C. Taylor, 1–20. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. ——. ed. Critical Terms for Religious Studies. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Van der Veer, Peter. Religious Nationalism: Hindus and Muslims in India. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.
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PROBLEMS, QUESTIONS, AND CURIOSITIES: A RESPONSE TO IVAN STRENSKI Elizabeth A. Castelli In his provocative paper, ‘The Proper Object of the Study of Religion: Why It Is Better to Know Some of the Questions than All of the Answers,’ Ivan Strenski has proposed that people engaged in the academic study of religion focus on problems of and questions about religion, approaching their investigations from a stance of innocent/scientific curiosity as a way of avoiding becoming problematically invested in and with their objects of study. My response1 focuses on these categories—‘problems,’ ‘questions,’ and ‘curiosities’—since they frame Strenski’s discussion of what is at stake in our collective study of religion. Although it will become clear that I come at these questions and problems and the stance of curiosity from a somewhat different point of view, I want to emphasize that I appreciated and learned a great deal from Strenski’s paper, and I am very grateful for the opportunity to engage in a conversation with it. The Problem of the Inescapability of Religion In the service of a broader appeal for scientific rigor in the academic study of religion, Strenski opens his paper with the passionate insistence that people engaged in the academic study of religion should make a sharp distinction between ‘studying’ religion and ‘doing’ religion. This distinction is glossed as a distinction between the academic study of religion, on the one hand, and theology, on the other.2 At the outset, I must confess a visceral sympathy for the 1 My sincerest thanks to Rosamond Rodman, Randall Styers, and Jack Hawley for taking the time to read and comment on this paper in its various incarnations. Their generous suggestions and comments have most certainly improved the final document. 2 Beyond the concerns about this opposition raised in the body of my argument, it is also worth recognizing the Western bias embedded in the terms of the opposition where ‘theology’ stands for all aspects of religious interestedness. Thanks to Rosamond Rodman for pointing this out to me. One could take this critique even a step further and remind ourselves of Jonathan Z. Smith’s assertion that even ‘religion’ itself
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impulse that drives this attempt at division and classification. Indeed, in general, I am quite aware of some of the perils involved when the boundaries between the academic study of religion and other possible modes of engagement with religion get blurred. After all, my own bread-and-butter course wherever I have taught is ‘Introduction to the New Testament.’ Such a course seems fated perennially to bring the conflicts between the academic study of religion, on the one hand, and personal commitments to particular forms of religion, on the other, into high (and sometimes quite emotional) relief. When I began teaching a number of years ago at a small, Midwestern (and formerly church-related) liberal arts college, the students there were required to study religion in partial performative fulfillment of the school’s motto: Scientia et religio, ex uno fonte. On this campus, the predominantly blond and overwhelmingly white students used to celebrate their collective diversity by observing with considerable satisfaction that there were both Presbyterians and Lutherans in the same classroom. Meanwhile, in my own department, one of my senior colleagues took great pleasure in repeatedly demanding in public to know if I considered myself a papist. It is perhaps understandable why I (an avowed feminist with markedly postmodern tendencies, a longstanding ambivalence toward the Catholic church of my upbringing, and a surname that ended in a vowel) might have taken solace in my capacity as the professor to declare ‘theology’ out of bounds in my classroom. But, in spite of my experience-based sympathy for this impulse, I have to say as well that I remain somewhat uneasy about it. In particular, I am uneasy with how and where the insistence upon such sharp distinctions may inadvertently position us as scholars of religion. There are three reasons for this. My first reason has to do with the irony embedded in the attempt to keep these borders intact. The very gesture of drawing what Strenski calls “a sharp, bright line between the academic study of religion and the doing of ‘theology’” could quite easily turn out to be a mere parody or mimicry of the religious impulse toward purity apparent in many, if not all human societies. I recall Mary Douglas’s wonderful axiom that “uncleanness is not a native category but finds it origins, not in the distant human past, but in the Enlightenment scholar’s study. See Jonathan Z. Smith, ‘Religion, Religions, Religious,’ in Critical Terms for Religious Studies, ed. Mark C. Taylor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 269–84, esp. 281: “‘Religion’ is not a native term; it is a term created by scholars for their intellectual purposes. . . .”
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is matter out of place.”3 In the framework Strenski draws for us, lived religion seems to function as the out-of-place matter, the uncleanness that threatens to pollute the bounded space—indeed, the sanctity—of the classroom, the humanities division, or the university as a whole. Put in the terms of psychoanalysis, I wonder, in other words, about the uncanny return of the repressed. Related to this point, I also wonder about the adequacy of the binary division embedded in Strenski’s formulation: are ‘the academic study of religion’ and ‘the doing of “theology”’ the only two options available to those concerned with, interested in, or curious about ‘religion’? The second cause for concern involves how power, authority, and expertise are being deployed in a classroom in which such boundaries are drawn and where the state of the debate is construed as an incommensurable division between academic knowledge and lived religion. I know full well that my declaring ‘theology’ out of bounds in that rural Midwestern classroom did a number of things, not the least of which was to make my life easier and to assuage my anxieties as a beginning teacher. My confident assertion of the priority and superiority of certain forms of historical knowledge in that context was certainly a gesture grounded in an intellectual commitment (my postmodern qualms about historicism notwithstanding). But it was also a gesture grounded in my authority and power in the classroom, a move whose character remains for me troubling and ambivalent, and one I have been less willing to make so categorically in subsequent teaching contexts. But the third reason why I am troubled by the abstract distinction between ‘studying’ and ‘doing’ is that some of my favorite scholars of religion are fieldworkers, and these scholars have provided critical challenges to the study of religion as a whole around questions of method and ideas about critical subjectivity. Here, I think of work like Karen McCarthy Brown’s Mama Lola, Robert Orsi’s The Madonna of 115th Street, and Loring Danforth’s Firewalking and Religious Healing.4 These scholars, and others like them, raise in complex and
Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966), 40. 4 Karen McCarthy Brown, Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); Robert Anthony Orsi, The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880–1950 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985); Loring Danforth, Firewalking and Religious Healing: The Anastenaria of Greece 3
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nonreductive ways for all of us the urgent question of perspective, what we might call the insider/outsider question in the study of religion.5 They have advocated quite compellingly for what one might call a method of ‘critical sympathy’ when they undertake to study the religious lives of individuals and communities. Many have raised especially pointed ethical challenges to the field, challenges that would invite us to problematize Strenski’s ‘sharp, bright line’ rather than simply to reinscribe it.6 I will have more to say about such forms of scholarly work further on. For now, I simply want to observe that the bracketing for which Strenski argues can most certainly help to sharpen certain kinds of questions. But at the same time it leaves other sets of questions inarticulate and, indeed, unaskable. I wonder about the costs for the field of declaring some of these important questions out of bounds simply because they lie alongside that blurry and sometimes dangerous ‘insider/outsider’ borderline. The Problem of Definition and Historicizing ‘Religion’ As Strenski quite rightly points out, the history of attempts to define ‘religion’ as an object of study has been enormously fraught. The hegemony of western Christianity’s version of the category is a wellknown dimension of this history. To respond to this domination, Strenski turns to the theoretical framework presented by Ninian Smart in which seven dimensions (myths, rituals, doctrines, ethics, social forms and organizations, experiences, and material/aesthetic elements) constitute a theoretical framework for determining whether something is a ‘religion’ or not. Many have found Smart’s schema a useful pedagogical starting point for expanding students’ notions of what and the American Firewalking Movement (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989). The discussion of Karen Brown’s work in Strenski’s paper was added to the original conference paper, in response perhaps to my discussion of this work in my original comments at the conference. 5 An excellent anthology of essays on this problematic may be found in Russell T. McCutcheon, ed., The Insider/Outsider Problem in the Study of Religion: A Reader (London: Cassell, 1999). 6 See Robert A. Orsi, ‘Snakes Alive: Resituating the Moral in the Study of Religion,’ in In Face of the Facts: Moral Inquiry in American Scholarship, ed. Richard Wightman Fox and Robert B. Westbrook (Washington/New York: Woodrow Wilson Center International Center for Scholars/Cambridge University Press, 1998), 201–26; reprinted in Women, Gender, Religion: A Reader, ed. Elizabeth A. Castelli with Rosamond C. Rodman (New York: Palgrave/St. Martin’s Press, 2001), 98–118.
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‘counts’ as religion—precisely because it can serve to disrupt unexplored or unexamined self-evidencies. But there are a couple of places where I would also want to add some nuance to Strenski’s deployment of these categories. I am concerned first of all with the very high level of abstraction that characterizes Smart’s (and therefore, by association, Strenski’s) starting point. The majority of the problems and questions that Strenski identifies as the most pressing for the academic study of religion return to concerns raised by phenomenologists and other theorists preoccupied with questions of morphology and social evolution, with questions of origins. ‘Religion,’ it is presupposed, exists as an abstract entity within which various ‘religions’ can be arranged and categorized. Religion-in-the-abstract, this approach suggests, can (and should) be objectified and thereby rendered suitable for scientific interrogation. This taxonomical way of approaching the study of religion has the effect of rendering any attention to the particular as merely a stepping-stone toward the real goal: understanding ‘religion’ in general and as a general (social, cultural) category. It also creates the prospect that any particular example may be judged ‘not really’ religion since the pre-existing abstractions will govern and define what falls within the purview of ‘religion.’ This effect is evident in Strenski’s discussion of the processes by which certain phenomena ‘become’ or ‘cease to be’ religions. He points, for example, to Comte’s discussion of positivism as the ‘religion of humanity,’ and argues that what happened in this case is “that a religion has come to be; what was once a philosophy has ‘become a religion.’ He places this transformation in stark contrast to what happens when yoga moves, in his words, “from India to the suburbs.” Deracinated from its rich and textured traditional contexts and from its original mythic frameworks and linguistic worlds, and resituated in American health clubs and dance studios, yoga (in Strenski’s view) “has ceased being a ‘religion.’” When the point is put in these terms, I think it is hardly controversial—though, I don’t know about where you live, but where I live, people certainly engage in their yoga practice with the commitment and enthusiasm usually characterized by the adverb religiously! But more seriously, Strenski’s articulation of the problematic actually raises for me a different set of questions or problems. My question is not: ‘Is yoga, when it is taught at the 92d Street Y, still a religion?’ Instead, my question is: ‘Of what is the postmodern diffusion
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of this ancient religious practice a telling symptom?’ Or, put otherwise: ‘How does this example help scholars of religions think about the post-Enlightenment and postmodern processes whereby “religion” in its traditional, institutional sense appears to have a narrowing purview whereas religious ideas and practices have been deracinated, replanted, globalized, commodified, multiplied, and hybridized?’ Similar questions and problems arise a little later on with the discussion of the festival of Kwanzaa, an invented tradition with roots in Afrocentric thought. Here again, Strenski’s starting point is the fixed framework of Smart’s schema for an abstraction called, ‘religion,’ and the question must then be: ‘Does Kwanzaa provide evidence for supposing that there is a distinct entity called “African American ‘religion’”?’ I would suggest that, if we came at the problem from the other side, starting from what it is that people are doing—and thinking and saying about what they are doing—then we might end up with a different set of questions. We might instead ask, ‘How does the example of Kwanzaa help us formulate and reflect upon a whole range of questions about religion in our own cultural and historical setting? For example, how is Kwanzaa a quintessential example of diasporic culture-making and identity-formation, of cultural hybridity and postmodern pastiche? How does such an example help to challenge and transform our own fixed definitions of religion? [And also . . .] What does this festival, this invented tradition, have to tell us about the specificity of African American religious life? [Finally . . .] How does our capacity to track the “invention” of Kwanzaa (or any other contemporary religious innovation) give us the tools to understand processes of religious formation in other contexts for which we have only documentary or archaeological traces?7’ (Parenthetically, in reframing the question or problematic in this way, it occurs to me that we all have our own strategies for deciding what questions seem urgent and what questions are already sufficiently settled. And these strategies are undoubtedly, in some measure, a simple matter of what one’s surroundings allow one to see and experience. I live and work at the mouth of Harlem, and so it does not seem to me that there is much controversy at all over the question of whether or not there is a distinctive entity called ‘African American religion.’ It seems to me more or less self-evident that there is, since 7 I am grateful to Jack Hawley for pointing out this last, and very important, question to me.
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I see it lived out all around me all the time. How and why African American religion overlaps with other categories of religion that one might more readily recognize—various stripes of Protestantism and Catholicism, Judaism, Islam, or traditional African religions—is what, in my view, invites and inspires curiosity. But whether African American religion exists as a recognizable and independent religious formation seems to me to be more or less incontrovertible.) I want to make one final point about the invocation of Smart’s framework here. Strenski paraphrases Smart’s seven dimensions of religion in this way: “A religion is defined by its social institutions, actual buildings and physical property, a clergy, a set of sharply defined beliefs, a program of prescribed rituals, a group of adherents.” He anticipates the suggestion that this framework might be too broad or amorphous, encompassing too much and potentially being insufficiently specific. The problem is that ‘religion’ might, as a consequence of this broad framing of it, be reduced to or confused with “a ‘cultural,’ ‘social,’ or ‘affinity’ group . . . [or] a ‘political’ society . . . [or] a society that patronizes the arts.” Strenski’s solution to the problem is to add an eighth dimension to Smart’s seven more structuralist/formalist categories. Strenski’s eighth dimension is what seals the ‘religiousness’ of a ‘religion.’ He writes, “[T]hey [that is, adherents to a particular religion] are not primarily doing something economic like an ‘investment club’ might do. They spend their time publicly professing dedication to lofty and perhaps transcendent ideals— not to scanning the Wall Street Journal.” The specific contrast that Strenski draws here—between a church and an investment club—paradoxically brings to the surface the complicating example I kept thinking about all the way through the discussion of Smart’s dimensions of religion: to wit, capitalism.8 For I would argue that capitalism fits every single aspect of the working definition for religion here. Capitalism has its social institutions, actual buildings and physical property, a clergy, a set of sharply defined beliefs, a program of prescribed rituals, a group of adherents; it has myths, rituals, doctrines, ethics, social forms and organizations, experiences, I am not, of course, the first person to make this connection. See Walter Benjamin, ‘Capitalism as Religion,’ in Selected Writings, Volume 1, 1913–1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996), 288–91. This fragment was written in 1921. More recently, see David R. Loy, ‘The Religion of the Market,’ Journal of the American Academy of Religion 65 (1997): 275–90. 8
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and material or aesthetic elements. It also, I would argue, sustains itself on “publicly professing dedication to lofty and perhaps transcendent ideals”—the creation of surplus value, the promise of salvation from discomfort and unhappiness through the repeated rituals of consumption, and the dream of a worldview that might well bind all people throughout the world together. (Notice how every utterance from the lips of Alan Greenspan is received as a Delphic pronouncement. Picture high priest Bill Gates leading us all in the chant: one world, one operating system.) Late capitalism even has managed to retrieve ancient religious practices for a postmodern age in its penchant for ritual human sacrifice, offering up hapless victims to appease the strange appetites of the angry and capricious god called ‘The Global Market.’ My point here is not that Smart’s schema should simply be abandoned because I can fairly easily map it onto parts of social life that do not fall within the self-evident category of ‘religion’—things like capitalism or, say, American football culture.9 My point is to call attention to precisely those sorts of border-blurring, anxiety-inducing examples—those examples that Smart (and perhaps Strenski) would call ‘religion-like’ rather than ‘religion’ proper—and ask why the object of the study of religion should not be construed broadly enough to include these objects as well.10 Curiosity and the Study of Religion Curiosity—looking over other people’s affairs and overlooking our own.11
In addition to focusing on problems of religion, Strenski also frames his methodological and theoretical proposals in terms of the category of curiosity. Specifically, he situates his own project in contrast to those 9 See James McBride, War, Battering, and Other Sports: The Gulf between American Men and Women (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1995), esp. ch. 3, ‘From Battle Front to Home Front: Football Metaphors and America’s “Superbowl,”’ 77–106. 10 The other side of this argument, of course, is to take more seriously than does Strenski the arguments of a scholar like Timothy Fitzgerald who argues for the critical interrogation of the very category, ‘religion,’ itself. See Timothy Fitzgerald, The Ideology of Religious Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). This book was recently reviewed by Benson Saler, Gustavo Benavides, and Frank Korom, with a response by Timothy Fitzgerald in Religious Studies Review 27:2 (April 2001): 103–15. Coming at this problematic from a slightly different vantage point is Jonathan Z. Smith, ‘Religion, Religions, Religious,’ cited above at n. 1. 11 Horace Smith, The Tin Trumpet, or Heads and Tales, for the Wise and Waggish: to which are added, Poetical Selections (London: Whittaker & Co., 1836), 113.
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projects that have “broadly theological or ideological interests,” asserting that he is “not trying to promote religious studies for the purpose of creating or destroying, fostering or fighting, or for that matter, applauding or criticizing religion.” In setting aside such concerns, Strenski explains that, “[t]hese things simply are not interesting to those with the insatiable curiosities about understanding and explaining the world about them.”12 There are those, he acknowledges, whose research is guided by belief, interests, theory, ideology, or theology. But then there are those who “are just puzzled, confounded, or curious, and really do not know or care why.” In this apportioning of the scholarly world, there are “ulteriorly motivated types” and then there are “purer souls consumed with desire to poke about in the attempt to make sense of the world around them.”13 This latter group acts out of “innocent curiosity” (emphasis his), also known as “scientific curiosity.” It is to this category of ‘innocent curiosity’ that I wish to turn my attention. Strenski illustrates the distinction between those with ulterior motives and those with pure souls with two constrasting examples: on the one hand, Captain Cook (who “clearly set out on his voyages . . . with a surfeit of economic, political, and career interests”) and, on the other, Sydney Parkinson or John Webber (whose work as illustrators and documentarians on Cook’s voyages displays nothing “but an absorption in their subject matter approaching a kind of dazzled curiosity or stunned wonder at the otherness before them”). Like Strenski, I am admittedly no expert on any of these historical figures. But my own curiosity was piqued by his invoking them to illustrate this theoretical contrast, and I found myself caught up in the fascinating legacy left by Parkinson. So, a brief detour through his story. Sydney Parkinson was a young artist who traveled with Captain Cook on the ship, Endeavour, on a round-the-world journey from 1768 through 1771. He died of dysentery during the final months of the journey at the age of 26.14 He is remembered by different Strenski, ‘The Proper Object of the Study of Religion,’ 154. Ibid., 155–56. 14 Parkinson’s death constitutes his sole mention in the journal of the journey kept by Captain Cook: “Sunday, 27th [of January 1771].—Little wind, and sometimes calm. In the evening found the Variation to be 2° 51? W. Departed this life Mr. Sydney Parkinson, Natural History Painter to Mr. Banks, and soon after John Ravenhill, Sailmaker, a man much advanced in years. Wind Variable; course S. 30° W.; distance 19m.; lat. 10° 12? S.; long. 256° 41? W.” James Cook, Captain 12 13
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groups of people in different ways: he was the first European artist in Tahiti, the first Quaker in Australia (then New Holland), and a great collector of indigenous curiosities which were later to be determined to be of considerable value and which generated some controversy upon the return of the Endeavour to England. His journal from the voyage was originally published in London in 1773, and the reprint edition that appeared in 1784 was accompanied by multiple prefaces written by various parties interested in the authorizing character of the story and the monetary value and proper disposition of his collection of curiosities.15 Parkinson’s story is interesting in its own right, but for the purposes of this discussion, I am primarily concerned with his work as a purported manifestation of ‘innocent curiosity.’ It is striking that one of the prefaces (attributed to Stanfield Parkinson, Sydney’s illiterate brother) to the second edition of Parkinson’s Journal ascribes both ‘innocent’ and ‘insatiable’ curiosity to the dead artist. His “insatiable curiosity,” the text suggests, was so profound that it overrode all other reasonable considerations and, indeed, led to Sydney’s death.16 Whereas others on the voyage, “for want of a more innocent curiosity . . . were indulging themselves in those sensual gratifications which are so easily obtained among the female part of uncivilized nations,” Sydney exercised “no other passion than that of a laudable curiosity.” While his fellows were ensnared by “vicious appetites,” Sydney was “protected by his own innocence, securely exercising his pleasing art amidst a savage, ignorant, and hostile people. . . .”17 In other words, according to the writer of this preface, Sydney’s inno-
Cook’s Journal during his First Voyage Round the World made in H.M. Bark “Endeavour” 1768–71, ed. Captain W. J. L. Wharton (London: Elliot Stock, 1893; repr. ed., Australiana Facsimilie Editions 188; Adelaide: Libraries Board of South Australia, 1968), 368. 15 Sydney Parkinson, A Journal of a Voyage to the South Seas, 2d ed. (London: Charles Dilly, 1784; repr. ed., London: Caliban Books, 1984). The controversy concerning Parkinson’s journal can be traced through the prefaces to this second edition, reproduced in the reprint edition at pp. v–xxiii, 1–22. (Note that there are two sets of pages numbered ‘1–22’ in this edition, the first set marking the pages of the ‘Explanatory Remarks on the Preface to Sydney Parkinson’s Journal of a Voyage to the South-Seas’ written by John Fothergill, along with a postscript. The second set of pages numbered 1–22 appear as the first pages of the journal itself. I am citing Fothergill’s explanatory remarks and postscript here.) See also D. J. Carr, ed., Sydney Parkinson: Artist of Cook’s Endeavour Voyage (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press [in association with the British Museum (Natural History)], 1983). 16 ‘Preface by the Editor,’ in Parkinson, A Voyage, 2d ed., vi. 17 Ibid., vii.
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cent curiosity actually allowed him to avoid all (whether salutary or salacious) forms of encounter or engagement with the people into whose world he sailed. He continued to exercise ‘his pleasing art,’ unimpeded by either the lures or the hostilities of the otherness he recorded in his journal and his drawings. More importantly for our purposes, both the method and the meaning of ‘his pleasing art’ endured, unchallenged and unchanged in the face of his contact with the native other. The indigenous folk remain the objects of his art; he remains the subject of his own narrative and artistic expression. His subjectivity remains uninterrogated; theirs never comes into view. Meanwhile, Parkinson himself, interestingly enough, describes his own curiosity and that of his fellows as grounded in an explicitly religious sensibility. In the opening pages of his journal, the young Parkinson marvels at the wondrous diversity of “the works of the Deity” and reflects upon the insignificance of the earth itself, “but a dark speck in the creation.” This recognition of his world’s lack of significance gives birth to a curiosity that is, as it turns out, an explicitly religious quest, one related to biblical history: A curiosity, perhaps, equal to Solomon’s, though accompanied with less wisdom than was possessed by the Royal Philosopher, induced some of us to quit our native land, to investigate the heavenly bodies minutely in distant regions, as well as to trace the signatures of the Supreme Power and Intelligence throughout the several species of animals, and different genera of plants in the vegetable system, “from the cedar that is in Lebanon, even unto the hyssop that springeth out of the wall:” and the more we investigate, the more we ought to admire the power, wisdom, and goodness, of the Great Superintendant of the universe; which attributes are amply displayed throughout all his works; the smallest object, seen through the microscope, declares its origin to be divine, as well as those larger ones which the unassisted eye is capable of contemplating. . . .18
Parkinson’s curiosity derives, in other words, from his theological conviction that the rich diversity he encounters testifies to the divine origins of all he sees. Beyond its religious orientation, the prose of Parkinson’s journal is recognizably part of the genre of travel writing that emerged with Europe’s encounter with the rest of the world from the Renaissance 18 Parkinson, A Voyage, 2d ed., 10–11 (see n. 12 above for an explanation of the double pagination in this volume; this citation and any subsequent ones refer to Parkinson’s own journal, not to the prefatory material).
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on. The journal includes a record of events and encounters on shipboard and with indigenous people in Tahiti, New Zealand, New Holland (Australia), and other islands. There are plates with engravings made from Parkinson’s drawings, including the first representations of Maori and other forms of indigenous tattooing. The journal also provides long lists and descriptions of flora with both native and Latin names. In addition, it incorporates descriptions of certain ceremonies and rites, some characterized as “very odd,” along with a few detailed verbal and drawn portraits of ceremonial spaces and ritual personnel.19 Meanwhile, Parkinson’s journal, like those of other European travel writers, provides a complex portrait of the traveler’s method of critical comparison. One mode of comparison involved a process of mythological renaming. The men aboard Captain Cook’s ship routinely, it appears, learned the names of indigenous leaders and then immediately renamed them out of a repertoire of European mythological names. From Parkinson, one learns that the Europeans called the Tahitian chief Tubora Tumaida by the name ‘Lycurgus’ while renaming the Tahitian king Tootahau, ‘Hercules.’20 This comparative gesture is simultaneously complimentary (a chief named for the famed Spartan lawgiver, a king named for a hero) and unsettling (why are their own names and stories inadequate or insufficient?). It becomes another example of how indigenous otherness comes to be a problem requiring resolution—here, through domesticating naming. Parkinson’s comparative method extends into lengthier reflections on the relative merits of civilized and uncivilized life, as when he 19 Parkinson, A Voyage, 21 (“On the 27th, we saw a very odd ceremony performed”); 27 (“On the 13th, as Mr. Banks sat in the boat, trading with them as usual, we saw a very odd ceremony performed”); 67 (on a religious practitioner’s prayer for favorable winds, concluding with, “he told us that we should have wind when the sun arrived at the meridian, and so it happened, though we did not impute to him the gift of prophecy or foresight”); etc. See also Cook, Captain Cook’s Journal, 101–2, for a brief discussion of Tahitian religion. It is worth noting Captain Cook’s rhetorical reticence to write about such matters, which his commitment to the dissemination of ‘every and the least knowledge’ ultimately overrides. “Having given the best account I can of the manners and Customs of these people [the Tahitians], it will be expected that I should give some account of their religion, which is a thing I have learned so little of that I hardly dare to touch upon it, and should have passed it over in silence, was it not my duty as well as inclination to insert in this Journal every and the least knowledge I may obtain of a people, who for many Centuries have been shut up from almost every other part of the world” (101). 20 Parkinson, A Voyage, 17, 21.
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observes that civilized Europeans have lost their ancestors’ robustness for having given in to luxury and lassitude.21 Later, he speculates on the contingency of various forms of ethics: “. . . what is a sin in Europe,” he writes, “is only a simple innocent gratification in America; which is to suppose that the obligation to chastity is local, restricted only to particular parts of the globe.”22 In Parkinson’s comparative judgments, the ‘uncivilized’ often tend to emerge as the winners in a contest over the superiority of their ethical and emotional forms of social life. But the issue is less how one fares in the comparison than the power dynamics embedded in the very practice of comparison.23 One can see these dynamics emerge dramatically in the attempts by Parkinson (and others) to systematize local languages. Striking for their inclusion in Parkinson’s journal are lists of indigenous words and phrases along with their English translations. Here, one encounters, for example, the Malay way to ask, “Have you got any silk stockings?”24 More interesting, however, are the indigenous terms of “the people of New Holland” that do not have direct English translations but rather lengthier explanations as to context. For example: “Yarea & charo: words uttered in a tone of pleasing surprize, on seeing the whiteness of some of our people’s skin who had taken off their cloaths, in order to bathe,” or “Yecalca: Expressed on seeing their spears that we had taken,” or “Yerchee: Expressed on feeling the effects of a burning glass.”25 For all the aesthetically pleasing drawings that Parkinson left as testimony to his innocent curiosity, there are also untold stories here. There are the stories of the events that actually produced the indigenous utterances, ‘Yarea,’ ‘Charo,’ ‘Yecalca,’ and ‘Yerchee.’ And there is at least one larger, more encompassing story waiting to be told—a metanarrative written in an idiom expressed on feeling the effects of being the object of another’s curiosity. What I am suggesting here, beyond a proposition of the need for a postcolonial story to supplement (and ultimately displace) the colonial Parkinson, A Voyage, 23. Ibid., 25–26. 23 For the field of comparative religion, these power dynamics are grounded in the imperial encounter itself. For a trenchant analysis of this history, see David Chidester, Savage Systems: Colonialism and Comparative Religion in Southern Africa (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1996). 24 Parkinson, ‘A Vocabulary of the Malayan Language, as spoke at Batavia, usually called there the Low Malay,’ in A Voyage, 184–94, quotation at 194. 25 Parkinson, ‘A Vocabulary of the Language of the People of New Holland,’ in A Voyage, 148–52, at 152. 21
22
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story, is that there are other options beyond the stark binarism of (guilty) ulterior motives or (innocent) purity of intent. Among these options, I want to consider one in which innocent curiosity gives way to intentional interestedness. Such an interestedness recognizes that those of us who study religion bring histories and subjectivities to our work. It rejects the view that there are objective or neutral positions for scholars to occupy, pristine outposts safely above the fray of the worlds we seek to interrogate and understand. It takes seriously the ethical demand that any engagement with other human beings (historical or contemporary) makes upon us. It requires that we not only ask questions, but that we engage in sustained conversation. I believe that such intentional interestedness offers a provocative model for the future of the study of religion. Two projects currently taking place in my corner of the world are useful examples. Both provide especially salutary models for thinking about what the future of the study of religion might look like. One is the ‘African Americans and the Bible’ project, under the leadership of Vincent Wimbush at Union Theological Seminary across the street from where I teach.26 The other is ‘The Newark Project,’ under the direction of Karen McCarthy Brown at Drew University, a massive fieldwork, participant-observation project in which scholars and students are mapping the religious landscape of Newark, New Jersey.27 Although these two projects have their own orientations and styles of operation, they nevertheless share certain features that lend themselves very well toward a model for the future of the study of religion. One of the most important features of both projects is that they are radically collaborative in their structure. Many people from a range of different academic disciplines are present at the table. Moreover, practitioners join scholars at the table, and both bring their different kinds of knowledge to the conversations and to the framing of the problems they address. The research teams are racially mixed and culturally diverse. The object of study in each case is broadly construed and remains always only provisionally defined—open perennially to reconfiguration as more sites, performances, and communities come into view. 26 Vincent L. Wimbush, ed., with assistance from Rosamond C. Rodman, African Americans and the Bible: Sacred Texts and Social Textures (New York: Continuum, 2000). 27 See the Project’s website at: www.depts.drew.edu/newarkproject/ especially the ‘Archives’ section with its ‘Reports,’ ‘Slides,’ and other emerging documentation of the religious life of Newark.
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Both projects unsettle conventional disciplinary practices within the subfields of academic religious studies. Wimbush’s project on ‘African Americans and the Bible’ provides a fundamental challenge to the historicist philology of traditional biblical studies, a field still in thrall to European Enlightenment—indeed, scientific—models of textual study. Instead of following liberal Protestantism’s lead in insisting that the Bible must be the starting point and proper object for anything that calls itself biblical studies, this project turns its attention instead to the social and cultural contexts in which the biblical text interacts with historical and contemporary religious life. Meanwhile, Brown’s project reorients the social-scientific study of religion away from an empirically based research model and away from the traditionally formulated study of religious institutions. Instead, the project is characterized by a pattern of study that invites (perhaps even requires) researchers to engage in a critical sympathy with the communities whose lives are being documented. The result is that ‘religion’ turns up in unlikely places, in the fissures of fragmented communities and lives, in storefronts, homemade living-room shrines, basement meeting halls, and public processions. ‘Religion’ is embodied in the Yoruba priest in Sheldon, South Carolina, who will be featured in the ethnographic film produced by the ‘African Americans and the Bible’ project. This man received inspiration from the biblical character Moses and found in that inspiration the motivation to move from 1960s New York to the rural south to found Oyotunju Village and to recreate the traditions of his ancestors.28 ‘Religion’ is found in the devotional festivals in Newark studied by ‘Newark Project’ member Peter Savastano, festivals where San Gerardo of Maiela, an eighteenth-century Italian saint, has been conflated with—one might even say possessed by— Gèdè, the Haitian spirit.29 In these festivals, supplicants bathe the saint’s statue in milk or cream and clothe it in garments stitched together out of dollar bills. For the heterosexual, he is a patron saint 28 Union Theological Seminary Ph.D. student in Bible and Culture, Velma Love, is currently working on an oral history of Oyotunju Village and is centrally involved in the broader documentary project. 29 Work presented at ‘Whose Millennium? Religion, Sexuality, and the Values of Citizenship,’ the annual conference of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies, CUNY Graduate Center, New York City, 13–14 April 2000. See also the conference reports: Nancy Levene, ‘Who is Sleeping in the Bed of Sodom?’ and Elizabeth A. Castelli, ‘Border Troublings,’ CLAGS News 10:2 (Summer 2000): 6–8.
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of fertility. For gay men and lesbians, he is the patron saint who will help you find a boyfriend or girlfriend. For victims of childhood beatings, he is a protector saint and a healer. And in response to the essays (in this volume) by Friedrich Wilhelm Graf and Peter Berger,30 I do want to notice that if we explore these two examples in all their richness, we will see that they embody modes of religious life that resist facile reduction to just so many identity politics. And they resist easy dismissal as merely a self-deluding embrace of narratives of victimization. Making these two projects and the examples I have drawn from them my models for a possible future of the study of religion complicates the discussion here. I have come at the question of ‘the proper object of the study of religion’ from the other side, starting with complexly embedded religious worlds as they present themselves and moving through them, critically and consciously, toward theoretical insights and topographical propositions. What this approach allows for is a broader definition of the field framed as ‘the proper object of the study of religion.’ From my point of view, this field should be construed broadly enough to assure that everyone involved in these two projects is a full participant in whatever conversations we are planning on having. From my point of view, the most interesting and curiosity-satisfying future for the study of religion will be found not in the formulation of a set of questions, as important as such work is. The most engaging future resides in a broad, inclusive, risk-taking, and border-blurring conversation—conversation in all of its dialogical messiness, conversation inflected by a willingness to place the self at risk. For in the end, constructing the best bulwark against the threat of becoming one of the ‘prophets of the lecture hall’ decried by Berger31 may require that we transform our very mode of communication—from one of lecturing to one of listening.
30 31
See pp. 23–46 of this volume. See p. 46 of this volume.
DIVERSITY AND THE STUDY OF MYSTICISM Steven T. Katz I would like to contribute to the larger agenda of this conference by setting out a specific agenda for one significant segment of the study of religion in its totality, that is, for the study of mysticism in all its forms. To begin, let me state the elementary principle of my own work on comparative mysticism(s) that I have been engaged in for the past thirty years. It is the single epistemological assumption that there are no pure (i.e., unmediated) experiences. Neither mystical experience nor more ordinary forms of experience give any indication, or any grounds for believing, that they are unmediated. That is to say, all experience is processed through, organized by, and makes itself available to us in extremely complex epistemological ways. The notion of unmediated experience appears, if not self-contradictory, at best empty. This epistemological fact seems to me to be true because of the sorts of beings we are, even with regard to the experiences of those ultimate objects of concern with which mystics have intercourse, e.g., God, Being, nirvana, etc. This ‘mediated’ aspect of all our experience seems an inescapable feature of any epistemological inquiry, including the inquiry into mysticism, and has to be properly acknowledged if our investigation of experience, including mystical experience, is to get very far. Now, given the genesis and character of my hermeneutic there are at least six interconnected and interdependent areas of study that need to be explored in new ways in order to gain an adequate and rich, a full and correct, understanding of mystical experience. The rest of this essay will concern itself with these subjects. However, before going further, I would argue that even those scholars who do not agree with me about the character of mystical experience need to consider the issues I am about to discuss in deeper and more penetrating ways than has been the case until now.
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I. Form Criticism
The first subject that we, collectively, must turn our attention to is what I would call a new ‘form-critical’ method for handling the mystical texts. I would like to make four points relevant to this subject. First, the main legacy we have of the great mystics is their writings and related linguistic creations. We have no access to their special experience independently of these texts. What we call the great historical mystical traditions of the world are in fact a series of documents of differing sorts. No one has any privileged access here to the original mystics’ experience outside its textual incorporation. And it is these documents that are the data for all analytic decipherment and scholarly reconstructions. Second, these literary remains, in their variegated forms, necessarily and inescapably include ‘interpretive’ structures. Neither mystics nor we, their readers, can overcome this fact. What we have are the already encoded experiences now reported—this and this alone is what is available for study. Whatever the epistemological complexities that intrude on, that constitute, the act of mystical knowing or awareness—that is, whatever the interpenetration of prior “conditioning,” inherited and willed intentionality, and the experience had—what we have in the mystical source per se is the entangled and nonreductive product of this extraordinary epistemic process. Third, it must be recognized that mystical literature is composed from differing perspectives and in different ways: (a) first-person reports; (b) the mystic’s own interpretation of his or her experience; and (c) the ‘interpretation’ of such reported experience by members of one’s own religious community or again by members of other religious traditions. All these situations can be more or less highly ramified. Fourth, mystical literature comes in many forms, and the modality chosen as the means of communication in any instance is not incidental or tangential to its content. These diverse forms include biography, biblical exegesis, aphorisms, theoretical and theosophical treatises, poems, prayers, polemics, dogmatics, and didactic compositions. All these genres enrich and complicate the decoding of mystical reports. The significance of the complexity of the literary corpus that composes the world’s mystical traditions needs to be understood.
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II. Ontologies The ontology of each mystical tradition and the influence it exerts on the mystical experience experienced by the various mystics needs to be examined with special care. This is especially true in scholarly contexts that seek to compare mystical experiences. For example, the ontology of Judaism argues that human beings have a soul and that there is a ‘personal’ God to whom one ‘clings’ (devekuth) in mystical ecstasy. Moreover, the Jewish mystic performs the mitzvot as a necessity on the mystic’s way because he conceives of himself, the world (or cosmos), and God in a very special light. Foremost, perhaps, among the elements of his self-consciousness is his conception of God as the sort of Being who is in some sense personal and, even more, who is ethically and evaluatively personal, i.e., a God who is affected by good deeds and acts of obedience, and the relation to Whom is affected by the proper performance of prescribed actions. Thus, the Jewish mystic’s experience is a preconditioned experience of a (moralpersonal) God. We see this pre-experiential configurative element, for example, in the details of the central Kabbalistic doctrine of the relation of human action and the Sefiroth (Divine Emanations which comprise the highest levels of the upper worlds) in which every Sefirah is related to a human ethical counterpart, so that the perfect performance of ethical behavior becomes, above all, the way towards relation with these Divine Emanations. More generally, the level of one’s experience with the different rungs of the Sefiroth (of which there are ten) is dependent on one’s ethical and ritual behavior (mitzvot), and especially on prayer done with the right commitment and concentration (known as kavvanah). The Jewish mystics believe that such mystical prayer leads the soul on its upward ascent because mystical prayer leads to a recognition of, and contact with, the true meaning of God’s ‘Names’ which are the real ontological structure of the upper worlds. That this complex, pre-experiential pattern affects the actual experience of the Jewish mystic is an unavoidable conclusion. Alternatively, the ontology of Buddhism teaches the ‘Four Noble Truths’ that center around the issues of suffering and its overcoming, and the ‘EightFold Path’ which are the prescribed means of this overcoming, and all of this is related to, based upon, the Buddha’s doctrine taught in the ‘Discourse on the Marks of Not-Self,’ that there is ‘no-self,’
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i.e., that there is no simple, pure substance which is permanent and which has its own independent substantial existence analogous to the soul in western traditions or to atman in Hinduism. And then there is the allied doctrine of ‘dependent origination.’ And all this brings us directly to nirvana, the goal of the entire Buddhist enterprise in all its elaborate detail. While it is a subject of fiercely debated divergent opinion among Buddhologists, for our purposes it seems fair to say that nirvana: (1) is the recognition that belief in the phenomenal ‘self ’ of mundane existence is an illusion; (2) is most especially characterized by the extinction of ‘suffering’ which is the predominant feature of ordinary reality; (3) is not a conditional or conditioned reality; (4) is in some positive way the attainment of unique wisdom or insight into the impermanence (anitya) of all existing things; (5) is not a Being; (6) is a state of condition, i.e., in the sense of being ‘Nirvanaized’; and (7) is not a relational state of being. From this complex structure, let us concentrate especially on two cardinal features of the Buddhist account. First, the basis of the entire system is the awareness of suffering in the world and the goal of the system is the extinction of suffering; secondly, the goal, nirvana, is not a relational state in which the finite self encounters a saving or loving transcendental Being—God—but rather is a new ontological (if this term is not inappropriate) state of being (if these terms are not inappropriate). That there is no encounter of any sort results from the fact that there is no real self and no transcendental other self. Again, it should also be noted that in the Buddhist doctrine there is no divine will which plays any role as there is no divinity. Rather, one has in place of the divine will the strict law of ethical causality, Karma, which is at the root of the causal chain of existence, re-existence or reincarnation, and release. Just setting this Buddhist understanding of the nature of things over against the Jewish should, in itself, already be strong evidence for the thesis that what the Buddhist experiences as nirvana is different from what the Jew experiences as devekuth. However, let us draw this out more clearly. To begin, when the Jewish mystic performs his special mystical devotions and meditations, kavvanot, he does so in order to purify his soul, i.e., to remove the soul from its entrapment in the material world in order to liberate it for its upward spiritual ascent culminating in devekuth, adhesion to God’s emanations, the Sefiroth. The Buddhist mystic, on the other hand, performs his meditative practices as an integral part of the Buddhist mystical quest,
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not in order to free the soul from the body and purify it but rather in order to annihilate suffering by overcoming any notion of ‘self,’ holding that the very notion of a substantial ‘self ’ or ‘soul’ is the essential illusion which generates the entire process of suffering. Buddhist literature specifically represents the Buddha as criticizing the belief in a permanent or substantial self (the Hindu doctrine of atman) as a false, even pernicious, doctrine which, paradoxically, in so far as it encourages egoism in one’s pursuit of one’s own eternal happiness, makes the fulfillment of one’s happiness an impossibility. In addition to its insistence on the extinction of suffering through the elimination of the ‘self,’ nirvana is also not a relational state, i.e., it is not the meeting of two distinct selves or realities who come together in loving embrace. Nirvana is the absence of all relation, all personality, all love, all feeling, all individuality, all identity. Nirvana is the achievement (if we can use this term, but we have no better one) of calm, of peace, of tranquility. While it is the banishment of care or anxiety, of concern or striving, it is not the creation of a new condition of meeting. Nirvana is no ‘something,’ nor does it contain or permit the continued existence of either individual beings or one grand Being. Its ontology cannot even be easily classed as theistic, monistic, or naturalistic. In the world of religious ideas it comes the closest to reminding one of Wittgenstein’s remark made in another connection about ‘not being a something nor a nothing either.’ Moreover, and this cannot be emphasized too strongly, it is this theoretical structure of the impermanence of all existence, the resultant suffering of all beings, and the doctrines of no-self, meditation, etc., upon which the whole of Buddhist life and its goal, nirvana, is built. The Buddhist understanding of reality generates the entire elaborate regiment of Buddhist practice, and it is this understanding of reality which defines in advance what the Buddhist mystic is seeking and what we can tell, from the evidence, he finds. To think that his pre-conditioned consciousness of how things are and how to find release from suffering in nirvana is extraneous to the actual Buddhist mystical experience is bizarre. Whatever nirvana is, and indeed whatever devekuth is, in so far as words mean anything and philosophical inquiry has any significance, there is no way one can describe, let alone equate, the experience of nirvana and devekuth on the basis of the evidence. There is no intelligible way that anyone can legitimately argue that a ‘no-self ’ experience of ‘empty’ calm is the same experience as the experience of intense, loving, intimate relationship between two substantial selves,
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one of whom is conceived of as the personal God of western religion and all that this entails. The losing of self is not equivalent to the finding of another, especially when this other is conceived of as the God of Jewish tradition. To emphasize one key issue: one is especially struck in Jewish mysticism by the imagery of love, even including very pronounced sexual imagery, which is used to express all sorts of ‘relations’ relevant to the kabbalistic mind. This aspect is totally absent from early Indian Buddhism which equates sexuality with desire and sees desire as the basic element which causes suffering and which is to be overcome in nirvana. Now, this is not to ‘evaluate’ either the truth-claims of the sought and reported experiences in Judaism and Buddhism, etc., or to presume to rank them in terms of better or worse as Otto and Zaehner, for example, quite arbitrarily do, or again, as D. T. Suzuki does, but now reversing the dogmatism and opting for the superiority of Zen Buddhism. What I wish to show is only that there is a clear causal connection between the religious and social structure one brings to experience and the nature of one’s actual religious experience. Again, the ontology of Hinduism holds that there is a soul (atman) in man that is the same as the ‘World Soul,’ though for the most part this ‘World Soul’ is interpreted in impersonal terms. In other words, each mystical theory and hence each mystical experience grows out of, and is part of, a larger ontological understanding. No one has yet studied the detailed implications of this relationship in any sustained way. I would like to recommend this project to all of you because I believe that the underlying ontological commitments of religious and mystical communities go a long way towards defining the sort of mystical experiences the mystics of those communities have. III. The Theological and Social Contexts of Mystical Experience A pressing need exists to analyze the theological and social contexts of our mystical data. Here I would call attention first, to the role of the respective mystical ‘model’ in each mystical fellowship. By ‘model’ here I do not mean a theoretical construct as in the physical sciences but rather the nature of ‘individuals’ who become norms for their tradition in a variety of ways. Such individuals become Ideals; their individuality becomes categorical; their biographies didactic. The normative individual is the medium of a universal teach-
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ing; the instrument for the revelation of more general truths. Every religious community, and every mystical movement within each community, has a ‘model’ or ‘models’ of the ideal practitioner of the religious life. These paradigmatic figures can be either human or divine and either male or female, with examples of each of these types to be found in the sources. The alternating theologies with their variant religious anthropologies reveal that the model plays many roles and has many functions. Rather than try to analyze all of these many and different functions here let me just point to one example that lies at the very heart of the Christian mystical tradition—the model of Christ. That is to say, in Christian mysticism the imitation of Christ is the dominant model and this in two main senses. The first of these is predicated on the image of Christ as the ‘Beloved’ of the ‘Lover’ after the imagery of the Song of Songs, then reworked in various New Testament passages, discussed above. The second pattern established by the christological model is of the suffering Christ which leads to extreme forms of Christian mystical asceticism and mortification. Examples of the replication of these christological models abound in Christian mystical texts, for example, Julian of Norwich. Through a revelation of Christ and the Trinity she is led to realize that, “It is gods wyll that I see my selfe as much bound to hym in love as if he had done for me all pathe hath done; and thus every soule thynke in regard to his lover.”1 The structural elements of Julian’s revelation are in accord with our explanatory thesis. Clearly she labored to see Christ and especially to carry his suffering, his passion. With her desire to experience Christ’s suffering fulfilled in a most visual way, she is content in the knowledge that the participation in this suffering leads to love of a most intimate kind. In this she is not unusual but typical, with her ‘visions’ drawing upon the residue of her cultural inheritance, e.g., the works of Suso; the Priority of the Passion; pseudo-Bonaventure’s Meditationes vitae Christi; while in her yearning to share in Christ’s passion she recapitulates the spirituality of the Franciscans and aspects of Bonaventure. Similar images and descriptions predicated on this christological typology abound in Christian mystical writings. One finds them in 1 Julian of Norwich, A Book of Showings to the Anchoress Julian of Norwich, ed. Edmund Colledge and James Walsh (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1978), chap. 65, revelation 15.
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abundance in Richard Rolle, who was especially known for his meditations on Christ’s passion; in Margaret Kempe; in Richard of St. Victor; in Teresa of Avila; in pseudo-Dionysius, one of the fountainheads of the Christian mystical tradition’s emphasis on love; in Francis of Assisi who perhaps of all medieval Catholic mystics most emphasized the dialectic of yearning after a share in Christ’s suffering and the love of Christ; Meister Eckhart and his disciples, John Tauler and Henry Suso, the latter being one of the more excessive advocates of mortification on record. It is powerfully presented, too, in mystics of such differing times and places as Ruysbroeck, Boehme, and Fox. That is to say, it is a formative, indeed dominant, conceptualstructural dynamic in virtually the entire range of Christian spirituality. And, for our concerns, in addition to its intrinsic interest, it is to be noted as a powerfully conservative factor. That is, it shapes Christian mystical experience according to a very specific pattern: that of the Jesus of the Gospels and Pauline Epistles. Notwithstanding its variety of presentation, this historic ‘backward looking’ model plays a powerful role in setting the ideal behavior after which the Christian initiate is to seek and limiting the forms Christian mysticism is to take. Secondly, I would call attention to the fact that in almost all mystical traditions we find the importance of a teacher or guru who leads the novice along ‘the way.’ In the Jewish tradition there is a strong aversion to auto-didacticism both in traditional rabbinic and even more in mystical matters. Indeed, in the Jewish tradition, until the historic calamity of the expulsion from Spain in 1492 called for a radical new approach to mysticism, mystical wisdom was always held very close by its devotees and was only taught in small circles to a select few. The constant fear was expressed that this knowledge, if obtained by the unlettered without the guidance of a teacher, could lead to antinomianism and heresy, as indeed happened in the seventeenthcentury pseudo-messianic movement known as Sabbatianism and the eighteenth-century pseudo-messianic movement known as Frankism. In the Buddhist tradition, one also finds the same emphasis on being guided along the path towards nirvana by a qualified teacher. Only a Buddha reaches self-enlightenment, all others must be helped towards this end. No less an authority than the late Richard Robinson has argued: “Every form of Buddhism has held that guides are necessary.”2 Here too, one sees not only the importance of a qualified 2 Richard Robinson, The Buddhist Religion: A Historical Introduction (Belmont, CA: Dickenson Publishing Company, 1970), 33.
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teacher or bhiksu, but also how this insistence on proper instruction grew into the widespread institution of Buddhist monasticism, with all its strict discipline and ideological commitments. And these emphases, of course, are not unique to Buddhism, the institution of the guru-like master being found in all eastern traditions, as for example, Hinduism, especially in its Tantric variety, and Zen. The Zen tradition is highly instructive here, for though it made spontaneity the great virtue in achieving satori, this spontaneity was achieved through the mediating role which the Zen master played in the ‘enlightenment’ of his disciples. Not only were the Zen masters considered the paradigms of Zen practice to be emulated by their disciples, but they even became the objects of Zen meditation for their disciples. Even more importantly, it is the Zen master, through the seemingly meaningless koans which he sets his students to meditate upon, as well as in the purposeful physical and mental abuse he subjects his students to, who destroys the illusions in which the disciple is imprisoned and which prevent him from reaching satori. The master induces in the disciple the condition of ‘Zen sickness,’ which allows the disciple to break the bonds of conditional experience and to encounter reality as it really is, in its ‘suchness.’ Again, this aspect of the mystical situation is highly focused in the history of Sufism which developed a widespread, highly refined, tradition of Sufi-schools which aided the believer salak at-tariq (travelling the Path). The essence of these mystical Orders, often centered in special Sufi monasteries known as khanaqahs, was the formal relation of master and disciple, of murshid and murid, based upon the ideology that, though each man potentially, latently, possessed the ability to merge with Allah in ecstatic union ( fana), this potency could be actualized only with the assistance of a qualified master (except in the case of a small spiritual elite or elect known as khawass or Sufiyya on whom Allah has bestowed special favor). The disciple followed the tariqa (‘the way’) which was a practical method for moving upward through a succession of stages (maqamat) culminating in the experience of fana—unity in Allah. The tariqa consisted of set prayers, supererogatory exercises, other varied liturgical and penitential acts, fasts, retreats, vigils, and the like. This highly structured procedure prepared the disciple for his experience, i.e., it prepared him in the sense of putting him in the specifically Sufi frame of consciousness both ideologically and existentially, for his ecstatic experience, the form of which was also anticipated in advance. Likewise, the overwhelming preponderance of Christian mystics is found in
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monasteries and holy orders with their lives centered around chastity, ‘good works,’ and an extremely rigorous regimen of prayer. Fritz Staal has also reminded us that the Mexican Indian teacher, Don Juan, is essential for Castaneda’s remarkable experiences, whatever one thinks of Castaneda’s experiences. In all these instances one must ask, “what does the guru teach?” The answer is that he teaches a specific way and a specific goal; his students follow him along the former because they want to reach the latter. Thus, to take one example, the Buddhist ‘seeker’ comes to his master (and the Sangha) and follows his prescribed meditations and yoga practices to reach that state in which suffering is annihilated and the erroneous notion of self, known as the doctrine of anatmavada, is completely overcome. Alternatively, the Hindu ‘seeker’ loyally adheres to his guru’s instructions because he desires to affirm the ultimacy of his self and its relation to the universal self, known as atmavada. Again, the Murid is loyal to the rigorous discipline of his Murshid because he seeks to merge his soul with the personal God of Islam; while the Jewish Kabbalist practices his regimen of prayer and asceticism to find devekuth with God’s extended-emanated being manifest in the Sefiroth. The Buddhist guru does not teach what the Hindu guru teaches, though superficial association of the term confuses the unwary. The Murshid does not teach what the Kabbalist teaches, nor again does Teresa of Avila teach St. John of the Cross the same ‘way’ as Don Juan or the Taoist Master. Third, as an issue of importance in its own right—and as an example of how one needs to do comparative study—I would call attention to the widely practiced art of yoga. Yoga is found in all the major oriental religions, yet the goal of yoga, and even the meaning of yoga, differs from particular tradition to particular tradition. Thus, for example, in Upanishadic Hinduism yoga is practiced in order to purify and unify the individual ‘soul’ and then to unite it with Brahman or, as later represented in the Bhagavad Gita, with Krishna. However, even within Hinduism, yoga combines with other metaphysical systems which claim to provide the ‘way’ and define the ‘goal,’ samadhi, differently. The Samkhya tradition, for example, understands the goal to be the perfection of the soul which does not lead to any form of unio mystica but rather to a splendid self-identity which, like God’s perfection, is self-contained and isolated. Alternatively, Buddhism also inherited yoga practices as a central element but now as central to a radically different metaphysical schema which recognizes neither the existence of a personal God—or even of an
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impersonal one—nor the substantiality of individual souls (atman or perusha). Instead, Buddhism views yoga as a technique for overcoming its metaphysical raison d’être, suffering and the corollary liberation from all illusions of substantiality. Yoga is now put at the service of ‘emptiness,’ remembering that emptiness is not a ‘something’ and that one must not reify emptiness into a thing as, for example, Heidegger does with ‘nothing.’ It must also be noted that in Buddhism, as in Hinduism, the proper metaphysics also becomes the subject of debate and schism, creating alternative Buddhist schools with their differing analyses of the nature and purpose of yoga. Without going into further detail let it suffice to note that yoga is also practiced in Jainism and other oriental traditions which take still other views than those found in Hinduism or Buddhism regarding the nature of the soul, ultimate reality, and the purpose of life. This variety of dogmatic doctrinal belief is not to be dismissed as merely marginal or preparatory, nor can one, recognizing the complexity of the circumstances, talk about yoga in the abstract, for yoga in that circumstance will then certainly become just an empty abstraction. Moreover, the significance of the contextual element becomes all the more pressing when one realizes that for Indian systems metaphysics is soteriology. What one believes does affect one’s salvation—and ‘salvation,’ differently understood from tradition to tradition, is the respective goal(s) of each. The experience that the mystic or yoga has is the experience he seeks as a consequence of the shared beliefs he holds through his metaphysical doctrinal commitments. Fourth, I have time here merely to mention the crucial role of ‘elite’ religious communities, e.g. monasteries, sanghas, and the like, in the generating of mystical experiences; the nature and importance of set practices, e.g., the chanting of psalms or ‘mystical prayer’; the meaning and role of established meditative techniques that are aimed at re-conditioning consciousness; and the purpose and results of ascetic behavior, and the like. IV. Cross Cultural Typologies of Mysticism The logic, as well as the possibility, of framing cross-cultural phenomenological typologies of mystical experiences has to be re-thought. Though this has been a central aspect of the academic study of mystical experience since James’s pioneering work, I remain unconvinced by the results so far achieved. It seems to me that the fact is that
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these typologies of supposedly common elements not only always reduce the actual variety of disparate experience to fit a specific theory but they also turn out to be of little help in understanding mystical experience because they are so broad as to be applicable to any one of several mutually exclusive experiences. Consider some of the reasons why this is so, beginning with the meaning or meanings of the terms used by mystics to describe or interpret their experiences. For it is this factor that misleads those like Underhill, Otto, Stace, Bucke, Arberry, and Zaehner, among others, into thinking that all mystics are referring to the same experience or to a small number of similar experiences. For example, Stace, in his argumentation for the existence of a ‘universal core’ common to all mystical experiences compares, among others, Eckhart’s Christian experience, the Jewish Kabbalist’s experience of devekuth, and the Buddhist doctrine of sunyata or the Void. In each case Stace believes that the use of apparently similar language reflects an underlying ‘core’ experience. For example, he holds the ‘fact’ that in each of these mystical reports it is claimed that there is no empirical content in the experience, and that all such mystics seem to describe their experience as being non-spatial, nontemporal, beyond language and ineffable, paradoxical, sublime, and joyful, among other traits, as clear evidence for his views regarding the existence of a ‘common core.’ However, Stace and the others who follow a similar procedure and arrive at similar results are here being misled by the surface grammar of the mystical reports they study. That is to say, what appear to be similar-sounding descriptions are not similar descriptions and do not indicate the same experience. They do not because language is itself contextual and words ‘mean’ only in contexts. The same words—beautiful, sublime, ultimate reality, ineffable, paradoxical, joyful, transcending all empirical content, etc.—can apply and have been applied to more than one object. Their mere presence alone does not guarantee anything; neither the nature of the experience nor the nature of the referent, nor the comparability of various claims is assured by this seemingly common verbal presence alone. Consider the following exercise. A Jew could use all these terms to refer to his experience of devekuth with the moral, personal Absolute Being he calls God. At the same time, the Buddhist could use all these phrases to refer to the absence of all being in nirvana, while the Hindu could use them to refer to his experience of absorption into the Impersonal Absolute Brahman. Again, the
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Taoist could use these terms, as well as Plotinus or the nature mystic, in referring to Nature. We can express this clearly through the following example. Consider the ambiguity of the proposition: X transcends all empirical content, is beyond space and time, is ultimate reality, gives a sense of joy, is holy, can only be expressed in paradoxes and is actually ineffable, where X can be replaced by several, radically different and mutually exclusive candidates, e.g., God, Brahman, nirvana, Nature.
What emerges clearly from this argument is the awareness that choosing descriptions of mystic experience out of their total context does not provide grounds for their comparability but rather severs all grounds of their intelligibility for it empties the chosen phrases, terms, and descriptions of definite meaning. This logical-semantic problem plagues all the attempts which various scholars, from William James on, have made to provide a common phenomenological description of mystical experience. There is much more that needs to be explained and critically examined in regard to cross-cultural typologies but let what has already been said suffice to indicate that the issue needs careful reexamination. V. Some Thoughts on Language, Paradox and Ineffability The logic of ‘ineffability,’ ‘paradox,’ and related terms as used by mystics has to be rethought. This means exploring the way mystics use language and the propriety of such usage. Consider here as an example of the complexity involved in the use of language by mystics the various uses of the terms regularly translated into English as ‘nothingness,’ in the various mystical traditions. When comparisons are made (based on the presence of the term ‘nothingness’) without careful inquiry, insuperable problems emerge, for one has to ask at the outset about the precise use of the term. Is it being used as a subjective description of an experience, or as a putative objective description of an object, or of an objective ontological state of being? This is the difference between using the term in a way analogous to the subjective use of ‘happiness,’ i.e., “I experience happiness,” as compared to the objective (and object) claim “I experience God.” This distinction already indicates that the utterance of the term ‘nothingness’ does not suffice to assure the univocal use of the term. Again,
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this usage encourages one to reflect on the ontological claims that lie beneath and are necessary correlates of language. Even agreeing that in two or more cases the term ‘nothingness’ is being used in the sense of an objective ontological reference, there is still no surety that the term is being used in synonymous ways. One has to ask whether the various experiences of ‘nothingness’ are similar or dissimilar experiences of the same phenomenon, i.e., ‘nothingness,’ or different experiences of different phenomena, i.e., ‘nothingness’ is a term which is used to cover alternative ontic realities. In this latter instance, which seems to fit at least a substantial segment of the data of mystical experience more adequately, the difference between cases is a difference between what is experienced, not just how something is experienced. The appropriateness of this second schema, i.e., that the term is used to cover differing ontic ‘states of affairs,’ recommends itself because to hold that it is a case of how one experiences a common reality one would have to have a sufficiently delimiting list of corresponding and agreed predicates that the experienced object possessed in both (or more) cases which are being compared. This, however, is absent in at least many, if not most, cases. Concrete cases of usage will assist us here. Stace, for example, finds the use of ‘nothingness’ to be a near-universal feature of mystical experience, which he takes to be another valuable support for his universalistic ‘core’ thesis. Thus he compares the use of the term as found in a Hasidic tale with that found elsewhere in eastern and western mystical reports. Unfortunately, Stace’s comparison is facile, being based on an ignorance of the Hasidic-Kabbalistic context, which gives the term its peculiarly Hasidic meaning. The term ‘nothing’ or ‘nothingness’ in this Jewish intellectual environment does not mean, as Stace erroneously believes, a reference to an introvertive experience of mystical unity of the monistic sort which Stace favors. Stace, working from translations rather than the original Hebrew texts, fails to appreciate that the term in this setting is a translation of the term Ayin, which is used in kabbalistic literature as a name of God, relating to his first acts of self-revelation from His self-contained mysteriousness as Eyn Sof (God as He is in Himself ) and yet still prior to his manifestation as the first Sefirah Keter. In the late thirteenth-century work Masoret ha-Berit, the following understanding of the term Ayin is given: “having more being than any other being in the world, but since it is simple, and all other simple things are complex when compared with its simplicity, so in comparison it is
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called ‘nothing’ (Ayin).”3 As Ayin, ‘nothingness,’ God, as the term is meant to indicate, is still beyond any and all human understanding of experience. As Ayin, God is still alone. No human experience ever achieves relation with this dimension of God’s nature. Stace’s comments on this notion, therefore, can be seen to be a case of exegesis which is totally out of context and without any meaning in the original kabbalistic sources and Hasidic mystical report. Alternatively, the term ‘nothingness’ is also prominent in Buddhist texts. Mu, the Chinese and Japanese Buddhist term for ‘nothingness’ and ‘non-being,’ for example, is not a referent to God as he is in himself or in his first stages of self-revelation but rather refers to the absolute ontological condition of emptiness or sunyata which transcends all being, all predication, all substantiality. And here, of course, the understanding of sunyata becomes the subject of fierce debate between competing schools of Buddhism, being especially important to the Mahayanists. Again, it is often, but in my view erroneously, argued that the Christian mystical tradition of Dionysius the Areopagite and his heirs which talks of ‘nothingness,’ (as nichts in Eckhart’s language), is the same as the Buddhist Mu, for the Christian mystic such as Eckhart seeks the re-birth of his soul now purified through its immersion into the Gottheit, whereas the Buddhist seeks sunyata as the transcendence or liberation from all selfhood. We note too that the elusive concept of the ‘self,’ obviously central to this discussion, needs close scrutiny in its eastern and western and Buddhist and Christian contexts, if these comparisons are to make sense. Merely adding the ‘self ’ to the list of terms used in all traditions, without thorough exploration and analysis of its meaning, is to compound the confusion respective to clarifying, for example, the notion of ‘nothingness.’ Related to the linguistic-cum-ontological confusion just discussed there is also a substantial logical issue which now calls for more sustained discussion. This issue relates to the claim that mystical language is defined by its ‘ineffability’ and its ‘paradoxicality.’ These two features are standard elements in all phenomenological descriptions of mystical experience and are taken to be grounds for their comparability; but do they actually support this position? Do these elements logically allow for the inquiry into the possible identity of mystical experiences and their attempted comparability, especially 3 David ben Abraham ha-Lavan, cited in Gershom Scholem, Kabbalah (New York: Quadrangle/New York Times Book Company, 1974), 95.
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their claimed equivalence or similarity? What leads me to ask these questions is the following argument: the terms ‘paradox’ and ‘ineffable’ do not function as terms that inform us about the context of experience, or any given ontological ‘state of affairs.’ Rather they function to cloak experience from investigation and to hold mysterious whatever ontological commitments one has. As a consequence, the use of the terms ‘paradox’ and ‘ineffable’ do not provide data for comparability, rather they eliminate the logical possibility of the comparability of experience altogether. Consider the following example: (1) mystic A claims experience X is paradoxical and ineffable, while (2) mystic B claims experience Y is paradoxical and ineffable. The only logically permissible conclusion one can draw in this situation is that both mystic A and mystic B claim their experience is paradoxical; nothing can be said about the content of their respective experiences X and Y for there is no way to give content to experiences X or Y in such a manner as to learn anything about them, apart, as we have said, from their both being paradoxical, which could then serve as the basis of a reasonable comparison. To assume, as James, Huxley, Stace, and many others do, that because both mystics claim that their experiences are paradoxical they are describing like experiences, is a non sequitur. Another way of getting at this issue is by asking the question: What ontological or logical reason demands that there be only one experience that is ineffable or paradoxical? What emerges in answer to this question is that if mystical experiences(s) are being accurately described when they are said to be paradoxical and ineffable, then these experiences are actually being removed from all possibility of definition, description, or pointing to, and thus also, from all possibility of comparability. Moreover, not only is there now no possibility of comparing different mystical experiences but the perplexing question about the status and intelligibility of the other elements in mystical reports also opens up. How strongly can any of the elements in a mystical report be taken as evidence for a phenomenology or typology of mysticism in so far as these statements are associated with the basic notion that mystical experience is ineffable and paradoxical? If the terms ‘paradoxical’ and ‘ineffable’ mean anything, do they not cancel out all other descriptive claims, thus undermining any and all attempts at a phenomenological typology of mystical experience based on post-experiential reports? There is certainly something logically and linguistically odd at
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work here that is almost always ignored and which needs careful critical scrutiny. A fortiori it would appear that to take the mystic’s claim seriously, i.e., that his proposition ‘X is PI’ is a true description, turns out to have the damaging implication that one cannot make any reasonable or even intelligible claim for any mystical proposition. The proposition ‘X is PI’ has the curious logical result that a serious interpretation of the proposition neither makes the experience X intelligible nor informs us in any way about X, but rather cancels X out of our language—which, of course, is what most mystics claim they want. This, however, is no foundation for a phenomenology of mysticism or a typology of comparative mystical experience, for there are a wide variety of mutually exclusive ontological ‘states of affairs’ which can thus be ruled out. At this juncture it genuinely is a case of ‘where you cannot speak be silent.’ As a part of this discussion one has also to ask what mystics mean when they make the assertions they make. For example, when mystics make such claims do they mean them literally? This raises a whole host of fundamental issues that require decipherment. For example, is mystical language meant to be descriptive or just transformational as, for example, in a Zen koan or Hindu mantra, or both? (I believe both depending on context). As to its transformational character, let me just make a brief comment based on the wellknown example of the Zen koan. In posing the koan, the master is not attempting to pass information of a doctrinal or dogmatic sort to his student—although what is taught by the master, and what is learned by the student, does carry such content in an extended or a translated sense. Rather, the master is seeking to revolutionize the student’s consciousness, particularly in the context of meditation— when consciousness is particularly sensitive—such that it breaks free of and transcends the regulative categories of knowing and thereby is opened up to new forms of awareness that are conducive to, and permit, satori. Here language performs an essential mystical task, but it is not a descriptive task. Meditation on the ‘nonsensical’ koan, defined by paradox or absurdity, ‘the sound of one hand clapping,’ is the linguistic means whereby language corrects itself, that is, it corrects the errors of propositional and descriptive language that lead the mind to false ontic commitments, particularly in the Buddhist context in terms of selfhood, the substantiality of things, and the existence of a (or the) One. By denying logically and necessarily any logical, and hence transcendental, analysis, by repudiating regular
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and regulative forms of epistemic construction and deconstruction, the koan undermines the absoluteness of the ordinary, the force of the syllogism, the requirements of the law of the excluded middle, the metaphysical and epistemological claims of an ontology of substance, and pushes the disciple toward the deeper, highly counterintuitive truth of ‘not-self ’ and nirvana, or in Nagarjuna’s language, sunyata (Emptiness). It is to be emphasized that it is language, if in highly unusual, even contested forms—for example, paradox, ‘category mistakes,’ and the like— that induces this positive aberration of consciousness and the creation of the new possibility of samyegdrsti (right view), samkalpa (right thought), and prajña (wisdom), thereby opening up the route to a proper understanding of the truth of anatman (the doctrine of ‘no-self ’), and hence to nirvana (or better yet, ‘being nirvanized,’ as nirvana is not, at least in early Buddhism, a place). It is the ability of language to induce ‘breakthroughs’ of consciousness by being employed ‘nonsensically,’ literally non-sense-ically, that is fundamental to the traversal of the mystical path, to the movement from consciousness A to consciousness B. Again, what is the role of sacred languages, alphabets, and mystical lexicons in the great mystical traditions? And what of the magical and theurgical use of words, or of words as power? I would also point out here that an elemental premise of the heretofore dominant scholarly theory regarding the insufficient fit between language and transcendental experience is that language is a human convention. As such it is earth-bound, ill-suited to objects/subjects of ultimate concern. But this repercussive thesis is not universally accepted. Many of the world’s most significant religious and mystical traditions begin with the belief that their language is sacred—the very language of God or Being—and as such possesses an ontic status altogether different from merely immanent/conventional languages, making it capable of expressing transcendental realia in various ways, with a particular competence. This claim, among others, is made by kabbalists on behalf of Hebrew, Sufis on behalf of Arabic, and Hindus on behalf of Sanskrit. In each case, the mystic of the said tradition sees himself or herself as possessing, in language, both the vehicle of divine/transcendental expression and one of the very sources of divine creativity. As such, the employment of linguistic forms in these languages, particularly as embodied in sacred texts, is not subject to the same restrictions as are imposed by the utilization of conven-
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tional semiotic systems. Knowledge of the Tetragrammaton, for example, and its appropriateness vis-à-vis the Divine is not the same as either the correspondence between the word ‘chair’ and a chair, or even that between the English word ‘God’ and the Divine. For the Tetragrammaton is the Absolute’s self-identification, possessing powers by virtue of this ontic ground, this metaphysical source and connectedness that other linguistic ascriptions lack. For the kabbalist, therefore, meditation and manipulation of the four-lettered Name is a theurgic, meditative, and transformative act made possible by the necessary link between it and its transcendental source/Object. Kabbalah is, of course, not alone in offering up these types of alphabetical speculations. Pythagoreans as well as Muslims and individual Christian mystics engaged in these sorts of explorations, sharing the presupposition that language is not merely utilitarian, conventional, or instrumental in character. In Sufism, for example, Arabic words and roots connected to the ninety-nine names of Allah, particularly the supreme name Allah itself, were manipulated in much the same way as the Hebrew names of God were by kabbalists in order to construct prayers and incantations for various contemplative and practical (e.g., healing) purposes. As part of al-asma al husna, the theology of the Divine Names, Sufis have employed these names in order to empower their spiritual movement heavenward and to affect the world below. The “teaching of the names” is the opening by which the Sufi gains an insight into the essence, the ‘name,’ of things, which in turn reflects some manifestation of the Divine Names: that is, all names, all knowledge, derive from the transcendental attributes of Allah. And comparable matters arise for Hindus in the nature and use of Sanskrit. My preliminary studies of these central issues suggest that whatever else the world’s mystics do with language they do not, as a rule, merely negate it. Pressed to the outer limits of the ‘sayable’ by the transcendental objects/subjects of their concern, yet often assisted by the resources of positive revelation and/or the content of their (and others’) ‘noetic’ experience and, as a rule, urgently desirous of sharing these extraordinary truths and experiences, they utilize language to convey meaning(s) and content(s) in a variety of amazingly imaginative ways. It is indeed their success at just this sort of substantive communication that allows us to speak of, to learn of, and to participate in mystical traditions at all.
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VI. Mysticism and Sacred Scripture
As a necessary and interrelated consideration of our analysis of language and mystical genres I would also call to your attention the need for very close study of the rich, profound, and consequential relationship that has existed between mystics and the sacred scriptures of their traditions. This is to recognize that, for example, the teachings of Jewish mysticism and of individual kabbalists were unintelligible outside of the Tanach and later rabbinical commentaries thereon; that Christian mystics drew deeply from and were fundamentally shaped by the New Testament story and its many forms of reading; that Sufism was a Qur’an-intoxicated mystical form; that Hindu teachers and teachings were incomprehensible apart from the Vedas and Bhagavad Gita; and that even in Buddhism scripture played an important role. Here I would just note, to begin a very complex conversation, that mystics across traditions and cultures have always assumed that the sacred texts of their traditions are authentic centers of divine, transcendental, ultimate truth. As Hugh of Saint Victor describes it, the study of scripture seeks “an understanding of the secrets of God,”4 nothing less than the “secrets of God,” while Hallaj announces, in reflecting on the centrality of the Qur’an, especially verses 7:1 and 47:19: “fi’l Qur’an ilm kull shay” (In the Qur’an is the knowledge of all created things). The sacred texts—that is, the texts taken as sacred—are not just literary compositions but also revelations, the opening up of God’s will or, in nontheistic language, the source, the ground, for the disclosure of what is Ultimate. These texts are not merely human accounts, the product of human imagination, no matter how lofty and sublime they may be. They, and their interpretation—a subject to which we return again and again— are authoritative, the very Urgrund for all subsequent theological insights and aspirations. For this reason the definition of the Vedas as sruti is ‘truths that were heard’ by rsis (seers) at the beginning of the cycle of creation. And complementarily, rsis are defined as seers because they ‘see the truth.’ In like manner, the mystical quest is thus, quite literally, the discovery or rediscovery of the mysteries encoded in scripture, the recovery of the superabundant truth and meanings hidden in these primal documents.
4
‘Didaskalion,’ book 5, chap. 10, in Patrologia Latina, vol. 76 (Paris, 1844), 698C.
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Consistent with this, another premise conceives of these specially valued documents—or at least some of them—as being ontologically primitive, that is, as part of the very fabric of reality itself. So the sages of the rabbinic era referred to the Torah as the blueprint of all creation. And in a different idiom, and as part of an alternative theological Weltanschauung, the Jaiminya Upanisad Brahmana describes the threefold creation of the world from the Vedas in much the same way. The effort to understand scripture is, therefore, not merely a literary or intellectual exercise but also a highly charged spiritual encounter, for to discern the meaning of the sacred text is to come to know something of God—or Brahman, or Being, or the Ultimate— who reveals Himself or Itself in the text. It is in this sense that Pseudo-Dionysius, despite his radical apophatic theology, acknowledges: “With regard to the secret Deity beyond Being, it is necessary to avoid all speech, that is, every incautious thought beyond what Holy Scriptures divinely reveal to us. For in these sacred texts the Deity itself manifested that which suited its goodness.”5 Going still further, a medieval Christian spiritual master describes the “pious probing into the profundities of scripture” as an act of “retrieving Christ the Lord from the depths of the Scriptures.”6 Likewise, Eckhart refers to the central concern of his investigation of scripture—a highly ramified enterprise in which he was irresistibly and continuously engaged—as the experience of ‘Christ, the truth’ in the text. It was in this broad experiential sense that Catholic mystics looked to scripture as “magistra fidei nostrae” (the mistress of our faith). In addition, one has to pay close attention here to such issues as the character of scriptural interpretation in the various traditions; the nature of symbols and symbolic interpretations; the issues of typology or metonymy; and again, the presence of paradoxical formulations and interpretations of scripture, e.g., by Eckhart. Given the richness of this internal dialogue among mystics, mystical traditions, and canonical scriptures—and recognizing that these repercussive connections have been little studied—I recommend this subject to you for serious study.
‘Divine Names,’ chap. 1, in Patrologia Graecae, vol. 3 (Paris, 1875), 588C. Cited in Henri de Lubac, The Four Senses of Scripture, vol. 1 of Medieval Exegesis, trans. Mark Sebanc (Grand Rapids, MI: W. B. Eerdmans, 1998), 61. 5
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Conclusion
What I have attempted to do in this essay is to show that the study of mysticism, of mysticism(s), is only in its scholarly infancy. There is a great deal of elemental and important work to do in this repercussive area of study in the twenty-first century.
RESPONSE TO STEVEN KATZ Francis X. Clooney We all owe a debt of gratitude to Steven Katz for his early and pioneering work in the contextualization of mysticism. Katz has for years been a leader in redefining study in this field, in his own monographs and particularly in his introductory essays in Mysticism and Philosophical Analysis and Mysticism and Religious Traditions. Katz’s essay in this volume, ‘Diversity and the Study of Mysticism,’ nicely summarizes, restates, and reaffirms the points made in those early volumes, now organized into six categories: form criticism; ontology; theological and social contexts; typologies and their limits; language, paradox and ineffability; and sacred scripture. His work is valuable because it forcefully draws attention to the context, and thus to the details, of traditions, with respect to language, culture, ritual, spiritual practice, and teaching traditions. He persuasively and soberly cautions us against tantalizing and convenient notions of a ‘context-free’ study of mysticism. This work has proved valuable, as reminder and confirmation, even to those of us whose traditions were already and for a long time quite consciously contextually sensitive and committed to the values enunciated by Katz. His claim that experience is necessarily mediated through textin-context is in keeping with the teachings of numerous major traditions, e.g., the lectio divina tradition in the Christian West, the Rabbinic tradition of commentary and oral Torah, the Upanisadic/Vedantic tradition of the threefold practice of sravana (hearing the text), manana (reflecting on the meanings of the text), nididhyasana (contemplation) as essential to true learning and to even self-realization. Other examples will come to the mind of the reader as well. As we consider this paper in light of the past twenty years of scholarship, we can also gladly affirm that Katz’s work nicely supports much of the research that is actually being done by scholars today. Much of the study of mysticism today shies away from efforts to (over)generalize or esotericize the study of religious experience(s); even for reasons of postmodern suspicion, adherence to the text in its specific historical context has been affirmed over against generalizing
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and universalizing theories. It is striking, indeed, that Katz reaffirms his earlier arguments without explicitly attending to this quite mainstream scholarly consensus. (The paper would have been more forceful had Katz explicitly acknowledged his allies when making points their work quite nicely supports.) Since I am in substantial agreement with Katz, the following comments are friendly additions and reflections which test his thesis by exploring its boundaries; rather than repeating what we agree on, though, I wish to push the boundaries of what he has argued, in order to see where the study of mysticism is heading in the new century. I offer my comments under four headings: the value and necessity of generalization; the general and ‘supra-textual’ truth articulated by mystical writers and mystical theologians; the need to retrieve excluded and marginalized voices in the study of mysticism; the emergence of new, global mysticisms which are not specific to the major, recognized traditions. The Value and Necessity of Generalization First, it seems more evident than Katz admits that while generalizations about common features that go beyond the warrants of any particular context are vexed with problems, they are also proper strategies required in the writings of mystics and in writings about mysticism. Indeed, Katz’s own paper argues for the importance of text and context in a strikingly abstract and broadly generic way which relies heavily on shared and analogous features which cross traditional boundaries. Even to argue against superficial similarities and easy comparisons, Katz has to draw on analogies which draw parallels among the practices, goals, categories, and realities of different traditions—which then can be distinguished. Even if nirvana, moksa, and beatific vision are not the same, for certain purposes they are properly grouped together; even if atman, ‘self,’ ‘soul,’ and the Buddhist ‘no-soul’ (anatta) are not the same, we know what we mean by placing them together, whatever qualifications we may then make. Katz rightly notes that mention of ‘yoga’ occurs frequently in Indian spiritual disciplines, even if the disciplines which call themselves ‘yogic’ are often quite different from one another. Yet their use of the term ‘yoga’ is for the most part not incorrect, since areas of important commonality link the traditions willing to use the term ‘yoga.’ And so forth.
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But this kind of generalization is a necessary feature of Katz’s paper and not a flaw, since he cannot avoid the fact that there are analogous structures shared by mystical traditions even when differences must then come prominently to the fore. In covering vast amounts of material under his six headings, Katz himself rightly tends to reduce traditions to a few salient points, even if the traditions are in fact more complex in numerous ways. Generalizations need not be harmful, provided they are used with salutary caution. We must generalize and draw out typologies, and it is both proper and necessary to do so even when arguing against scholars who overgeneralize. Mystics themselves generalize, especially when they are aware of other traditions and even when they do not wish to abandon the specificity and privilege of their own traditions. The point then is not to question the immense value of paying attention to mystical experiences and teachings as inscribed in specific contexts; we ought to agree with Katz on this. Rather, we need clearer rules for the inevitable instances when we need to step beyond such contexts. The General and ‘Supra-Textual’ Truth A second reflection concerns how we are to assess the theological writing of mystics who, after all, are shaped not only by their traditions, but who also make public, rationally accessible truth claims which are intended to tell readers—friends, enemies, contemporaries, scholars writing centuries later—about those traditions and the mystical experiences therein entailed. In an important way, mystics who write are also theologians who make claims about the nature of reality and therefore evidently intend to claim the attention even of those who have not had the same experiences nor practiced the same spiritual practices. To do so, they must appeal to other kinds of data and must fashion different kinds of reasonable and plausible claims which can be persuasive across contextual boundaries. Let us consider this point further. Mystics, at least those who write, are intentionally interactive with their traditions, helping to shape and reshape them; the traditions themselves are in part the fruits of the work of the mystics in the traditions. Context therefore not only shapes how we are to receive the mystical, but it is also expressive of the meanings of the mystical and its claims about reality. To the extent that mystical and theological writings include such claims
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which can be taken seriously as valid claims and yet which are to be considered as distinguishable from the texts in which they are inscribed, to that extent the ‘mystical’ is broader and more accessible than might be expected were one to concentrate entirely on texts in context. Not only mystical texts, but also catechetical texts and doctrinal texts, for instance, become relevant in assessing the meaning of mystical claims, and then too philosophical and logical claims, etc. We therefore can ask what the world must be like for a certain mystical experience to be true; one can make claims about human nature, or the divine, such as support particular views of mystical experience, but which are also accountable to a wider range of disciplinary perspectives which need not be so strictly text-based. What is true may well be intelligible even to those who have not read the text, and such will be a truth that can be approached from multiple traditional bases. There will then be no entirely fixed dividing line between mystical teachings which require as responses specific attitudes and practices on the one hand, and claims about truth and practice which demand the assent of reasonable persons familiar with the nature of the world on the other. Mysticism does ‘transcend’ its specific context and texts, and thus the pathway to broader generalizations is opened. Retrieving Excluded and Marginalized Voices in the Study of Mysticism Third, even as we acknowledge warmly what we gain by a focus on reading texts and by focusing on tradition-specific claims as Katz suggests, we need also to ask what may be lost sight of in adhering very closely to a strict reliance on great texts. A focus on texts and their commentaries can very well be tantamount to a focus on elites and on normative paradigms which are in part defined in terms of what they leave out. A written record is not entirely innocent of the charge of excluding those who did not get to write, and whose experiences both confirm and diverge from normative written accounts. (Needless to say, traditions which have not preserved written source materials need not be classified as devoid of mystical experiences, and these too need to be studied; but the ‘oral’/‘written’ distinction is yet another issue to be argued in a broader context than this brief response allows.) One cannot simply wish into existence a commonality of experi-
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ences, of course, but neither can one stipulate that all mystical experience should fit neatly into the boundaries of the privileged texts and commentaries which belong to well-defined traditions. Appeals to universal mystical experiences may often be clumsy or ill-founded, but we should still be able to acknowledge that much of the interest in purer, common, and even universal mystical experiences is prompted by a kind of democratic intuition which seeks to include what is usually or almost always excluded, the more vaguely described experiences of those to whom there is not available either the privilege or discipline of polished, classic texts. Katz does not in principle exclude wider possibilities, but the force and plausibility of his position would be strengthened by more attention to the problems of classicism, elitism, and the drive to include what, since it does not normally get written down, lives on mainly in oral and popular formulations. The Emergence of New, Global Mysticisms My final observation has to do with the future of mysticism and the study of it. Katz is on firm ground in his estimation of the roots of most mystical traditions, and in his account of the resources we need for the study of mysticism. He is persuasive regarding its past and regarding major aspects of the work that needs to be done at present. But in proposing the agenda for the next generation’s work, he does not discuss the eclectic, cross-cultural, and global possibilities, which are now emerging and which have already been changing how mystical experience is going to be experienced, thought of, and written about in the future. There is no need to think that mysticism is forever established in its classic textual and tradition-specific forms; indeed, there is evidence to the contrary. People no longer know only their own traditions, and their religious and spiritual identities are no longer shaped entirely by those home traditions. In the increasingly global context that characterizes mysticism—along with every other aspect of religion and theology and what people think and write with respect to any of these—we are faced with the fact of persons who are literate in multiple traditions, who cross established boundaries, transgressing contexts, reading texts in ways not anticipated by their original authors and communities. Such people then also have mystical experiences in those more complex novel settings which do not
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quite fit any of the traditions. In today’s global context some mystics at least have interreligious and cross-cultural mystical experiences, and scholars will have to begin more seriously to figure out how to rank and assess such experiences in their new contexts. Of course, even if consequent, unanticipated developments will keep changing the dynamics of the project Katz has so patiently and persistently defined in this paper and in his earlier work, he himself has provided many of the necessary categories and cautions which will be all the more needed in the maturing of global mysticism in this new century and millennium. For his contribution to the study of mysticism, we must remain very grateful indeed.
ENGENDERING THE STUDY OF RELIGION Elizabeth A. Clark This essay proposes to correlate the differences between women’s studies and gender studies with varying approaches to historical scholarship.1 Although most contemporary professional historians have abandoned an older style of narrative description for analyses of change and causation,2 the still more recent challenge to this analytic paradigm by a hermeneutic or literary one has been strongly resisted by social historians adhering to the analytic model.3 Characteristic of this debate is the question of whether historians understand themselves as working on ‘documents’ or on ‘texts.’ I shall argue that scholars of early Christian history—my field of specialization—are largely textualists, practitioners of a species of intellectual history.4 ‘Women’s studies in religion,’ I shall suggest, has appropriated the social history model, while ‘gender studies in religion’ has begun to adopt the hermeneutic paradigm; keeping both models in play, I shall argue, enriches historical studies of religion. One implication of this essay is that scholarship I wish to thank Elizabeth Castelli for her extensive assistance with materials for this essay. See now the essays in Elizabeth A. Castelli with assistance from Rosamond C. Rodman, eds., Women, Gender, Religion: A Reader (New York: Palgrave/St. Martin’s Press, 2001). An earlier version of this essay (‘Women, Gender, and the Study of Christian History’) appeared in Church History 70/3 (2001). I thank the American Society of Church History and the editors of Church History for permission to reprint parts of this essay. 2 Thus Liz James’ blunt assessment of “stage one” feminist historiography: it is “boring” simply to write that “there were women saints and this is what they did”— yet this approach was acceptable to the patriarchal establishment, so that “we could all safely ‘do women’.” In “stage two” (and here she writes as an art historian) the ‘why’ questions were asked, centering around the investigation of a “feminine aesthetic” and an investigation of the means of production (‘Introduction,’ in Women, Men and Eunuchs: Gender in Byzantium [London/New York: Routledge, 1997], xii–xiv). 3 See discussion in Joan W. Scott, ‘Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,’ American Historical Review 91 (1986): 1066. The debate over narrative was triggered both by historians’ reactions to the work of Hayden White and, ‘within the profession,’ by Lawrence Stone’s essay, ‘The Revival of Narrative: Reflections on a New Old History,’ Past & Present 85 (1979): 3–24. 4 For a spirited defense of historical materials as ‘texts,’ see intellectual historian Dominick LaCapra’s History & Criticism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985). 1
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on women and gender in religion, however original its subject matter, is highly dependent on theoretical and historical approaches derived from other academic disciplines. I. Women and Religion Published in the first volume of the journal Signs (1976), historian Joan Kelly’s essay, ‘The Social Relation of the Sexes: Methodological Implications for Women’s History,’ rapidly achieved classic status.5 Kelly, a Renaissance historian, claimed that women’s history had “shaken the conceptual foundations of historical study” by problematizing “three of the basic concerns of historical thought: (1) periodization, (2) the categories of social analysis, and (3) theories of social change.”6 Concerning periodization, Kelly argued that eras often touted as manifesting progress for men did not do so for women—in fact, that women often lost status during these periods. Thus Kelly famously concluded that there was no ‘renaissance’ for women—“at least not during the Renaissance.”7 Taking the history of contraception as a benchmark for historical periodization, for example, would produce a very different trajectory of progress.8 Moreover, Kelly urged historians to broaden their concept of social change to include developments in the relations between the sexes,9 and to rework theories of social change to trace “the connections between changes in class and sex relations,”10 attending especially to the determinative role of “property” in the sexual order.11 The goal of this new women’s history, Kelly concluded, was twofold: “to restore women to history and to restore our history to women.”12 5 In Signs 1 (1976): 809–23. I cite from the version reprinted in the collection of Kelly’s essays, Women, History, and Theory: The Essays of Joan Kelly (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 1–18. 6 Kelly, ‘The Social Relation of the Sexes,’ 1. 7 Ibid., 3, 19. The next year, Kelly published a longer essay on this theme, ‘Did Women Have a Renaissance?’, in Becoming Visible: Women in European History, ed. Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koonz (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977), reprinted in Kelly, Women, History, and Theory, 19–50. 8 Kelly, ‘The Social Relations of the Sexes,’ 3–4. 9 Ibid., 8. 10 Ibid., 9. 11 Ibid., 12. This latter theme Kelly developed in a third essay, ‘The Doubled Vision of Feminist Theory: A Postscript to the “Women and Power” Conference,’ Feminist Studies 5 (1979): 216–27, reprinted in Kelly, Women, History, and Theory, 21–64. 12 Kelly, ‘The Social Relations of the Sexes,’ 1. Fellow Renaissance historian
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Whether or not historians have been able to achieve the transformation of their discipline that Kelly envisioned, for three decades and more ‘real women’ as agents and as victims have been raised up for investigation. For example, women’s patronage of religious institutions has been much-studied; women owned some of the house churches in which early Christians met,13 and they generously funded monasteries, churches, and the poor throughout the patristic and medieval periods.14 Yet patronage depends less on the sheer fact of ‘femaleness’ than on class, since only women of means had the ability to serve as patrons. At best, in historian Janet Nelson’s words, there were occasions when the “forcefulness of nobility compensated for the weakness of gender.”15 The same could be said for widows, a second group who have received much attention in recent years. Although historians have shown that even within confining patriarchal structures, widows sometimes exerted considerable influence, it is more often the case that widows of insignificant social class found themselves in positions of “enhanced vulnerability.”16 Diane Owen Hughes notes the (somewhat limited) help that the Annales school of history contributed to this process: Annales historians weaned others away from a narrative history of politics and ‘great men’ by suggesting that through the study of household relations and rituals, we could begin to map “the silent world of those ruled by structure rather than event . . .” (‘Invisible Madonnas? The Italian Historiographical Tradition and the Women of Medieval Italy,’ in Women in Medieval History and Historiography, ed. Susan Mosher Stuard [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987], 49). 13 E.g., Carolyn Osiek, ‘Women in House Churches,’ in Common Life in the Early Church: Essays Honoring Graydon F. Snyder, ed. Julian V. Hills (Harrisburg, Pa.: Trinity Press International, 1998), 300–15. 14 E.g., Elizabeth A. Clark, ‘Patrons, Not Priests: Women and Power in Late Ancient Christianity,’ Gender & History 2 (1990): 253–73; for the medieval period, see the project ‘Women’s Religious Life and Communities, A.D. 500–1500,’ led by Mary Martin McLaughlin; interim report, ‘Looking for Medieval Women,’ in Monastic Studies: The Continuity of Tradition, ed. Judith Loades (Bangor [Wales]: Headstart History, 1991), esp. 274; Jo Ann McNamara, ‘The Need to Give: Suffering and Female Sanctity in the Middle Ages,’ in Images of Sainthood in Medieval Europe, ed. Renate Blumenthal-Kosinski and Timea Szell (Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press, 1991), 199–221. For women as patrons in Buddhism, see Janice D. Willis, ‘Nuns and Benefactresses: The Role of Women in the Development of Buddhism,’ in Women, Religion, and Social Change, ed. Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad and Ellison Banks Findly (Albany: SUNY Press, 1985), esp. 73–77. 15 Janet L. Nelson, ‘Women and the Word in the Earlier Middle Ages,’ in Women in the Church, ed. W. J. Sheils and Diana Woods, Studies in Church History 27 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 70, cf. 63, 77 for other examples. 16 The phrase is Janet L. Nelson’s; see her essay ‘Family, Gender and Sexuality in the Middle Ages,’ 169. For a detailed examination of an early medieval widow’s ‘will,’ see Nelson’s ‘The Wary Widow,’ in Property and Power in the Early Middle Ages,
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Women’s agency, in other words, has varied considerably with the workings of class, law, social custom, generational difference, and religious hierarchy.17 As historian Lyndal Roper concedes, “[v]ast historical changes may barely disturb the relations of power between men and women.”18 “Uneven developments”—“the possible discontinuity between positions occupied within the economic, political, and symbolic orders”19—belie any attempt to predict a straightforward narrative of the conditions under which women prospered.20 Scholars of women in the history of Christianity, however, have not fully attended to the intersections of these factors with religion.21 Perhaps ed. Wendy Davies and Paul Fouracre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 82–113. For recent studies of widows in the early Christian text, the Didascalia Apostolorum, see Charlotte Methuen, ‘Widows, Bishops and the Struggle for Authority in the Didascalia Apostolorum,’ Journal of Ecclesiastical History 46 (1995): 197–213; idem, ‘“For Pagans Laugh to Hear Women Teach”: Gender Stereotypes in the Didascalia Apostolorum,’ in Gender and Christian Religion, ed. R. N. Swanson, Studies in Church History 34 (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 1998), 23–35; also see her essay which makes clear that not all classed as ‘widows’ were women with deceased husbands, ‘The “Virgin Widow”: A Problematic Social Role for the Early Church?’, Harvard Theological Review 90 (1997): 285–98. But compare the situation in nineteenth- and twentieth-century India, where religious and political contestations over widows’ rights—and deaths—provide some of the most fascinating (and grimmest) evidence for the vulnerability of the condition of widowhood. On sati, see, for example, Lata Mani, ‘Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India,’ in Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History, ed. Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1990; first edition, New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1989), 88–126; John S. Hawley, ‘Hinduism: Sati and Its Defenders,’ in Fundamentalism and Gender, ed. John Stratton Hawley (New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 79–110. For a recent case in India in which Muslim custom and Indian law clashed, see Zakia Pathak and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, ‘“Shahbano”,’ Signs 14 (1989): 558–82, and Peter J. Awn, ‘Indian Islam: The Shah Bano Affair,’ in Fundamentalism and Gender, 63–78. 17 Even Joan Kelly, who doubtless wished to claim as much ‘agency’ for women as possible, points to the mode of production and property relations as keys to understanding women’s roles: ‘The Social Relations of the Sexes,’ 9, 12. 18 Lyndal Roper, Oedipus and the Devil: Witchcraft, Sexuality and Religion in Early Modern Europe (London/New York: Routledge, 1994), 37. Roper’s overall argument is that historians have left out ‘the psychic’ from their considerations. 19 John Frow, Marxism and Literary History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), 76. 20 For one expression of this problem, see Jill K. Conway, Susan C. Bourque, and Joan W. Scott, ‘Introduction: The Concept of Gender,’ Daedalus 116 (1987), xxii: “Recent social theory has led us to see that changes in the family in earlymodern and modern Europe did not neatly coincide with changes in the forms of government, economic organization, or religious practice.” 21 In early Christian texts pertaining to women which I have studied, ‘class’ (in the sense of money and status, differently configured in antiquity than later) often reigns supreme: see various essays in my Jerome, Chrysostom, and Friends: Essays and Translations, Studies in Women and Religion 1 (New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 1979); and The Life of Melania the Younger: Introduction, Translation, and Commentary, Studies
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in a wish to accord religion the dominant role in their accounts, they often leave to their colleagues in other disciplines the study of the ways in which ‘women’s religion’ has been manipulated in the political arena—for which nineteenth- and twentieth-century France provides some stunning examples.22 And most surely, the introduction of women’s history in religious studies has by no means transformed the discipline, much to the disappointment of scholars (such as myself ) who shared Kelly’s vision.23 Nonetheless, one benefit of a focus on women (as contrasted with gender) in religious history has been to reveal the ways in which female agents managed to circumvent the confines of patriarchy in its various historical manifestations,24 for example, by redefining their teaching activities as ‘domestic,’ not ‘public,’25 or as ‘speaking,’ not ‘preaching.’26 Raising up women’s agency has enlarged our knowledge of the past. in Women and Religion 14 (New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 1984). The aristocratic associations of women religious continues into the early Middle Ages; see Jane Tibbetts Schulenburg’s interesting observations on how biographers of women saints tried to make them ‘classless’ (‘Saints’ Lives as a Source for the History of Women, 500–1100,’ in Medieval Women and the Sources of Medieval History, ed. Joel T. Rosenthal [Athens, Ga./London: University of Georgia Press, 1990], 287). By the later Middle Ages, more could be known about those whose status was less than aristocratic; see, for example, Marilyn Oliva, ‘Aristocracy or Meritocracy? Office-Holding Patterns in Late Medieval English Nunneries,’ in Women in the Church, 197–208. 22 See, e.g., Caroline Ford, ‘Female Martyrdom and the Politics of Sainthood in Nineteenth-Century France: The Cult of Sainte Philomène,’ in Catholicism in Britain and France Since 1789, ed. Frank Tallett and Nicholas Atkin (London/Rio Grande: Hambledon Press, 1996), 115–34. James F. McMillan, ‘Reclaiming a Martyr: French Catholics and the Cult of Joan of Arc, 1890–1920,’ in Martyrs and Martyrologies, ed. Diana Wood (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1993), 359–70. Barbara Corrado Pope, ‘Immaculate and Powerful: The Marian Revival in the Nineteenth Century,’ in Immaculate and Powerful: The Female in Sacred Image and Social Reality, ed. Clarissa W. Atkinson, Constance H. Buchanan, and Margaret R. Miles (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985), 173–200. 23 For a discussion of the lack of progress in women/gender studies in Religion, see Ursula King, ‘Introduction: Gender and the Study of Religion,’ in Religion and Gender, ed. King (Oxford/Cambridge: Blackwell, 1995), 1–38. For historian Judith M. Bennett’s assessment of the field of history, see her ‘Feminism and History,’ Gender & History 1 (1989): 251–72. 24 Thus Judith Bennett calls historians to engage in studies of the workings of patriarchy throughout history—how it “adapted, changed, and survived over time and place. Women have a large part to play in this historical study of patriarchy, not merely as victims, but also as agents” (‘Feminism and History,’ pp. 262–63). 25 Linda Lierheimer, ‘Preaching or Teaching? Defining the Ursuline Mission in Seventeenth-Century France,’ in Women Preachers and Prophets through Two Millennia of Christianity, ed. Beverly Mayne Kienzle and Pamela J. Walker (Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press, 1998), 212–226, esp. 213. 26 Peter Vogt, ‘A Voice for Themselves: Women as Participants in Congregational Discourse in the Eighteenth-Century Moravian Movement,’ in Women Preachers and
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Likewise, attention to ‘real women’ has stimulated discussions of periodization. Following Joan Kelly’s ground-breaking essay, ‘Did Women Have a Renaissance?,’27 historians debated traditional periodizations of Western history. Most feminist historians now acknowledge that there is no straightforward narrative of women’s progress, nor do developments pertaining to women necessarily proceed in tandem with those pertaining to men.28 Historians may, however, identify social, economic, and other factors that in different periods permitted women’s freer activity, for example, in early Christianity, as analyzed by Karen King, a de-emphasis on the “hierarchical ordering of power,” a tolerance for religious forms such as prophecy, and the construction of female Christian identity separate from sexual and reproductive roles.29 Another site of debate regarding periodization has centered on the Protestant Reformation/early modernity: while Protestant (male) historians traditionally privileged this era as an advantageous turning point, scholars examining evidence pertaining to women have offered quite different estimates. Some, such as Colin and Jo B. Atkinson, divide the sixteenth century into more and less liberating decades
Prophets, 234–35. Also see Karen L. King’s comments (‘Voices of the Spirit: Exercising Power, Embracing Responsibility’), along this line in the same volume, 339. Amy Hollywood stresses genre distinctions as one factor accounting for differences in representations of medieval women religious: whereas (male) hagiographers depict their subjects as practicing a form of asceticism in accord with the church’s desire for women’s behavior (e.g., not too extreme), women writers such as Mechtild of Magdeburg and Marguerite Porete express a more unrestrained theology: The Soul as Virgin Wife: Mechtild of Magdeburg, Marguerite Porete, and Meister Eckhart, Studies in Spirituality and Theology 1 (Notre Dame/London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995), esp. 50. 27 See above, n. 7. 28 To be sure, re-periodizing human (and especially Western history) with a view to women’s fate is not a recent preoccupation: from different perspectives, nineteenth-century writers, such as Sarah Hale, best-known as editor of the Godey’s Lady’s Book, and J. J. Bachofen offered their varying imaginative reconstructions; see Sarah Hale, Woman’s Record (2nd ed., New York: Harper & Brothers, 1855), discussed in Nina Baym, ‘Onward Christian Women: Sarah J. Hale’s History of the World,’ New England Quarterly 63 (1990): 249–70 (the narrative is one of women’s progress under the influence of Christianity, culminating in contemporary America); J. J. Bachofen, Myth, Religion, and Mother Right: Selected Writings of J. J. Bachofen (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967; translation of the 1927 German original, Mutterrecht und Urreligion) (the story of primitive matriarchy’s downfall). 29 Karen L. King, ‘Prophetic Power and Women’s Authority: The Case of the Gospel of Mary (Magdalene),’ in Women Preachers and Prophets, 32–33.
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for women,30 while others outrightly deny that women progressed in this era.31 Lyndal Roper, for example, counters historians’ attachment to narratives of “the rise of individualism and rationality” in early modernity with the reminder that the witch-craze, responsible for the deaths of so many women, was most prominent in this period, not in the allegedly benighted medieval era.32 Likewise, the Gregorian Reform of the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries, praised by earlier scholars as a moment in which the Catholic Church amended its practices, is now characterized by historians such as Janet Nelson and Dyan Elliott as a moment when women lost status and power.33 In Jo Ann McNamara’s view, the Gregorian Reform attempted to create a “woman-free space,” “a church virtually free of women at every level but the lowest stratum of the married clergy.”34 In these accounts, the period of the Gregorian Reform signals not Catholic glory, but female denigration. If attention to women (in contrast to gender) has enhanced historical and religious studies by suggesting new ways to think about 30 Colin Atkinson and Jo B. Atkinson, ‘Subordinating Women: Thomas Bentley’s Use of Biblical Women in “The Monument of Matrones” (1582),’ Church History 60 (1992): 298–99. 31 See, for example, the essays of Keith Moxey, ‘The Battle of the Sexes and the World Upside Down,’ and of Thomas Head, ‘The Religion of the Femmelettes: Ideals and Experience among Women in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century France,’ in That Gentle Strength: Historical Perspectives on Women in Christianity, ed. Lynda L. Coon, Katherine J. Haldane, and Elizabeth W. Sommer (Charlottesville/London: University Press of Virginia, 1990), 134–48 and 149–75, respectively. 32 Roper, Oedipus and the Devil, 5. 33 Janet L. Nelson, ‘Women and the Word in the Earlier Middle Ages,’ 76–78 (in an effort to mark more deeply the boundaries between clergy and laity, the line between women and men was more sharply policed); Dyan Elliott, ‘The Priest’s Wife: Female Erasure and the Gregorian Reform,’ in Elliott, Fallen Bodies: Pollution, Sexuality, & Demonology in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 80–106. Conrad Leyser cautions, however, against imagining that misogynist texts correlate directly with social reality; in his view, the Reform movement can be seen as a contest between male religious specialists, using women to ‘think with’ (‘Custom, Truth, and Gender in Eleventh-Century Reform,’ in Gender and Christian Religion, 75–91, esp. 82–83, 87, 90–91. 34 Jo Ann McNamara, ‘The Herrenfrage: The Restructuring of the Gender System, 1050–1150,’ in Medieval Masculinities: Regarding Men in the Middle Ages, ed. Clare A. Lees, Medieval Cultures 7 (Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 5, 7; cf. McNamara, ‘The Need to Give,’ 204, 221. McNamara plans a book that will reperiodize late antiquity and the early Middle Ages. In her broader scheme, women gained status, compared to their previous and subsequent statuses, in the period between the demise of the Roman Republic and the era of the Gregorian Reform. Private conversation with McNamara, July 8, 2000.
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agency and periodization, other aspects of this approach have now come under criticism. The first, an offshoot of the quest for origins, has been particularly prominent in studies of religions that have historical founders, most notably Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism. Just as scholars of medieval women searched for “a medieval El Dorado,”35 so scholars of religious history looked back to origins (often, of the religions to which they themselves give allegiance) to locate a golden era when women were accorded generous treatment by a prescient founding figure. Although I acknowledge that concepts such as routinization and hierarchalization are useful in analyzing social changes that occur in a religion’s early history, the emphasis in ‘women in religion studies’ has rather been to look to the liberating teaching of a founder, accorded normative status for presentday devotees, before the trajectory of devolution set in. It is not only historians of Christianity, however, who press this trajectory.36 Scholars of Islamic women’s history have looked to the era of Mohammed as exemplifying a more egalitarian form of Islam, soon corrupted by interpretations of the Qur’an that disadvantaged women.37 Likewise, some scholars of women in Buddhism, adopting what Donald Lopez dubs “the bad monk theory,”38 have claimed that women’s status declined after an initial era of glory.39 Even adherents of religions that lack founders sometimes appeal to the authoritative texts of the distant past—for example, to the Vedas— to support the notion that there was an originary period in Hinduism when women were esteemed and sati was unknown.40 These accounts 35 The phrase is Barbara A. Hanawalt’s, ‘Golden Ages for the History of Medieval English Women,’ in Women in Medieval History and Historiography, 17. 36 Most recent feminist histories of early Christianity (including some of my own work) follow this pattern. Many early writings by Rosemary Radford Ruether and Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza elaborate this scheme, and the theme became standard. 37 See, for example, Riffat Hassan, ‘Feminism in Islam,’ in Feminism and World Religions, ed. Arvind Sharma and Katherine K. Young (Albany: SUNY Press, 1999), 248–78; Jane I. Smith, ‘Women, Religion and Social Change in Early Islam,’ in Women, Religion, and Social Change, 19–35. A helpful overview of the varied ‘historiographies’ of early Islam’s approach to women can be found in Judith Tucker, ‘Gender and Islamic History,’ in Islamic & European Expansion: The Forging of a Global Order, ed. Michael Adas (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993), 37–73. 38 Donald Lopez, private conversation, July 23, 2000. 39 For example, see Nancy Schuster, ‘Striking a Balance: Women and Images of Women in Early Chinese Buddhism,’ in Women, Religion, and Social Change, esp. 103. 40 See the excellent studies and critiques by Nancy Falk, ‘Gender and the Contest over the Indian Past,’ Religion 28 (1998): 309–18; Uma Chakravarti, ‘Whatever Happened to the Vedic Dasi? Orientalism, Nationalism and a Script for the Past,’
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of pure origins and subsequent devolutions—whatever their historical factuality—serve mainly, I would argue, as inspirations for present-day practitioners. Moreover, the early search for pristine origins often entailed a ‘blaming of the Other’ for misogynistic features of the religion in question and its subsequent devolution.41 Thus a feminist Jesus was originally established at the expense of an impure forerunner, Judaism;42 likewise, Islam was blamed for introducing the subjection of women into Indian Hinduism.43 At worst, attempts to ground women’s presence in history appeal to a mythic past, as in the case of various ‘fundamentalisms’;44 or
in Recasting Women, 27–87; and Lata Mani, ‘Contentious Traditions,’ esp. 111–14 (those working for the abolition of sati in the nineteenth century privileged more ancient texts to enable “the belief that Hindu society had fallen from a prior Golden Age” [111]). These studies on India are informed by a more sophisticated approach to the intersections of politics, women, religion, and post-colonial theory than most others I have read. For an example of an author who accepts the ‘devolution’ theme in Indian religion, see Ellen Banks Findly, ‘Gargi at the King’s Court: Women and Philosophic Innovation in Ancient India,’ in Women, Religion, and Social Change, 38–41; e.g., 38: The Vedic period was “an era of unsurpassed advantage and opportunity for women.” Or, again, an ancient era, rather than a text—say, Israel’s Iron Age— can be advanced as one in which near-equality for women was achieved. See the arguments, based on both archeology and Biblical texts, of Carol Meyers, ‘Gender Roles and Genesis 3:16 Revisited,’ in The Word of the Lord Shall Go Forth, ed. Carol Meyers and M. O’Connor (Philadelphia: Oriental Schools of Research, 1983), 337–54; idem, ‘Procreation, Production, and Protection: Male-Female Balance in Early Israel, Journal of the American Academy of Religion 51 (1983): 569–93. 41 King, ‘Voices of the Spirit,’ 340. 42 See the classic essay by Leonard Swidler, ‘Jesus Was a Feminist,’ Catholic World, January 1971, 177–83; and the also classic response by Judith Plaskow, ‘Blaming the Jews for Inventing Patriarchy,’ Lilith 7 (1980): 11–12, and idem, ‘Anti-Judaism in Feminist Christian Interpretation,’ in Searching the Scriptures, Vol. I: A Feminist Introduction, ed. Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza (New York: Crossroad, 1993), 117–29. 43 Falk, ‘Gender and the Contest over the Indian Past,’ 312; Chakravarti, ‘Whatever Happened to the Vedic Dasi?,’ 38, 55–56. If Christian feminists gave up the appeal to ‘origins’ as foundational for their views, would they be any the worse for their renunciation? Or is Christian tradition so rooted in historical explanation that any move to renounce the search for historical foundations would necessarily be counted as a blasphemous misrepresentation? Here, it is tempting to reflect on Rita Gross’s observation that such historical questions are not so important for Buddhist feminists as for Christian ones, “because history is neither exemplary nor normative for Buddhists. . . .” See Rita M. Gross, ‘Strategies for a Feminist Revalorization of Buddhism,’ in Feminism and World Religions, 84. 44 For Islam, see Minoo Moallem, ‘Transnationalism, Feminism, and Fundamentalism,’ in Between Woman and Nation: Nationalisms, Transnational Feminisms, and the State, ed. Norma Alarcón, Karen Caplan, and Minoo Moallem (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 334; on Protestant fundamentalism, see Randall Balmer, ‘American Fundamentalism: The Ideal of Femininity,’ in Fundamentalism and Gender, esp. 53.
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traditions are invented wholesale, as in the cases of some New Age appropriations of Native American traditions and of ‘goddess’ religion.45 But ‘imagined tradition’ also manifests itself in non-mainline religions: Uma Chakravarti sees her work as documenting the invention of tradition in Hinduism,46 and Catherine Hall’s study of the nineteenth-century Baptist missionary James Mursell Phillippo demonstrates how he produced a “Jamaica of the mind.”47 A third problem that I think often has attended the study of women as historical subjects and agents has been an over-concentration on ‘the body’ and on ‘women’s experience.’ The reasons for this concentration are understandable: as Ursula King notes, to feminist scholars, frustrated that the study of religion was so often text-oriented and over-intellectualist—traits that often excluded women from serving as subjects of study—attention to religious experience, especially as connected to the body, seemed useful.48 And when ‘an indisputable authenticity’ was attributed to that experience as a bedrock of foundational evidence that no (male) historian could challenge, women were endowed with an agency capable of resisting oppression.49 The most important critique of ‘women’s experience’ is Joan Scott’s, 45 Laura E. Donaldson, ‘On Medicine Women and White Shame-ans: New Age Native Americanism and Commodity Fetishism as Pop Culture Feminism,’ Signs 24 (1999): 677–96. See the critique of ‘goddesss religion’ by archeologists Ruth Tringham and Margaret Conkey, ‘Rethinking Figurines: A Critical View from Archaeology of Gimbutas, the “Goddess” and Popular Culture,’ in Ancient Goddesses: The Myths and the Evidence, ed. Lucy Goodison and Christine Morris (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998), 22–45, 197–202, and that by classicist Helene P. Foley, ‘A Question of Origins: Goddess Cults Greek and Modern,’ Women’s Studies 23 (1994): 193–215. 46 Chakravarti, ‘Whatever Happened to the Vedic Dasi?,’ 78. The phrase ‘the invention of tradition,’ as she acknowledges, comes from Eric Hobsbawm; see chs. 1 and 7 in The Invention of Tradition, ed. Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); and his interesting earlier essay, ‘The Social Function of the Past: Some Questions,’ Past & Present 55 (1972): 3–16. 47 Catherine Hall, ‘A Jamaica of the Mind: Gender, Colonialism, and the Missionary Venture,’ in Gender and Christian Religion, 361–90. Also see Jonah Steinberg’s exploration of how the Modern Orthodox movement within Judaism has recast the rabbinic and medieval Jewish past by proclaiming that niddah had not to do with menstrual impurity, but allows couples to enjoy “an eternally renewing honeymoon,” stands as another nice example of the mythic recasting of tradition for purposes of present edification: Jonah Steinberg, ‘From a “Pot of Filth” to a “Hedge of Roses” (and Back): Changing Theorizations of Menstruation in Judaism,’ Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 13 (1997): 5–26. 48 Ursula King, ‘Introduction,’ 19–20. Also see June O’Connor, ‘The Epistemological Significance of Feminist Research in Religion,’ in Religion and Gender, 57. 49 Joan W. Scott, ‘The Evidence of Experience,’ Critical Inquiry 17 (1991): 787.
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‘The Evidence of Experience,’ published in Critical Inquiry in 1991. Although Scott appreciates her colleagues’ belief that a resort to experience challenges traditional historians’ appeal to “brute facts” and “objectivity,”50 two problems soon became evident: first, that some people’s experiences seemed to be more important than others (it was just as easy to ignore women’s experiences as to overlook women as agents);51 and second, that the experience to which feminist historians often appealed was that of white, middle-class women, which was represented as if it were the experience of all women.52 But other problems attended historians’ appeal to experience, in Scott’s view: appealing to experience tended to “take as self-evident the identities of those whose experience is being documented,” thus naturalizing the very difference that needed to be explained. Agency was decontextualized by assuming that it was “an inherent attribute of individuals.” “The evidence of experience,” Scott continues, “then becomes evidence for the fact of difference, rather than a way of exploring how difference is established, how it operates, how and in what ways it constitutes subjects who see and act in the world;”53 the appeal to experience often fails to examine critically the workings of ideology, or how experience was historically constituted. Femaleness, in other words, remained ‘un-historicized.’54 Since experience “is Ibid., 780, 786. Scott especially emphasizes this problem in regard to historian E. P. Thompson’s book, The Making of the English Working Class: although ‘experience’ is introduced as a category for historical analysis, the ‘experiences’ were all of men (‘The Evidence of Experience,’ 784–85). 52 E.g., Chandra Talpade Mohanty, ‘Feminist Encounters: Locating the Politics of Experience,’ in Destabilizing Theory: Contemporary Debates, ed. Michèle Barrett and Anne Phillips (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), 27. For similar critiques from those working in women’s studies in religion, see, e.g., Sheila Greeve Devaney, ‘The Limits of the Appeal to Women’s Experience,’ in Shaping New Vision: Gender and Values in American Culture, ed. Clarissa W. Atkinson, Constance H. Buchanan, and Margaret R. Miles (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1987), 32; Elizabeth A. Castelli, ‘Heteroglossia, Hermeneutics, and History: A Review Essay of Recent Feminist Studies of Early Christianity,’ Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 19 (1994): 77. 53 Scott, ‘The Evidence of Experience,’ 777. 54 Ibid., 778–79. Scott’s critique of the appeal to ‘women’s experience’ reinforces that of historian Denise Riley, who although conceding that feminism would not want to renounce the category of ‘women’s experience’ entirely, urges historians to register that a simple appeal to ‘women’s experience’ “closes down inquiry into the ways in which female subjectivity is produced, the ways in which agency is made possible, the ways in which race and sexuality intersect with gender, the ways in which politics organize and interpret experience—in sum, the ways in which identity is a contested terrain, the site of multiple and conflicting claims.” And as Riley 50 51
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always contested and always therefore political,” Scott argues, historians must probe how the knowledge derived from experience is produced.55 In religious studies as elsewhere, the emphasis on women’s experience was often coupled with an emphasis on the body. An important pioneer in studies of the female body in Christian history is Caroline Walker Bynum, whose books Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women56 and Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion57 alerted scholars (indeed, far beyond the ranks of medievalists) to the importance of the body for the study of medieval women. Bynum’s work served to raise the body to the status of a worthy historical subject. For early Christian studies, Peter Brown’s The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity58 acquired a similarly canonical status. From such books, readers might assume that since the body was a girl’s one contribution to the social order, it deserved to be emphasized.59 Because early Christianity was so often seen as denigrating the body, was it now not important to honor it? Moreover, had not religion scholars learned from Mary Douglas to trace the ways in which the body served as a map of society,60 and from Michel Foucault, how the body could serve as a site for the contestation of power?61 pointedly reminds scholars who celebrate ‘women’s experience,’ those ‘experiences’ are not likely to be the result of “womanhood alone, but [exist] as traces of domination. . . .” See Scott’s summary of the import of Riley’s important book, ‘Am I That Name?’ Feminism and the Category of Women in History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988); in Scott, ‘The Evidence of Experience,’ 787; and Riley, ‘Am I That Name?’, 99–100. 55 Scott, ‘The Evidence of Experience,’ 797. 56 Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press, 1987. 57 New York: Zone Books, 1991. 58 New York: Columbia University Press, 1988. 59 Brown, The Body and Society, esp. ch. 1; idem, ‘The Notion of Virginity in the Early Church,’ Christian Spirituality: Origins to the Twelfth Century, ed. Bernard McGinn, John Meyendorff, and Jean Leclercq, World Spirituality 16 (New York: Crossroad, 1986), 429, 430, 436. 60 Mary Douglas, Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology (New York: Pantheon Books, 1970). Also see the warning to historians against effacing “the material praxis of people’s lives” in Susan Bordo, ‘“Material Girl”: The Effacements of Postmodern Culture,’ in Negotiating at the Margins: The Gendered Discourses of Power and Resistance, ed. Sue Fisher and Kathy Davis (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1993), esp. 314. Bordo here warns against what she calls “a new inscription of mind/body dualism. What the body does is immaterial, so long as the imagination is free.” 61 Especially Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, The Birth of the Prison, and the volumes of The History of Sexuality.
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Yet a disinclination to emphasize the female body stands as a countertheme in many feminist writings: after all, is not the body a factor that kept women in their subjugated position for so many centuries? Was this not an explanation for Anglo-American feminists’ dis-ease— whether warranted or not—with the celebration of female bodiliness by French feminists such as Luce Irigaray and Hélène Cixous?62 Did not a celebration of the female body risk “a naively unitary view of the female and of reflecting and reproducing dominant cultural assumptions about women”?63 Thus the benefits from an appeal to the female body as a means of highlighting women’s contributions were not always in evidence. Insofar as medieval women mystics, for example, have been viewed through the lens of their bodily experiences, Amy Hollywood’s book, The Soul as Virgin Wife: Mechtild of Magdeburg, Marguerite Porete, and Meister Eckhart, provides an important nuance.64 Hollywood argues that these three figures enacted a “desomatizing transformation of ‘female spirituality.’”65 Their own writings show their retreat from the ‘somatic’ religious experience that historians have sometimes judged to be “constitutive of women’s religious experience.”66 Although male-authored hagiographical accounts of medieval women religious often do emphasize ‘the body,’ Hollywood argues, the mystics she studies stress the “exiled soul.”67 Hollywood thus nuances what she See discussion in Elizabeth Grosz, ‘Conclusion: A Note on Essentialism and Difference,’ in Feminist Knowledge: Critique and Construct, ed. Sneja Gunew (London: Routledge, 1990), 338; and Paul Smith, Discerning the Subject, Theory and History of Literature 55 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 142–47. Scholars of French feminism now often point out that for theorists such as Irigaray and Cixous, ‘the body’ means ‘the written body.’ 63 Foley, ‘A Question of Origins,’ 199 (critiquing some recent exaltations of ‘the Goddess’). Cf. Morny Joy, ‘God and Gender: Some Reflections on Women’s Invocations of the Divine,’ in Religion and Gender, 137: the most problematic idealization of ‘women’s experience’ lies in the appeal to ‘the Goddess.’ 64 See n. 25 for bibilographical reference. 65 Hollywood, The Soul as Virgin Wife, 5. 66 Ibid., 24. 67 Ibid., 26, 35. She urges close attention to the genre in which accounts of women are written, differentiating male-authored hagiographies from the theologies that Mechtild and Marguerite produced. In Mechtild’s text, “the will increasingly displaces the body as an adversary who must be quelled, closed off, and reshaped through ascetic acts” (86). Hollywood faults scholars such as Caroline Walker Bynum for not noting the strong distinction between hagiographies of women by men, and works such as the ones that Hollywood here studies (27–31). Hollywood’s interest in apophatic mysticism (e.g., 24), prompted her further study of Luce Irigaray’s link to this tradition: ‘Deconstructing Belief: Irigaray and the Philosophy of Religion,’ Journal of Religion 78 (1998): 230–45. 62
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perceives as a recent over-concentration on women’s bodily experience in the discussion of Christian medieval mysticism.68 One last distinction often employed by scholars in the ‘women’s history’ mode is that between public and private. Here, the assumption that women’s sphere throughout much of Western history was the home, the alleged realm of ‘the private,’ is taken to explain their lack of representation in the spaces deemed ‘public.’ This account has been appropriated by historians of early Christian women in particular to argue that women probably served as leaders when the Christian community met in house churches, defined as an expansion of private space, while they were excluded from leadership roles when the church acquired public space.69 Yet it remains dubious whether the public/private distinction always helps to explain changing gender expectations.70 The distinction does not hold well for early Christianity, Carolyn Osiek claims, arguing from architectural and other evidence pertaining to houses (and thus house churches) in Christian antiquity. Moreover, since meetings in a house church were not restricted to members of the immediate household, they were not, strictly speaking, private. House churches, Osiek argues, might best be considered “as the crossroads between public and private.”71 Likewise, for the early Middle Ages Janet Nelson has argued that a division of public/private according to gender is “not entirely apt”: were not court and convent “both in a sense public spaces”?72 68 Yet recently, historian Lyndal Roper, reacting to what she considers “an excessive emphasis on the cultural ceation of subjectivity” in recent historical writing, urges historians to a reconsideration of the body, understood in all its physicality: see Roper, Oedipus and the Devil, 3, 4, 17, 21. 69 This argument has been advanced especially by Karen Jo Torjesen; see her When Women Were Priests, chs. 4–6, and her essay ‘Reconstruction of Women’s Early Christian History,’ in Searching the Scriptures, ch. 19. 70 Susan Mosher Stuard, ‘A New Dimension? North American Scholars Contribute Their Perspective,’ in Women in Medieval History and Historiography, 94. 71 Osiek, ‘Women in House Churches,’ 302–03; simply because women were not addressed in public settings (as recorded in literary texts), she notes, “does not mean that they were not there”; that women were indeed active in business and the professions suggests that that the “social invisibility” accorded women in many ancient texts should not be interpreted as “actual invisibility.” Also note Charlotte Methuen’s critique of the other assumption, that church space is ‘public’: the issue is not that “the Church should act as a proper public institution, but that it should represent the right kind of household with the right kind of social roles” (‘“For Pagans Laugh to Hear Women Teach”,’ 34). 72 Nelson, ‘Women and the Word in the Earlier Middle Ages,’ 74.
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Reviewing the first volume of Georges Duby’s edited collection, The History of Private Life, Nelson faults his “curiously ahistorical” assumption that “private life” means “domesticity”—an assumption indeed contradicted, she notes, by the volume’s various essays on aristocratic households. Gender, Nelson argues, does not lie on the side of the ‘private,’ but often confounds the very distinction between public and private.73 Perhaps the distinction between public and private may hold for later periods, e.g., the Renaissance, with the development of new urban political structures,74 but scholars of history and religion would need to establish this point, not assume it. These, then, are some of the more problematic issues that should be addressed in considering the history of women. In two areas, however, I perceive an overlap between the assumptions of women’s history and those of gender history, namely, in studies of women as demonized heretics and as witches. This subject can be approached from the point of view of ‘real women’—women who were tortured and executed—as well as from that of ‘women-as-code.’ Women accused of heresy in early and medieval Christianity include those labeled ‘Gnostics,’ Montanists, Priscillianists, Origenists,75 Cathars,76 73 Janet L. Nelson, ‘The Problematic in the Private,’ Social History 15 (1990): 355, 363–64. Her views reinforce those earlier voiced by Joan Kelly: in the Middle Ages, the family order was a public order (‘The Social Relation of the Sexes,’ 14). 74 Yet the public/private distinction can be questioned by scholars of Italian Renaissance/early modern history: see, for example, Giorgio Chittolini, ‘The “Private,” the “Public,” the State,’ in The Origins of the State in Italy 1300–1600, ed. Julius Kirschner (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 34–61; and Stanley Chojnacki, ‘Daughters and Oligarchs: Gender and the Early Renaissance State,’ in Gender and Society in Renaissance Italy, ed. Judith C. Brown and Robert C. Davis (London/New York: Longman, 1998), 63–86. Also see Linda Kerber’s fascinating discussion of the ways that the trope of ‘separate spheres’ has been deployed by commentators and historians since the time of De Tocqueville: ‘Separate Spheres, Female Worlds, Woman’s Place: The Rhetoric of Women’s History,’ Journal of American History 75 (1988): 9–39. 75 Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (New York: Random House, 1979), ch. 3; Images of Women in Gnosticism, ed. Karen L. King (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1988); Ross Shepard Kraemer, Her Share of the Blessings: Women’s Religion among Pagans, Jews, and Christians in the Greco-Roman World (New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), ch. 11 (‘Heresy as Women’s Religion: Women’s Religon as Heresy’); Christine Trevett, ‘Gender, Authority and Church History: A Case Study of Montanism,’ Feminist Theology 17 (1998): 9–24; Jensen, God’s Self-Conident Daughters, 133–82 (on Montanist women); Virginia Burrus, The Making of a Heretic: Gender, Authority, and the Priscillianist Controversy (Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press, 1995), passim; Elizabeth A. Clark, ‘Elite Networks and Heresy Accusations: Towards a Social Description of the Origenist Controversy,’ Semeia 56 (1991): 81–117. 76 See Richard Abels and Ellen Harrison, ‘Participation of Women in Languedocian
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and Beguines.77 Studies of the witch-craze now fill volumes, since Hugh Trevor-Roper’s pioneering work of 1967 (in which, it must be noted, ‘women’ are not the issue at [or on the] stake).78 Yet many of these essays and books also advance a gender-studies-inspired exploration of the rhetorical and symbolic demonizing of women, over against and by means of which ‘orthodoxy’ was shored up. In texts and documents pertaining to heresy and witchcraft, women are represented not only as ‘real women,’ but are deployed as signs of sexual temptation and depravity. In early Christian studies, Virginia Burrus’s work has pointedly illustrated some ways in which ‘orthodoxy’ was secured by aligning female gender and heresy.79 In the Middle Ages, the demonization of the priest’s wife— no doubt a ‘real woman,’ but also a figure of rhetoric—helped to secure the theory and practice of clerical celibacy so essential to the Gregorian Reform.80 As these few examples suggest, there are significant Catharism,’ Medieval Studies 41 (1979): 215–251; Anne Brenon, ‘The Voice of the Good Women: An Essay on the Pastoral and Sacredotal Role of Women in the Cathar Church,’ in Women Preachers and Prophets, 114–33; see also her book, Les Cathars: Vie et mort d’une églisle chrétienne (Paris: J. Grancher, 1996). 77 Ernest W. McDonnell, The Beguines and Beghards in Medieval Culture (New York: Octagon, 1969; 1st ed. 1953). For selections from Beguine literature, see Elizabeth Alvilda Petroff, ed., Medieval Women’s Visionary Literature (New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), chs. 4, 5, 7. For extended discussions of the theology of Beguines Mechthild of Magdeburg and Marguerite Porete, see Hollywood, The Soul as Virgin Bride, chs. 3, 4. 78 Hugh Trevor-Roper, ‘Witches and Witchcraft: An Historical Essay,’ Encounter 28.5 (1967): 3–25 and 28.6 (1967): 13–34; also see his The European Witch-Craze of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1969). Among the numerous studies are Anne Llewellyn Barstow, Witchcraze: A New History of the European Witch Hunts (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1994); Bengt Ankarloo and Gustav Henningsen, ed., Early Modern European Witchcraft: Centers and Peripheries (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990); Roper, Oedipus and the Devil, part III. For other studies, see notes in Elizabeth A. Clark and Herbert Richardson, Women and Religion (Revised edition; San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1996), 351–54. 79 Virginia Burrus, ‘The Heretical Woman as Symbol in Alexander, Athanasius, Epiphanius, and Jerome,’ Harvard Theological Review 83 (1991): 229–48; idem, ‘“Equipped for Victory”: Ambrose and the Gendering of Orthodoxy,’ Journal of Early Christian Studies 4 (1996): 461–76. 80 See Elliott, Fallen Bodies, ch. 4, and 118, 160. For an analysis of the phenomenon that emphasizes the side of rhetoric, see Leyser, ‘Custom, Truth, and Gender in Eleventh-Century Reform.’ That ‘women’ served as the markers for deviance in early modernity is now a commonplace—whether as ‘witches’ (Elspeth Whitney, ‘The Witch “She”/The Historian “He”: Gender and the Historiography of the European Witch Hunts,’ Journal of Women’s History 7 [1995]: esp. 86), or as the Quaker women accused by the London gutter-press of sexual depravity (Kate Peters, ‘ “Women’s Speaking Justified”: Women and Discipline in the Early Quaker Movement,’ in Gender and Christian Religion, 227). And the topos continued to prove
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areas in which the fates of ‘real women’ and woman-as-symbol conjoin in the accounts left to us. But I am getting ahead of my story. What does the move to gender history signify, and what are its perceived benefits and potential pitfalls? II. Gender and Religion If ‘woman’ was a category open to debate in decades past, much more so is ‘gender.’ Gisela Bock, in the lead essay for the new journal Gender & History in 1989, expressed the assumptions that characterized the 1970s and 1980s: first, that ‘gender’ was to be understood in contrast to ‘biological sex,’ and second, that gender studies was a spin-off from, but still essentially identified with, women’s studies— with a passing nod to men added.81 Since the issue of class then dominated the subfield of social history, Bock’s concern was to wrest a space for women and gender.82 ‘Gender’ now became the term to describe the socially-constructed nature of sexuality and sexual relation: sex was the ‘raw material’ out of which ‘gender’ was produced.83 In a famous version of this model, Gayle Rubin, through a reading of Claude Lévi-Strauss and useful: thus the ‘Hallelujah Lasses’ of the Salvation Army in nineteenth-century Britain were branded as ‘prostitutes’ for their association with styles of popular commercial entertainment (Pamela J. Walker, ‘A Chaste and Fervid Eloquence: Catherine Booth and the Ministry of Women in the Salvation Army,’ in Women Preachers and Prophets, 297–98). As Walker comments, the women managed to put the denigrating image to good use: they claimed that they would “sweep the sewers” to save the world, go where polite women wouldn’t go to purify pestilence (298)—a nice example of women inverting the rhetoric of denigration to claim moral superiority. 81 Gisela Bock, ‘Women’s History and Gender History: Aspects of an International Debate,’ Gender & History 1 (1989): 11, 14, 17. For Bock, women’s history and gender history (here elided) attempt to render visible “the concrete, manifold and changing forms of women’s and men’s bodily experience, activity, and representation. . . .” That ‘gender studies’ is often taken to mean ‘women’s studies’ is also noted by Ursula King, in her ‘Introduction: Gender and the Study of Religion,’ 4–5, 30; likewise Susan Mosher Stuard, ‘Fashion’s Captives: Medieval Women in French Historiography,’ in Women in Medieval History and Historiography, 71. 82 Bock, ‘Women’s History and Gender History,’ 18. As one example, Bock argued that the history of religions remained “incomprehensible” if treated as a “gender-neutral” field of study (21). 83 Donna J. Haraway, ‘“Gender” for a Marxist Dictionary,’ in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991; German original, 1987), 132—a distinction that Haraway claims goes back to Marx’s and Engels’s inability to historicize the man/woman relation.
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other French theorists, coined the phrase, the ‘sex-gender system,’ defined as “the system of social relations that transformed biological sexuality into products of human activity and in which the resulting historically specific sexual needs are met.”84 At this early stage of the discussion, theorist Eve Sedgwick argued that ‘gender’ enabled scholars “to gain analytic and critical leverage on the female-disadvantaging social arrangements that prevail at a given time in a given society, by throwing into question their legitimative ideological grounding in biologically based narratives of the ‘natural’.”85 Many feminist theorists in the 1980s nuanced and challenged those interpretations of sex and gender.86 Perhaps the most famous challenge came from Judith Butler in her 1990 book, Gender Trouble, who questioned the binary opposition between sex and gender and suggested that the category of sex itself is as much a constructed phenomenon as social historians held gender to be.87 To imagine that ‘sex’ was ‘prediscursive’—as did those who contrasted ‘sex’ with ‘gender’—is itself, Butler argued, “the effect of the apparatus of cultural construction designated by gender,”88 which in Butler’s view is secured through “a stylized repetition of acts.”89 For Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (in a later mode) and others, gender studies soon became a code for gay studies. Sedgwick argued that gender criticism should entail a criticism of the categories of gender analysis, not just criticism through them.90 She further urged historians to undertake a “history of heterosexuality,” rather than permitting heterosexuality “to masquerade so fully as History itself ” under “institutional pseudonyms such as Inheritance, Marriage, Dynasty, Domesticity, and Population—when it has not been busy imperson84 Haraway’s succinct analysis of Rubin, ‘ “Gender”,’ 137 (Rubin would doubtless add, ‘men’s sexual needs’). See Gayle Rubin, ‘The Traffic in Women,’ in Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna Rapp Reiter (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975), 157–210. Rubin’s thesis was overtly political: “At the most general level, the social organization of sex rests upon gender, obligatory heterosexuality, and the constraint of female sexuality” (179). 85 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, ‘Gender Criticism,’ in Redrawing the Boundaries: The Transformation of English and American Literary Studies, ed. Stephen Greenblatt and Giles Gunn (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1992), 274. 86 The history of this discussion is well-reviewed in Haraway, ‘“Gender”,’ 137–46. 87 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York/London: Routledge, 1990), esp. ch. 1. 88 Ibid., 7. 89 Ibid., 140. 90 Sedgwick, ‘Gender Criticism,’ 273.
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ating Romance”91—the very topics, it may be noted, that social historians and historians of women often chose for their studies. Such were some of the important moments in the theoretical analysis of the term ‘gender.’ For historians, however, the most important discussion of ‘gender’ was to be found in Joan Scott’s 1986 essay, ‘Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis.’ Here she summarized current understandings of the concept, with emphasis on “the social organization of the relationship between the sexes” and “the fundamentally social quality of distinctions based on sex.”92 That ‘gender’ would now include men was not news. But the aspect of Scott’s article that alarmed some social historians was her insistence that ‘gender’ must be related to symbolic systems, to its production in language. Social science, Scott argued, was undergoing a shift from scientific to literary paradigms that entailed a switch “from an emphasis on cause to one on meaning.”93 Thus ‘gender’ could be understood as “a primary way of signifying relationships of power,” “of signifying differentiation” in general.94 Far from merely characterizing relations between the sexes, ‘gender’ could, for example, be used to express notions of class, or the relations between colonialist nations and their subjects.95 Historians most devoted to a feminist agenda that centers on women and their agency have strongly criticized a Scottian approach to history as undercutting the stress on ‘women.’ For them, privileging gender and language seemed to signal a retreat in the wider historical discipline in which the battle still raged over women’s history.96 Had not Scott opted for the ‘high fashion’ of ‘gender’ which (in Gisela Bock’s words) “seeks to soften the challenge of women’s history by developing a kind of gender-neutral discourse on gender”?97 Social historians argued that in Scott’s brand of history, “language replaces material factors,” and terms such as “social change” and Ibid., 293. Scott, ‘Gender,’ 1053, 1054. 93 Ibid., 1063, 1066. 94 Ibid., 1067, 1070. 95 Ibid., 1073. The concepts of ‘man’ and ‘woman’ are both empty and overflowing categories—“[e]mpty because they have no ultimate, transcendent meaning. Overflowing because even when they appear to be fixed, they still contain within them alternative, denied, or suppressed definitions” (1074). 96 Christine Stansell, ‘A Response to Joan Scott,’ International Labor and WorkingClass History 31 (1987): 29. 97 Bock, ‘Women’s History and Gender History,’ 16. 91 92
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“causality” are supplanted by “discourse,” “rhetoric,” and “meaning.”98 But surely, as Scott herself might rejoin, ‘discourse’ does not mean ‘just words;’ ‘discourses’ take shape in communities that bear the marks of their social, economic, and political organization. This is not, Scott writes, to introduce a new form of linguistic determinism, nor to deprive subjects of agency. It is to refuse a separation between “experience” and language and to insist instead on the productive quality of discourse. . . . And subjects do have agency. They are not unified, autonomous individuals exercising free will, but rather subjects whose agency is created through situations and statuses conferred on them. . . . Experience is a subject’s history. Language is the site of history’s enactment. Historical explanation cannot, therefore, separate the two.99
In Scott’s view, women have not here been displaced, but conceived in a new mode, namely, as “a means of representing ideas about social order and social organization.”100 Indeed, replying to her critics, Scott argued that a more radical feminist politics and history requires “a more radical epistemology.”101 Such a history would shift from “the recounting of the great deeds performed by women” to “the exposure of the often silent and hidden operations of gender that are nonetheless present and defining forces in the organization of most societies.”102 Historian Judith Bennett’s moderating assessment of the debate 98 Claudia Koonz, ‘Post Scripts,’ The Women’s Review of Books 6 (1989): 19. Historian Christine Stansell complained, “While we were occupied with realigning social history with formal politics, the edge of speculation has moved away from the nature of society to the nature of knowing; experience lost out to epistemology. . . . the franchise on the big questions . . . has gone to the literati” (‘A Response to Joan Scott,’ 25). Even the history of sexuality, Lyndal Roper objected, should not be reduced to a “linguistic taxonomy” (Oedipus and the Devil, 160). Feminist historian Claudia Koonz pointedly asked, “Are political battles to be won or lost on the field of discourse?” (‘Post Scripts,’ 20). 99 Scott, ‘Evidence,’ 792–93. 100 Joan Wallach Scott, ‘“L’ouvrière! Mot impie, sordide . . .”: Women Workers in the Discourse of French Political Economy, 1840–1860,’ in Scott, Gender and the Politics of History, 162. 101 Joan Wallach Scott, ‘Introduction,’ Gender and the Politics of History, 4. 102 Joan Wallach Scott, ‘Women’s History,’ in Gender and the Politics of History, 27 (an original version of this essay appeared in Past & Present 101 [1983]: 141–57). Nor does moving from a more ‘objective,’ analytical view of history to one that holds history to be an interpretive practice mean that standards are being abandoned, since the community of historians shares “a commitment to accuracy and to procedures of verification and documentation,” although the latter are themselves open to debate and to change ( Joan Wallach Scott, ‘AHR Forum: History in Crisis? The Others’ Side of the Story,’ American Historical Review 94 [1989]: 690).
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seems salutary. For Bennett, gender history “reminds us that many seemingly ‘natural’ ideas about women and men are, in fact, socially constructed, and it has the potential to demolish entirely the academic ‘ghettoization’ of women’s history.” But she also warns that ‘women qua women’ still need more attention from historians, that material reality must always be kept in play, and that the inequality of the sexes should not be ‘intellectualized’ in a way that forgets the “hard lives of women in the past; the material forces that shaped and constrained women’s activities; the ways that women coped with challenges and obstacles”—all of which can get lost in gender history.103 I agree that both women’s history (with its focus on social, political, and economic forces) and gender history (with an edge on the production of knowledge) need to be kept in tandem, most especially for the study of historical eras for which abundant documentation exists. But for my own period of early Christian history in which the extant materials are for the most part ‘texts’ of a highly literary and rhetorical nature, I would argue that the exploration of gender, in both its pre-Scottian and Scottian modes, seems particularly desirable. The arguments of feminist social historians who fault Scott for construing the discipline of history on the model of intellectual history104 seem less applicable to early Christian history, which is, I would posit, largely a subfield of intellectual history. Within religion studies on women and gender, almost all scholars profess to accept the notion of gender as socially constructed; whether many so understand ‘sex’ is dubious.105 At the simplest level, gender 103 Bennett, ‘Feminism and History,’ 258. This formulation, however, suggests a pre-Scottian approach to gender history. 104 I thank Barbara Harris for clarifying this point for me. 105 Kari Borresen, a scholar of women in Christian history and theology, is one of the few who outrightly rejects the sex/gender distinction on which much earlier women’s scholarship was based. Blaming the prevalence of the distinction on social scientists, she believes that the “sharp distinction between sex as biologically determined and gender as culturally constructed” is simply “a relic of androcentrism in asexual disguise.” Labeling her own approach more “holistic,” she argues that “gender” should mean both “psycho-physical sex” and “socio-cultural [constructed] gender.” Her own work, however, does not appear to replicate Judith Butler’s argument, that is, that sex as well as gender should be considered a ‘performance.’ See Kari Elisabeth Borresen, ‘Women’s Studies of the Christian Tradition: New Perspectives,’ in Religion and Gender, 246–47; idem, ‘Recent and Current Research on Women in the Christian Tradition,’ Studia Patristica (= Texte und Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der altchristlichen Literatur) 29 (1997): 224. Borresen’s larger project, however, is to trace the intellectual history of the notion of the imago Dei in Christian theology; see The Image of God: Gender Models in Judaeo-Christian Tradition, ed. Kari Elisabeth Borresen (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995).
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studies ‘lets men in,’ both as subjects for discussion and as authors. As medievalist Allen Frantzen expresses this notion, “gender theory redefines the positions from which one can write about sexual difference; it allows men equal opportunity to assume the positions of feminist critics,” and “also redefines the positions of power in medieval texts and institutions. . . . The role of victimizer and victim can be occupied by men and women alike, and the same men and women can occupy different roles at different times.”106 An explicit focus on men’s studies in religion is still in its infancy; the book Redeeming Men: Religion and Masculinities, one of the first to address the topic wholesale, was published in 1996.107 The book’s introduction underscores the difference between ‘men’s studies’—as ‘critical’ and political—and traditional scholarship by and about men. Acknowledging its debt to feminist theory, the editors cite male studies scholar Harry Brod: “Like women’s studies, men’s studies aims at the emasculation of patriarchal ideology’s masquerade as knowledge.”108 Although most essays I have read under the rubric of men’s studies in religion appear less aggressively ‘emasculating’ than Brod’s statement implies, Redeeming Men does suggest some of the topics that could profitably be discussed under this rubric, e.g., Evelyn Kirkley’s exploration of the ‘Men and Religion Forward Movement’ (with its slogan, ‘More Men for Religion, More Religion for Men’) which, despite its brief heyday in 1911–1912, attempted to counter the Victorian era’s alleged ‘feminization of Christianity’;109 or John Fout’s interpretation of moral purity movements in pre-Nazi Germany as (in Fout’s view) a deliberate attempt “to regulate male behavior with the specific intent of countering the endeavors made by women to carve out a public role. . . .”110 Within Judaism studies, Daniel Boyarin’s and Michael Satlow’s work illuminates our understanding of ‘men in religion.’111
Allen J. Frantzen, ‘When Women Aren’t Enough,’ Speculum 68 (1993): 451. Redeeming Men: Religion and Masculinities, ed. Stephen B. Boyd, W. Merle Longwood, and Mark W. Muesse (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1996). 108 Ibid., xiii–xiv, citing Brod, ‘The Case for Men’s Studies,’ in The Making of Masculinities: The New Men’s Studies, ed. Harry Brod (Winchester, Mass.: George Allen & Unwin, 1987), 40. 109 Evelyn A. Kirkley, ‘Is It Manly To Be Christian? The Debate in Victorian and Modern America,’ in Redeeming Men, esp. 80–83. 110 John C. Fout, ‘Policing Gender: Moral Purity Movements in Pre-Nazi Germany and Contemporary America,’ in Redeeming Men, 104. Also see Fout’s longer study of the topic in the Journal of Men’s Studies 1 (1992): 5–31. 111 Daniel Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct and the Rise of Heterosexuality: The Invention of the 106
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Another much-cited study of gender that relates historiographical problems pertaining to men in addition to women is Jo Ann McNamara’s, ‘The Herrenfrage: The Restructuring of the Gender System.’ McNamara suggests that the question medievalists have debated for over a century, the Frauenfrage (how to understand the alleged medieval problem of disposing of excess women), was precipitated by a crisis over masculinity. In McNamara’s view, the Gregorian Reform destabilized sexual relations in that it accorded superior status only to celibate men, but left unanswered the question of how men could display their ‘manliness’ if not by dominating women.112 Hence ‘the Herrenfrage’. . . . Another aspect of the exploration of gender resonates well with the now-famous aphorism of Lévi-Strauss, that women were “good to think with.”113 They were, to be sure, ‘good’ for thinking about relations between men and women, as exemplified in rhetorical discourses that pertain to authority and to morals.114 Thus Conrad Leyser, writing about the Gregorian Reform: The woman in the texts of Reform is, therefore, like the woman in the courtly romances, or the woman who is Jesus as Mother: she is not an historical agent but a woman to think with. . . . [But, he continues, we need to ask further:] why actors in the drama of Reform should have called upon this rhetorical tradition when they did. . . . why the ancient rhetoric of gender was used to enforce a division of male sexual labour in eleventh-century Europe.115
But if women were good for thinking about power relations between men and women, gender might stretch the ‘ways to think’ still further. If, with Marilyn Strathern, gender is seen as “a code for the
Jewish Man (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Michael L. Satlow, ‘“Try To Be a Man”: The Rabbinic Construction of Masculinity,’ Harvard Theological Review 89 (1996): 19–40; idem, ‘Jewish Constructions of Nakedness in Late Antiquity,’ Journal of Biblical Literature 116 (1997): 429–54. 112 McNamara, ‘The Herrenfrage,’ esp. 3–8. 113 Provocatively developed by Janet Nelson in ‘Women and the Word in the Earlier Middle Ages,’ 58–59, and n. 20: Nelson notes that on the one hand, we should ask, ‘For whom was it good to think?’; on the other, we should reflect on the translation of the phrase, for ‘bonnes à penser’ can also mean ‘goods to think’ (i.e., ‘women as property’). 114 See, for example, Julia M. H. Smith, ‘Gender and Ideology in the Early Middle Ages,’ in Gender and the Christian Religion, 51–73; and Leyser, ‘Custom, Truth, and Gender,’ in the same volume, 75–91. 115 Leyser, ‘Custom, Truth, and Gender,’ 91.
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conceptualisation of difference,”116 it could ‘stand in’ for many things: for example, as an aid for medieval churchmen’s and friars’ conceptualization of God, as Caroline Walker Bynum and John Coakley have taught us;117 as a description of the relation of male master to male disciple in Sufism;118 as an aid to understanding how sacrifice and kinship structures are related;119 or as furnishing the field on which debates about tradition (equated with ‘woman’) were played out in nineteenth-century India.120 In fact, gender analysis could prove useful for the study of many topics in which power is articulated, for example, for class analysis.121 Turning to my own field of specialization, late ancient Christianity, I note that women have been a central focus of scholarship and teaching for three full decades. Various colleagues have raised up for consideration the lives and activities of ‘real’ women, and have called attention to topics such as asceticism and martyrdom in which women receive more textual representation than we might expect, Marilyn Strathern, ‘Marriage Exchanges: A Melanesian Comment,’ Annual Review of Anthropology 13 (1984): 50. 117 Caroline Walker Bynum, ‘ “. . . And Woman His Humanity”: Female Imagery in the Religious Writing of the Later Middle Ages,’ in Gender and Religion: On the Complexity of Symbols, ed. Caroline Walker Bynum, Stevan Harrell, and Paula Richman (Boston: Beacon Press: 1986), 257–288; idem, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages, Publications for the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, UCLA, 16 (Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982); John Coakley, ‘Gender and the Authority of the Friars: The Significance of Holy Women for Thirteenth-Century Franciscans and Dominicans,’ Church History 60 (1991): 445–60; idem, ‘Friars, Sanctity, and Gender: Mendicant Encounters with Saints, 1250–1325,’ in Medieval Masculinities, 91–110. 118 Margaret Malamud, ‘Gender and Spiritual Self-Fashioning: The Master-Disciple Relationship in Classical Sufism,’ Journal of the American Academy of Religion 64 (1996); esp. 101–102: when female imagery was applied to the disciples, it betokened their ‘dependence and subordination,’ but when applied to the master, it suggested creative and nurturing powers. 119 Nancy Jay, ‘Sacrifice as Remedy for Having Been Born of Woman,’ in Immaculate and Powerful, 283–309. 120 Mani, ‘Contentious Traditions,’ 90, 118. Mani writes (118): “Tradition was thus not the ground on which the status of women was being contested. Rather the reverse was true: women in fact became the site on which tradition was debated and reformulated. What was at stake was not women but tradition.” Or in one last example, how female characters in religious literature could be used to introduce novel ways of thinking about philosophy, as in the story of Gargi at the king’s court in the Brhadaranyaka Upanishad: see Ellison Banks Findly in ‘Gargi at the King’s Court: Women and Philosophic Innovation in Ancient India,’ in Women, Religion and Social Change, esp. 38, 45. 121 Scott, ‘Gender,’ 1069, 1073, emphasizing that the nature of the process depends on its specific historical determination. 116
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given their absence from most discussions of ‘high theology.’ Yet much less attention has been paid to the ways in which ‘woman’ or ‘the female’ becomes a rhetorical code for other concerns. In part, this inattention may stem from the fact that patristics is a highly traditional field of study, many of whose practitioners reject theoretical incursions onto their scholarly turf, or indeed, even analyses that employ concepts now common to a modern scholarly vocabulary. Nonetheless, the slowness seems more surprising insofar as most ancient Christian writings—highly literary and rhetorical in their construction—fall squarely into the category of textually oriented intellectual history. Although some of us for a decade or two played that we were anthropologists, encountering ‘real natives’ in our texts, I would argue that we should now register more fully that the written materials surviving from late ancient Christianity are almost exclusively ‘texts,’ not ‘documents.’ And if we believe, with ancient historian Averil Cameron, that “[l]anguage is one of the first and most fundamental elements in the construction of sexual identity,”122 then attention to the ways in which patristic authors construct ‘woman’ (and much else) through their discourse seems mandatory. To study the meaning of the rhetoric pertaining to women—in addition to raising up women as agents and victims—enlarges our historical perspective. I wish to cite just one book to illustrate how gender analysis of this type might enlarge our understandings of the texts of late antiquity. Among recent studies of early Christian women, a book that successfully employs the category of gender is Kate Cooper’s The Virgin and the Bride: Idealized Womanhood in Late Antiquity.123 Published in 1996, Cooper’s book details the disruptions that the rising tide of ascetic fervor—especially a fervor for sexual renunciation—wrought on ancient Roman notions of chaste matronhood. Cooper explores the “conventions by which gender-specific characteristics were assigned to women and to men, and the rhetorical ends that such conventions could serve,” an exploration that not only illuminates “the relations between men and women,” but also “the competition for power between men and other men.”124 She examines the ideology that
122 Averil Cameron, ‘Sacred and Profane Love: Thoughts on Byzantine Gender,’ in Women, Men and Eunuchs, 17. 123 Kate Cooper, The Virgin and the Bride: Idealized Womanhood in Late Antiquity (Cambridge/London: Harvard University Press, 1996). 124 Ibid., 4.
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measured a man’s suitability for public duties by the (assumed) quality of his marital relationship.125 The much-lauded concord between husband and wife thus “served as an emblem of . . . the self-mastery that made men reliable citizens.”126 Aristocratic chaste matrons thus assume a “symbolic position as arbiters of masculine virtue,” a symbolic function that the coming of Christian asceticism, with its message of sexual and marital renunciation, fiercely challenged. Indeed, Christian asceticism questioned whether there was “a religiously positive role for married couples, and a socially positive role for married women. . . .”127 Yet Cooper nuances her argument with a further observation: despite asceticism’s throwing a “wild card” into Roman notions of social rank by its disruption of “inherited patterns for negotiating status,” it (somewhat ironically) “drew from the same rhetorical font as did the ideal of a chaste wife as guarantor of social concord: both sought to dissociate particular women from the stereotype of the gender as persuaders to vice, while leaving unchallenged the stereotype itself.”128 Cooper’s book, then, explores the construction and deployments of gender, and illustrates well “the volatile role of gender in the discourse of moral superiority,” as she puts it.129 Here we come to understand better the complexities of late ancient aristocratic manhood by seeing something about men in relation to ‘their’ women—women as ‘real’ and as symbolic of wider social values.130 Finally, I would urge that as scholars of religious history continue to raise up the lives of ‘real women’ in ways that expand and alter our understanding, that scholars of religion also remember the utility for religious studies of Roger Chartier’s recommendation that historical work be an exercise in analyzing the process of representation and the function of ideas in ideological systems.131 Ibid., 5–11. Ibid., 5. A man’s practice of sexual temperance—manifest in his harmonious, faithful relationship to a wife—was understood to signal “the self-control of a male protagonist in matters other than the sexual” (11). 127 Ibid., 14, 82. See 16–17: Cooper aims “to chart the subversion of the rhetorical economy itself. . . .” 128 Ibid., 85–86, 113. 129 Ibid., 147. 130 Likewise, Cooper’s essay, ‘Apostles, Ascetic Women, and Questions of Audience: New Reflections on the Rhetoric of Gender in the Apocryphal Acts,’ SBL Seminar Papers 1992, 147–53, texts which, she argues, were “made-to-measure for rhetorical purposes” (149); the fight to win women for Christianity in the Apocryphal Acts is “not really about women,” but “represents a challenge to the social order” (151). 131 Roger Chartier, Cultural History: Between Practices and Representations, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), 13–14, 34. 125 126
AGENCY AND EVIDENCE IN FEMINIST STUDIES OF RELIGION: A RESPONSE TO ELIZABETH CLARK Amy Hollywood Elizabeth Clark begins her paper by distinguishing women’s studies in religion, which she associates with the practices of social history and “analyses of change and causation,”1 and gender studies in religion, which she associates with textual analysis and the explication of meaning. She therefore reads the move from women’s studies to gender studies as paralleling that from social history to cultural history (and of course, as Clark shows, neither women’s studies nor social history disappears).2 The association is very useful, allowing Clark to chart a wide range of material on women and gender in religion and the points of convergence and disagreement within this scholarship. In response to her paper, I would like to highlight two central areas of conflict between women’s studies and gender studies that emerge in Clark’s account, the first having to do with historical agency and the second with the nature of evidence. Clark poses the second in terms of the relationship between ‘documents’ and ‘texts,’ a distinction to which I will return toward the end of my response. This question of evidence is related, I think, to the first area of conflict in feminist work in history and religion: the fear, often voiced by social historians of women, that the turn to texts and the analysis of gender replaces actual women with discourse, social practices with language, and—underlying these worries—denies agency to historical women, reading them instead as hopelessly and deterministically mired in misogynist systems of meaning. Yet Clark makes a similar charge in her discussion of women’s history, suggesting that agency remains a problem for both camps. (This raises the question of whether the distinction between women’s Elizabeth A. Clark, ‘Engendering the Study of Religion,’ 217. For more on the shift from social history to cultural history, see Roger Chartier, Cultural History: Between Practices and Representations, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988); and Mark Poster, Cultural History and Postmodernity: Disciplinary Readings and Challenges (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). 1 2
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studies and gender studies and Clark’s association of that distinction with the one between social and cultural history ultimately hold true.) As Clark argues, women’s religious patronage in early Christianity “depends less on the sheer fact of ‘femaleness’ than on class.”3 This is tied to a worry voiced by Lyndal Roper when she argues that it is still unclear “how gender itself effects social change.”4 If gender is entwined with “class, law, social custom, generational difference, and religious hierarchy,” Clark suggests, then the agency of women as women seems called into question.5 (Would the same be true for men, with the curious result that the gender of historical agents would once again be rendered historically insignificant?) For Roper, the problem is that gender tends not to work as an explanatory category and that, in order to understand changes in gender relations, historians and theorists revert to the ‘old chestnuts’ (the Reformation, the Renaissance, or Absolutism, for example.) Yet one must ask whether these kinds of claims themselves explain anything. Isn’t the point, as with gender, that we need to think about what caused the changes known descriptively as the Reformation or the Renaissance? (Or, as Joan Kelly asks, whether, from the perspective of women, these changes even occurred?) Similarly, might not both women’s history and gender history be interested in tracking shifts in societal configurations of sexual difference as well as their possible causes? And might these causes emerge both from the interplay and enactment of ideologies of sexual difference as well as from other ideologies and practices? The confusion between description and explanation in part emerges when a certain kind of women’s history—with its social historical agenda—encounters and takes over the category of gender (developed as an analytic category for cultural and textual analysis).6 According Clark, ‘Engendering,’ 219. Lyndal Roper, Oedipus and the Devil: Witchcraft, Sexuality and Religion in Early Modern Europe (New York: Routledge, 1994), 15. 5 Clark, ‘Engendering,’ 220. 6 On the distinction between description and explanation in religious studies, see Wayne Proudfoot, Religious Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). Proudfoot argues that descriptive reductionism, in which a person’s experiences are described in terms foreign to them, is a problem in a way that explanatory reductionism is not. This suggests that contemporary theoretical tools should only be used for the task of historical explanation, not that of description. Yet in fact modern theoretical categories can help historians see things about the past, and so describe them, that are often otherwise rendered invisible by the degree to which they are presumed and unspoken within the earlier historical moment. Gender is one such 3 4
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to Nancy Fraser, Joan Scott, Linda Gordon, and other gender theorists and historians (who are often also, it should be noted, social historians, although perhaps of a new kind), gender is not a causal category— raising the question of whether an abstraction itself can cause anything— but rather an analytic and descriptive one. Moreover, the kind of genealogical analysis that often (although certainly not always) accompanies the turn to gender as an analytic category is not meant, as Fraser and Gordon explain in their study of the term ‘dependency,’ as a causal analysis. “Rather, by contrasting present meanings of dependence with past meanings, we aim to defamiliarize taken-forgranted beliefs in order to render them susceptible to critique and to illuminate present-day conflicts.”7 This is precisely what much of the new historical and genealogical work on gender attempts to do. Seen from this perspective, the worry that femaleness or gender can’t explain historical change is, at least in part, misguided. Nor is Roper’s worry, cited by Clark, that “vast historical changes may barely disturb the relations of power between men and women” in itself a problem.8 Rather, historians might be interested in charting precisely the “uneven developments” and possible discontinuities “between positions occupied within the economic, political, and symbolic orders.”9 (For Roper, the issue is that there is less change than we might desire and so less room for defamiliarization. This is at least in part an issue to be decided empirically, although differing theoretical emphases will affect the extent to which change or continuity in gender relations are brought to the fore.) Again, I think the real worry for Clark, as becomes evident in one of her footnotes, is about agency and the related question of the nature of historical explanation. While gender historians might claim to be content simply to describe and analyze configurations of gender within various historical moments, most historians want to tool of analysis. At issue here is the extent to which such a category can be translated to other times and places, a question that can only be answered through careful historical work. 7 Nancy Fraser and Linda Gordon, ‘A Genealogy of “Dependency”: Tracing a Keyword of the U.S. Welfare State,’ in Nancy Fraser, Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the “Postsocialist” Condition (New York: Routledge, 1997), 122. Cited in Amy Allen, The Power of Feminist Theory: Domination, Resistance, Solidarity (Boulder: Westview, 1999), 51. 8 Clark, ‘Engendering,’ 220. Citing Roper, Oedipus and the Devil, 37. 9 Clark, ‘Engendering,’ 220. Citing John Frow, Marxism and Literary History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 76.
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do more. So, oddly, the problem of agency becomes as much if not more of a problem for social historians, who do seek to explain history. The clear distinction Clark attempts to make between women’s studies approaches and gender history, like that between social and cultural history on which it rests, here begins to break down.10 “Even Joan Kelly,” Clark writes, “who doubtless wished to claim as much ‘agency’ for women as possible, points to the mode of production and property relations as keys to understanding women’s roles.”11 Yet what would Clark put in the place of these economic factors as the explanation for women’s social roles? ‘Femininity’ and ‘gender’? Or the self-determining agency of individual women themselves? Is the fear here that women are only real historical agents if femininity or gender is itself an agent—if that which acts within them is their gender or, put another way, if they act insofar as they are women (rather than despite being women and/or insofar as they are rich, like the women heads of early Christian house churches mentioned by Clark)? Or is the fear that using economic categories to explain women’s roles effaces their individual agency as actors in history? In response to the first reading, as Clark makes clear, there is no simple ‘femininity’ in the present or the past; gender differentiation is always complexly tied to issues of social status, race, class, and sexuality (and often, Clark reminds us, religion). With regard to the second possible reading of Clark’s worry, we need to recognize, following the work of philosophers like Michel Foucault and Judith Butler, that power is productive as well as constraining and that the very means for producing subjects of a certain type both limits the possibilities open to these subjects and provides the conditions necessary for agency. In other words, the split between agency and determination or victimization that underlies Clark’s account of the debates between women’s studies and gender studies (although she actually shows that the problem emerges in both approaches to history) is itself over-drawn, thereby obscuring the ways in which the very conditions that bring about subordination are also the source of agency (however limited or constrained that agency might be in Crucial to this breakdown is the issue of historical explanation, one to which feminist historiography might usefully turn its attention. See, for example, Christopher Lloyd, Explanation in Social History (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1986), and Allan Megill, ‘Recounting the Past: “Description,” Explanation, and Narrative in Historiography,’ The American Historical Review 94 (1989): 627–53. 11 Clark, ‘Engendering,’ 220, n. 17. 10
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particular situations of subordination—even at times to the point of effacing agency entirely).12 The philosopher Amy Allen argues that Foucault’s account of power is rendered problematic by its inability to account for agency. According to Allen, Foucault needs an account of what mediates between subjects’ agency and the power that both subjects them and makes them subjects. This is provided, she goes on to argue, by Butler’s account of citationality.13 Subjectivity is taken on through a complex series of performative citations of the norms that constitute subjectivity within a given society. “However, the very fact that it is necessary for norms to be reiterated or cited by individuals in order for them to maintain their efficacy indicates that we are never completely determined by them. . . . If we were completely determined by gender norms, there would be no need for us to continually cite and reiterate them; that we are continually compelled to do so gives us good reason for thinking that we are not so determined.”14 And, I would add, we are continually compelled to do so because our ability to act in meaningful ways depends on our becoming (at least marginally) recognizable subjects (to at least some social group or subgroup). This raises another issue, however, as Amanda Anderson shows in her analysis of feminist historical work on gender in the Victorian era. For Anderson, feminist literary historians like Nancy Armstrong and Mary Poovey fail to distinguish adequately between historical agency and critical reflection. Their accounts, which “position women as continuous with modern discipline or regulation create not exactly an empowered but rather simply a powered subject.” The portrayal of these ‘passive agents’—women who through their actions help bring about precisely the changes to modern subjectivity Armstrong and Poovey chart—is, Anderson argues, compensated for by “anomalous portraits of aggrandized agency.” In other words, while these historians grant most of the women they study an agency that involves little or no critical detachment or self-reflection on their role as agents of social, cultural, and political change, a handful of women are portrayed as fully cognizant of and actively manipulating the cultural and social scripts available to them.15 For Anderson, these ‘portraits 12 On this issue, see Amy Allen’s discussion of the distinction between power and domination in Foucault’s work. Allen, Power of Feminist Theory, 43–51. 13 A notion Butler borrows from Derrida, although with important modifications. 14 Allen, Power of Feminist Theory, 73. 15 The other question buried here is that of the political and moral quality of
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of aggrandized agency’ are a return of the repressed within feminist history, in which the forms of self-reflection denied to past agents (and assumed by the historian) are attributed (over-attributed, Anderson argues) to certain exceptional women. What goes untheorized and unreflected on by the historian, Anderson argues, is “the forms of critical detachment that underwrite aspirations to systemic understandings of the social totality, and the forms of political action that might fuel, accompany, or issue from such understandings.”16 The problem, I think, becomes even more complex when we move outside of the modern West to moments when critical reflection is understood in radically different ways.17 Despite these complexities—or perhaps because of them—Clark’s hope that women’s social history and the examination of the ideological constructions of gender can co-exist seems both realizable and necessary. Yet Susannah Heschel, in a paper on gender and Jewish historiography, asks directly another question lurking in the interstices of Clark’s: do the postmodern approaches to textuality render “the text unable to serve as a source of historical information because it is defined as an ideological expression?”18 Put in Clark’s terms, if we read documents as texts, is their value as documents undermined? The issue here is that of evidence. Can texts shaped by gender ideologies serve as evidence about women’s lives? The answer, Clark suggests, is sometimes and in some ways. First, as Clark notes, we need to think about the genre of texts—the purposes for which they were written and the audiences they addressed. Some texts, it must women’s (and men’s) agency. Much work in women’s history and gender studies continues to read women’s lives in terms of agency and victimization. Even when that narrative has been subverted, a tendency remains to read passive agency as political regressive and what Anderson calls aggrandized agency as progressive. Even Anderson herself seems to presume that the theorization of critical self-reflection will involve the articulation of a necessarily progressive stance. The possibility that someone could be a self-reflective female agent and a social conservative or a perpetrator of violence remains unarticulated in much of this literature. Feminist historiography still remains caught in a hagiographical mode in which women are seen either as victims or as merely passive—and hence not fully responsible—agents. Conversations with Susannah Heschel helped me to articulate this point. 16 Amanda Anderson, ‘The Temptations of Aggrandized Agency: Feminist Histories and the Horizon of Modernity,’ Victorian Studies 43 (2000): 57. 17 For example, what do we do with medieval women mystics who both claim that they are nothing and that God alone acts through and in them. Here the contrast between passive and aggrandized agency takes on entirely new meanings. 18 Susannah Heschel, ‘Gender and Jewish Historiography,’ Conference at Schloss Elmau ( July 16–18, 2000), 11.
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be acknowledged, are more ideologically driven than others, or driven in different ways, or by competing and often conflicting ideologies. Hagiography, for example, should be read differently than court documents. Court documents will provide different kinds of evidence and have different measures of reliability depending on whether they are from ecclesial or civil courts, and so on. Only the kind of care in textual analysis promoted by cultural historians (although certainly not unknown to historians before the emergence of the new cultural history) can begin to articulate and assess these differences. Secondly, as Clark points out, knowledge of prevalent ideologies is itself a kind of historical knowledge. It may tell us more about the men who generally authored these writings than about women or their lives, but it does tell us something about the climate in which they all lived. Arguably, male-authored writings provide a portion of the ‘script’ by means of which subjectification occurs. Yet they shouldn’t be taken on their own and without other supporting documents or artifacts as direct evidence for how women cited this script and/or whether they enacted other culturally available scripts in order to resist those found within any individual text or group of texts. Perhaps most importantly, we have to ask what role these scripts (or ideologies or belief systems) played within the worlds in which they were produced and read. Were they just throw aways and dead metaphors or were they ‘socially and legally regulated’ norms? And what of the regulatory power of belief itself?19 The latter is a particularly crucial question for those of us interested in religion, as Clark’s turn to the theological dimension of early Christian texts so powerfully demonstrates.
19 As Kate Cooper convincingly shows with regard to early Christian texts, for example, conceptions of femininity that appear first in texts authored by and addressed to men as ways to think through important shifts in social organization and ideologies are later read and taken up as livable scripts by women. See Kate Cooper, The Virgin and the Bride: Idealized Womanhood in Late Antiquity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 67.
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DETRADITIONALIZING THE STUDY OF RELIGION Paul Heelas
. . . it is necessary to be aware of confusing a free, private, optional religion, fashioned according to one’s own needs and understanding, with a religion handed down by tradition, formulated for a whole group and which it is obligatory to practise. The two disciplines which are so different cannot meet the same needs: one is completely orientated towards the individual, the other towards society. Emile Durkheim1 Whether we believe in God or not, I think most of us have a sense of the spiritual, that recognition of a deeper meaning and purpose in our lives. The Queen2
Introduction Generally speaking, the study of religion remains strongly traditionalized. Most scholars of religion consider themselves to be specialists in particular traditions. During the last couple of decades or so, however, increasing numbers of voices have argued that religious studies has become over-traditionalized. The (postmodern, postcolonial) argument is that many (all?) religious traditions are reifications or constructions, owing a great deal to the essentializing, rationalizing, and regulating ambitions of the colonialists and their high modernist academic legitimators. Accordingly, so the argument goes, religious studies is currently over-traditionalized in that scholars are studying western constructions or reifications, rather than those complexities, those micro-narratives or ‘small things’ which are revealed when traditions are deconstructed. (This is the underlying argument, for example, of Mark C. Taylor’s edited volume, Critical Terms for Religious Studies.)3 1 Emile Durkheim, in W. S. F. Pickering, ed., Durkheim on Religion (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975), 96. 2 The Queen, Christmas Day Speech, 2000 (as recorded by Heelas). 3 Mark C. Taylor, ed., Critical Terms for Religious Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
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Like the postmodernists and postcolonialists I want to argue that the study of religion should be less strongly tradition-focused than is currently the case. However, my argument is neither post-modern nor post-colonial. Instead, it relies on the fact that major changes are underway in the religious sphere. Of particular note, a spiritual revolution has taken place in many (all?) ‘western’ settings: a revolution which concerns an apparently massive shift away from traditionalized, institutionalized theistic religion in favor of (largely) detraditionalized, (largely) deinstitutionalized spiritualities of life—exemplified by New Age spirituality whilst also being of much broader scope. And the spiritual revolution means that the study of religion has to change. New questions are raised; new methods of study have to be developed; new languages of description and interpretation are called for; new theories are required; in sum, the revolution sets a new agenda. As for the meaning of detraditionalization—a concept which plays a key role in what follows—the basic idea is that this involves a shift of authority: from without to within, with ‘voice’ being displaced from established sources as it comes to rest with the experiencing, authorial subject.4 It must be emphasized that the term very much refers to a process, or set of processes, which take place along a spectrum. Any tradition can be detraditionalized to varying degrees (and, conversely, any tradition can be traditionalized to varying degrees). Thinking specifically of religion, liberal Christianity, with the critical role played by human reason, is more detraditionalized than conservative Christianity, where the authoritative role is played by that which transcends the self; spiritualities of life (or New Age spiritualities), where authority is experienced as resting with that which is immanent or integral to the ‘natural’ order, are more detraditionalized— if not post-traditionalized—than either. Detraditionalization involves a shift from transcendental religion to spiritualities which do not belong to any tradition: but there are many places along the way.5 See Paul Heelas, Scott Lash and Paul Morris, eds., Detraditionalization (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996). 5 The end point of the detraditionalization of religion is post-traditional spirituality. So although detraditionalization might contribute to secularization (as when liberal religion ceases to appeal because there is so little tradition left), it is not the same thing: the endpoint of secularization is ultimately no religion or spirituality. 4
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A Spiritual Revolution? There is ample evidence that institutionalized traditions, most especially the churches, chapels, and cathedrals of Christianity in ‘western’ settings, have been eroded by the forces of secularization. Life after tradition, it is often claimed, is therefore taking the form of atheism, agnosticism, or simply indifference to what the religious realm has to offer. Religion, it appears, is giving way to secularity. But the evidence supports another interpretation. Whilst it shows that institutionalized religious traditions are not (generally speaking) faring well under the conditions of late modernity, there has not in fact been a great surge in the numbers of atheists, agnostics, and the indifferent. And not all forms of institutionalized religion are faring badly. The explanation suggested here is that rather than the religious simply giving way to the secular, the religious (for God) also is giving way to the spiritual (for life). Religion can be defined in terms of obedience to a transcendent God and a tradition which mediates that authority; spirituality as experience of the divine as immanent in life. Whilst the former is under threat, it will be argued that the latter is thriving. And it is doing well in two spheres: (a) amongst those who are not involved with institutionalized religion (church, chapel, mosque, temple)—which helps explain why numbers of atheists, agnostics, and the indifferent are not increasing as rapidly as might be expected given the overall decline of tradition, and (b) within the field of traditionalized religion itself—which explains why not all forms of the institutionalized are faring badly. Characterizing and locating ‘religion’ and ‘spirituality’ Before providing a portrayal of how spirituality is flourishing in territories beyond institutionalized traditions and in some contexts within the traditionalized frame of reference, more needs to be said about what it means to refer to religion and spirituality. And together with this task, how is the decline of religion and the growth of spirituality to be ‘mapped’ with regard to what is happening to beliefs (from the religious to the atheistic) in ‘western’ societies? The distinction between spirituality and religion, not just analytical but also covering what these terms have come to mean for many people, has been long in the making. And the distinction has come
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into greater prominence during and since the 1960s, many coming to treat spirituality as that which lies within and religion as that which lies without. Religion, as defined by the Oxford Concise Dictionary, involves “belief in a superhuman controlling power especially in a personal God entitled to obedience and worship; expression of this in worship; a thing that one is devoted to.” Religion is thus very much God-centered, with no mention—at least in the definition—of any affirmation of life in the here-and-now. Furthermore, especially since the 1960s, religion has increasingly come to be seen as that which is institutionalized, involving: prescribed rituals; established ways of believing; the ‘official,’ as regulated and transmitted by religious authorities; that which is enshrined in tradition; the ethical commandments of sacred texts; and the voice of the authority of the transcendent. Indeed, for many it has also come to be associated with the formal, dogmatic, and hierarchical, if not the impersonal or patriarchal. One of the people interviewed during a study carried out by Robert Wuthnow says, “Religion is something outside of yourself. There’s somebody in the pulpit telling you things, but I needed to know from the inside.”6 And this leads us to the key characteristics which have come to be associated with spirituality. Spirituality has to do with the personal; that which is interior or immanent; that which is one’s experienced relationship with the sacred; and that wisdom or knowledge which derives from such experiences. At heart, spirituality has come to mean life. The equation is Spirituality = Life = Spirituality = Life, Life being taken to mean the spiritually-informed personal, intimate, experiential, existential, ‘psychological,’ self and relational-cum-self depths of what it is to be alive: rather than life as led in terms of the stresses and strains, ambitions and configurations that the (capitalistic) world has to offer. Life, rather than what transcends life in the experiential here-and-now, becomes Ultimate, which means that (much) contemporary spirituality may more precisely be termed spirituality of life. Turning now to the issue of locating religion and spirituality, if indeed a shift has taken place from religion to spirituality, perhaps amounting to a spiritual revolution, where has it taken place? This question is now looked at by reference to three countries, Sweden,
6
Robert Wuthnow, After Heaven (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 182.
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the USA, and Britain. Certainly in Sweden and Britain, the evidence suggests that although the numbers involved in institutionalized traditions in these countries are small, and declining, the numbers of atheists or agnostics are also quite small, and not increasing significantly. There seem, therefore, to be a lot of people in the ‘betwixt-andbetween’ who are neither involved in traditional religion nor identify themselves as atheist or agnostic. This suggests that if a spiritual revolution is underway, it could well be located among this area of the population—people who may believe in ‘something’ (in that they are not atheists or agnostics), but who are not obviously religious in the traditional sense. Numerical evidence does indeed support the idea of a ‘middle territory’ betwixt-and-between regular attendees and atheists/agnostics in both Sweden and the USA. In Sweden, regular attendance of traditional religion—at 2%—is on the point of total collapse. Yet only some 15% or so of the population think of themselves as atheist or agnostic. That means 83% are betwixt-and-between. In the USA, the great majority (94%) ‘believe in God.’ On first sight, institutional attendance is very much higher than Sweden, with 42% stating that they participate in congregational worship. On closer inspection, however, when church attendance is actually counted on the ground the figure drops to around 20%. The middle territory then amounts to 74% of the population rather than the 52% suggested by less reliable self-reporting. And as for Britain, surveys show the numerical growth of the middle territory. Between 1950 and 1990 there has been a much larger decline of regular attendees than there has been an increase in atheists or agnostics: resulting in an 18% increase in the betwixt-and-between sector (from 48% to 66%). All this evidence (and much more could be provided) turns attention to what is going on among those who are neither atheists/agnostics nor regular attendees. The first point to make is that it would be foolish to deny that a very considerable variety of beliefs and practices are present. Drawing on evidence from a range of sources, these might include: non-attending traditionalists; nominal ‘Christians’ or rites of passage ‘Christians’ (who only attend for ceremonial purposes); those who believe in ‘some sort of spirit or life force’ or in possessing a ‘soul’; belief in the paranormal or angels; those who experience the sacred in nature (63% in Finland); those who hold the ‘there are more things in heaven and earth . . . than were dreamt of in your philosophy’ outlook or the closely related ‘I’m not religious . . .
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I definitely believe in something’ view; and out-of-the ordinary ‘religious’ or ‘spiritual’ experiences. The second point is that it is reasonable to suppose that the majority—if not the great majority—who are somehow religious or spiritual without being regular attendees are involved with the (relatively) detraditionalized activities. True, some of the things taking place are not detraditionalized (the Bible reader in an old people’s home, for example). But as for the rest, the fact is that those involved are not interested in participating in traditionalized religion. And this strongly suggests that they do not want to be encumbered with too much (if any) tradition. Given this range of (largely detraditionalized) activities and beliefs, is it possible to argue that a spiritual revolution is underway within the territories between institutionalized religion and atheism/agnosticism? I believe so, much indicating that a great deal of what is taking place in the territories beyond institutionalized-cum-traditionalized religion has indeed to do with life-cum-spirituality. New Age spiritualities of life The most visible expression and articulation of life-spirituality is the New Age movement. And there is much to indicate that it is growing. Yet—it will be argued below—the New Age is not only of significance in itself. Just as importantly, it can be viewed as a symptom of something wider, a spiritual revolution more broadly conceived in mainstream culture. The New Age may very well be just the most visible tip of the iceberg. To briefly introduce the New Age, Life- or Self-spirituality is characterized by three basic themes. First, life lived out of the ‘ego’ or ‘lower self ’—what we are by virtue of socialization-cum-traditionalized—does not work. Second, from birth (if not before) our true, pre-social-cum-traditionalized, or integral essence, is of a spiritual nature. And third, spiritual disciplines provide the way within, from the lower to the higher realm of being. Overall, the great cry is: practice, engage, find ‘what works for yourself,’ find your truth of experience. In the words of Kahlil Gibran, “He who sees his real self sees the truth of real life for himself.”7 Clearly New Age spiritualities are very much about life: identifying what is wrong with one’s life at the level 7
Kahlil Gibran, The Little Book of Life’s Wisdom (London: Arrow, 2000).
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of ego-operations; realizing one’s inner, true life by way of transformative practice. Equally clearly, such spiritualities are (albeit to varying degrees) detraditionalized. With spirituality lying within the self—together, for many, within the natural order as a whole—one’s spiritually-informed experience is the only true source of authority and judgement. No external source of authority or judgement should simply be relied upon, for it could well be contaminated by the egooperations of others. Indeed, in the most radical quarters one does not even listen to the guru or master: except, perhaps, by way of one’s own spiritually-informed experience. Hence books with titles like If you Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him!, and songs with lines like “And I turned to you and I said/No Guru, no method, no teacher.” Ultimately, the aim is to experience life as one’s own inner-directed life. Aiming to express one’s own life to the full, traditions, with their supra-self, externally sustained frames of reference and injunction, can have little or no role to play. For they dictate life as that which is spelt out by the tradition. As Martin Goodman puts it, “I will be a Filament of Life but an Affiliate of No one.”8 But are New Age spiritualities of life a growing force, perhaps adding up to a spiritual revolution? Such spiritualities have a wellestablished history in the ‘west,’ belonging as they do to the ‘Romantic’ strand of western culture. Think, for example, of Shelley’s “the god of my own heart”; “the divinity of man’s own nature”; the “divine beauty of life”; or think of Tolstoy’s “Life is everything. Life is God. Everything changes and moves in that movement is God. And while there is life there is joy in consciousness of the divine. To love life is to love God. Harder and more blessed than all else is to love this life in one’s sufferings, innocent sufferings.” Cutting a long story short, until the 1960s New Age spiritualities of life were largely— although by no means entirely—the concern of writers, artists, and professional people (often from the upper middle classes). During the 1960s, however, the quest for inner spirituality shifted from being the concern of (relatively) small numbers of the cultural elite (with their ‘centers of life’, such as the Tolstoyan community Whiteway, in the Cotswolds) to being the concern of much greater numbers of younger people. With the counter-culture, the inner quest entered the campus and became adopted by many of those ‘baby boomers’ who were then coming of age and going to university or college. 8
Martin Goodman, In Search of the Divine Mother (London: Thorsons, 1998), 36.
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As for what has happened since the 1960s, there is little doubting the fact that New Age spiritualities of life have continued to increase in numerical significance. It is true that the counter-culture (the ‘home’ of spiritualities of life during the 1960s and earlier 1970s) has largely withered away. However, the New Age has developed a more ‘complementary’ relationship with the mainstream: and it is in this connection that most growth has taken place. Consider, for example, the expansion of ‘new spiritual outlets.’ These are comprised of individual practitioners, or small(ish) groups led by practitioners, who cater for the spiritual quest: typically of those who live mainstream rather than counter-cultural lives. Practitioners offer any number of methods to help participants experience healing, growth, wholeness, tranquility, vitality, or wisdom. And there is pretty conclusive evidence that new spiritual outlets have grown. There is little doubting the fact, for example, that there has been a very considerable increase in number and size of that key ‘institution’ of the New Age, namely all those magazines which direct people to new spiritual outlets. Or one can think of findings from the Kendal project (a study, among other things, of spirituality in this town). There are approaching 100 spiritual practitioners, catering for around some 650 clients and group members on a weekly basis: almost certainly far larger numbers than would have been the case in, say, 1970. Together with new spiritual outlets which involve face-to-face experiential practice, we can also think of new spiritual outlets which provide material to be taken home. The book, the music, the video, the magazine; or indeed, the material that can be found at home, by way of the internet. Considering just one of the ways of providing (potentially) spiritually enlightening material, namely the book, it would be hard to refute the claim that growth has taken place. From 1993 to 1997, for example, there was a 75.5% increase in the UK of ‘New Age/occult’ publications. Then there are those new spiritual outlets which operate directly within the mainstream of society, aiming to replace or complement existing institutional arrangements with those which are more enlightened. The hospice movement, for example, whilst also involving other forms of the sacred, has certainly grown in Britain and other countries, and is very much focused on spiritually-informed meanings of life. Or think of schools, in particular at the primary level, with classes on ‘RE’ or personal and social ‘values’ dwelling on shared (supra-traditional) ‘experiential spirituality.’ Only fifty years ago schools
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taught Christianity, and by rote; in Britain at least, there is relatively little of this left today. Or consider the fact that new spiritualities of life have increasingly entered the very heartlands of capitalistic modernity, namely big business, with the rapid growth of New Age management trainings. A recent survey in Britain finds that 39% have tried or experienced ‘alternative medicine,’ with 22% having practiced meditation. Figures such as these do not of course demonstrate ‘serious’ involvement with New Age spiritualities of life (‘alternative medicine’ could simply mean, for example, buying aromatherapy at a major drug store). But they are suggestive. What is more, a major study carried out in the States finds that 31% of ‘baby boomers’ say that ‘people have God within them.’ And as we shall see below, there would appear to be 14% in the States who identify themselves as ‘metaphysical believers and seekers.’ There is also the consideration that a survey carried out in Texas found 66% reporting that ‘spiritual truth comes from within.’ And in Holland, 16% of youth claim to have been influenced by New Age or Eastern religions.9 Spiritualities of life in mainstream culture New Age spiritualities are a growing force in mainstream culture. Indeed, in some localities (such as Marin County, north of San Francisco), it could well be the case that the spiritual revolution has taken place in that more people are now engaging in the face to face encounters provided by new spiritual outlets than with the congregations of tradition. (In passing, it can also be noted that there are recorded instances of New Age spiritual outlets buying church and chapel properties.) It would be rash, though, to conclude that New Age spiritualities of life—in Britain as well as in other countries— have ‘overtaken’ traditionalized religion in the population at large. There is simply not the evidence to support such a conclusion. But there is another way of arguing that a spiritual revolution is underway. This involves pointing to evidence that spiritualities of life—of a more indeterminate, inchoate, if not mysterious nature than is to be found in explicit New Age circles—are widespread in the culture, there also being evidence of growth relative to traditional beliefs. 9 For more on the numerical significance of New Age spiritualities of life, see Paul Heelas, The New Age Movement (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996).
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Consider, in this regard, surveys which show that belief in a spirit or life force has overtaken the traditional (theistic) belief in a personal God. Thus as Robin Gill et al. report for Britain, belief in ‘God as personal’ has declined from 43% during the 1940s and 1950s to 31% during the 1990s, with ‘God as Spirit or Life Force’ having increased from 38% to 40% during the same period of time.10 As for Europe, the overall picture—for the 1980s—is that 32% believe in a personal God, 36% in a spirit or life force. Consideration can also be paid to a very recent (2000) survey, carried out for the BBC’s ‘Soul of Britain’ series. Involving detailed telephone interviews with 1000 people, the survey shows that whereas 26% express belief in a personal God, 44% believe in some kind of spirit or life force or that ‘there is something there’ (with only 8% ‘convinced atheists,’ it can be noted). Supporting evidence also comes from figures concerning belief in the ‘soul.’ Drawing again on the ‘Soul of Britain’ survey, respondents were asked, “Do you consider yourself solely to be a biological organism, which ceases to exist at death, or is there another existence after death?” 52% replied “No, another existence after death,” 31% answered “Yes, a biological organism, which ceases at death,” and 17% said “Don’t know.” In response to another question (with multiple answers allowed), concerning a range of beliefs, 69% claimed belief in ‘the soul,’ 62% in ‘God’; 51% in ‘life after death.’ It can be added that the 62% believing in ‘God’ have fallen from the 76% of 1980, whereas those believing in the soul have risen from 59% in 1981 to the current 69%. And regarding Europe, figures gathered during the 1980s suggest an overall picture of 60% believing in the soul. It is presumably the case, of course, that Christians believe in the soul. But given the fact that so many believe in some sort of spirit or life force, it is highly likely that the ‘soul-figures’ which have just been presented indicate that very considerable numbers of people (somehow) link their souls with some sort of spirit or life force. Furthermore, it is highly likely that many equate their lives—better, their being alive—with spirituality when they say they believe they have a soul. And then there is the consideration that 51% (or 52%) Robin Gill, C. Kirk Hadaway and Penny Long Marler, ‘Is Religious Belief Declining in Britain?’ Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 37, no. 3 (1998): 507–16; here: 509. 10
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believe in life after death: presumably having much to do with belief in a soul which transcends what it is to be a mere biological organism and which therefore can live on once biological life ceases to exist. And with church attendance now down to 7.5%, many of these people clearly do not practice traditional religion. Theistic spiritualities of life Evidence of widespread belief in a life force, spirit, and a soul provides support for the spiritual revolution thesis; and, as we have seen, there is also evidence of growth in New Age quarters. But there is also another cluster of evidence that supports the thesis of a spiritual revolution: the fact that spiritualities of life are also a growing force within the sphere of institutionalized, traditional religion, in particular many forms of Pentecostalism, neo-Pentecostalism, Charismatic Christianity, Evangelicalism, and ways of being Born-again Christian. Theistic spiritualities of life, as they can be called, combine belief in a transcendent personal God and other components of traditional (particularly Christian) belief with themes more commonly (and obviously) found in New Age spiritualities of life. Thus belief in biblical authority (traditional) may well be combined with a stress on the importance of experiencing the indwelling and life-transforming power of the Holy Spirit (spirituality of life). Theistic spiritualities of life thus combine or mix the traditionalized (the authority of tradition) with the detraditionalized (the authority and power of one’s spiritually informed experience). The ‘Word of Life’ as one organization (significantly enough) is named.11 Donald Miller offers a vivid portrayal of the phenomenon in the USA.12 Miller is looking at ‘New Paradigm churches’ otherwise called ‘megachurches,’ ‘postdenominational churches,’ even the ‘postmodern traditionalists.’ More specifically, he is looking at Calvary Chapel, Vineyard Christian Fellowship and Hope Chapel, together numbering over 1000 congregations in the USA and growing rapidly. In some ways these denominations are strongly traditionalized. Clergy, for example, insist on biblical authority, even literalism. At the same time, however, the detraditionalized is also well in evidence. What
My emphasis. Donald E. Miller, Reinventing American Protestantism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 11
12
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participants call ‘purity of heart’ is taken to be more important than what they think of as ‘purity of doctrine.’ Time and time again, it is emphasized that ‘personal conviction’ counts for more than doctrine. Above all, detraditionalization is in evidence in the way in which the Holy Spirit has become more important than external tradition. For it is the Holy Spirit which plays a key role in providing direction for daily life. First hand experience of the Holy Spirit, rather than ‘mere’ tradition, serves as the key source of authority in guiding believers’ lives. Furthermore, and more generally, New Paradigm worship provides direct access to an experience of the sacred, an experience which addresses the deepest personal needs of participants: thereby transforming their lives in the here and now. New Paradigm churches are thus detraditionalized in the sense that personal experience—directly informed by the Holy Spirit—serves as the key source of authority. Even the way in which biblical tradition is understood is being detraditionalized: “In spite of their relatively conservative [‘fairly literal’] reading . . . new paradigm Christians do not see the Bible as a legalistic ‘rule book’ so much as an instrument through which the Holy Spirit speaks to them. For new paradigm Christians the Bible is God’s way of communicating to humans, and it is in meditating on scripture that individuals receive guidance and instruction for their lives. When they read the Bible, they claim, the Holy Spirit speaks to them regarding the things they should change in their lives, people they should nurture and care for, and new directions they should take in their career or service to God.”13 So New Paradigm churches provide a ‘spirituality’ (a favored term) of the ‘heart’ (another favored term). They cater for life. They address deepest personal needs. They have a strong therapeutic dimension. This adds up to traditionalized experience and experienced tradition. The success of New Paradigm churches is significant enough, Miller writing of a ‘revolution’ transforming American Protestantism. The success of what Robert Wuthnow calls ‘small groups’ or ‘support groups’ is even more remarkable.14 Little in evidence prior to the 1960s, some 80 million Americans had become involved in small face-to-face groups by the early 1990s. According to Wuthnow, small groups that meet regularly and provide caring and support for those who participate in them now have such social significance that they 13 14
Ibid., 130. Robert Wuthnow, Sharing the Journey (New York: The Free Press, 1994).
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amount to something which has become at least as important to understand as the economy or the political system. Whether or not this is overstating things is open to debate. What is clear, however, is that the small group movement—two thirds of which is underpinned by religious tradition—is very much orientated towards life; more exactly, the life of the soul. For these are intimate, egalitarian groups, which provide an opportunity for participants to discover what it means to become more fully alive and more deeply in tune with their own spirituality and with God. Quite literally, the groups provide an opportunity for participants to share their journey through life, and to discuss interpersonal relationships, emotions, matters to do with self-identity or personal morality. In the words of one interviewee: “When I sit amongst the group and I listen to what people have to say, I feel very strongly a movement of my own spirit, so it’s I suppose what one would call a meditation, but I have a very strong sense of God being present for me in that context.”15 For the majority of groups where religion is important, scripture serves as a point of reference; as something to be discussed and interpreted. The widespread view is that people must pursue their own unique spiritual goals (for no one else can live one’s own life), sharing insights with one another on the basis of unique life-experiences rather than relying on any absolute, supra-self, universal truths. Small groups, in other words, might often have a Christian frame of interpretative reference, but they are quite strongly detraditionalized. So, like the New Paradigm churches, there is a degree of tradition-input, but tradition does not stand in the way of allowing participants the freedom to explore and express their own (and relational) lives. Looking more generally at theistic spiritualities of life then, there is little doubting the fact that combinations/transformations of the more traditionalized and the more detraditionalized, of the authority of tradition and that of experience—of what might be called traditionalized experience-cum-experientialized tradition, is a potent force. As well as the examples above, one might think of the success of Pentecostalism in South America: on the one hand a (relatively) traditionalized Christian frame of reference; on the other the immediate and experienced authority of the empowering and life-transforming Holy Spirit, by-passing tradition by virtue of its transmission by way of personal
15
Ibid., 263–64, my emphasis.
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experience. Or again, one might think of the success of Evangelical, Pentecostal, or charismatic forms of Christianity in Britain: doing ‘better’ than other (liberal, or many of the strongly traditionalized) forms of Christianity by holding their own against the forces of secularization, or actually growing. The evidence is widespread.16 The spiritual revolution as a cultural fact I have been arguing a controversial thesis, namely that a spiritual revolution has taken place: that more people now favor the language of spirituality to that of religion. And the conclusion to be drawn is that if people in western societies today are going to be spiritual or religious, they will tend to favor the former—a conclusion supported by the three main arguments, and associated batteries of evidence, which we have been looking at: • that New Age spiritualities of life are growing. (Although it has to be accepted that this, alone, does not amount to a widespread revolution.) • that less clearly articulated beliefs about life-spirituality—often articulated in terms of soul, life force, spirit—are widely pervasive within mainstream culture. (And there is some evidence to suggest that they are expanding in some settings.) • that within the territories of traditionalized/institutionalized religion, much suggests that theistic spiritualities of life are doing well, if not very well, in some countries. Of particular note, there is the evidence of the turn from religion to spirituality provided by the work of two major sociologists of contemporary religion, Robert Wuthnow and Wade Clark Roof. Although Wuthnow does not deal with the issue systematically, his Sharing the Journey contains example after example linking the success of the small group movement to the attention it pays to spirituality (life, the personal or psychological, the therapeutic, the intimate re the relational).17 Roof ’s more systematic analysis, based on a large-scale 16 For more on the (relative) success of the charismatic movement in Britain see Leslie J. Francis, David W. Lankshear and Susan H. Jones, ‘The Influence of the Charismatic Movement on Local Church Life: A Comparative Study among Anglican Rural, Urban and Suburban Churches,’ Journal of Contemporary Religion 15, no. 1 (2000): 121–30. 17 Op. cit.
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study, breaks his sample down into the following categories: dogmatists (totalling 15%), born again Christians (33%), mainstream believers (26%), metaphysical believers and seekers (14%), and secularists (12%). The dogmatists (involved with traditionalist religions of the text) are those who say they are religious, not spiritual. The born-again Christians (broadly equivalent to those involved with what we are here calling ‘theistic spiritualities of life’), mainstream believers (liberal religion), and metaphysical believers and seekers (broadly equivalent to those involved with what we are calling ‘New Age spiritualities of life’), however, are reported as being spiritually minded; indeed, in the throes of spiritual reawakening and ferment. This means that 73% of those surveyed (or more) prefer to use the language of ‘spirituality’ rather than ‘religion.’ But that is not all. For rather curiously, it transpires that one half of the people in the secularist category claim that God lies within the person. This means we can add 6% to the 73% already arrived at. 79% of Americans, it follows, are spiritually-minded. Given this final figure, is it hardly surprising that Roof summarizes his findings as follows: More than any other, it is the experiential face of religion that takes on current prominence: in story after story the quest is for something more than doctrine, creed, or institution, although of course these are usually involved. What is sought after has to do more with feelings, with awareness of innermost realities, with intimations of the sacred— what amounts to the very pulse of lived religion.18
Research Agendas My overarching aim in this essay has been to argue that the study of religion—at least in connection with the contemporary ‘west’— will surely have to become less concerned with the study of the traditionalized, and more concerned with the detraditionalized, if it is to keep abreast of developments. On the one hand, to put it bluntly, the fact that involvement with traditionalized religion is now down to 2% in Sweden means that there is now rather little left to study on the institutionalized front. But on the other hand, the fact that
18 Op. cit., my emphasis. Survey findings are reported on page 321; the quotation from pages 33–34.
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so many Swedes still believe in something provides fertile territory for inquiry. The future of research surely has to follow the way that Sweden (to remain with that ‘cutting edge’ of change) has moved: firmly and progressively away from clearly spelt out ‘religion.’ Whether or not a spiritual revolution has actually taken place in various ‘western’ settings, the fact remains that more than enough has now occurred to set new research agendas. And, it has to be said, there are signs that the study of ‘religion’ is lagging behind developments ‘on the ground.’ We know little, for example, about what people mean when they say they believe they have a ‘soul’ or when they affirm faith in a ‘life-force.’ We do not know what to make of the fact that so many believe in the paranormal. (Is this existentially significant? Does it involve spirituality?) We know little about the numbers of people who are involved in the face-to-face encounters of new spiritual outlets. We know even less about high street provisions of (apparent) spiritualities of life. What, for example, is the significance of the growth in sales of ‘Mind, Body and Spirit’ literature? Does it signify a consumeristic ‘reduction’ of the New Age for well-being purposes, spiritual questing, both, and if both, in what proportion? ‘On the ground,’ empirical inquiry into such matters has barely begun. Key research challenges—such as establishing the number of people who are involved in spiritualities of life on a one-to-one basis with their practitioners, when practitioners operate pretty ‘invisibly’ from their homes (as they not infrequently do), insist on the anonymity of their clients, and do not keep good records of how many clients they see over a given period of time—have yet to be thought through. To give another example, how are we to set about establishing whether or not somebody buying a copy of The Celestine Prophecy is treating it as a ‘marginal’ consumer pleasure or as a ‘serious’ spiritual guide? Or both? The sacralization of life Just as changes in the subject matter of the study of religion—at least in ‘western’ settings—is triggering new research agendas with regard to empirical investigation, so it must surely serve to trigger new research agendas with regard to theory and explanation. And one of the great challenges in this regard is to explain the uneven fortunes of the traditionalized and the detraditionalized: the co-existence of seculariza-
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tion, taking place with regard to much of the traditionalized, and— at least in measure—sacralization taking place with regard to much of the detraditionalized. One line of inquiry which, I think, deserves further study concerns what can be thought of as the ‘cultural turn to the interior life.’ As modern times have moved on, the argument goes, mainstream or ‘primary’ institutions—in particular religious traditions— have lost much of their ‘meaning’ or ‘significance.’ Many people have thus been ‘thrown back upon themselves,’ their own ‘subjectivities’ or lives, as the key source of their meaning and significance. Marx, with his ‘all that is solid melts into air’ argument, and Weber with his ‘iron cage,’ have provided powerful accounts of the erosion of significant ‘meanings’ and values within the mainstream. Then there are those strands of thought—running through Simmel and Gehlen, then Luckmann, and then Peter Berger and his co-authors in The Homeless Mind—which very much concentrate on people being ‘forced’ to treat their own ‘interior’ lives as their primary source of significance.19 As Jacques Le Rider puts it, in his discussion of fin de siecle mysticism among Viennese intellectuals, “For one who refused any hasty identification with current ideas and shifting fashions . . . there was no option but to seek deep in his own self for the answers to questions left in suspense by the ‘irrecoverable’ self.”20 Add to this the argument that modernity has witnessed increasing individualization or autonomization. Whether or not this is true in practice, it can scarcely be doubted that those structural conditions which have developed with modernity, including the division of labor and autonomous mobility and competitiveness within the economy, are associated with the development of beliefs and values having to do with the sovereign agent. And, it goes without saying, sovereign individualism means that people have to think of themselves as acting from what has to come from within (will-power, for example); have to exercise authority on the basis of their own lives; have to so-to-speak ensure that they are ‘filled’ with enough content to act autonomously. And as well as fuelling the thrust towards the interior life, this process also serves to fuel loss of faith in what mainstream institutions have to offer: to the extent to which they dictate 19 20
See Heelas, op. cit., for further discussion. Jacques Le Rider, Modernity and Crises of Identity (Cambridge: Polity, 1993), 57.
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how one is to live one’s life rather than catering for one’s autonomy, then to that extent they have little if anything to offer for one’s own life. (If indeed that is what one is concerned with.) Such theories help explain how modernity is associated with the turn to ‘interior life.’ The idea that ‘only I can live my life’ has come into starker prominence, as have the associated ideas that ‘no one else can live my life’ or that ‘no one else can tell me how to run my personal life.’ We are in the realms of the (Wordsworthian) ‘life-itself,’ or what we shall call here the ‘interior-life’: one’s own unique experiences of what it is to be alive, one’s emotions, bodily subjectivities, conscious states, psychological opportunities and challenges, personal ethicalities, and relational (even natural/cosmic) intimacies.21 This is the life which emphasizes the value of being true to oneself and others, the importance of finding out what one truly is and is capable of becoming, the significance of feeling ‘really’ authentic and alive: now. It is not ‘life-as,’ that is, as constituted and regulated by the generalized roles, duties, and obligations of the institutional order, the ‘given’ or ‘traditional’; that which overarches the specificities of the personal. The Foucault-driven objection that there is no such thing as a ‘genuine’ interior-life (other, perhaps, than by virtue of simply being alive), because all else comes from socio-cultural provisions for living, is irrelevant. For what is under consideration is the attention paid to what is taken to be the interiorities of that which only belongs to oneself: to the experiences which only I can experience. It might well indeed be the case that a great many remain firmly locked into various forms of life-as . . ., forms of living which here encapsulate much of interior-life in the public, communal—and thus not interior-life ‘specific’ and attentive—realm. Indeed, it is almost certainly the case that no one can live without life-as. Having said this, however, interior-life has surely become much more significant since the advent of modernity. In the words of Georg Simmel, “. . . this emotional reality—which we can only call life—makes itself increasingly felt in its formless strength as the true meaning or value of our existence.”22 And this is the kind of development which has such a great bearing on explaining the uneven fortunes of religion and spirituality.
See Don Cupitt, The New Religion of Life in Everyday Speech (London: SCM, 1999), for a highly illuminating portrayal of the Wordsworthian turn. 22 Georg Simmel, Essays on Religion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 24. 21
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The argument is that the cultural turn to the interior life means that if people are spiritual or religious they are much more likely to practice forms of spirituality or religiosity which cater to the immediacies of their lives in the here-and-now than they are to be relying on tradition per se: traditions which are God-focused, with their formulations for life as it should be lived according to God (and therefore paying scant attention to individual lives per se, in, for example, congregational worship), or which are life-denying (in that they treat this life as a disciplined, salvational preparation for the true life to come rather than dwelling on what this life has to offer), or both. Those intent on exploring their own lives are much more likely to adopt detraditionalized forms of spirituality (which illuminate, fulfill, and express what it is to have an—often seemingly contingent—life of one’s own) than they are to defer to traditions which dictate what kind of determinate, traditionalized life-as one should aspire to as a member of tradition: a supra-life-itself life, in that it belongs to tradition which exists before and after the life of any particular individual, and operates over-and-above the unique qualities of any particular individual’s interior life. For if one is living out one’s own life, with what right and with what knowledge of the intimacies of one’s unique existence is anyone else in the position to tell one how to live? The dictates of the tradition-informed past are simply not in order in relation to life-focused cultural assumptions and priorities. Thus detraditionalized New Age and theistic spiritualities of life could well be doing (relatively) well precisely because they are detraditionalized. For this means that they can enter into the uniqueness and shifting opportunities and challenges of what it is for a person to be alive in the expressive/creative/relational/therapeutic/lifeaffirming —whilst ever-changing —here-and-now. Such spiritualities promise to facilitate self-interpretative (and so life-reflexive) diagnoses of what is wrong with one’s own life; they offer practical remedies, to be experientially tested to see whether they can help to fulfill the specificities of what one’s own life experiences have to promise. They promise the miraculous, healing, life-enhancing, empowering shift. That is, from an old life (due to the contaminations of modernity, the Fall, or both) to the new life: a life which is sacralized, whether by the intrinsic spirituality or Higher Self of the New Age, or by the salvational coming-to-dwell Holy Spirit of the Christian God). Liberation, healing, the release of potential—all to make the most of one’s own life in this world.
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Conclusion
Approaching one hundred years ago, Durkheim wrote of “those contemporary aspirations towards a religion which would consist entirely in internal and subjective states, and which would be constructed freely by each one of us.”23 Recently, Wade Clark Roof concludes that, “Contemporary quests for spirituality are really yearnings for a reconstructed interior life.”24 And Don Cupitt writes, “We have supposed that what has been happening has been the secularization of religion, and we have failed to see the much greater extent of the sacralization of life, even though it has already deeply affected us all.”25 Since the interior life ultimately can only be one’s own (however much it might be inspired by the relational), since ‘living within’ (to draw on the title of a book about Sri Aurobindo and the Mother) is surely unique to the life-circumstances of the person, it is no surprise that detraditionalized spiritualities and relatively detraditionalized traditions are doing better than the lives-as of traditionalized formulations. For rather than providing instruction about the life one should aspire to live—in accord with supra-self tradition, and so ultimately the life of God—in the fashion of religion, spirituality enters into and works with the intricacies of the intimate or self-possessed. Again, people are not so much interested in the meaning of life as conveyed (in generalized terms) by tradition, as they are interested in the meaning of what they mean (or might mean) for/to themselves. Given what has developed on the ground, I have argued that an important research agenda for the study of ‘religion’—at least in ‘western’ contexts—is to arrive at a more determinate, comprehensive, and explanatory picture of what is happening to those detraditionalized vehicles which identify spirituality with life or introduce spirituality to the interior life. And the spiritual revolution—if indeed it continues to unfold—will surely contribute to the future development of the study of ‘religion.’ Will it become necessary to complement Departments of Religious Studies with Departments of Spiritual Studies? And should it not become more pressing to link the (rela-
23 Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1971), 47. 24 Op. cit., 43. 25 Op. cit., his emphases, 2.
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tive) success of detraditionalized forms of religion and spirituality with more general trends within modernity which point in their direction? Namely those (relatively) detraditionalizing trends within modernity which undermine those ‘firm’ values and institutions which affirm life-as—not least the life-as of religious tradition—by virtue of the fact that they involve the affirmation of the value of what lies within.
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RESPONSE TO PAUL HEELAS Ann Braude I want to thank Paul Heelas for his contribution to this volume and for the considerable body of thought he has devoted to these questions in his books. I concur that there is much to be gained by ‘detraditionalizing’ the study of religion. And like Heelas, I find the empirical grounds for doing so to be more compelling than the theoretical grounds offered by postmodernists. An approach to the study of religion focusing exclusively on traditions, Heelas argues, simply does not fit the evidence. It cannot adequately explain the religious phenomena that we are witnessing in the contemporary world. Heelas argues that the study of religion must change because religion has changed. This thesis I think, suggests two lines of discussion that I would like to take up in this response. First, has religion changed? I have spent a bit of time exploring the ‘spiritual revolution’ that Heelas has described, thinking about the significance of the statistics he has presented, as well as about the categories he has proposed, and about the chronology he suggests. Second, if we change our approach to the study of religion when religion changes, how do we study the past? Can the study of the past also be detraditionalized, and should it be? This question is crucial both for historians and for those whose faith is rooted in tradition, and who view their role as scholars to be the interpretation and exegesis of the tradition. Many scholars, like myself, who study earlier periods find that they need to go beyond the confines of tradition to explain their data. First, the ‘spiritual revolution.’ Heelas draws our attention to the current numerical prominence of participants in two recent religious developments: the New Age and Pentecostalism, both of which he sees as reflecting a ‘cultural turn to life.’ As he appreciates, religious outlooks sharing the New Age’s emphasis on the immanence of the divine and its location in and accessibility through the self are hardly new. They have existed as part of a continuum with transcendental and communal emphases in many religious contexts. He notes both Troeltsch and Durkheim observing a trend toward individualized sources of truth long before the current New Age Movement. Going
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back earlier one recalls George Fox’s admonition to ‘mind the light within,’ as well as the radical individualism of nineteenth-century movements of Transcendentalism (which might have been called ‘imanentism’) and spiritualism, which viewed institutions and hierarchies as so many roadblocks to direct communication between the individual and the divine. Heelas’s description of the detraditionalizing traditions within Christian movements emphasizing the active presence of the Holy Spirit also calls to mind historical precedents. His observation (citing Donald Miller) that in so-called ‘megachurches’ purity of heart is taken to be more important than purity of doctrine reminded me of two successful eighteenth-century movements: Methodism and Hasidism. Indeed, one may think of early Christianity itself when Heelas sees evidence of detraditionalization in the extent to which the role of tradition is replaced by the role of the Holy Spirit. The success (or some might say the failure) of all of these movements depended upon their ability to transform themselves from detraditionalizing movements into traditions that possess the capacity to perpetuate themselves. This observation leads to some of the issues relevant to my second proposed line of discussion, namely, how to study and classify the past. Hasidism, I think, provides an extreme example of a detraditionalizing movement that is now seen as a vehicle of tradition both by adherents and by many observers. It is very difficult to institutionalize a religion that persists in asking people to look within themselves for religious truth. Once they have looked there they may or may not find themselves in conformity with co-believers. To refer to the case I know best, that of spiritualism, nineteenth-century mediums complained constantly of the difficulties of serving a religious group whose commitment to individualism prevented the formation of national organizations. They told stories of arriving in distant locations for speaking engagements to find that no hall had been rented or that their appearance had not been announced. What I find remarkable is that such stories were the exception rather than the rule. In general, traveling trance lecturers were greeted by enthusiastic audiences even though their faith proved insusceptible to organization for half a century. Yet even without organizations hundreds of mediums, most of them female, were able to make a living as traveling lecturers. The difficulties of assessing the numerical strength of spiritualism are instructive for Heelas’s goals because of its many similarities to contemporary New Age beliefs. One cannot count the members of
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a group that has no organizations to belong to, no ordained clergy or official leadership, no theological seminaries, and for whom séances conducted in the home are the most central religious activity. One can estimate the number of local organizations, but this is a mammoth undertaking that would prove extremely taxing with the large number of groups that constitute the contemporary New Age. By the time spiritualists began to form denominations at the turn of the century, the movement had lost much of the enthusiasm that made it a mass movement. While these denominations have a fascinating life and history of their own, they represent a different moment and a different religious impulse from the one that drew huge crowds to nineteenthcentury mediums. It may be illuminating to note that contemporary leaders in these denominations complain that although their teachings should appeal to New Age seekers, they have not been able to capitalize on the New Age’s popularity. This may be precisely because they have institutionalized, and they present beliefs similar to those of many New Age groups in the context of a tradition stretching back to 1848—which doesn’t sound quite so new after all. A slightly different pattern of a similar phenomenon can be seen in Christian Science, one of the most successful groups that emerged from the New Age’s most recent predecessor, the New Thought Movement. Thanks to its founder’s understanding of the importance of institutionalization for the perpetuation of her Church, Christian Science has been a tightly organized and well-structured institution from its early years. However, this has not translated into a consistent pattern of growth. While there are no firm statistics, it appears that the church has lost members following the pattern of liberal Protestant denominations, rather than benefiting from its similarities to New Age beliefs. Another instructive case here would be the other major New Thought Religion, the Unity School of Christianity, if only we had the data. The point I want to make here is that religious movements encouraging a turn to the self may not have much staying power. And it is possible that the New Age may be a passage on the way to something else, rather than a permanent feature of the religious landscape. But this transience itself may be part of the phenomenon of which Heelas is urging us to take stock. To illustrate this point, let me offer a few statistics of my own, in the form of a yellowed slip of paper that I ripped out of USA Today a couple of years ago. I offer these statistics-without-portfolio by way of applauding Heelas’s call for more and better information about the variety of groups that
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make up the New Age Movement. The statistics we have are suggestive, but not yet persuasive. In the absence of solid statistics, I will turn to “USA Today Snap Shots: A look at the statistics that shape the nation.” This particular set of statistics concerns ‘Belief in the Beyond.’1 “Belief in many of these phenomena,” USA Today tells us, “has grown sharply since the 1970s.” They offer a chart depicting “adults today vs. 1976 who say they believe somewhat in” spiritualism (12% in 1976 vs. 52% today), faith healing (10% in 1976 vs. 45% today), astrology (17% in 1976 vs. 37% today), UFOs (24% in 1976 vs. 30% today), reincarnation (9% in 1976 vs. 25% today), and fortune telling (4% in 1976 vs. 14% today). Whether these statistics are accurate or not, they suggest a number of issues that are relevant in documenting the extent and impact of the movements Heelas is talking about. First, they add up to 203%. I suspect that this accurately reflects that adults who believe in one of these things most often believe in more than one. Second, the huge numbers suggest an overlap between those who believe in spiritualism, astrology, etc., with the large majority of Americans who twenty years earlier told pollsters that they considered themselves to be bornagain Christians. Paul’s notion of a ‘cultural turn to life’ might be able to incorporate both a born-again experience and the beliefs on this list; nevertheless, the possibility of a single person moving from one to the other or perhaps back and forth between them raises a host of interesting questions. In some sense the ‘cultural turn to life’ is a variant of the secularization thesis. The sacred canopy that provided meaning in traditional religions has not disappeared in this account, rather it has been eaten away by the moths of modernity so that the rain is coming through, and (if you’ll permit me to beat a dead metaphor), we are all scrambling to construct our own hats to keep our individual heads dry. The gap left by the demise of traditions is filled not by secular values but by ‘spiritualities of life.’ The similarity of this thesis to the secularization thesis also calls attention to the regional focus of Heelas’s comments. I would suggest that we should be cautious indeed about generalizing theories of religion based on European data. The discovery of a religious trend that is most pronounced in Scandinavia and applies primarily to Western Europe recalls the reflection that Peter Berger has made when look-
1
April 20, 1998, 1.
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ing back at the secularization thesis with the wisdom of hindsight: it turned out to be precisely accurate in only two parts of the world, western Europe and American universities. We have all been chastened by the shortcomings of methods devised from European data when applied to the rest of the world, especially in the area of religion. Students of World Christianity have long urged us to direct our attention outside of Europe and the United States to see the vibrant centers of growth of contemporary Christianity. Indeed, if we took statistics as the basis of our study of traditions, we would probably not focus on contemporary Europe at all. Let me give one example of a recent event that peaked my curiosity. And this comes from an even more suspect source than USA Today: ‘Crosswalk.com, the Christian web portal.’ There I read about an event that occurred last month (August 2000) called ‘Silk Road 2000.’ According to the report 18,000 Christians from the primarily Muslim countries of Chechnya, Iraq, Kurdistan, Uzbequistan, Iraq, Syria, Yajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Turkey gathered for a five-day festival in Kazakhstan organized by Korean missionaries. Hundreds of Korean-Americans and Korean-Canadians joined 2000 South Koreans at the event. The only western media representatives invited to participate were Norm and Cher Nelson, hosts of an international Christian radio broadcast based in California, who reported it on their show and website ‘Life at its Best.’ They reported that this was the largest Christian gathering that had ever occurred in a Muslim region. According to the Nelsons: “Local practitioners of occultist religions carried out on-site satanic rituals to curse the festival; but, the accumulated power of two years worth of prayer was too strong.” They report that “[t]he soul-stirring capstone experience” of the event occurred “when the government’s non-Christian Minister of Religious Affairs, who came to the stadium to monitor the celebration for possible infractions, was so deeply moved that he made a public decision to receive Jesus Christ as his savior.” Notably, the webaccount featured a photograph of a “Russian/Jewish Christian.” The organizers attributed the event’s success to its nationalistic bent. They report that the Kazak words for ‘shine Kazakhstan’ thundered from the assembly, and the primary goal of the event, rather than evangelism, was to demonstrate God’s love for the people of Kazakhstan. Where does an event like this fit in the scheme Heelas has proposed? Whether or not its details are accurate, it raises a number of interesting questions. For Korean Missionaries, Kazak Christians,
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recent converts from Islam, former communists, and the occasional Russian Jew, should this event be seen as an example of detraditionalization, retraditionalization, perhaps both at once, or neither? All of the examples I have offered are intended to suggest my hope that the study of religion can be detraditionalized without being dehistoricized. We can, I believe, learn much about new forms of religiosity by looking at their historical precedents. And we cannot, I feel equally sure, understand the type of religiosity burgeoning in many parts of the world without understanding both the traditions that give rise to missions and the contexts in which those missions take hold.
RETRADITIONALIZING THE STUDY OF RELIGION: THE CONFLICT OF THE FACULTIES: THEOLOGY AND THE ECONOMY OF THE SCIENCES John Milbank The first thing which members of a modern theology or religious studies department must face up to is that a large percentage of their atheist or agnostic colleagues in the academic world probably consider theology or any other mode of religious reflection as none other than a fantasizing about the void.* As to the study of religion, they may very well consider it valid to ask just why it is that humanity has systematically pursued so many will o’ the wisps, but they are far less likely to be convinced that one requires an entire separate department devoted to this task. If religion is a human phenomenon, they may be inclined to argue, then the human sciences— psychological, social, and even biological—must take it within their purview for the sake of completeness. A separate department of religious studies, however purged of theology, still wafts behind it a trace of the odor of sanctity: for if the human sciences cannot deal comprehensively with religion, this still implies that there is something ‘religious,’ something transcendentally in excess of the biological, historical, social, and psychological. In the face of such doubts there is, in the end, no convincing apologetic ground upon which theology and religious studies can stand. In secular terms, they should not exist. One might protest at this point that the question of God, or of other religious beliefs, remains something which can be given objective, rational consideration. And that may be fair enough, but such an issue is adequately dealt with in terms of the philosophy syllabus. Another, more valid, objection would be that there are other examples of subject areas organized by field of studies, rather than field plus angle of approach: urban studies for example, or environmental studies, which are unified only by * This essay is a reprint of: John Milbank, ‘The Conflict of the Faculties: Theology and the Economy of the Sciences,’ in Faithfulness and Fortitude, ed. Mark T. Nation and Samuel Wells. Copyright 2000, The Continuum International Publishing Group. Reprinted with the permission of the publisher.
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an object of inquiry, to which several different disciplinary approaches may be taken. This is, of course, the case, but such subject areas are inherently vulnerable to collapse from within and take-over bids from without. They tend to exist at all only for temporary or expedient reasons. Moreover, in the case of religion, as we shall see, a third cause of strain is the question as to whether ‘religion’ defines with sufficient precision any discrete area of inquiry whatsoever. Thus one is returned to the truth that self-justification of theology or religious studies before a secular court is well-nigh impossible, and that religious studies is in no better case here than theology. Nonetheless one should not despair, for one reason which is entirely cynical, and for another which is entirely theological. The cynical reason can be dealt with in a short paragraph; the theological one will occupy the rest of this essay. The cynical reason is that utter incoherence and lack of ability to withstand the critical trial of reason does not matter so long as one can come up with cash and customers. In our postmodern era the ‘free, rational inquiry’ of the enlightenment which could reveal only formal truths as objectively real, thus handing over the whole realm of the substantive to the play of agonistic forces, has itself been inevitably invaded by such forces, since form feeds only on the substantive, and never perfectly inhabits its own purity. Enlightenment, therefore, is bound to evolve into the postmodern mixture of the purest, most unbounded and therefore most rigorous logic, plus the most untrammelled sway of vanity and fashion. In many ways a ‘religious studies department’ is well adapted to our era; but we should be warned: the point of fashion is to change, and religious constituencies may well yet further wither away, or more probably mutate and take their custom elsewhere, far away from universities (or what in the future will remain of them). The cynical reason for not despairing, as outlined above, may be entertained by religious studies, and even by theology, so long as it remains aware that it is, indeed, cynicism. However, the second and alone substantive or genuinely hopeful reason for not despairing is not available to religious studies. It is a theological reason alone. This is the possibility that the secular atheist or agnostic consensus might be challenged. And the grounds for this challenge would be simply that they have got everything the wrong way round. They claim that theology, alone amongst purported academic disciplines, is really ‘about nothing.’ But theological reason, if it is true to itself, replies to this with a counter-claim: all other disciplines, which claim to be
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about objects regardless of whether or not these objects are related to God, are just for this reason about nothing whatsoever. This claim holds true for theology however much these disciplines may assist us, in both good and evil fashion, in practical negotiations with the objective appearances of things, for if we take an appearance as a mere ‘object,’ that is to say if we take it in abstraction from the question whether or not it discloses in some degree God as being his creature, we treat it effectively in an atheistic manner, whether or not we remain agnostic as to the answer to the question. And atheism is but a polite English name for what on the Continent has more often been called what it is: nihilism. It is not, in any sense, as its own apologetic insinuates, the negative doubting of God; on the contrary, it is the positive affirmation of the absoluteness of the void, and the capacity of that void to generate the appearance of a solid something—for all that this appearance, if it arises from nothing, must be without ontological remainder, and must at every instant vanish not just from our sight but in itself. The object, concerning whose participation in infinite actuality—God—we maintain a gnoseological suspense, is an object construed as indeed a will o’ the wisp. For if it is taken apart from God, as something in itself, then this must mean a something arising from nothing. Therefore the object— the very objectivity of the object as that which appears to the evidence of sight without reference to its origins, or its inevitably hidden aspects—is constituted by its disguise of the real, a real which is really nothing. By contrast, the only ‘something’ for this secular outlook is the appearance of the object which is mere appearance or illusion, since there can be no disclosive relation between something and nothing: of nothing there is nothing to disclose. It seems that atheism turns out to be much more difficult and indeed mystical than theology, as serious atheists, unlike smug thoughtless ones, have always known. Thus for theology, other disciplines, even if they can show us how, amorally, to more and more seek to possess a realm of illusion (though such possession will finally defeat us) and although they can refine more and more the increasingly bizarre and nihilistic paradoxes of logic and mathematics, as well as physics divorced from metaphysics and biology divorced from teleology, are precisely as secular disciplines (although they will nearly always possess also an implicit and redeeming supernatural orientation) through and through nihilistic. By contrast, theology understands itself as alone studying things as ineliminably real, in that they are taken as having their source in an
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original, indefeasible actuality. A consequence of this view is that theology also understands itself as alone able to remain with the question of truth, without running into inevitable aporias. For theology, indeed, truth is an adequation or correspondence of knowledge with the real, since the one entirely real reality, God, is itself both infinitely actual and infinitely knowing. As real, he is also manifest and self-aware, or truthful. For us to express a truth means that to a degree we correspond in our being to God via an awareness of aspects of the creation to whose lesser reality we also correspond, since the creation is rooted in God, and its being is entirely from God. From this theological perspective alone it makes sense to say that knowing corresponds to being even though we have no other access to being, other than via knowing, and thus a claim that our knowledge ‘corresponds’ can never be checked up upon. We cannot compare what is known with the knowledge of it, since what is known is not available other than through knowledge. Hence a claim to know truly, a claim to know at all, does indeed as Plato argued only make sense within the framework of mathexis (participation), for it amounts to a faith that what one shows or expresses in knowledge radiates mysteriously, and in a limited measure yet not deceptively, from a plenitudinous source that is both the source of all things and the genuine depth of all things. Outside this theological framework, the redundancy theorists of truth are right; ‘truth’ is an eliminable term since it only means that what is ‘is’, and ‘is’ in this context can only mean that which appears to us (in terms of both nature and culture) to be, the world as we either pragmatically or conventionally reckon with it.1 However, there is no secure phenomenalist resting point here, no safe version of transcendental ‘limits of human reason’ within which there may persist a certain sort of certainty concerning the real. For behind the complacency of so-called redundancy or disquotational theory lurks the more fearful specter of ‘diagonalization.’ Within the diagonalizing perspective, to say that true statements pertain to the world as we 1 See Arthur Fine, The Shaky Game (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1986), 112–171; Hilary Putnam, Pragmatism: An Open Question (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995); Donald Davidson, ‘The Structure and Content of Truth,’ The Journal of Philosophy 87, no. 6 ( June 1990): 279–326; Richard Rorty, ‘Pragmatism, Davidson and Truth,’ in Truth and Interpretation, ed. Ernest LePore (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 333–55; Bruce D. Marshall, ‘ “We shall bear the image of the Man of Heaven”: Theology and the Concept of Truth,’ in Rethinking Metaphysics, ed. G. L. Jones and S. E. Rowl (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 93–117.
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pragmatically or conventionally handle it raises the reflexive problem of how that statement itself is legitimated, since it cannot itself be pragmatically or conventionally grounded or disquotationally reduced.2 It seems that in one instance we cannot substitute for the word true—that is the instance when we say ‘it is true that all uses of the word true can be translated into other terms.’ For even if we say instead ‘all uses of the word true can be translated into other terms,’ the fact that we need to make this assertion shows that to affirm the redundancy theory is to assert that the redundancy of use of the word ‘truth’ corresponds to the way things are, such that after all we encounter here an unavoidable speculative gap between knowledge and being where use of the word ‘true’ or equivalent phrasing still has an irreducible function. In a corresponding fashion, if we elect to think that it is true that ‘true’ indicates only what appears to us to be the case, then (as Plato pointed out in the Theaetetus)3 we still have to say “it appears to me that truth reduces to whatever appears to anyone to be.” And here again truth is not disquotable nor reducible to appearance since an ‘appearance’ which establishes that truth resides only in appearings-to-be cannot itself be within the normal plane of appearances, but is rather a meta-appearing which establishes the absoluteness of this plane. Yet at the same time a meta-appearing must after all be regarded as also just another contingent and subjective appearing and so as contradictorily belonging on the same first-order plane after all. In this way it is, in principle open to challenge by another appearance which could disclose the non-ultimateness of mere appearing-to-be itself. So here once again, there arises an unavoidable—if undecidable—issue about correspondence and thus about truth. It has now been seen, both from the way in which ‘truth’ is not redundant in asserting its redundancy, and the way in which the theory of truth as appearance both is not and yet is itself an appearance, that these theories are beset by deconstructive paradox. Thus to uphold the limits of pragmatic or conventional reason, and a disquotational theory of truth with its accompanying phenomenalism, one must also transgress those limits or ‘diagonalize’ out of them, to use the jargon, and risk the notion that one’s decision to regard On ‘diagonalization’ see Graham Priest, Beyond the Limits of Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 3 Plato, Theaetetus 161C–162A. 2
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the world only pragmatically or else conventionally does after all correspond—beyond mere pragmatism or conventionalism—to the way things are. This ‘way things are,’ this implicit ontology, would be that the world is through and through phenomenal without disclosure of anything deeper, that is to say that for working purposes it is a meaningless and partially manipulable flux floating above a void (an implied ‘center’ of lack of reasons and non-origination). So after all, phenomena without truth, that is to say, phenomena containing no inner impetus to self-disclosure (as in a theological theory which accepts an ontological dimension to truth) do nonetheless disclose the truth of the void. But as we have seen, this is a self-cancelling form of self-disclosure, which announces the equal untruth as much as truth of what is disclosed, since the void discloses nothing, and in consequence the truth entertained here is a truth crossed out, a contradictory untruth, just as the result, as Hegel realized, of any transcendental limitation of possible knowledge is a constitutive contradiction. For if, as we have seen, in the theory under consideration, all truth relates only to appearances, then according to the logic of set-theory this statement itself both must and yet cannot be merely phenomenonal: it is simultaneously groundless, floating in a void, and yet grounded within the phenomenal horizon. Hence, just as for secular knowledge all appearances equally are and are not, so also reality is disclosed truly and yet as entirely untrue. Plato, followed by Augustine, Dionysius, and the whole Christian tradition up to Aquinas and Eckhart (and in his wake Nicholas of Cusa), was right: in the mere finite flux taken in itself there resides no truth, and the principle of non-contradiction, of logic itself, cannot be upheld or grounded logically, but only through assent to the realm of eternal unchanging forms, or of the ideas in the mind of God, where what is actual abides, and as infinite or ‘outside itself ’ escapes all set theoretical contradictions. The above reasonings suggest that theology, in the face of secular attack is only on secure ground if it adopts the most extreme mode of counterattack: namely that unless other disciplines are explicitly ordered to theology (assuming that this means participation in God’s self-knowledge, as in the Augustinian tradition) they are objectively and demonstrably null and void, altogether lacking in truth, which to have any meaning must involve some sort of adequatio (for mere ‘coherence’ can only concern the coherence of conventions or appear-
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ances). But one might well protest, how does this picture relate to the real situation in today’s universities where it is simply not the case that with 100% consistency secular academics say to students of theology or religion ‘you speak of nothing’ and even less true that those students solemnly intone in reply, ‘no, it is rather you who speak of nothing.’ However, to understand why what I believe is the real situation rarely emerges to the surface, one needs to consider briefly the historical emergence of modern theology and religious studies, and in particular the often hidden role of the state in this emergence. There are four significant dimensions here which I want now to enumerate. First, around 1300 or so theology itself perversely invented the possibility of an entirely non-theological mode of knowledge. Duns Scotus and his successors through Suarez and Descartes to Kant elaborated the notion that it was possible adequately to think of Being as such apart from its instantiation as the infinite actuality of God. In consequence it became legitimate to think of the being of a creature apart from its creaturehood. But this alters altogether the meaning of contingency. No longer is the apparent being of a thing taken as God’s willed partial disclosure of himself; instead it is taken instead as raw possibility. For if God has been bracketed out, the being of a creature is exhaustively that which appears to our knowledge, and that which appears to our knowledge, that which we can clearly and distinctly grasp, is simply that which is thinkably coherent and so possible. Thus a being taken in abstraction from God is immediately reduced to its enablement by possible being, rather than prior actuality. But if possibility is prior, then a ‘might not be’ or ‘nothing’ is on the same level with being, and meontology as fundamental as ontology. As J. F. Courtine puts it, the contention of Eckhart (but also of Augustine and Aquinas)—which was the inner kernel of orthodoxy tragically rejected as heterodox by the Catholic church itself before and around 1300—that in its most actual self the creature in some sense is God, and of itself is nothing, is negatively demonstrated to be correct by all subsequent deviant scholasticism. In this later and decadent development the inner essence of a finite being becomes nothing as much as something, so that in Suarez and then in Wolff, and even in Kant’s first critique, the real subject of ontology is not ens, but aliquid (something) or objectum, the ‘transcendental’ reality that might equally be or not be. I have already
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indicated how this, the substructure of all modern pragmatism, most phenomenology, and most analytic philosophy is implicitly nihilist, rendering the question of ‘postmodernism’ a trivial irrelevance.4 The second dimension is closely related to the first. Once the fundamental Augustinian-Dionysian-Thomist structure of analogy of being and participation in being had been destroyed by the Scotist view that finite and infinite being ‘are’ in the same univocal sense, theology gradually changed its character. For Aquinas, to talk adequately of anything, one had to speak of it as a creature, to refer its being to God as alone truly being in himself. In consequence, metaphysics, understood by Aquinas primarily as ontology, diagonalized out of itself in dealing with one topic—namely the first cause, God—that fell within its purview. Paradoxically this one topic, God, is for the Thomist view of metaphysics (as not for Aristotle who remained with a strange aporetic tension) bigger, of greater scope than its supposed all comprehensive subject matter of ens commune—‘being in common.’5 There is however no real paradox here, only because this subject matter of metaphysics, ens commune, is itself provided by a higher cause, which is the subject of a higher science. But here, uniquely, the cause and the science are at one. They are the first cause and its own self-knowledge: God himself and his scientia Dei which is theology, utterly ineffable and beyond our grasp. The basic conclusions of metaphysics, that there is a cause of being which is itself a plenitudinous being, are for Aquinas flickering and uncertain, just because we only ever weakly participate in being and truth, and are, besides, fallen creatures. They are only truly confirmed, established from their ground, by God’s imparting to us his own self-knowledge, through his entry gradually into human time (the typology of the Old Testament) and finally with Christ at the incarnation. This entry not only confirms God as first cause and esse ipsum to our wavering reason, but also discloses the inner reality of God as Trinitarian, namely as an infinite will to give being, to be known and loved through selfmanifestation which pre-grounds the creative act. 4 See Jean-François Courtine, Suarez et le Problème de la Métaphysique (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1990); Eric Alliez, Capital Times, trans. George van den Abbeele (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1996), 141–241. 5 See Courtine, op. cit.; Alain de Libera, Le Problème de l’Être chez Maître Eckhart: Logique et Métaphysique de l’Analogie (Geneva: Cahiers de la Revue de Théologie et de Philosophie 4, 1980); Edward Booth, Aristotelian Aporetic Ontology in Islamic and Christian Thinkers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
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But after Aquinas and Eckhart, this sense of theology as participation in the science of God and the blessed gradually evaporated and indeed was subject already to a kind of secularization such that theology as such was really already abandoned. How? Because instead of the most fundamental determination of being as theological, one now has a theologically neutral determination of being, and theology is forced to work within this framework as if, idolatrously, there were something more ontologically fundamental than God. For the figure of participation is substituted the figure of distance: as if God were a very remote, infinitely large object. And where infinite was traditionally a negative description of God, it now, in the late middle ages, became a positive definition of his essence. And of course a God whose defining nature is to be unbounded, and a God of which nothing finite necessarily discloses anything, since its finite essence is simply a logical or grammatical ‘might not be,’ is a God who quickly becomes hypostasized will or force. The late mediaeval imagining of a reality divided between infinite arbitrariness on the one hand and finite contingent possibilities on the other already projected in advance a nihilistic imagining of a blind flux undergirding meaningless and delusory appearances. Increasingly the Scotist ‘proofs of God’ in terms of the necessary priority of infinite Being, did not seem like proofs of God, as opposed to proofs of some sort of immanent absolute or even immanent absolute void: a conclusion eventually arrived at by Spinoza. As a result, theology was thrown more and more back on a new sort of foundation in positive revelation. But in this case also, it was just as true that theology took for granted a philosophical preestablishment of what an object or a fact was: something clear and evident, without depth, unambiguous and provable according to ‘evidence.’ God was now seen as disclosing himself in facts which, increasingly, to distinguish themselves as divine facts, had to be miraculous facts, or else their recognition depended upon an entirely separate, internal—and only accidentally related to the revealed object—movement of our understanding by the Holy Spirit.6 The traditional integrity of theology was thereby lost: for previously theology was not a secondary reflection upon data, whether of scripture or tradition; on the contrary, theology was the event of divine disclosure, a 6 See Avery Dulles, The Assurance of Things Hoped For: A Theology of Christian Faith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); René Latourelle, Theology of Revelation (New York: Staten Island, 1967).
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happening in which inner inspiration and outward expression in signs were seamlessly and intrinsically united. Instead of this sophisticated and believable notion that theology concerns the gradually renewed disclosure of God himself through creatures which makes use of the ceaseless becoming of creation in time, an entirely superstitious and contemptible notion of an arbitrary and blind faith in certain supposedly revealed facts was substituted. Yet this strange fideistic superstition is itself captive to the emerging secularity of a God reduced to the status of an object and so able to disclose himself, according to his arbitrary will, through lesser objective possibilities. Thus, although this circumstance was for a long time hidden, the mainstream of learned theology effectively ceased to be theology long ago. Above all, it ceased to be about God, because it ceased to be itself the existential event of divine illumination, and became instead a second-order reflection on facts or practices of some sort. (When, for example, Barth says that theology is primarily about the Church and its conformity to scripture it seems to me he has not escaped this post-1300 decadence).7 The third dimension concerns the State. Scotist distance from an absolute, voluntarist God, from the outset meshed nicely with and was used to support a new conception of earthly authority as legitimate according to the exercise of power by a single sovereign center if constituted by and exercised in the right formal terms, quite apart from the question of the inherent justice of its acts. This meant that public life, as falling entirely under such sovereign sway, was subject to a paradoxically theological secularization in that its ordering, though divinely legitimate, no longer in any way reflected divine order or cosmic hierarchy. Partly as a result, ‘religion’ ceased to betoken specific patterns of individual participation in public practice, ceased, in short, to be a ‘virtue,’ and became instead a private attitude; not even any longer a disposition to virtue, but rather an act of assent to certain emotionally neutral ‘beliefs’ in certain revealed facts and propositions. Moreover, in the early modern period, while the state was unable altogether to escape the assumption that the practice of religion alone held society together, it quickly came to suppose that the state simply required general assent to some set of beliefs for the sake of disciplined and uniform public worship, plus 7 Karl Barth, Dogmatics in Outline, trans. G. T. Thomson (London: S.C.M., 1966), 9–14.
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the supernatural sanctioning of morality and its own positive laws. In that moment the notion of ‘a religion’ and of a plurality of ‘religions’ was born, and later inappropriately used to classify the practices and inherited wisdoms of other cultures.8 Even today, the state retains some vestigial interest in the usefulness of a private sphere of piety, and therefore tends to encourage the notion that there is a ‘religious’ dimension of life, which assists the state’s own ends without trespassing on its sovereignty. Concomitantly, it still prefers the public dimension of religion—mystical attachment to corporate bodies and organizations of social practice—to be alienated to its own domain: hence the occasionally re-emerging phenomenon of ‘civil religion.’ The fourth dimension, after those of modern ontology without God, modern debased theology, and the modern theopolitical codetermination of the state and religion, concerns the emergence of a notion of ‘ritual’ activity. In the Middle Ages and in most traditional societies all proper action is ritual in the sense that it reflects a cosmic order: as Talal Asad has stressed, the monk’s writing in the scriptorium or labouring in the field was as much liturgical as his saying of the offices in chapel.9 And all these ritual acts were no mysterious symbolic language for some sort of psychological secret attitude; on the contrary they were simply plain, ordinary, transparent acts, whose structure nonetheless pointed to an inexhaustive depth of divine mystery. But later, with the reduction of religion to mean primarily a set of beliefs, actions related to those beliefs started to be thought of as strange, as hovering between real, normal actions, and certain hidden psychological dispositions. In this way a realm of ‘ritual’ or ‘symbolic actions’ was born, which helped to strengthen the illusion that these are religious phenomena, available for study and inquiry. Whereas, in fact, this is a modern western projection: traditional Hinduism, for example, was not a religion, not an aspect of the Indian way of life, it simply was that life or rather plural lives in their specific totality, their specific structuring and specific visions. Taken altogether these four dimensions have helped to shape the modern disciplines of theology and religious studies. Theology has 8 See Peter Harrison, ‘Religion’ and the Religious in the English Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993); W. T. Cavanaugh, ‘“A fire strong enough to consume the house”: The Wars of Religion and the Rise of the State,’ Modern Theology 2, no. 4 (Oct. 1995): 397–420. 9 Asad, Genealogies, 125, 171.
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been regarded, unlike philosophy, as a ‘positive science’ concerned with a certain delimited field, rather than as the very consummation and transfiguration of philosophy or the science of being as such. It has also been frequently regarded by the state as primarily functional and practical in character. In Kant’s last strange published work, The Conflict of the Faculties, he argued that the higher university faculties, theology, law, and medicine, can be allowed only limited freedom, since they serve the practical and legal purposes of the state, whereas philosophy, a lower faculty, as being without public responsibilities or direct public consequences, is free to pursue pure truth without hindrance.10 But this, we can now see, is the perfect political equivalence of nihilism: philosophy which can only after all for Kant attain the truth of appearances can think what it likes (is a kind of adventure playground, without upshot, for adults), and yet beyond philosophy, and beyond appearances, in the noumenal void, a strict formalism for the safeguarding and sacralizing of an empty freedom, of the void as the essence of subjectivity, pertains. And it is finally theology justified by practical truth which upholds this politically amoral realm of strict and empty formalism. It is no longer by Kant allowed, beyond the formal exigencies of state legal practice, to think the ratio between the unknown and manifest appearances (thanks to Kant’s strict duality of the sublime and the beautiful) despite the fact that this is the only true site for Christian theology.11 Within the bounds laid down by the state, theology is instead confined to upholding a supposedly universal morality and to better scholarly establishment of the facts which are taken to ground belief. Thus theology in the course of the nineteenth century acquired wholly questionable sub-disciplines which were no longer expected to participate in God’s self-knowledge, but were instead expected simply to establish the foundational facts and with pure historical neutrality (on which the church as department of state depends): biblical criticism, church history (as no longer a reflection on divine providence), historical theology, and so forth. Even after the decline of public belief, theology has hoped that this self-desiccation of its unity
10 Immanuel Kant, ‘The Conflict of the Faculties,’ in Religion and Rational Theology, trans. A. W. Wood and G. di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 233–329. 11 See John Milbank, ‘Sublimity: The Modern Transcendent,’ in Religion, Modernity and Postmodernity, ed. P. Heelas and P. Morris, 258–84 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998).
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into non-theological components will win it general respectability. But it is a short-term strategy and in the end theology is here only preparing its own auctioning off to other faculties: to history, oriental studies, classics, etc. The task then now for theology is not, of course, to abandon historical scholarship, but to reinvent Biblical studies, Church history, and so forth as also attempts, beyond scholarship, to participate in the mind of God. Alongside theology, religious studies has emerged as the study of a questionably (for reasons we have seen) discrete area of human existence. To that extent, it is not a readily defensible discipline, even if history of religions at its best has attempted an interesting sort of historical ethnography and histoire totale of human culture. But what alone really drives the study of religion as a distinct discipline is either a vacuous and impossible pluralist theology (whose impossibility I have explained elsewhere),12 or else the atheist or agnostic attempt to explain whatever in human culture falls outside the norms of western, post-Scotist reason. It is perfectly all right to admit such attempts within a theology and religious studies department, as long as one insists that the department is still—as a whole and primarily—committed to theology. For otherwise, if one adopts a neutral stance, one is really giving free rein to one inevitable ambition of such inquiries, namely to get rid of theology as an academic venture. By all means, we should include in our endeavors, for example, the psychology of religion but never should we be under any illusion that this is partially in order to encourage a dialogue between theology and psychology. Why not? Because while theology is perfectly open and always has been to discourses about physical influences on the soul (the traditional theory of melancholy and so forth) it regards itself, in one central aspect, as the discourse about the soul’s psychic reality. Hence psychology, outside of physical science, is a rival of theology: indeed it is easy to show genealogically that it is itself but the faint trace of religious belief in the soul, an absurd attempt to talk about the soul without God, despite the fact that the soul as ‘spiritual’ has only been historically constituted in terms of our point of contact with transcendence.13 Such an attempt is strictly analogous 12 John Milbank, ‘The End of Dialogue,’ in Christian Uniqueness Reconsidered, ed. Gavin d’Costa (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1990), 174–92. 13 The point is well made from a stance hostile to religion by Richard Webster in his Why Freud Was Wrong (London: HarperCollins, 1996), esp. 457–77.
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to all post-Scotist attempts to talk about actuality apart from God, and with the same result: finite actuality, here spiritual actuality, must fade away. And, furthermore, the attempt also inherits a theological privatization of religion whereby, instead of the ‘humanly psychic’ simply being taken as coterminous with all specifically human outward activity as the spring of ‘life’ and principle of order in such activity (as the psychic is also the principle of life and measure of all other, non-human, realities) it is seen as denoting some elusive, mysterious, supposedly ‘internal’ aspect of our existence. Accordingly, the ‘psychic’ is supposed to be more manifest to laboratory investigation of an isolated individual under artificial experimental conditions than in ordinary interpersonal everyday life. Thus in relation to secular inquiries into religion, theology should never surrender its hegemony. But ironically, nor should the practitioners of such inquiries want it to, at least if they wish to remain focused upon religion or a fortiori to remain located within a religious studies department. For without theology’s unique assertion of a raison d’être, namely maintenance of at least the possibility of an alternative to secular nihilism, the long-term threat of an ‘auctioning off ’ of such secular studies of religion remains. And rather similar considerations apply to the study of other religions (though that is the wrong term). One should say here, first of all, that theology itself should of course include a reflection on the theological meaning of the history of religions. Alongside this, a religious studies department will validly include ‘neutral’ studies of such history, besides where possible encouragement of interior intellectual developments of other traditions by practitioners of such traditions themselves—although I think we need to be aware of the degree to which the tradition of such reflection in the case of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam has been historically ruptured: we must not be taken in by inauthentic modern simulacra of such reflection. The facts of history and simple pressure of numbers dictates that such reflection will continue to be more carried out by Christians and by Jews. But there are also two further points. The first is that the very rationale for allowing a pluralist encouragement of different traditions of reasoned inquiry also demands continuing Christian theological hegemony. Why? Because this rationale denies that reason can ever be divorced first from a more than rational commitment and second from the specificity of time and place. Thus this rationale itself requires that as Christian theologians we sustain our tradition of
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reflection as a matter of more than rational commitment, which means in turn that we have to insist that a faculty of religion is, whatever else it is, at least a faculty of theology, meaning of course Christian theology, as well as that more simply ‘metaphysical’ theology inherited from the Greeks and common to the three monotheistic faiths. But in addition, the realities of time and place to which a theory of ‘traditioned’ reason is committed still in Europe and America for the moment require the culturally prior role of Christian reflection. And since the notion of traditioned reason alone can withstand the sway of a supposedly neutral reason, and since this notion demands for the above reasons that we sustain the distinctions of Christian commitment and assert its priority for theology and religious studies, then it is paradoxically this priority alone which shelters other modes of traditional or religious reflection. By contrast a strictly secular, neutral regard would simply sweep them away in the wake of Christian theology itself. It is inconceivable and simply idolatrous to suppose that theology could ever be a component of some supposedly more inclusive and hybrid discipline of religion and theology in general (even though, of course, it is possible to imagine that a Christian theology ‘track’ within a department of religion and theology could readily share in common courses on say the Old Testament, Greek Philosophy, and Mediaeval Philosophy with Islamic, Jewish, and History of Religions tracks). And yet, I can hear a Muslim or a Jew protest, is there not something very strange about what you say? How can Christian theology shelter other religious visions if it is within this tradition alone that secular nihilism was pre-invented? There is no answer I can give here which they will find acceptable, and yet I think there is an answer which is highly relevant for Christians. That is that despite the fact that Christian learned theology abandoned the framework of analogy and participation for a kind of proto-nihilism, it was nonetheless Christian thinkers alone in the middle ages who fully succeeded in elaborating such a framework. Without the encouragement of the Trinitarian sense that God is in himself the God who expresses himself creatively, and the Christological sense that God only speaks from within history and can only restore a broken history by kenotically entering personally within it, the Arabic and Jewish scholastics (as well as the Jewish kabbalists) tended not to be able to reconcile God’s simplicity and supremacy of will with his eminent possession of the excellencies of goodness, truth, and beauty
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manifest in the creation (despite their intense will to do so). With the abandonment of participation by Christian theologians, such an inability invaded Christendom also, with the inverse consequence that the Trinitarian and Christological doctrines started to lose their centrality and inherent logic, becoming the subjects of mere authorized belief.14 For this reason it can validly be asserted (and should be accepted by Christians) that the call to recover analogy and participation, which is equivalent to a call to reinstate the hegemony of theology as an alternative to nihilism, will tend to be also (if by no means exclusively since one has no warrant to rule out the possibility of future more successful Jewish and Islamic neoplatonisms) a call to recover specifically Christian theology.
14 See John Milbank, ‘History of the One God,’ The Heythrop Journal 38, no. 4 (Oct. 1997): 371–400, and David B. Burrell, Knowing the Unknowable God (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1986), and idem, Freedom and Creation in Three Traditions (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1993).
THEOLOGY OR RELIGIOUS STUDIES? THE FUTURE OF RELIGIOUS STUDIES: A RESPONSE TO JOHN MILBANK Paul Morris Religious studies, religion, phenomenology of religion, history of religions, and the social scientific study of religion usually mark themselves off from divinity, theology, and training for the Christian ministry. The history of religious studies often begins with this demarcation and the relationship with theology is sometimes tense and at times adversarial. Many of the pioneers of the non-confessional study of religion were, of course, theologians with interests beyond the traditional theology syllabus who developed notions of natural religion and employed comparative and other methods from the humanities and social sciences. In Britain, most of the departments of theology now include some element of religious studies, in terms of teaching and research in religious traditions other than Christianity, and in their approaches to the study of religion, such as the anthropology, sociology, and philosophy of religion. Many former theology departments are now designated theology and religious studies, and the older antagonism appears less evident—not least because religious studies, theology, and biblical studies, consigned to the same Higher Education Funding Council cost category, have found themselves necessarily working together on advocacy as well as research and teaching assessment exercises. In many North American institutions there is a clear division between theology, or divinity, and the teaching of religion in the arts and sciences. In others, under the guise of the study of religion a theological education is actually pursued. In addition, courses in non-Christian traditions are often taught by scholar-adherents whose commitments shape their teaching in ways similar to some Christian models of formation, while other scholars in religious studies teach a sort of broad humanistic ‘natural theology.’ In Germany, and in Europe more generally, the situation is different again with a denominational demarcation of faculties and separate ‘scientific’ history of religions programs.
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In his essay, ‘The Conflict of the Faculties: Theology and the Economy of the Sciences,’ John Milbank, a professor of philosophical theology in a department of religious studies at a state university in the USA, presents an uncompromising and provocative account of the relationship between theology and religious studies. It is deliberately provocative in the sense that it will stimulate thought and elicit a response from many, including those whose views of theology differ from his as well as those in religious studies who reject his partial characterization of their fields or areas of study. It is uncompromising in that there can be no truce or compromise between ‘his theology’ and what he refers to as the ‘secular consensus.’ Where Milbank places his own model of theological studies in stark contrast with what he sees as the reigning model of religious studies today, I suggest that the two models have more in common than Milbank recognizes. Both, for example, can join forces in an analysis and critique of the capitalist-liberal order. Further, this joint work could be particularly fruitful were Milbank willing to deal more adequately with pluralism and to indicate in more detail exactly which sources of authority are most important for his philosophical arguments and constructive proposals. Milbank begins by noting that in the dominantly secular world of our universities, secular academics accuse those in theology and religious studies of ‘speaking about nothing,’ that is, of dealing with the subjective, the immaterial, and the unreal, mere appearance. On the other hand, the other disciplines are concerned with the material, the objective, and the ‘real,’ and they include many scholars of religion who focus on the visible, material, and ‘real’ manifestations of religions. Milbank’s intention is nothing less than to turn this accusation on its head: “No,” he claims, “it is rather you that speak of nothing.” Accordingly, he argues that, in fact, it is secular studies that are based on nothing and have for their object a void, while only theology (and religious studies, hanging on to theology’s apron strings) is focused on the substantive, the certain, the real. The first half of Milbank’s paper is dedicated to a sparkling, albeit much too brief, attempt to demonstrate this claim. Employing a Platonic distinction between appearance and reality, he asserts that without god to vouchsafe appearance by reference or correspondence to reality, secular knowledge devolves into atheism or agnosticism, both of which are versions of or names for nihilism. Secular knowledge, then, becomes at first an epistemological and then an ontological
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nihilism. Unless god grounds our experience, the postmodernists are right that truth is merely a dimension of discourse, and thus only conventional or pragmatic. Like the postmodernists, Milbank too considers that “we cannot compare what is known with the knowledge of it, since what is known is not available other than through knowledge.”1 What makes the difference is that ‘to know truly’ is: within the framework of participation, for it amounts to a faith that what one shows or expresses in knowledge radiates mysteriously, and in a limited measure yet not deceptively, from a plenitudinous source that is both the source of all things and the genuine depth of all things.2
Milbank pursues this theological argument vigorously but in a rather truncated form. Thus readers are unlikely to be convinced, particularly by the evocation of faith. Equally, the connections between the issues of appearance and reality and the curriculum debates in theology and religious studies, or the relationship between the two subject areas, are not always evident. Readers who are interested need to follow up Milbank’s more extensive arguments in his books, Theology and Social Theory and The Word Made Strange. Suffice it to say here that Milbank’s conclusion is that theology is the sole antidote to nihilism, and that this validation of theology includes religious studies only insofar as it a lesser form of theology. The second half of Milbank’s paper explores four related aspects of his history of the development of modern theology and its sidekick, religious studies. First, he explores the very possibility of an ontology without god. He traces this ‘secularization’ of thinking as beginning around 1300 with Duns Scotus and (via Suarez, Descartes, and Kant) coming to shape the framework and nature of modern thought. This leads, secondly, to the transition of theology from the ‘self disclosure of god’ (theology as the participation in being itself as found in the Augustinian and Thomist traditions) to a radically limited form of theology as reflection on the data of god as object. This new theology focuses on god’s miracles and the character of faith. Thirdly, the modern nation state, the secular polis, establishes a new subordinate role for a depoliticized and privatized religion. Lastly, this reduced
Milbank, ‘Retraditionalizing the Study of Religion: The Conflict of the Faculties: Theology and the Economy of the Sciences,’ 282. 2 Ibid. 1
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religion is characterized as a set of beliefs, rituals, and symbolic practices. It is this last point—a particular definition and understanding of ‘religion’—that links the history of theology and secularism to religious studies, in that religious studies, according to Milbank, has the object of its study constructed by this very specific and not always fully acknowledged history. Religious studies is thus concerned with a greatly reduced form of religion not as ontology but as the description and analysis of specific rites and beliefs. The third and final section of Milbank’s paper charts the stages in the transition of pre-Scotus theology as the ‘science of being,’ to Kant’s categorization of theology as a ‘positive science.’ Along with law and medicine these object-specific academic endeavors are held to serve public life and thus are regulated by the state, in contrast to subjects (such as philosophy) which, having no practical or public consequences, are free for unrestrained speculation. For Milbank, theology’s public role in the modern state is to legitimate and moralize the ‘politically amoral realm,’ a realm only made possible by Scotist secularism. He understands modern theology to have developed to do just this. He ends with a call for theology to assume its former glory, beginning as the basis for a critique of the ‘secular consensus.’ There are doubtless many objections theologians might understandably want to make to Milbank’s version of theological history and to his view of the Orthodox tradition. But one doesn’t have to subscribe to Milbank’s normative history of theology or agree that modernity is irredeemably nihilistic (and has its origins in the heretical and pagan developments that led medieval theologians astray) to appreciate the value of an alternative history of secularity (beginning in the fourteenth century, before the Enlightenment) and the impact that such a historical narrative could have on our understanding of the history of Christianity and ‘religion’ in the West. Further, such a history has important implications more broadly for the study of religions. My own intentions are somewhat more constrained than Milbank’s. Rather than challenging the whole secular order, I would be content if the blind certainty of received wisdom were challenged and a critical process of interrogation begun. As a teacher of the history and theory of religions I consider that the study of religions or theology does provide the basis for our predominantly secular students—students without theological training —for something seemingly not offered anywhere else in their studies: a questioning of the prevailing dominant capitalist, managerial, economic rationalist, accounts of
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humanity and its purposes. The study of religions with its alternative narratives is an ideal place for such vital questioning to be fostered. Milbank’s characterization of religious studies is somewhat unfair in that while there is indeed a small number who are committed to the unquestioning application of social scientific methodologies to ‘religious data,’ most scholars are critical of these very methodologies and are fully aware of the relationship between the rise of modern social scientific discourse and the negative portrayal of religion as part of an Enlightenment self-understanding and definition. Further, Milbank does not adequately address or resolve the issue of religious pluralism, which led in part to the establishment of academic programs in religions beyond theology. The political context of theology and religious studies needs much more attention. In the contemporary context the state often appears to play little, if any, attention to theology or religious studies programs (although there does seem to be a correlation between the expansion of religious studies in the Cold War era and the freedom to study religion versus the atheistic enemy state). Indeed, those who study religion do seem often to be charged with playing a role in the articulation of public morality. Scholars in religious studies, parallel to other disciplines and ‘area studies’ in the social sciences and humanities, have in recent years engaged in an unprecedented degree of disciplinary self-reflection. They have developed genealogies of ‘religion’ and ‘religions,’ and they have critically examined the arguments for a discrete and independent area of inquiry at all. Milbank’s work can be seen as making a significant contribution to these discussions, albeit from a very specific theological perspective. Milbank is provocative in his demands that those engaged in academic inquiry come clean concerning their authoritative axioms and principles, even to the point of attributing ‘implicit’ underlying positions to his opponents, but he is less effective in declaring his own authorities, in scripture and in the church. If his defense of theology is successful purely on philosophical grounds then what need is there for his theology? If not, then he must declare his hand. The tensions between religious studies and theology can be productive, as can the relations and debates between different theologians and scholars from different religious traditions. A theologian who knew nothing of religious studies and the history of religions or a scholar of religion unaware of theology would fail to do justice to their chosen
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area of study. The humanities and social sciences do, of course, have a view, or views, as to what might be called ‘scholarly formation’— a predisposition to think in specific ways and a degree of mastery of a body of authoritative literature—but generally formation plays a much lesser role in these fields than it does in Christian theology, where a student comes to embody a particular authoritative tradition. Religious studies often goes to great lengths to separate academic activity from personal belief and commitment, not always successfully. Notwithstanding Milbank’s plausible claim that the very centrality of Christianity in western academic history entails the centrality of Christianity in theology and religious studies, it is essential to recognize that orthodox histories always submerge alternative histories and other viewpoints. Similarly, normative Christian theological history obscures other Christianities, other theologies, and the concerns of other religious traditions—just as there was a time before the secular, for many traditions there was a historical, if not theological, time before, or outside and independent of, Christianity. Milbank demands that we take our research and teaching most seriously in the battle for ‘truth.’ We must consider the underlying foundations, history, and broader implications of our work most seriously. As one who studies contemporary religion I consider it important that scholars of religious studies recognize a tremendous overlapping of interests with Milbank—shared concerns that he too might fully recognize. These include issues such as the role of religion in the modern state, the rise of secular thinking, the religious and moral critiques of the capitalist-liberal order, and the need to include the role and work of current theologians, such as Milbank, in our work on contemporary religion. Finally, I have much more moderate aims for my academic concerns (and much less fear of an already effected compromise with the secular) than his (‘the self-disclosure of god’) and I would be content to explain something of our beliefs, practices, social forms, and sources of authority, reflecting on how these have come to be and how they affect and shape contemporary politics, international relations, culture, morality, and the ways we understand our lives.
ERNST TROELTSCH AND THE FUTURE OF THE STUDY OF RELIGION Trutz Rendtorff The title of the topic I have been asked to address contains an allusion to a colloquium whose papers were published in 1976 under the title ‘Ernst Troeltsch and the Future of Theology.’1 A good twentyfive years separate that colloquium at Lancaster University in England from this Congress in the United States. In the categories of world history, of course, that is not a long time. Is it possible that we could know more about the future now than we did then? At that time, John Clayton, who edited those 1976 papers, was Lecturer in Religious and Atheistic Thought at Lancaster, and has since assumed a Professorship at Boston University. Meanwhile, the Ernst Troeltsch Society, which (together with Boston and Harvard universities) helped to organize this Congress, was founded in Augsburg, Germany, in 1981. This society is now working on a complete critical edition of the writings of Ernst Troeltsch, the first volumes of which began to appear in 1998.2 At the time of the previous Congress one could still understand the lack of interest in Troeltsch in much of twentieth-century theology by citing, for example, Richard R. Niebuhr’s notion of a ‘Barthian captivity of the history of modern Christian thought.’3 But just as so many other iron curtains have been lifted, so, too, has this ‘captivity’ become a thing of the past. It is present, if at all, only in George Lindbeck’s idea of a narrative tribe, or a tribal religion.4 The future of the study of religion is assembled in an exemplary See John Clayton, ed., Ernst Troeltsch and the Future of Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976). 2 Ernst Troeltsch, Kritische Gesamtausgabe (henceforth KGA), ed. Friedrich W. Graf and Volker Drehsen, Gangolf Hübinger, Trutz Rendtorff; 20 vols. (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter); the following volumes have been published to date: Die Absolutheit des Christentums und die Religionsgeschichte (1902/1912), vol. 5, 1998; Schriften zur Bedeutung des Protestantismus für die moderne Welt (1906–1913), vol. 8, 2001; Schriften zur Politik und Kulturphilosophie (1918–1923), vol. 15, 2002. 3 Quoted in Clayton, Ernst Troeltsch and the Future of Theology, x. 4 George Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1984), 135. 1
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way at this Congress. In plenary addresses we have heard about the state of research and the contested approaches in the field. In the parallel sessions we have witnessed promises of development and change. Thus, I could say that the theme of this last address has already been treated sufficiently in this Congress, and that therefore it remains for me to say only, “Everything we have heard and discussed this week will be the future of the study of religion. There it is!” But for some reason I doubt that this is what the organizers had in mind when they asked me to speak on this topic today. All in all, things do not look bad for ‘Ernst Troeltsch and the Future of the Study of Religion.’ What was once the future and now is the past seems to have fulfilled at least some of that which was expected of it. If Troeltsch were here as a participant in this Congress, how would he judge the present situation, which was once his future? Perhaps he would feel the price of the renewed interest in his work: his work, too, has been historicized. It is important to remember that the historical method was the founding rock upon which the science of religion gained its position and asserted and established itself against religious prejudice and particularly against the apologetic opposition of dogmatic theology. This method was no special possession of Ernst Troeltsch, as he himself pointed out in his well-known essay, ‘Historical and Dogmatic Method in Theology.’5 In his 1901 work, The Study of Religion,6 Morris Jastrow— to name just one contemporary of Troeltsch—did not tire of stressing the fundamental and guiding meaning of the historical method for the study of religion. William Clebsch7 made Jastrow’s book newly accessible in 1981 in the series, ‘Classics in Religious Studies.’ Discussions about historical method (in both the narrow and everexpanding senses) are part of the everyday concerns of the study of 5 Ernst Troeltsch, ‘Historische und dogmatische Methode in der Theologie,’ in Gesammelte Schriften II (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr/Siebeck, 1913), 729–53. English translation: ‘Historical and Dogmatic Method in Theology,’ in Religion in History, ed. James Luther Adams and Walter F. Bense (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1991), 11–32. 6 Morris Jastrow, The Study of Religion (London: Walter Scott, 1901). Ernst Troeltsch published a review of Jastrow’s book in Deutsche Literaturzeitung 26, no. 1 ( Jan. 7, 1905): cols. 12–14. 7 See William Clebsch, Christianity in European History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979). Here he discusses the question of religion’s universal claim. Making reference to Troeltsch’s essay, ‘The Dogmatics of the “Religionsgeschichtliche Schule”’ (American Journal of Theology 17, no. 1 [ January 1913]: 1–21; also in Religion in History, 87–108), he quotes Troeltsch’s statement that “the essence of Christianity differs in different epochs, and is to be understood as something involved in the totality of its active influence” (see Clebsch, 279).
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religion as a scientific discipline. Perhaps we should not underestimate this trivial observation. A future of the study of religion in a more than archival or antiquarian sense will only exist if religion indeed persists into the future. History, as Troeltsch understood it, is more than method. For Troeltsch the goal of all history was ‘the understanding of the present.’8 No one should hide the constructive character of history. This is something that Troeltsch as a theologian and philosopher of history emphasized again and again. Troeltsch spoke of the constructive character of historical research in a way that targeted its practical relevance. For Troeltsch historical research was “the basis and presupposition for the creation of norms and value judgements” to measure the “actions of an epoch directed to itself,” or the way to find a “proper basis for our actions in relation to our own time.”9 Concepts of norms and value judgments do not suggest neutrality and impartial objectivity, which are viewed as the postulates of scientific research. Rather, they suggest practical engagement and partisanship in light of the present. But such things have been bound up with ‘religion’ since it first became a theme in the modern period. Religion, it was thought, should be wrested from the rule of the church and dogmatics, and should be freed from its captivity. It was out of this interest that the science of religion emerged as an independent discipline.10 From its inception, the science of religion was bound up constitutively with a practical interest, even though this interest may not often be apparent in its own scientific discourses, methods, and definitions of religion. This practical interest has always been the salt in the soup. And with it, there is always an interest in shaping the future. Concerning Troeltsch and the future of the study of religion, I would like to make a few observations which relate to this interest in the practical and in the future. In doing so, I do not wish to enter into that sprawling labyrinth of methodological and analytical definitions which are the concern of the experts. 8 Ernst Troeltsch, Die Bedeutung des Protestantismus für die Entstehung der modernen Welt (Munich/Berlin: Oldenbourg, 1906). English translation: Protestantismus and Progress: A Historical Study of the Relation of Protestantism to the Modern World (London: Williams & Norgate, 1912). 9 ‘Das Wesen des modernen Geistes,’ in Gesammelte Schriften IV (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1925), 297; English translation: ‘The Essence of the Modern Spirit,’ in Religion in History, 237. 10 See, for example, Ernst Troeltsch’s articles, ‘Aufklärung,’ and ‘Deismus,’ in Gesammelte Schriften IV, 338–73 and 429–87.
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I. The Future Beyond the Present
Which future do we mean? In the material discussion of the methodological principle of historical relativity in Die Absolutheit des Christentums,11 Troeltsch arrives at the conclusion that we have come to know the highest achievements of history not merely by chance, but rather because such achievements are “the only significant developments which have arisen from an elemental matrix.”12 For Troeltsch, as is well known, the history of religion leads us to see that in the circle of the great world religions Christianity belongs to these highest achievements. After he presents this view of historical development as progression toward the highest level of religion in history, Troeltsch makes to himself the following objection: The presence of humans on earth must be calculated in several hundred thousand years, of which we know only the last six or seven thousand. How long humans will remain on our planet is fully unknown. What about the future? In view of the future, Troeltsch reflects on the possibility of “climactic changes associated with the shifting poles.” In new ice ages they could bring the full displacement of the physical foundations of culture. What we know as our history could potentially have as many unknown predecessors as it may have unknown futures. Absoluteness as high or highest validity of religions may be an assumption that is interesting only relative to ‘our’ history.13 When Troeltsch spoke at the Fifth World Congress for a Free Christianity in Berlin in 1910,14 he emphasized the huge span of time that constitutes human history, noting that development might at any time come to a grandiose and abrupt end. Further, he reflected on the possibility that, in the magnificent life of the divine, there might exist still “other universes with other sources of light” beyond that of our own.15 Here again Troeltsch envisions with speculative eyes 11 Ernst Troeltsch, Die Absolutheit des Christentums (1902) = KGA, vol. 5 (henceforth KGA 5). English translation: The Absoluteness of Christianity and the History of Religions, introduction by James Luther Adams, trans. David Reid (Richmond, VA: John Knox Press, 1971). Henceforth Absoluteness. 12 KGA 5, 172; Absoluteness, 91. 13 Ibid. 14 ‘Die Zukunftsmöglichkeiten des Christentums in Verhältnis zur modernen Philosophie’ (enlarged lecture at the ‘World Congress for Free Christianity,’ Berlin 1910) in Gesammelte Schriften II, 837–62. English translation: ‘On the Possibility of a Liberal Christianity,’ in Religion in History, 321–43. 15 ‘Die Zukunftsmöglichkeiten,’ 850; ‘On the Possibility,’ 350.
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‘new ice ages’ that could be followed by the creation of new religions. Concluding these cosmological speculations, Troeltsch states, “However, we need not be led astray by what is completely unknown, whether in the past or in the future.”16 History in general, universal history, is only relevant as known history, relative to our own world and its cultures. But ought we follow Troeltsch’s advice? For the sake of discussion, let me briefly take up and play with those Troeltschian speculations: Do not visions of the future beyond our known history belong constitutively to the worldview of any religion? It is true that the destruction of the cosmology as implied in Christian eschatology was one of the main starting points of the modern critique of religion. The modern study of religion developed out of this critique, as did the transformation of religious images of the future into an ethical understanding of the Kingdom of God in liberal theology. But that is a topic that I cannot discuss further here. Today’s questions give Troeltsch’s reflections about the future a different weight. The question of whether ‘shifting poles,’ ‘changing climates,’ and ‘ice ages’ or their opposites could change the basis of culture lies in no way ‘outside of our known cultural circles,’ as Troeltsch suggested. On the contrary, these issues, along with questions about the results of human conduct, have become highly relevant themes in recent decades—beginning at least with the report of the Club of Rome in 1972. Bound up with such themes are imperatives for the ‘actions of an epoch directed to itself.’ And it is obvious that religious consciousness reacted with special sensitivity to the extrapolation of the data concerning possible or real ecological crisis. Should these outlooks let the study of religion rest undisturbed? Historical-critical consciousness has set up a rational barrier between human history of culture in academic studies on the one hand and cosmological imagination in religions on the other. Is this barrier as solid and firmly built as the historical hermeneutic of culture suggests? Must and should therefore the future of the study of religion perhaps expand the field of its comparative studies in order to explore how religions with their implicit and explicit theologies respond to this new type of experience? It may be quite possible that constructive studies of religions which would examine the presence of the future would recognize new criteria of differentiation between religions which 16
KGA 5, 172; Absoluteness, 91–92.
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cannot be simply accounted for as cultural prejudices. Where the signs of ecological crisis are not taken as indication of a divine fate, but are understood as a call for ‘action upon our own world,’ the ecological imperatives of responsibility for the future can only be addressed to strong self-reflective personal subjects. It is well known that Troeltsch held to his position: Taking every conceivable possibility into account, our civilization, rooted as it is in “antiquity and in Christianity,” could fall back into barbarism. Although this would mean the end of Christianity in its present form, the religious idea of “personalism” would “return in different historical forms” and “restitute itself ” and “fashion itself anew.”17 In the context of present experience it is perhaps not necessary to wait so long for this test. Could it not be a worthy field of the future study of religion to ask which formations of religion have developed resources to meet the future in categories other than mythical or cultic ones? Such research would have to inquire whether there are any discernible alternatives to a religious education whose goal it is to cultivate the idea of the responsible self. I leave these questions open as an example for future discussion. II. The Abolition of the Uncertainty of the Future Questions in another direction, although no less urgent and speculative, could be asked in relation to Troeltsch’s reflections on the yet unknown future history. Such questions would be concerned with something like the abolition of the uncertainty of the future. As a stimulus to discussion I would like to make reference to the explosive development of biology, which is often regarded as the leading science of the new century, just as history was the leading science of the nineteenth and hermeneutics that of the twentieth century. I am not concerned with the validity of such estimations and interpretations. It is unmistakable that molecular biology in the departments of genetic research and genetic engineering has given rise to a new wave of interpretations of the world. Expectations of progress have always had a religious timbre. Progress is often conceptualized as the ‘betterment of life,’ as the hope for the overcoming of suffering, as redemption from the pain of finitude, 17
KGA 5, 199; Absoluteness, 116.
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and as freedom from the uncertainty of contingency. Certainly, progress seen as the ‘improvement of life’ is used also to legitimize the critique of religion aiming to overcome religion, which offers instead expectations of a better afterlife. This discussion opens up a different field of discourse. The complex tensions between religion, which is based in history, and modern science are stronger (and even of a different kind) than currently perceived in debates about truth and realism, or in constructions of the intellectual compatibility of science and religion. The price of exact clarity is one-sidedness. The reduction of complexity is a distinguishing mark of religious speech, symbols, and worldviews. But not only. In proclaiming the goals of applied genetic research, promises are made with the authority of the most up-to-date scientific knowledge, hinting at a possible end to mortality and contingency. It is promised that humanity will become a self-determining subject of its own evolution. Promising the end of an uncertain future by correcting humanity’s genetic disposition is akin to ‘playing God’ (Dworkin). Why is it that scientists make use of religious language and images? How does this use of religious language function? Personalism, which Troeltsch saw as the decisive ground of Christianity’s value, is reduced to genetic production and optimization, which are lifted up as the criteria for the culture of a new humanity. It seems clear that the research agenda for the field of religion today should include an examination of these new developments in genetics and their public interpretation. In particular, scholars should analyze the worldviews implied in genetic technology and the way its promises are communicated to the public. Everyone acknowledges that religion implies a worldview. But does this not also hold for sciences as well? How are the history of humankind and the history of biological evolution to be connected or differentiated? To be prepared for new dimensions of the ongoing history of religion, the study of religion needs more than ever to be based on and guided by a philosophy of religion. III. Theology or Study of Religion? The long-standing tension, and indeed conflict, between religious studies and theology is based in large part on a difference in practical interests. For Troeltsch the science of religion belonged to the cultural
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sciences. As a theologian he was interested in connecting Christian theology to the questions of the new cultural sciences, both methodologically and systematically. For him religious studies was a new and independent discipline coming from the general discipline of philosophy of religion and theology. In his essay, ‘Religion and the Science of Religion,’ Troeltsch speaks of a difference between “naïve religion” and religion that has been “scientifically elaborated,” educated by science.18 This distinction marks the specific problems of religion in modernity. Religious studies do not generate true religion; they could only produce something like the ‘religion of intellectuals’ or the ‘religion of seminars and congresses.’ Where does the practical problem lie? Scholars in the field of religion emphasize that they are committed to researching and valuing all religions equally and neutrally. Morris Jastrow spoke of the generally sympathetic attitude with which the student of religions is taught to examine all religions, independent of his or her own religious convictions. But not without one’s own convictions! Thus, Jastrow could say that “the student who has not passed through actual religious experiences misses an important preparation for the study of religion.”19 In order to have a sympathetic attitude toward all religions, one must first have “decided convictions of one’s own.” We must “have experienced ourselves the power of religious sentiment.” Addressing his critics in theology, Troeltsch explicitly pointed to his own religious convictions, which were established prior to his entrance into the field.20 This is a delicate theme, because personal religious convictions do not function well as arguments in scientific discourse. It is also delicate if one recognizes that one’s own religious convictions are themselves culturally conditioned; scholars do not live in a province outside of history. It is even more difficult if those convictions are formed as a critique of the theology belonging to one’s own religious tradition. It was precisely within this constellation of issues that Troeltsch connected the difference between naïve and scientifically elaborated religion to a practical task. ‘Naïve’ religion can be charcterized by 18 ‘Wesen der Religion und der Religionswissenschaft,’ in Gesammelte Schriften II, 452–99; here: 463ff; English Translation: ‘Religion and the Science of Religion,’ in Ernst Troeltsch: Writings on Theology and Religion, trans. and ed. Robert Morgan and Michael Pye (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1990), 82–123; here: 89ff. 19 Jastrow, The Study of Religion, 324 n. 7. 20 Preface to the first edition of KGA 5, 91; Absoluteness, 26.
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an aversion to all quests for scientific knowledge, but expressing strong religious feelings. In Troeltsch’s judgment, historical forms of ‘naïve’ religion tend to be one-sided, culture-less, exalted, narrowminded, unharmonious, and confused. Those are strong words. Only in seldom cases has this tendency been compensated through the “seal of religious genius.”21 It is here that religious studies as an academic discipline comes into view. Religious studies, as a scientific ‘discipline’ of religion, shares in the task of ‘disciplining’ naïve religion, e.g. of cultivating and educating religion.22 Naïve religion demands the corrective of education, knowledge of the real world, and justly reflected tolerance, looking beyond one’s own worldview. In all these directions the study of religion and the historical religions are tied to each other by the concept of a common human culture. What follows from that? Troeltsch assigns to the study of religion the practical goal of ordering and clarifying that which has grown up in a naïve and wild way. According to him, the study of religion has to do with the cultivation of religion so that it might overcome what Troeltsch called the ‘naive isolation’ of religion and be part of a consciously acting intelligent culture.23 This is something other than a general sympathetic attitude which indiscriminately allows everything to be valid. And it certainly sounds challenging to the ears of academic scholars. To Troeltsch, this challenge was part of the progress of the history of religion itself as a foundational element of modern culture. Religion which has gone through the impact of science will and must change. And it has changed: Christianity without cultivation would have been left to be a “cultureless Christianity” with the tendency of a “sanctimonious clericalism.”24 Does the same apply to religions in the plural? I have raised this point for a specific reason. In Christianity, the task of educating and regulating religion is the practical end of theology. But in the battle with modern sciences, theology has turned from rationalized dogmatics towards the roots of religion, to immediate faith, to experience and religious feeling in order to ground its independence over against the secular sciences in empirical structures which are beyond the grip of secular science. In consequence, theology presents itself as a kind of religious performance. 21 22 23 24
‘Wesen der Religion,’ 467; ‘Religion and the Science of Religion,’ 92–93. ‘Wesen der Religion,’ 468; ‘Religion and the Science of Religion,’ 93. Ibid. ‘Wesen der Religion,’ 467; ‘Religion and the Science of Religion,’ 93.
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On the other hand, ‘religious studies’ in the academy decidedly wants to study religion without theology, often treating theology as non-existent or worthy of neglect because of its normative religious claims. But precisely because of this, would it not be of great interest if religious studies were to take up the topic of theologies in the plural? Does not the science of religion turn its back on an important and significant field of research if it regards theology with disdain and ignorance? For this field of research it could prove fruitful and interesting to investigate the ways in which theologies, foremost those of protestant European or North American provenience, have taken up the methods and contents of the humanities and history. Historical and sociological interpretation were quasi baptized and incorporated into the religious-theological interpretation of the world. Yet, within this process traditional religion becomes a ‘different religion,’25 as critics in both Christian churches and sects aptly sense. The future of the study of religion should not turn its back on this theme. Christian theology in the context of western culture offers rich material for such considerations. Yet, this question becomes even more urgent if viewed under the perspective of those religious cultures whose intellectual elites currently enter the modern western space of reflection. No wonder that here the charge of ‘Eurocentrism’ or ‘Western prejudice’ raises its head. After all, Troeltsch’s vision of a reshaped religion in conformity with a modern scientific worldview ended, at the beginning of the twentieth century, in a rather skeptical tone. The positive effects of a science and philosophy of religion on the existing religions seemed to him to be rather marginal. In the first place, Troeltsch argued, one might expect them to be at work in ways of “reconciliation, in the settlement of religious differences of cultural mankind.”26 Finally, the inner power of religious life will have to bring about, out of its own depth, the transformation that could reshape and rebuild the future of religion.27 Science could at least come to aid in clarifying and in giving orientation in this process of transformation. Two decades later, after the First World War, Troeltsch directed scientific 25 “eine andere”; ‘Wesen der Religion,’ 469; ‘Religion and the Science of Religion,’ 94. 26 ‘Wesen der Religion,’ 497; ‘Religion and the Science of Religion,’ 119. 27 ‘Wesen der Religion,’ 499; ‘Religion and the Science of Religion,’ 120.
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insights to the analysis of the competition among the religions to reach purification and clarification.28 In our earthly experience the divine life is not a One, but a Many.29 As far as this distinction holds even for the central idea of personality, it points toward the basic structure of the relationship between religion and culture. Here, the help of scientific reflection will always be needed. IV. Religion beyond Confessions and Creeds Troeltsch, as a matter of fact, was a committed representative of a historical-philosophical and religious-historical Europeanism or Euroamericanism. That holds especially for his last great work, Der Historismus und seine Probleme (1922).30 Since we are discussing the future study of religion in Boston, let me mention some of the remarks of Troeltsch concerning the USA. The fact that North America has become more and more the center of western culture is, in the eyes of Troeltsch, just a geographical shift, a case where colonies have grown to greater importance than the colonizing country, a case of the end of colonial provincialism. America is the beginning of an “incalculable future,” one of the “open posts of the future.”31 Minted by a complex amalgam of antique and Christian elements, the Euroamerican culture is to Troeltsch an “unprecedented singularity.” To shape the future of this culture is the present practical and cultural task. Is the study of religion currently involved or even interested in such a task? Clearly there is much dissent, doubt, and objection toward it. Setting aside all ambitions of philosophies of history, the following is clear: as long as the academic discipline of religious studies makes use of the concept ‘religion’ in the singular—and it must do so in the face of the countless academic attempts at a consensual definition of religion—this challenge will always be present. Primarily, that is, for methodological reasons. But secondly with regard to the highly reflected understanding of ‘religion’ as it has been developed in the
28 Christian Thought: Its History and Application, ed. Friedrich von Hügel (London: University of London Press, 1923), 63; German edition: Der Historismus und seine Überwindung (Berlin: Verlag Rolf Heise, 1923), 83. 29 “nicht ein Eines, sondern ein Vieles”; Ibid. 30 Der Historismus und seine Probleme: Erstes Buch: Das logische Problem der Geschichtsphilosophie, Gesammelte Schriften III (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr/Paul Siebeck, 1922) = KGA, vol. 16. 31 Der Historismus, 729.
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modern age. To these aspects of the concept of ‘religion’ I now want to turn. Religion in the singular is a historically-constructed political and theological category, which arose in consequence of church division in the sixteenth century, a division that ended a longstanding unity of ecclesiastically dominated culture. The singular word ‘religion’ emerged out of the realities of the European religious wars (on the continent as well as in the UK), as a construct designed to bring peace beyond the unreconcilable church parties. And it is deeply bound to the basic structure of modern democratic nations, particularly in this country. I would like to recall the regulative function of the concept of religion over these conflicting religious parties by indicating briefly three characteristics of the term ‘religion’ in this historical sense. The first and fundamental characteristic is the practical and conceptual distinction between religion and politics. This distinction can only create peace if it is built into the regiment of rights, which binds everyone equally, the rulers as well as the faithful, the church, and religious groups. The common interest in peace can be achieved only through a practiced consciousness of this strict distinction. The second characteristic is this: Religion changes from a possession of the historical institutions of the Corpus Christianum to an entitlement of men and women, of human individuals. Religion in the singular as freedom of religion becomes a primary right and original property of the individual. Religious freedom as individual freedom prepares the way for the freedom of the personal and private sphere of life. With that, privacy is and remains an eminent political category. Finally, the third characteristic I will mention here is of a more abstract nature. The distinction of politics and religion produces in consequence many other distinctions; the attribution of religion to the individual subject nourishes a permanent process of reflexivity and differentiation, which leads by and large to an increase in the rationality of culture. Here we can identify the root of a serious concept of pluralism. Therefore, whoever reflects on ‘religion’ or studies ‘religion’ must always be conscious that this concept involves much more than religion. The concept of religion embraces not only religion as an object to be observed in a concrete sense associated with its particular contents, set apart from other forms of culture. The modern concept of
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religion functions as a structural element in culture in general. That this is the case becomes quite evident when one considers that religions outside of Euroamerican culture have for themselves no equivalent single term ‘religion’ or a concept of ‘religion’ that is tuned in this differentiated meaning. This culture, which was formed out of differentiation, individual freedom, and reflexivity, has met strong resistance in the name of an all-encompassing community and religious and national unity. This resistance points to an unresolved conflict between Christianity and modernity, a conflict that finds its continuation and revival nowadays. Moreover, it points to a dissatisfaction with a troubling culture of reflection and a desire for unambiguous clarity. In the wake of globalization this conflict nowadays finds its continuation and revival in the encounter with other religious cultures that feel estranged by a culture of differentiation and reflexivity. When, as it is the case today, religions in the plural are summoned and gathered together for dialogue, prayer, and proclamations, the initiators of such events use a concept of religion in the singular. They gather in order to unite around that which religions in the plural may have in common. To be honest, religious leaders must be capable of applying the distinctions that come forth with ‘religion’ to their own understanding of religion. But to what end? Do ‘religions’ bind together as ‘religion’ in order to direct the world toward a future global unity, which the world itself is incapable of achieving? The promise that world crises and conflicts could be solved under the auspices of religion could be understood as a revival of the idea of peace beyond the religious parties, but now in a reversal of the very constellation that produced the modern concept of religion. Should world politics find its shelter under the roof of religion? And how would the religions have to change to meet this kind of expectation? These may be some of the topics that belong to the future of the study of religion, if one attempts to discuss it from the perspective of Ernst Troeltsch.
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RESPONSE TO TRUTZ RENDTORFF Sarah Coakley In this appreciative response to the last contribution of this volume, I shall briefly attempt three undertakings. First, I shall give a ‘bare bones’ recapitulation of what I take to be the main points of Trutz Rendtorff ’s essay, in order to sharpen the focus of the issue of Troeltsch’s continuing relevance, or otherwise, for the issue of the future of the study of ‘religion.’ Second, I shall turn back the historicizing Troeltschian gaze on Rendtorff ’s proposals themselves, and suggest some critiques of Troeltsch’s own position as espoused by Rendtorff, which may reveal it to be more deeply tied up than is owned with the historical and political circumstances of contemporary Germany, and with the particular authority there of the academy. I shall question whether this model is easily exportable, and indeed— more speculatively—whether certain features of it would even commend themselves to a Troeltsch redivivus today. Thirdly, and finally, I shall probe a little further about Rendtorff ’s central question of what constitutes the ‘practical task’ (die praktische Aufgabe) confronting the contemporary study of religion, and how that might relate to the vexed issue of the study of religion’s relation to Christian practice. In both the second and third tasks I shall attempt to weave in some of the more memorable insights from other major essays in this volume, especially where they present contrasts to Rendtorff ’s position. I. Résumé: Rendtorff on Troeltsch and the Study of Religion in the Present and Future So first, the ‘bare bones’ of the argument, as I have understood it. Rendtorff has given us an account of Troeltsch’s distinctive approach to the study of religion, and his reading might be said to be at the polar opposite extreme of perceptions of religion’s significance from that of John Milbank in this collection; yet ironically, as we shall see, what both share at the end of the day—whether explicitly or implicitly—is a continuing insistence on Christian hegemony. At least the following central theses seem to be in play in Rendtorff ’s paper:
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a. The study of religion is an ‘historical’ undertaking which eschews dogmatism and must be wrested away from ecclesiastical captivity; b. its task, however, is no less ‘practically’ oriented than that of theology, since ‘historical’ study does not imply either dispassion or lack of constructive application; c. the most important ‘practical’ tasks of the study of religion, then, are appropriately seen as two-fold: (1) the tempering and rationalizing of ‘naïve’ religious claims; and (2) the re-direction of religious tradition into the future. (An adjunct aside in relation to this latter task is the suggestion that investigating key narratives of biology and genetics may become important in this coming century, since these may be performing a quasi-religious role culturally.) d. ‘Religion’ as a unifying category in the West, however, has a history which goes back to the religious wars of the post-Reformation period: it is a category of specifically Christian provenance, and this must be owned. But: e. The thematic cluster Christianity/Europeanism/Americanism/‘personalism’ hangs together intrinsically and must be taken forward, in collaboration with the globalization it has spawned, under the guidance of the overseeing experts in religion. I trust this is a fair précis and representation of the main points made in Rendtorff ’s paper. Now if, as I take it, Rendtorff is not just describing but significantly endorsing this ‘Troeltschian’ program, then let me turn next to my critique of it. II. Critique: Overcoming Troeltsch with Troeltsch Rendtorff ’s proposal about the science of religion’s task of tempering ‘naïve’ religion is puzzling, and seems to me problematic for at least four reasons. First, and at the merely exegetical level, this was an argument found predominantly in Troeltsch’s 1902 text Die Absolutheit des Christentums, and it not insignificantly disappears from Troeltsch’s own recommendations in later work; the discussion of it is already somewhat embarrassedly tempered in the second edition of Die Absolutheit, as Rendtorff is best qualified to tell us (having recently produced the important new German edition of this work). Second, Troeltsch himself saw the difficulties inherent in this notion:
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for who or what, after all, is to be deemed ‘naïve’ in this supposedly redeemable sense, and how can ‘naiveté’ be even back-handedly recommended, once the Ritschlian appeal to a direct ‘inward’ relation to the divine, (which seemingly originally sustained this discourse) gets set aside? If what constitutes ‘naiveté’ is a false attribution of absoluteness, then does that make, for example, the recent papal document Dominus Jesus a ‘naïve’ document? The charge seems strange, given the sophistication of Ratzinger’s (or his associate’s) arguments. So is then ‘naiveté’ instead a code for ‘fundamentalism’? But if ‘naiveté’ attaches to rituals, practices, or beliefs that simply look odd, ‘unscientific,’ or ‘superstitious’ to privileged (but perhaps rather secularized) professional Christian academicians of ‘religion,’ then surely we can turn the Troeltschian table again and inquire whose interests are served by this proposed academic ‘policing of the sublime’? Especially in the face of current-day neo-fundamentalisms, the suggestion that “naïve religion demands the corrective of education”1 raises immense questions both of the presumed hegemony of a particular ‘Christian’ academic culture, and of the sheer practicality of such an undertaking. When we take into account not only the enormous diversity of ‘traditional’ religious commitment in Northern Europe today, but also the ‘de-traditionalized’ forms of religious activity outlined in this volume by Paul Heelas, we see the enormity of the tasks suggested by Rendtorff, and we must surely muse on its pragmatic possibility. It is however the great merit of Troeltsch (and of Rendtorff ’s reading of him) to admit the Christian, post-Reformation genealogy of the unified term ‘religion’ that he is applying. But (and this is my third problem with Rendtorff ’s proposal) once the hierachical ordering of this ‘religion’ into a supreme Christian apex, as argued in Die Absolutheit, falls away (and Troeltsch famously rejected his earlier position in his last lectures, Christian Thought, admitting that even the values of ‘personalism’ are Western-specific), then why maintain this unified notion of ‘religion’ at all? Can it, as scholars like Steven Collins have charged, do anything but mislead, to valorize Christianity in a false new absolutism of presumed ‘hegemony’? Why not admit that it is Christian studies that are in play, with the so-called ‘other’ religions largely pushed to the margins of consciousness? (Where, for 1
Rendtorff, ‘Ernst Troeltsch and the Future of the Study of Religion,’ 309.
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instance, is the Islam of the German Gastarbeiter in the model of religion’s tempering of ‘naiveté’ here recommended?) Michael Pye’s challenge to take on board the different models of ‘religion’ present in different parts of the world, or in different communities in different parts of the world, is not part of Rendtorff ’s—or the earlier Troeltsch’s— picture as represented here, although I believe there actually were intimations of Troeltsch’s coming to understand this critique in his last essays. And finally must we not, as good Troeltschian historicizers, acknowledge also the specific German situatedness of the proposal here made by Rendtorff, namely, that the academic exponents of ‘religion’ take the Christian cultural matrix forward into the new era of globalization? (As Rendtorff puts it, “In Christianity, the task of educating and regulating religion is the practical end of theology.”2) To me, an English scholar working in America, such a bold project of supervision and regulation implies a confidence about the power of the academy in regard to religion that could hardly be countenanced except in very specific cultural circumstances. Only, perhaps, in a country in which senior academics still enjoy some considerable public power, financial rewards, and esteem—a modified remnant of the ‘mandarin’ class of Troeltsch’s day?—could such a proposal be mooted (whereas even for nearby Great Britain, for instance, where academic salaries have sunk disastrously in the last thirty years, such an idea seems severely unrealistic). Or again, only in a country where an established church-state relation has accustomed the public to official religious recommendations in the public sphere and the press, does this proposal seem in any way convincing. In the United States, in contrast to Northern Europe, it is hard to imagine—given the official church/state divide—by whom and how and where such religious guiding of the progress of globalization by academic theologians could possibly occur. And, further, let me underscore in a Troeltschian spirit of self-reflexive consciousness, that senior academics in religion in Germany cannot be said to represent the religious populace evenly: is this not a matter that should trouble, or at least concern, the norm-purveying academician of religion? Where are the women, the Jews, the Muslims, and the ‘new agers’—to name 2
Rendtorff, ‘Ernst Troeltsch and the Future of the Study of Religion,’ 309.
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but some of the constituents of the new German ‘pluralist’ population whose perspectives might need to be considered? Questions of power and voice again rise to the forefront in any consideration of how ‘naiveté’ might appropriately be construed or tempered. III. The ‘Practical Task’ After this series of deliberately contentious (but politically serious) queries, let me end with some further genuine puzzles, and a suggestion, about what Rendtorff calls the ‘practical task’ that confronts the study of religion today. Like Rendtorff, and following Troetlsch, I fully concur—though not all would, as Ivan Strenski’s contribution to this volume demonstrates—with the insistence that the study of religion is no mere dispassionate task of observation, but always involves— implicitly or explicitly—a political program. My puzzle is whether what I see as the new ‘iron cage’ of globalization is really one that can be so enthusiastically endorsed as a Christian heritage as Rendtorff appears to suggest, and I would like to see him defend this supposition, especially in the light of the critique of globalization’s destructiveness provided in this volume by Bryan Turner. My own views about the potential ‘practical task’ of religious studies lie, in contrast, in another direction, suggested by Pierre Hadot’s recovery of the necessarily integral connection of philosophy and ‘spiritual practice.’ It could be, I suggest, a more fruitful ‘practical task’ for the academy (and the relevant nation involved) to investigate the connections between the academic study of religions and the transformative undertakings of ascetic practice, than to imagine that a few politically powerful academics can wrest ‘religion’ willfully into the future in a chosen trajectory. Indeed, it could be that the problem of the recognition of ‘otherness’ that so exercises us in a postmodern, globalized world (as I have highlighted above), can only be resolved by a fundamental spiritual dispossession wrought through ascetic practice. Such would be a task in which practitioners (‘naïve’ or otherwise) could be equally engaged with academics of ‘religion,’ for pluralistic religious harmony can surely not be achieved merely by taking thought. But somehow I am doubtful that the majority of academic theological elites would take to this idea, even though some of Troeltsch’s last published remarks about the “special character of
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love”3 in recognizing truth in otherness might conceivably be read as endorsing such an approach. I must thank Trutz Rendtorff for a most challenging and stimulating discussion of the task that confronts today’s scholar of religion, and of the rich heritage of Ernst Troeltsch’s thinking in shaping such an undertaking.
3 Troeltsch, ‘The Place of Christianity Among the World Religions,’ in Christian Thought: Its History and Application, ed. Baron von Hügel (New York: Meridian Books, 1957), 63.
APPENDIX C 2000: T F S R P S P D The essays collected in this book were first presented in the main sessions held at Congress 2000. The conference also included the following parallel sessions and panel discussion. T, S 12, 2000
P S I: Trutz Rendtorff, University of Munich, Chair Lori Pearson, Harvard University: Troeltsch on Historical Development and the Identity of Christianity Howard Rhodes, Princeton University: Troeltsch as a Secular Theologian? John Milbank’s Criticisms of Troeltsch Revisited Joel Rasmussen, Harvard University: Empiricism and Mysticism in Troeltsch’s Philosophy of Religion Gangolf Hübinger, Viadrina European University Frankfurt (Oder): Cultural History and Political Transformation P S II: Gordon Kaufman, Harvard University, Chair Jeffrey Robbins, Syracuse University: The Theological Measure: Subjecting Religious Studies to the Voice of the Other Greg Dawes, University of Otago: Argument and the Rationality of Theology Norbert Hintersteiner, University of Vienna: The Concept of God in Global Dialogue Douglas Pratt, University of Waikato: Religion & Dialogue: Interreligious Engagement & the Study of Religions
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P S III: John Carman, Harvard University, Chair Paul Morris, Victoria University of Wellington: Religio-Cultural Maintenance: The Ethnicization of the Study of Religion Abdul Latif Samian, National University of Malaysia: Pluralism and the Study of Religion—The Malaysian Perspective Frank Korom, Boston University: Explaining Reductionism: On Cows, Dung, and Other Ecological Matters in Hindu India Rodney Petersen, Boston Theological Institute: Structural Adjustments in the Study and Practice of Religion P D: T S C R Livia Kohn, Boston University, Chair David Mozina, Harvard University: A Brief History of Western Attitudes toward Chinese Religion Louis Komjathy, Boston University: The History of a Misinterpretation: Reconsidering the Distinction between Religious and Philosophical Daoism Stephen Jackowicz, Boston University: Evil and Heterodox: Difficulties in Translating Chinese Medical Terms Jiang Wu, Harvard University: Syncretism and its Discontents: The Question of Syncretism in Late Ming Buddhism Zhihua Yao, Boston University: Is Chinese Buddhism True Buddhism? John Berthrong, Boston University, Discussant W, S 13, 2000 P S IV: Trutz Rendtorff, University of Munich, Chair Peter De May, Catholic University of Leuven: Respectful Rambler or Apologetical Hunter? The Polemic between Troeltsch and Kaftan
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Hans-Hermann Tiemann, Bissendorf-Wissingen: The Dynamics of Spiritualization according to Ernst Troeltsch Martin Kumlehn, University of Bonn: Ernst Troeltsch and the Relationship between Church, Religion, and the State P S V: Ray Hart, Boston University, Chair Aaron Stalnaker, Brown University: The Continued Relevance of the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme to the Comparative Study of Religion Brian Britt, Virgina Polytechnic Institute and State University: Texts of Concealment, Revelation and Gender—The Veil of Moses in the Bible and in Christian Art Ludger Viefhues, Harvard University: The Absoluteness of Philosophy and the Plurality of Religions Dennis G. Hargiss, Harvard University: Integral Phenomenology and the Comparative Study of Mysticism P S VI: David Little, Harvard University, Chair Kevin Schilbrack, Wesleyan College: Religious Studies as a Tripartite Field: Understanding, Explaining and Evaluating Terry Godlove, Hofstra University: Now You See It, Now You Don’t: Recasting the Reductionism Debate in Religious Studies Jason Slone, Western Michigan University: Cognitive Science of Religion: A Different Kind of Explanation Brenda Brasher, Mount Union College: On Ethics, Method, and Coyote Trickster Research
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INDEX
African traditional religions, 89 agency, and historical explanation, 245 agnosticism, 14, 255 Allen, Amy, 247 anatta, 212 Anderson, Amanda, 247 animism, 50, 67 pre-animism, 51 apocalypticism, 59–60 and belief in progress, 59 the renewal of, 59 Appleby, Scott R., 60 Aquinas, Thomas, 284–287, 297 Armstrong, Nancy, 247 Arnold, Matthew, 105 Asad, Talal, 32, 289 ascetic practice, 20, 319 and sexual renunciation, 241 atheism, 14, 255, 281, 296 Atkinson, Colin and Jo B., 222 atman, 192, 194, 212 Augustine, 284, 285, 297 Aum Shinrikyô, 92 authority, 143, 254, 263 of experience, 263 of tradition, 263 religious authority, 143, 254 Barth, Karl, 288 Barthes, Roland, 35 being: definition of, 287 and God, 285 Bell, Daniel, 133 Bellah, Robert, 39, 89 Benavides, Gustavo, 48 Bennett, Judith, 236 Berger, Peter L., 33, 39, 109, 157, 188, 267, 276–277 and secularization thesis, 277 Berlin, Isaiah, 144 Beyer, Peter, 121 Bhagavad Gita, 208 and mysticism, 208 bhiksu, 197 biblical eschatology, 59 Blumenberg, Hans, 59 Bochinger, Christoph, 62
Bock, Gisela, 233 body, sociology of, 109 Boyarin, Daniel, 238 Brod, Harry, 238 Brown, Karen McCarthy, 147, 175, 186–187 Brown, Peter, 168, 228 Buber, Martin, 55 Buddhism, 88, 91, 191, 292 and mysticism, 13 ontology of mystical tradition, 191 and women’s history, 224 Burrus, Virginia, 232 Butler, Judith, 234, 246–247 Bynum, Caroline Walker, 228, 240 Cameron, Averil, 241 Campbell, Colin, 62 capitalism, 7, 16, 296, 300 capitalist globalization, 38 and religion, 179 Chakravarti, Uma, 226 Chartier, Roger, 34, 242 Christian asceticism, 242 Christian theology, 310 Christianity, 88–89, 195, 264 and Christian mystical writings, 195 and christological model, 195 and women’s history, 220, 224, 237, 240 charismatic forms of, 264 Evangelical, 264 in Africa, 89 in the USA, 89 relation to study of religion, 317 see also ‘Protestantism’ and ‘Roman Catholicism’ Church of Positivism, 166 civil religion, 88–89, 289 civilizations, clash of, 108 Cixous, Hélène, 229 Clayton, John, 301 Clebsch, William, 302 Coakley, John, 240 Collins, Steven, 317 colonialism, 117 Comte, Auguste, 165
326
Confucianism, 91 constructivism, 3, 15, 17, 34–35, 41, 44, 71 as perspectivism, 71 Cook, Captain, 5, 181 Cook, James, 156 Cooper, Kate, 241–242 cosmopolitan irony, 126–127, 130 cosmopolitan virtue, 18, 104, 106–108, 126–127, 130–132, 134, 139–140 as an ethical concern, 106 cosmopolitanism, 103, 124, 126–128, 132 classical, 128 contemporary, 128 Stoical, 128 Courtine, J. F., 285 Cowles, James, 37 creation: concept of, 285 definition of, 282 cults, 61–62 the milieu of, 62 cultural studies, 16, 18, 105, 152 Danforth, Loring, 175 Daoism, 91 deconstructionism, 24, 30, 35, 43 Derrida, Jacques, 30, 35, 122 Descartes, René, 285, 297 detraditionalization, 14, 62–63 devekuth, 13, 191–193, 200 Dionysius the Areopagite, 203, 209, 284 discourse, 236 Douglas, Mary, 37, 174, 228 Duby, Georges, 231 Duns Scotus, John, 7, 285–288, 297–298 Durkheim, Émile, 16, 51–54, 63, 66, 72, 110, 129, 155, 273 Division of Labor in Society, 52 and mechanical solidarity, 129 dynamism, 51 Eckhart, Meister, 196, 200, 209, 284–285, 287 and his investigation of scripture, 209 ecological crisis, response of religions to, 305 Eight-Fold Path, 191 Eliade, Mircea, 15, 56 Elliott, Dyan, 223 Enlightenment, 30 epistemology, 282 epistemological modesty, 144 eschatology, 305
esotericism, 61, 63, 66 essence of Christianity, 45 essentialism, 45 Euroamerican, 311 evidence, 48 faith, 122 Faivre, Antoine, 63 Falungong, 92 femininity, as a category, 246 feminist historiography, 218 and ‘women’s experience,’ 227 Fitzgerald, Timothy, 151 Foucault, Michel, 30, 228, 246–247 Four Noble Truths, 191 Fout, John, 238 Fox, George, 274 Francis of Assisi, 196 Frantzen, Allen, 238 Fraser, Nancy, 245 Fromm, Erich, 37 functionalism, 56, 57 fundamentalism, 28, 58–60, 66, 68, 122, 225 fundamentalists, 61 fundamentalist movements, 60 fundamentalist view of history, 59 the notion of, 59 and secularism, 60, 68 Geertz, Clifford, 15, 57 on religion and social order, 58 Gehlen, Arnold, 109, 267 gender history, 237, 244 and women’s history, 231 gender studies, 10, 21, 217, 243, 246 and men, 237 gender, 233, 237 and symbol systems, 11, 235 and women’s history, 235 as a category, 233, 235, 240, 244, 245 as power, 240 as rhetorical code, 242, 249 category of, 10, 239 genetic research, response of religions to, 306 George, Stefan, 116 Gibran, Kahlil, 256 Gillen, F. J., 115 Gitlin, Todd, 126 global village, 108, 133 globalatinization, 122
globalization, 17, 18, 21, 32, 103, 105–108, 110, 117–123, 131, 139, 313, 316, 319 and hybridization, 103, 106, 120, 121 and religion, 120, 121 definition of, 117 cultural, 107 theories of globalization, 119, 120 glocalization, 120 God: and being, 285, 296 as Being, 286 as first cause, 286 as the real, 282, 286 as trinitarian, 286, 293 concept of, 288 nature of, 287 personal conception of, 14 proofs of, 287 Gordon, Linda, 245 Graf, Friedrich Wilhelm, 188 Gramsci, Antonio, 44 Gregorian Reform, 10, 223, 232, 239 Gross, Otto, 116 guru, 196–198 in Buddhism, 196, 198 in Hinduism, 198 Habermas, Jürgen, 44 Hadot, Pierre, 319 hagiography, 249 Hall, Catherine, 226 Hanegraaff, Wouter, 63 Harnack, Adolf von, 45 Hasidism, 274 Heelas, Paul, 62–63, 317 Hegel, Georg W. F., 113, 284 hermeneutics of suspicion, 36 Heschel, Susannah, 248 heterosexuality, history of, 234 Hinduism, 192, 194, 225, 289, 292 and ontology of mystical tradition, 194 and women’s history, 224 historical development: and accounts of women’s agency, 220 and gender, 245 and views of progress, 218, 222 historical documents, 249 historical evidence, 12, 248 historical origins, quest for, 224 historical periodization, 20 and women, 218 implications of, 222 historical school, 15
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historical texts, 248 historical-critical method, 28 historicism, 17, 29, 43, 103, 107, 111, 114, 118, 133 German historicism, 103, 133 relativist historicism, 107 history, 47, 65 category of, 16 Hobsbawn, Eric, 34 Hodgson, Marshall, 139 Hoffman, Bruce, 40 Hoggart, Richard, 105 Hollinger, David, 126 Hollywood, Amy, 229 Holocaust, 44 Hölscher, Lucian, 60 holy, 67 holiness, 67 Hubert, Henri, 51 Hugh of Saint Victor, 208 human condition, 107, 110, 111, 144 human rights, 18, 108, 140–141, 143–144 absoluteness of, 140 concept of, 19 rights of groups, 141 rights of individuals, 141, 144 Universal Declaration of, 143 universalism of, 140 identity politics, 35–36 identity, 19, 103–104, 108, 120, 126, 128, 140–142 and culture, 108, 141 cool, 128 national, 104 politics of, 126 politics of global, 120 religious, 104, 140–142 individual, 142–144 as rights-bearing citizen, 144 autonomous, 143 the idea of, 142 individualism, 16, 52, 142, 267 and economic ethos, 56 International Association for the History of Religions, 82–83, 98 invention of tradition, 16 invention, 48, 49 Irigaray, Luce, 229 irony, 126–127, 129, 139 cosmopolitan, 126–127 ironic distance, 129 Socratic, 127, 139
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Islam, 88, 225, 292 and women’s history, 224 James, William, 4, 23, 56, 199, 201 on the category of religion, 23 Varieties of Religious Experience, 56 Jastrow, Morris, 302, 308 Jesus, 225 as mother, 239 Judaism, 88, 191, 225 and mysticism, 12 and ontology of mystical tradition, 191 Juergensmeyer, Mark, 146 Julian of Norwich, 195 Kabbalah, 191, 207 Kant, Immanuel, 26, 30, 285, 290, 297, 298 karma, 192 kavvanah, 191–192 Kelly, Joan, 218, 221–222, 244 Kempe, Margaret, 196 King, Karen, 222 King, Ursula, 226 Kirkley, Evelyn, 238 Kohl, Karl-Heinz, 33 Kulturprotestantismus, 25 Kwanzaa, 167, 178 Lawrence, Bruce B., 59–60 Le Rider, Jacques, 267 Leavis, F. R., 105 Lèvi-Strauss, Claude, 239 Leyser, Conrad, 239 liberalism, 7 Lindbeck, George, 301 Lopez, Donald, 224 Löwith, Karl, 59 loyalty, 128–129, 139 hot/cool, 128–129 sociological study of, 128 Luckmann, Thomas, 33, 44, 109, 267 Luhmann, Niklas, 120–121 Luxemburg, Rosa, 44 Lyotard, J.-F., 119, 132–133 MacIntyre, Alasdair, 109 man, category of, 11 Mannheim, Karl, 44 Marett, Robert Ranulph, 50–51, 67 and pre-animism, 67 Marty, Martin E., 60 Marx, Karl, 267 Marxism, 44, 46
Mauss, Marcel, 51, 53 McLuhan, Marshall, 118–119, 128–129, 132–133 McNamara, Jo Ann, 223, 239 medieval era, 223 megachurches, 261, 274 men’s studies, 238 Methodism, 274 Miles, Margaret, 150 Millbank, John, 315 millenarianism, 40, 58 Miller, Donald, 261, 274 miracle, concept of, 287 modern period, 43, 222, 288, 298 modernism, 60 modernity, 16, 26, 48–49, 60, 308 the notion of, 49 modern culture, 60 moksa, 212 Montaigne, Michel, 123–125 Müller, Friedrich Max, 66, 114, 134, 155 multiculturalism, 107, 128 murid, 197 murshid, 197–198 mystical experience, 12, 189, 200, 203–205, 215 as an unmediated experience, 189 comparability of, 203–204 possibility of description, 204 typologies of, 13 universal core of, 200, 205, 215 see also ‘study of mysticism’ mystical language, 203, 205–207 as sacred, 206 its ineffability and paradoxicality, 203 mysticism, 12, 16, 55–57, 61, 66, 189, 205, 208–209 and role of teacher, 12 and sacred scriptures, 208–209 global, 212, 215–216 phenomenology of, 205 the future of, 215 see also ‘study of mysticism’ mystics, 213 as theologians, 213 medieval women, 229 nationalism, 18 Nelson, Janet, 219, 223, 230 New Age, 14, 15, 39, 62–63, 88, 252, 256–259, 264, 273, 275 and appropriations of other traditions, 226 in mainstream culture, 258–259
spirituality, 252 spirituality as Life- or Self-spirituality, 256–259, 264 new historicism, 24 New Paradigm churches, 261–262 and personal experience, 262 new religiosity, 61 New Testament, 208 and mysticism, 208 Nicholas of Cusa, 284 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 107, 110, 130 Niebuhr, Richard R., 301 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 17, 103, 111–112 nihilism, 7, 281, 290, 296, 298 nirvana, 13, 192–194, 212 non-mainstream religious communities, 15 nothingness, 201–204 in Buddhism, 203 in Jewish intellectual environment, 202 notion of truth, 17 numinous, 67 Nussbaum, Martha, 126 objectivity, 17, 70, 71 as scientism, 71 occidentalism, 24, 69 Olender, Maurice, 29 ontology, 12, 286–287, 296 orientalism, 24, 69, 117–118, 123, 125 Orsi, Robert, 175 Osiek, Carolyn, 230 otherness, 20, 72–73, 123–125, 127, 143, 319 concept of, 17 geographic, 125 problem of, 123 sacred as other, 143 Otto, Rudolf, 15, 56, 67, 71–72, 75, 115, 194 Parkinson, Sydney, 5, 181, 182 as European travel writer, 183 as religious person, 183 on ‘civilized’ and ‘uncivilized’ life, 184 postcolonial critique of, 185–86 Parsons, Talcott, 106, 110, 120 Pentecostalism, 263–264, 273 in Britain, 264 in South America, 263 person, 53 notion of, 53 perspectivalism, 17, 31, 71–72, 112 phenomenology, 56–57, 58, 286 critique of, 58
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Plato, 284 pluralism, 7, 19, 28 Poovey, Mary, 247 Popper, Karl, 4, 145, 154, 164 postcolonial theory, 6 postcolonialism, 21, 252 post-industrial society, 133 postmodernism, 4, 14, 20–21, 30, 43, 71, 107, 111, 119, 133, 252, 280, 286, 297 definition of, 119 post-secular religion, 68 pragmatism, 286 pre-animism, 50–51, 54, 67 pre-Christian religions, 88 pre-millennialism, 59 prophecy, 222 Protestant Reformation, 10, 222, 244 Protestantism, 16, 87 in Europe, 87 post-Protestant secularism, 87 Pye, Michael, 318 Qur’an, 208 and mysticism, 208 relativism, 18–19, 29, 43, 103–104, 106, 110–111, 127, 130 comfortable, 106; complacent, 127, 130 conventional, 110–111 cultural, 127, 131 and epistemological privilege, 45 relativity, 30 religion: and globalization, 120–121, 212, 215–216 and identity politics, 6, 188 and modernity, 56, 66, 122 and nationalism, 40 and politics, 2, 27, 31, 40 and public life, 4 and social order, 143 and spirituality, 253 and violence, 41, 146 as a modern Western invention, 48 as a science, 4 as a subject of study, 78–81, 98 autonomy of, 146, 161 category of, 1, 8, 31–32, 45, 156, 280, 288, 299 classic theories of, 37 contemporary forms, 38 decline of, 253 definition of, 4, 6, 176–177, 187 detraditionalized, 39, 271, 274
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future of, 75, 109 history of religions, 8, 65–66, 69, 73, 114 history of the category, 289, 303, 312, 316–317 institutionalized religions, 15, 219, 253, 261 in the modern world, 64 model(s) of, 86–92, 94 nature of, 165, 167–168 normative view of, 80 religious authority, 143, 254 religious freedom, 41 religious innovation, 89 religious universalism, 127 renaissance of, 68 role of scholars of, 318 understanding religion, 72–74 religious experience, 68 religious pluralism, 28, 68, 74–75, 89, 299, 310, 313 global, 68 in the USA, 89 religious studies, 47, 52, 56, 65–66, 68–69, 70–74, 77–78, 80–85, 94, 97–101, 103–106, 109, 111, 113–114, 118, 158, 175, 251–252, 265, 270, 273, 278, 291, 297, 299 and comparative analysis, 13, 21, 114, 118 and globalization, 103 and identity politics, 37, 45 and ideological commitments, 3, 17, 28, 155, 174, 180 and insider/outsider distinction, 176 and normative questions, 2, 9, 19, 21, 27, 41, 46, 98, 308 and objectivity, 28, 70–71, 101 and positivism, 101 and questions of truth, 23, 46 and relation to religious communities, 8, 17, 150, 156 and religious commitment, 37, 300, 308 and religious practice, 6, 175, 186 and the study of human condition, 111 as a community, 169 as a science, 145, 153, 155; coherence in, 77, 82, 94 confessional character of, 73 contemporary critiques of, 3, 31 curricular offerings, 159 dehistoricization of, 278 detraditionalization of, 62–63, 252, 273, 278
difference in, 77, 94 distinctiveness of, 147, 149, 153, 158 focus of, 1, 8–9, 161, 164, 186, 298 future of, 75, 103, 106, 109 global context of, 78, 117–118, 132–134 history of, 7, 17, 26, 66, 69, 73, 113–114, 117, 285, 295, 299, 305 interdisciplinary, 82, 99 methods in 79, 82, 97, 99, 252 over-traditionalization of, 251 postmodern critiques of, 1, 27, 32 promise of, 144 relation to other disciplines, 9, 82–84, 98–99, 105–106, 111, 151, 299 relation to theology, 5, 6, 19, 26, 85, 98, 100–101, 149, 155, 173, 279, 293, 295, 299, 307 task of, 18–20, 146, 188, 270, 309, 316, 319 Renaissance period, 10, 218, 231, 244 representation, 48 Reuter, Astrid, 33 Riesebrodt, Martin, 59 ritual, 289 Robertson, Roland, 120 Robinson, Richard, 196 Rolle, Richard, 196 Roman Catholicism, 86–87 in Latin America, 86 in Europe, 87 and anti-Catholic secularism, 87 Roof, Wade Clark, 264, 270 Roper, Lyndal, 220, 223, 244–245 Rorty, Richard, 107, 129 routinization, 224 Rubin, Gayle, 233 sacralization of life, 266, 270 sacred, 143, 254 as “other,” 143 experienced relationship with, 254 Said, Edward, 30, 125 sati, 224 Satlow, Michael, 238 Scheler, Max, 44 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 57, 113 Schmidt, Wilhelm, 115 scholasticism, 285 science, definition of, 154 Scott, Joan, 226–227, 235, 237, 245 sects, 16, 56, 58–59, 61–62, 66 as fundamentalism, 58, 66 secularization, 7, 14, 18, 68, 104, 106, 116, 122, 142, 267, 270, 276–277
and sacralization of life, 267, 270 and secularized public sphere, 142 and ‘turn to life’ spirituality, 276 global, 106 secularism, 104 thesis, 1, 277 Sedgwick, Eve Kosovsky, 234 Sefiroth, 191–192, 198 self, 53, 63, 142, 144 the modern concept of, 63, 142 the notion of, 53 within a religious idiom, 144 sex, 237 as a category, 234 ideologies of sexual difference, 244 Shoah, 34 Simmel, Georg, 55, 64, 267 skepticism, 127 Smart, Ninian, 166–168, 176, 179 Smith, Jonathan Z., 16, 48, 65 Smith, Wilfred Cantwell, 100 Smith, William Robertson, 134 social change: and gender 11, 244–245 concept of, 218 social sciences, 300 sociology of religion, 105, 114 Söderblom, Nathan, 67, 71 solidarity, 110, 128–129, 139–140 mechanical, 129 religious, 140 sociological study of, 110, 128–129 thick/thin, 128, 129, 139 Sombart, Werner, 53–54 Spencer, Baldwin, 115 Spinoza, Benedict de, 287 spiritual revolution, 14, 252–256, 264, 273 as a cultural fact, 264 spirituality, 14, 252–254, 268–269 and cultural turn to interior life, 268–269, 273, 276 as an immanent experience, 254 as theistic spiritualities of life, 261, 263, 269 growth of, 253 of life, 254 of life within the institutionalized religions, 261 Staal, Fritz, 198 Stace, W. T., 200, 202 Strathern, Marilyn, 239 Strauss, Leo, 117 Strenski, Ivan, 319 study of mysticism, 190–216 and form criticism, 190, 211
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and sacred scriptures, 208–209, 211 contextual element in the, 199, 201, 211, 213 generalizations in the, 212–213; mystical models in religious traditions, 195–199 ontologies of mysticism, 191–194 Suárez, Francisco, 285, 297 Sufism, 197–198, 206–207, 240 sunyata, 200 Suso, Henry, 195–196 Suzuki, D. T., 194 Tanach, 208 and mysticism, 208 Taylor, Mark C., 47, 48, 65, 160, 169, 251 Teresa of Avila, 196 theology: and concept of the state, 288 and religious pluralism, 292 content of, 280 definition of, 6, 149, 281, 287, 289–290 focus of, 292 history of, 285, 290, 297, 300 relation to ‘secular’ disciplines, 6, 284, 296 relation to other disciplines, 291, 300 relation to religious studies, 5, 6, 19, 26, 149, 173, 279, 292, 293, 295, 299, 307 Theravada Buddhism, 167 Tiele, Cornelis P., 155 Tillich, Paul, 70 Tönnies, Ferdinand, 55 Torah, 209 and mysticism, 209 tradition, 16, 47, 65, 263 authority of, 263 invention of, 226 Transcendentalism, 274 Trever-Roper, Hugh, 232 Troeltsch, Ernst, 4, 16, 17, 19–21, 42, 54–55, 58, 61–64, 66, 74–75, 103, 106, 113–114, 118, 133, 273 and institutionalization of Christianity, 54 on American scholars of religion, 24 on Euroamerican culture, 311 on historical development, 304 on historical research, 303 on naïve religion, 308, 316 on personalism, 307 on religious and non-religious spheres, 40
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on science of religion’s task, 316 on study of religion and normative questions, 46 on the absoluteness of Christianity, 304 on the future, 305 on the goal of history, 303 on William James, 23 truth: concept of, 282–284, 300 and ontology, 284 Turner, Bryan, 319 Tylor, Edward B., 50, 67 ultimate concern, 70 universal truth, 140 universalism, 126–127, 130, 140 religious, 127 universal claims, 140 vague, 130 van der Veer, Peter, 146 Varela, F., 40 Vedas, 208–209 and mysticism, 208–209 Victorian era, 247 Voegelin, Eric, 117 vulnerability, 106, 109, 110, 127, 131–132, 143 and the study of religion, 106, 110 as a human condition, 107 Wach, Joachim, 67, 72, 115 Weber, Max, 16–17, 38, 45–46,
53–55, 58, 66, 70, 72, 103, 106, 111, 114–117, 125, 133, 267 and disenchantment, 114, 116 and ‘iron cage,’ 267 The Protestant Ethic, 53, 125 Protestantism and capitalism, 53 and relativism, 111 and value-free science, 70 White, Hayden, 30, 34 Williams, Raymond, 105 Wimbush, Vincent, 186–187 Wolff, Christian von, 285 woman: as a category, 11, 233 as a rhetorical code, 241 women: and agency, 11, 219, 221, 235, 243, 246 in early Christianity, 237, 240 symbolic representations of, 232 women’s history, 10, 237, 244 and agency, 243–44, 246–247 and appeals to ‘women’s experience,’ 226, 228 and category of gender, 235–237 and gender history, 231 and historical periodization, 10 and public/private distinction, 230 and ‘the body,’ 228, 266 and use of category of gender, 244 women’s studies, 10, 217, 243, 246 Wuthnow, Robert, 254, 262, 264 yoga, 165, 198–199, 212
