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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Joas, Hans, 1948– author. | Skinner, Alex, translator. Title: The power of the sacred : an alternative to the narrative of disenchantment / by Hans Joas ; translated by Alex Skinner. Other titles: Macht des Heiligen. English
Description: New York, NY, United States of America : Oxford University Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020041241 (print) | LCCN 2020041242 (ebook) | ISBN 9780190933272 (hardback) | ISBN 9780190933296 (epub) | ISBN 9780190933302
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020041241
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DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190933272.001.0001
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Preface
It is a good tradition to use a book’s preface to provide some information about the institutions and individuals that have helped make it happen, thus reducing the accumulated debt of gratitude at least a little. This can easily be combined with some insights into its genesis, which I hope help the reader better understand the book.
This book has a clear point of departure in institutional terms. I am referring to the lectures I gave in the summer semester of 2012 at the University of Regensburg under the title “Sacralization and Secularization.” The framework for these lectures was provided by the visiting professorship funded by the Joseph Ratzinger Pope Benedict XVI Foundation, which I was the first to hold. My thanks go to the foundation and to the Faculty of Catholic Theology at the University of Regensburg for the invitation, and to my colleagues Bernhard Laux and Erwin Dirscherl, as well as Florian Schuller, director of the Catholic Academy in Bavaria, for their hospitality and support during my stay. I gave one of the talks immediately before the Regensburg lectures at the invitation of Heinrich Meier, head of the Carl Friedrich von Siemens Foundation in Munich. My sincere thanks to him and his co-organizer of the lecture series on “Religion and Politics,” Friedrich Wilhelm Graf.
While still based at FRIAS, the Institute for Advanced Study at the University of Freiburg, I was able to deliver a more developed version of the lecture series in the autumn of 2013 within the framework of the teaching program at the University of Basel’s Faculty of Theology. In addition to the students, I would especially like to thank my host, Protestant theologian Georg Pfleiderer. I presented certain parts publicly on a number of other occasions, which are too numerous to go into detail about here. Hence I mention just two other institutional contexts, within each of which I was able to present and discuss a number of chapters in preliminary form. The first opportunity came as William James Scholar at the University of Potsdam in the winter of 2012, thanks to an invitation from Logi Gunnarsson and HansPeter Krüger of the university’s Department of Philosophy. Finally, in March 2016 and March 2017, I took up an invitation from Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands to present the entire train of my thought within
the framework of seminars organized by the Thomas More Foundation. I thank the director of the foundation, Joost van der Net, and, as representative of all other participants, Jean-Pierre Wils (Nijmegen).
I feel some hesitation about mentioning my visiting professorship in Regensburg. I am of course aware that in the intellectual life of Germany, and beyond, many people are highly skeptical about Christianity or all religion, about the discipline of theology, the institutional framework of the churches—particularly the Catholic Church—and the thought and ministry of Pope Benedict XVI. My hesitation is based on the concern that some readers might abandon their reading of the present book without getting beyond the preface or, at least, might be unable to read what follows without prejudice. The information I have provided so far makes it easy, right from the outset, to put this book—which subjects Max Weber’s conception of disenchantment to highly critical examination and attempts to outline an alternative—down to religious motives and thus to pigeonhole it. Partly because of this, I have decided to take the bull by the horns and provide a fundamental, detailed discussion of the relationship between the scholarly engagement with religion and religious faith in the first few chapters.
The connection between this book and a number of my other publications is close and plainly apparent. In my book Faith as an Option: Possible Futures for Christianity (2014; first published in German in 2012), among other things I presented a critique of so-called secularization theory and explored the consequences of such a critique for our understanding of modernity and modernization. My critique in no way denies the phenomenon of secularization, but it radically questions its historical necessity or inevitability. Conversely, my book The Sacredness of the Person: A New Genealogy of Human Rights (2013; first published in German in 2011) focused on a process of sacralization that has been gaining strength since the late eighteenth century—that of the “person,” as evident in the history of human rights. In other studies, particularly on the so-called Axial Age, which have been incorporated into chapter 5 of the present book, I have grappled with a fundamental historical transformation in the character of the sacred. With these studies under my belt, I felt challenged but also equipped as I began to come to grips with Max Weber’s extraordinarily influential notion that the history of religion paved the way for secularization and modern rationalization. As I pursued this project, I stood on the shoulders of the great thinkers of American pragmatism; the founder of French sociology, Émile Durkheim; and Weber’s long-standing friend and rival Ernst Troeltsch. Closer to the
present, I was also influenced by the work of three leading sociologists. All of them drew deep inspiration from Max Weber, but in their accounts and conclusions they often diverged greatly from him. They are Robert Bellah, Shmuel Eisenstadt, and David Martin. I am greatly beholden and indebted to them. My decades-long engagement with the writings of Charles Taylor can also be felt once again in this book, though I diverge substantially from his views when it comes to the conception of disenchantment.
I owe a special debt of gratitude to the friends and colleagues who made valuable suggestions about the entire manuscript or parts of it. They include the theologian (and former Protestant bishop) Wolfgang Huber (Berlin), the philosopher Matthias Jung (Koblenz), and the sociologist Wolfgang Knöbl (Hamburg). Weber expert Johannes Weiß (Kassel) read and made helpful comments on the Weber-related parts of chapters 4 and 6. Years ago, philosopher Dieter Thomä (St. Gallen) provided me with an impulse that became important to chapter 6; he expressed the view that the theory I set out in my book The Genesis of Values (2000; first published in German in 1997) was virtually crying out to serve as the foil for a new interpretation of Max Weber’s “Zwischenbetrachtung” or “Intermediate Reflection.” I am very grateful to him for this inspiration and for his critical reading of the resulting effort. In the final stages of my work on the present book, the South African Institute for Advanced Study (STIAS) in Stellenbosch once again provided me with excellent working conditions, just as it had done in 2011, for which I am tremendously grateful. Since 2014 my work has been generously supported by the Porticus Foundation and since January 1, 2016, by the Max Planck Research Award, and I would like to gratefully acknowledge both here. I thank my assistant Mechthild Bock for her always reliable and meticulous approach to an ever-shifting array of tasks, Eva Gilmer of Suhrkamp Verlag for her excellent editorial work, and Christian Scherer, not for the first time, for his outstanding support in proofreading the text and compiling the index. Finally, I thank my wife, Heidrun. To share my life with her in joy and sorrow is the greatest gift of all.
Berlin, June 2020
Introduction
This book is an attempt to divest of its enduring enchantment one of the concepts central to the way in which modernity understands itself, namely that of disenchantment. As we will see, this concept is profoundly ambiguous, as are contrasting terms such as “enchantment” and “re-enchantment,” which also began to circulate after it was coined. Such ambiguity may lead to confusion and has, in fact, often done so in this case. Conveyed covertly along with the term itself, this ambiguity may also serve to establish a false sense of certainty. This undoubtedly applies to the narrative of a progressive process of disenchantment extending across millennia. If my argument is correct, we cannot simply project this narrative forward into the future. What we need, then, is an alternative to it, or perhaps several such alternatives—new narratives of religious history as it is intertwined with the history of power, narratives that might supersede that of disenchantment.
More than with any other thinker or scholar, the concept of disenchantment is closely associated with the name of Max Weber. In a strategically crucial part of the present book, I seek to come to grips with his use of this concept, and the problems his approach raises, through close and detailed reading of his work. But if we wish to outline an alternative, we need to do much more than just critique Weber. In addition to a wide range of empirical findings, such a project requires us to draw on other intellectual endeavors of the past pursued by other thinkers. Despite the dominance of the narratives of secularization and disenchantment—which we cannot, of course, simply equate, but which are not entirely independent of one another either—the two perspectives were never entirely uncontested or unopposed. Those seeking to develop a coherent alternative, therefore, must build on the legitimate aspects of these other thinkers’ observations.
This is also necessary because, at least in my personal experience, a critique of Weber on this point is all too easily attributed to the critic’s assumed religious motives. From this perspective, Weber comes across as the epitome of a sober and illusion-free thinker, one contradicted only by those incapable of the same degree of sobriety, of his heroic lack of illusion. Seen from this
angle, their forlorn or gushing efforts merely collapse in on themselves. But are we really dealing here with an opposition between objective scholarship and faith, realism and self-delusion, rationality and a readiness to sacrifice one’s intellect? Or do specific religious or antireligious motives also play an important role for Weber and other exponents of the narrative of disenchantment? Can narratives of such magnitude simply be derived from the facts? Can they be unambiguously confirmed or refuted by them? Would Max Weber himself ever have put forward this kind of defense? Can there even be a discipline of religious studies if we believe that religious or antireligious motives must inevitably play a constitutive role in it?
In order to explore these questions, while also seeking to tap the potential of intellectual history to stimulate possible alternatives to the narrative of disenchantment, the present book begins with fundamental matters. The first three chapters deal with the problems entailed in the scholarly study of religion itself against the background of three different disciplines. The first chapter is concerned with the discipline of history, the second with that of psychology, and the third with sociology. Eschewing encyclopedic aspirations, all three chapters are essentially limited to one intellectual constellation each, each of which seemed to me to provide particularly instructive insights into the history of scholarship. To be specific, I first consider the earliest of these cases, namely the attempt by the great Scottish philosopher and historian David Hume, in the mid-eighteenth century, to construct an empirically grounded, universal history of religion, one that set aside all theological presuppositions. I then turn to the undisputedly classic foundational document of an empirical psychology of religion, a rich phenomenology of individual religious experiences, which in many respects remains inspiring to this day. I am referring to the book written by American pragmatist philosopher and psychologist William James in the first few years of the twentieth century. When it comes to the emergence of the specifically sociological (and ethnological-anthropological) study of religion, things are not quite as clear-cut as in the other two cases with respect to the originary intellectual constellation. I have opted to focus on the discourse that unfolded, chiefly in France, on the role of collective rituals. This leads us from the historian Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges to his student, the classical figure of French sociology, Émile Durkheim, and his magnum opus of 1912—which was of such crucial importance to the sociology of religion—on the religion of the Australian aborigines and North American Indians.
It goes without saying, then, that the roots of all three of the cases I deal with lie in the foundational periods of the modern academic disciplines, a time when these disciplines were not yet clearly demarcated from one another. David Hume’s historiographical project, for example, is strongly based on a (specific) psychological theory. In what follows I am not really concerned with questions of disciplinary history, such as the development of an autonomous discipline called “religious studies” or “comparative religion.” Instead my focus is on three exemplary cases that enable us to discuss, in very different contexts, the fundamental question of the potential for objective statements about religion, while at the same time allowing us to gather together elements of a more comprehensive theory. To both these ends, it is necessary to go beyond the relevant author in each case, and his oeuvre, and to at least take a look at his implicit or explicit opponents, predecessors, and successors; this is why I referred to “constellations.” In the case of the discipline of history, therefore, I also delve into the reception of Hume in the work of Johann Gottfried Herder, because as a Christian he built productively on and extended Hume’s project, which had been motivated by a skepticism about religion, in a highly instructive way. In the case of psychology, we need to look both backward and forward from the work of William James. Backward, because theologians tend to date James’s methodological innovation one hundred years earlier, ascribing it to Friedrich Schleiermacher’s speeches on religion of 1799, addressed to “the educated among its despisers.” Forward, because James’s psychology was already perceived by contemporaries as one-sided and deficient with respect to the interpretation of highly intensive human experiences by the experiencing subjects themselves. A colleague and friend of James at Harvard University, a philosopher by the name of Josiah Royce (virtually unknown in Europe to this day), attempted, in his late work, in a way that seems quite sensational in retrospect, to overcome these deficiencies with the tools of a theory of signs—in other words, semiotics. In the third case, that of sociology, my focus is in any case on the gradual development of a methodological approach within a newly emerging subject. I present this approach in a way that distances itself greatly from the conventional interpretation of Durkheim; through comparison with later efforts to elaborate a theory of ritual, it is an approach I also outline in light of its ongoing significance to an anthropology of the formation of ideals. These first three chapters are intended to show that we have to trace religion back to historically situated human experiences of something that is perceived as sacred—experiences that we can only understand correctly if we anchor them in a semiotically transformed psychology of the self, if we
think of them as embodied in practices and if we avoid constricting them through an overly individualistic approach. This compressed description will not be entirely understandable to the reader at this stage. But my anticipatory remarks here indicate that alternatives to the intellectual framework typical of the naturalistic critique of religion developed at an early stage, and that there is a mutually constitutive relationship between the history of this critique and other ways of thinking that seek to do justice to both academic scholarship and religion.
Not until the fourth chapter do I turn to Max Weber and the narrative of disenchantment, but even there these are not my only concerns. The scholarly disciplines dealing with religion developed on a broad basis throughout the nineteenth century through historical, psychological, and sociologicalethnological research, and made available a great wealth of knowledge. This generated a growing need to piece together this accumulated but fragmentary knowledge, and to do so in order to analyze both history and the modern world. I believe that the two most powerful such attempts at synthesis were undertaken by two scholars who maintained the closest of intellectual relationships, indeed, who lived in the same house in Heidelberg for a number of crucial years: Max Weber and Ernst Troeltsch. Both men produced brilliant syntheses that embedded the dynamics of religious history in a more comprehensive, and itself highly nuanced, history of political, economic, social, and military developments. In the present book I refer to this more comprehensive history in shorthand form as a history of power, borrowing from Michael Mann’s multivolume, sociologically informed universal history, which revolves around four key sources of social power.1
Today, many people place these two scholars (Weber and Troeltsch) in very close proximity to one another in every respect. Yet from a history-ofreligion vantage point, and even more from the perspective of a religionfocused analysis of the contemporary era and anticipatory observations about the future, I see major differences between them. It would be apt to speak in terms of two alternative syntheses. Hence, before going into Weber, I develop a historical framework with the help of Troeltsch’s historical sociology of Christianity. In light of the empirical fact of the emergence of new ideals, this framework presents the history of Christianity as alternating between processes of sacralization and desacralization, explaining the character and object of these processes essentially in light of the history of the state. This, together with the elements gathered together in the first three chapters, provides us with a foil against which we can clearly discern
the special features of Weber’s thinking and allows us to critically appraise his ideas.
In both Max Weber’s sociology, which works with a universal history and is well-informed theologically, and in Ernst Troeltsch’s historical theology, which was increasingly concerned with psychological and sociological foundations, at the beginning of the twentieth century religious-theological and secular-scholarly modes of observation seemed to be entering into the most productive of exchanges. But this was soon to change, and as a result the impulses emanating from the work of Weber and Troeltsch did not make the kind of impact they ought to have. Certainly, Max Weber rose to become undisputedly the greatest classic figure of sociology; but as the subject increasingly turned its back on history, a gap opened up between the tremendous respect for Weber and the number of studies that actually pursued a program similar to his. I develop an explanation for this state of affairs in chapter 6. This gap has not been seriously bridged by the numerous studies that draw closely on Weber’s research without taking sufficient account of the changed state of research since his day, or those that simply canonize his assertions. Things are even worse when it comes to Ernst Troeltsch. In reaction to World War I, German Protestant theology underwent a far-reaching process of reorientation (which intensified later), for which the term “antihistoricist revolution”2 has come into circulation. This hampered further work on Troeltsch’s program within his home discipline, while scholars in other subjects failed to take up this program because the (only superficially plausible) impression took hold that his work was merely an inconsequential variant of Max Weber’s sharply contoured intellectual project.
I mention this here because the argumentational stance of the next (fifth) chapter depends on an understanding of this complicated situation. As a result of the developments outlined above, some scholars began to put forward an argument already embraced by many religious thinkers: that empirical research of a historical, psychological, and sociological-ethnological kind is certainly appropriate when it comes to “primitive” or “archaic” religions, but has nothing to contribute to the understanding of true religion based on real divine revelation, namely the Jewish or Christian variety. For many secular thinkers, such a claim is self-evidently absurd. Often, they do not even draw a sharp boundary between religions of revelation and other kinds, because for them the notion of a divine revelation is not qualitatively different from the “illusions” of other religions. This did not apply in the work of Troeltsch or Weber (and a number of others); through a concept such as “religions of
salvation,” they attempted to do justice to the profound empirical difference between these and other traditions. My contention is that in the twentieth century, on the basis of very different religious or antireligious motives, a discourse on this very question developed, the key term here being “Axial Age.” This discourse deals with the question of when and where, within the history of humanity, under what conditions and with what consequences, a fundamental transformation occurred in the understanding of the sacred, as a result of which, in connection with a fundamental increase in reflexivity, a concept of transcendence arose in the sense of a profound breach with all that is worldly. Crucial to this fundamental transformation are the political and social consequences of the desacralization of the structures of political power and social inequality. Chapter 5 presents the wide range of such intellectual approaches, sums up the state of empirical knowledge in this field, and develops out of it a concept of transcendence as sacredness-becomereflexive. This analysis also provides another important component of an alternative to the narrative of disenchantment.
Already inherent in this brief reference to the desacralizing effects of a religion that has become morally demanding is a break with all notions of a linear historical trajectory. Taking their inspiration partly from Max Weber and partly from Émile Durkheim, though sometimes quite unconcerned with their actual trains of thought, many analyses of the contemporary era, however, presuppose such a linear trajectory. Chapter 6 delves into the three most influential of such “dangerous nouns of process”: the concept of rationalization, borrowed from Max Weber; the concept of progressive functional differentiation, borrowed from Herbert Spencer, Georg Simmel, and Émile Durkheim, and the now all-pervasive concept of modernization, which emerged after World War II in the United States. Reflecting on the generally unnoticed consequences of the use of these concepts facilitates a reinterpretation of Weber’s famous “Intermediate Reflection,” one that liberates this text from the traditional reading, which is rooted in theories of differentiation. What we find is that Weber refers to a wide range of fundamentally different fields of tension that cannot be reduced to the notions of “rationalization” and “differentiation.” This finally clears the way for an outline of an alternative to the narrative of disenchantment.
This outline is delivered in chapter 7. This chapter begins at an elementary level, briefly summing up the main ideas of a theory of the sacred or of processes of sacralization as I have presented them in other books, while adding another idea: that of self-sacralization, as a risk bound up with every form
of sacralization. If we consider the tension that exists between the demands of transcendence as a form of sacredness-become-reflexive and tendencies toward self-sacralization, it is possible to develop a picture of religious history that does justice both to the power-critical and power-supporting potential of religions. The power of the sacred becomes evident in both the legitimizing and questioning of political and social power, because people’s ties to the sacred, as they experience it, are one of their strongest sources of motivation. In such abstract generality, this assertion may sound trivial. It must, of course, prove its ability to illuminate specific issues on a case-bycase basis. Chapter 7 provides no more, but also no less, than the outline of such a history.
The reader has now had a brief preview of the way my argument unfolds. I briefly address two other aspects of the present book’s themes in this introduction. The first concerns the reasons why a picture of religious history that is not geared toward the motif of “disenchantment” seems important to me, particularly today, and the second centers on the relationship between the scholarly study of religion and a language of faith appropriate to the contemporary world.
Discussions on religion today, as I argued in my book Faith as an Option, 3 are characterized by the fact that two pseudo-certainties, which exercised tremendous influence in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, have both lost their plausibility. Individuals of faith can no longer warn that processes of secularization lead to the loss of all morality, because the reality of highly secularized societies has not borne out these fears. Nonbelievers can no longer interpret their distance from all religion as an avant-garde step into a future toward which human history is headed of its own accord. If my analysis is correct, this opens up new potential for dialogue between believers and nonbelievers, but also brings up entirely new questions. First and foremost, these include the question as to the causes of processes of secularization, given that these can no longer be understood as the self-evident consequence of processes of modernization, and can, therefore, no longer be viewed as always already explained. But the attempt to achieve a valid explanation inevitably brings individuals and organizations into view as actors with objectives and ideas—in other words, it confronts us with secularization as a project.4 In this project, scholarship has always played a central role, whether in the sense of the scholarly refutation of specific religious teachings, or in the sense of an objective explanation for the existence of the allegedly “mysterious” phenomenon of religion itself.
Today we have reached a point at which the two long-dominant ideas must themselves be historicized—that is, the anthropological thesis of an essential relationship between religion and morality, and the self-confident ideas of those who believe they can explain religion objectively and thus render it ineffectual and superfluous. Beyond this vital process of historicization there lies the project, pursued in this book, of imagining a study of religion that eschews the unproductive dichotomy between a supposedly presuppositionless scholarly engagement with religion and a theological approach to religion allegedly based on unproven and unprovable presuppositions. Here this dichotomy is superseded by an awareness that all human commitments to certain values and identity-constitutive convictions are rooted in historically situated experiences. This, of course, is not enough. Such an awareness spares no one of the need to put forward coherent arguments justifying every single evaluative statement they make. But this awareness changes our stance within such argumentational discourses, our expectations of them, and our willingness both to recognize the limits of argumentational justifiability and to contemplate means of reasonable communication that do not adhere to the strict demands of rational argumentation.
In this changed discursive situation, in which few now expect everadvancing secularization, it is still possible to assume that disenchantment was the backdrop to the highly contingent history of the secularization of certain European countries—but no longer can it be considered the prelude to a reality that will come to hold sway worldwide. So the responses to disenchantment and secularization are bound to be highly variable within global power constellations, and cannot be simply and exclusively imitative, or a matter of “catching up.” My hope is that the attempt made here to look at the history of the scholarly engagement with religion, as well as the history of religion itself, in a way that is not from the outset pervaded by the narrative of disenchantment, will be of interest even to those who ultimately cleave to Weber and his narrative.5
Finally, and very briefly here, I would like to consider the question of a fitting language of faith, one that is appropriate in light of the scholarly engagement with religion. A newly emerging discipline such as sociology, like psychology or the myth-destroying discipline of history, was often perceived as a great threat to religion. The same year that William James published his great work of nonreductionist psychology of religion, Leo Tolstoy wrote a story titled “The Restoration of Hell.” Here a devil boasts that he has struck upon an idea to keep people from gearing their lives toward the teachings of
Jesus, namely to whisper to them that “all religious teaching, including the teaching of Jesus, is an error and a superstition, and that they can ascertain how they ought to live from the science I have devised for them called sociology, which consists in studying how former people lived badly.”6 A “science” that saw its task as overcoming faith and a faith that felt nothing but threatened by this “science”—these were two sides of the same coin. Much the same may be said of political theory, when secular thinkers presume to adjudicate on the “permissibility” of religiously motivated or even religiously grounded views in public debates and, conversely, when believers evade the task of justifying their political opinions in such a way as to persuade nonbelievers, and instead merely use instruments of power to achieve their objectives. Despite all the risks that continue to be generated by the mutually distorted perception of believers of various religions, or of believers and nonbelievers, in the changed intellectual landscape, I see a significant chance that a sphere is opening up in which everyone can articulate their experiences and assumptions and relate them to one another.7 This is not to naïvely underestimate the conflicts and risks entailed in such efforts. Such a project expects a lot of those religious believers—within the Christian traditions, for example—who have hitherto understood their faith as a matter of compliance with a doctrinal system. The understanding of religion developed here expects them to articulate their faith in a new way, while maintaining continuity with traditional forms. The following ideas require the secular-minded to part company with a conception of history that has in many cases, though not all, entered deeply into their self-image—a conception of history that assumes an inexorable and advancing process of disenchantment.
1
History of Religion as Critique of Religion?
David Hume and the Consequences
Today, it is usually taken for granted that religion can be the object of scholarly research and theory-building.1 Just as every other sphere of human life may be the topic of historical, sociological, or psychological analyses, so can religion. If relatively little attention was long paid to the scholarly engagement with religion internationally, in the decades after World War II, for example, this was certainly not due to any reservations about profaning the sacred. On the contrary, it was owing to the widespread assessment that, at least in the present world, religion has largely lost its significance. Why should one put a lot of effort into grappling with something that is about to be swept away by a comprehensive process of secularization?
When the scholarly study of religion emerged in Europe, the situation was very different. In any case, until the eighteenth century no one referred to a subject area called “religion” in the first place. Such a term was widely perceived as improper, particularly if it was supposed to include Christianity, simply because it inevitably leveled the differences between the true (Christian) faith and Judaism or Islam, but particularly between Christianity and what was traditionally encompassed by the collective terms of heathenism and idolatry. To speak of “religion” in such an all-encompassing sense presupposes a distance, in one way or another, from one’s own faith, and an insight into commonalities that link it with other forms. Particularly in England, by the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, constant confessional disputes increasingly appear to have spurred a tendency to abstract from each Christian confession and, ultimately, to imagine something that contrasted with all of them.2 This was preceded by a lengthy process in which, through the “discovery” of a “New World,” people’s consciousness of religious diversity had expanded, while the philological engagement with the classical and oriental languages, which had gained traction since the Renaissance, had deepened the understanding of religious history.3 The aforementioned contrast to the various confessions increasingly emerged as
a worldview of immanence, which meant doing without or rejecting transcendence. Such a worldview is the intellectual precondition for a conscious rejection of all religion, for a “secular option,”4 in contrast to which everything else could become variants of the curious phenomenon of “religion.” A general term of this kind could emerge only gradually and was long perceived as problematic.
Hence, even in the late nineteenth century, Max Müller, a leading Oxford Indologist and Sanskrit researcher of German origin, could still remark that “the very title of the ‘Science of Religion’ will jar, I know, on the ears of many persons.”5 For believers, this offensive potential was inherent in the fact that here their faith was being dealt with as a mere human phenomenon. This potential for offense increases substantially when scholarly research claims to do more than establish mere facts about religious life, that is, as soon as it seeks to reveal the “secret” that (supposedly) underlies all religion. This is the case whenever religious phenomena are conceptualized as a consequence of something else: as the “sigh of the oppressed creature” or the “opium of the masses” (Marx), as “illusion” or “projection” (Freud), as a misunderstanding of the effects of the ecstatic experiences sometimes undergone by human collectives (Durkheim), or even as a mere manifestation of brain processes (Dawkins). As early as 1902, American psychologist and philosopher William James coined the apt term “nothing but” explanations for such views within the study of religion.6 According to these explanations, religious phenomena have no substance in their own right; they are “nothing but” consequences of nonreligious phenomena, of which they represent a distorted manifestation.
Since its inception, the history of scholarly engagement with religion has undeniably been closely associated with such attempts to critique religion and promote secularism or with the rejection of such endeavors. This continues to echo down to our own time, when, for example, in education policy debates on the position of theology at universities, it has been claimed that religious believers are fundamentally ill-suited to carrying out an unbiased scholarly analysis of religion. Their entire world of thought, it is asserted, is so thoroughly saturated by their faith and its assumptions, for which there is no scientific evidence, that they cannot be serious candidates for the study of religion. Believers, of course, point out that, when it comes to religion, secularists are by no means neutral or free of presuppositions either. Their argument becomes even stronger when they add that there is no such thing as secularism in the singular, but rather a wide variety of secularisms, each of
which is characterized by a specific opposition to specific forms of religion. Furthermore, to cite another argument against those who advocate the secularist study of religion, it may be that (an at least imaginative) access to religious phenomena is a helpful if not necessary prerequisite for its study. Can one really be “religiously unmusical” if one is working on religion? Could one be literally unmusical if one had chosen to become a musicologist?
These remarks are not an attempt to engage with a polemical debate between believers and nonbelievers, but to probe the fundamental possibility of a scholarly study of religion, particularly in the sense of a space in which believers (of all kinds) and nonbelievers (of all kinds) can enter into a dialogue with one another in a productive way. The historiography of religion might constitute such a place. Or is such a historiography necessarily part of the critique of religion? That is the question I explore in the present chapter.
A Methodological Breakthrough
The epoch-making breakthrough to a universal history of religion, one that maintains a consistent methodological distance from all theological assumptions and is in this sense wholly profane, dates back to Scottish philosopher and historian David Hume. He called his book, which first appeared in 1757 and rapidly achieved international recognition, The Natural History of Religion, presumably signaling by its very title that he intended to produce a history of religion as a purely human (“natural” rather than “supernatural”) phenomenon and in no other sense.7 Yet it is not certain that this supposition is correct, given that Hume does not define the concept of natural history at any point in his work, and, moreover, it appears nowhere in the text at issue apart from the title. Prior to Hume, the term was initially used in a narrow sense for studies dealing with natural phenomena, such as minerals or fossils, from a historical angle.8 Subsequently, however, it was increasingly deployed by the authors of analyses that sought to explain moral— that is, cultural—phenomena, in light of natural conditions such as climate. The term “natural history” was also used to describe attempts to collate facts from a particular field of phenomena and, on this basis, to inductively identify lawlike regularities. Alternatively, from a quite different perspective, “natural history” meant studies that contrasted the incalculable diversity of phenomena with an idealized theoretical model of an allegedly “natural” development. Some of these ways of using the term “natural history” fit better
and some less well with Hume’s actual approach. Perhaps Hume was really just out to provoke, as some contemporaries suspected, and if so he was certainly successful. One of his greatest adversaries, Bishop Warburton, stated that the project of a natural history of religion was as meaningful as that of a “moral history of meteors.”9 Whatever the exact intention behind the title, then, it stands to reason that a historiography that emancipates itself from theological presuppositions will take a historicizing approach to the origins of the long-dominant framework.
Hume’s book has rightly been called the “beginning of the modern social scientific approach to the religious problem.”10 While Hume declares at the start of his text that “the whole frame of nature bespeaks an intelligent author, and no rational enquirer can, after serious reflection, suspend his belief a moment with regard to the primary principles of genuine Theism and Religion” (p. 134), we now know, on the basis of his other writings and his letters,11 that in reality he had a profoundly critical attitude toward every attempt to identify evidence for God in the nature of the world. However, justifiably worried about the consequences he might have to face for an openly critical view of religion, such as excommunication from the Church of Scotland, he presumably believed it necessary to dissimulate and pay lip service to theism. The extent to which Hume indirectly sought to subvert traditional religious ties through his text is a matter of controversy even in the most recent literature on him. It is of course even more hotly debated whether his account can or must impact on readers’ personal faith (as he perhaps intended), given the way he concealed his views. Much more important for us, however, than the question of Hume’s personal religious beliefs, his publishing strategy, and his exact intentions in writing his text is the new methodological approach characteristic of this work, which was, as I believe, of epochal importance. For him, scholarly texts could no longer cite a divine “revelation” as a causal explanation or an independent source of knowledge; such a “revelation” could itself only be the object of scholarly investigation.
Going beyond the traditional approach of viewing all religions from the standpoint of Christianity, Hume underlined the tremendous variety and differences between religions in the world, and he used this fact to argue against all attempts to derive religions “from an original instinct or primary impression of nature” (p. 134). This observation, however, is itself ambiguous. It might imply that religion as such is a universal, as it were anthropological phenomenon, but that for this very reason its individual variants cannot be straightforwardly derived from the nature shared by all human
beings. But it might also mean that religion is not a phenomenon found without exception among all peoples. Given that Hume contends that “some nations have been discovered, who entertained no sentiments of Religion, if travellers and historians may be credited” (p. 134), it rapidly becomes apparent that he is in fact seeking to dispute the universality of religion. With respect to peoples without religion, what he chiefly had in mind were probably Brazilian Indians such as the Tupinamba, whom he mentions elsewhere in his writings,12 but perhaps China as well, as the idea that it was unreligious was widespread in the eighteenth century and made a substantial contribution to the popularity of China among Enlightenment thinkers. Voltaire is said to have had a picture of Confucius above his writing desk in Ferney. While he recognized that this thinker was no thoroughgoing atheist, he saw him as a de facto nonreligious teacher of justice within the state and as an advocate of a wise approach to living one’s life. Hume’s reference to peoples without religion, of course, was chiefly focused on the future. If such people may have existed in the past, then the idea of a life without religion in the future inevitably seemed more plausible.
In this sense, Hume’s project of a natural history of religion was part of the rise of a “secular option.” I prefer this term to that of “secularization” when one is referring to the strength or weakness of religious faith because it makes it clearer that secularism is an option that has been taken up in different countries, regions, or milieus to very different degrees, and that “faith as an option” continues to exist alongside it. On this view, the secular option is a new option that joins the option of faith, but that also transforms faith into one option among several. How, though, might believers relate to the project of a “natural history of religion”? Are the disciplines that investigate religion saturated by the conflict between belief and nonbelief, or is there a possibility of a study of religion beyond these conflicts? This question can only be answered on a concrete level, with respect to the statements made by researchers of religion on the one hand and the de facto reactions to Hume’s pioneering achievement on the other. It is to these two complexes that I now turn.
Four Hypotheses in the History of Religion
Hume’s empirical assertions can be condensed into four hypotheses. First, he asserts that unprejudiced investigation into the history of religion shows
clearly that monotheism, even if it makes more sense from the perspective of rationality, has not held primacy historically. “We may as reasonably imagine, that men inhabited palaces before huts and cottages, or studied geometry before agriculture; as assert that the Deity appeared to them a pure spirit, omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent, before he was apprehended to be a powerful, though limited being, with human passions and appetites, limbs and organs” (p. 136). While previously polytheism had often been imagined as a corrupted form of an original monotheism—because human beings were ascribed a kind of natural tendency to embrace the (rationally authenticated) content of the Christian faith—Hume refutes this completely in historical terms. For him, in almost every case, polytheism was clearly the original and, for a lengthy period, almost solely existing form of religion. With this historical hypothesis, he consciously seeks not just to deal a death blow to the biblical notion of God’s self-revelation to the first people, but also to Enlightenment notions of a “natural religion” of humanity. In this sense, the “natural history of religion” provides no support for notions of a “natural religion,” but is in fact opposed to them.
The second hypothesis seeks to explain what the foundation of this original polytheism might be, if rational thought can be ruled out. For Hume, it is clear that it must be human beings’ passions, their emotions, out of which such polytheistic belief grows. In particular, it is the “concern with regard to the events of life, and . . . the incessant hopes and fears, which actuate the human mind” (p. 139). It is not “speculative curiosity” or “the pure love of truth” (p. 140) that plays the key role in the inner life of “such barbarians,” but “the ordinary affections of human life; the anxious concern for happiness, the dread of future misery, the terror of death, the thirst of revenge, the appetite for food and other necessaries” (p. 140). Hume imagines that, “agitated by hopes and fears of this nature, especially the latter, men scrutinize, with a trembling curiosity, the course of future causes, and examine the various and contrary events of human life. And in this disordered scene, with eyes still more disordered and astonished, they see the first obscure traces of divinity” (p. 140). In today’s language, we would say that Hume believes he can discern the psychological roots of religion in the experiences of contingency typical of human existence. He thus ascribes to religion a role in coping with such experiences of contingency: through prayers, sacrifices, and in other ways, human beings attempt to curry favor with their gods or idols. This is particularly pronounced, Hume believes, where happenstance is most dominant: on the high seas, at war, or in games of chance.
The third hypothesis has to do with the dynamics of religious history. For Hume it is simply empirically untenable to believe that the history of religion is a purposeful process, leading from an original polytheism to monotheism. The opposite notion, of course, is even less valid. Instead, as Hume sees it, in religious history we can identify an alternation between the two extremes, an oscillation between polytheism and monotheism, comparable to the changing of the tides (“Lex Hume”).13 Certainly, Hume believes, monotheism mostly arises from rational thought, yet compared to the passions, reason is generally weak and largely powerless, and this is especially true for the uneducated lower classes. As a result, it is probable that they will constantly seek to return to polytheism, even under conditions of official monotheism, because their embrace of the latter is not grounded in reason but is merely due to their yearning for the strongest possible god. Polytheism, then, may at the very least survive, and may even be reinvigorated. It was above all Hume’s friend Edward Gibbon, the great historian of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, who took up this idea, seeking to use it to explain the emergence of the Christian cult of the saints in late antiquity.14 But Hume himself was already referring in this vein to the Marian cult of Latin Christianity and the veneration of Saint Nicholas in Russian Orthodoxy. Islam and Protestantism, then, can be interpreted as movements running counter to polytheistic distortions.
Finally, the fourth hypothesis is especially explosive. It asserts that polytheism is by nature more tolerant than monotheism, because it is easy to integrate new gods into a heterogeneous pantheon, while monotheisms, by definition, strove to render the worship of any other god impermissible. In view of monotheisms’ proclivity for the suppression or destruction of rival religions and their inherent tendency toward schism, mission, and expansion, Hume believed that tolerance was barely compatible with their premises. For Gibbon, therefore, it was entirely understandable that the Roman state did everything it could to defend itself against its intolerant Christian citizens.15 Once again, it must be emphasized just how much Hume and Gibbon diverged from what we commonly think of as Enlightenment thought on religion. During an era when even most sophisticated critics of Christianity did not doubt its moral superiority to other religions, Hume sensationally sought, from the vantage point of peace, not only to ascribe to all religions a hazardous potential but to attribute a greater potential danger, indeed a potential for violence, to the more rational religion. In general, for Hume it was the more demanding religions that tended to suppress natural
moral impulses. In fact, for him the mere emphasis on strict ritual guidelines in religions already represented a danger to compliance with natural moral impulses.
At least some of the four hypotheses, through which I have summed up Hume’s arguments here, may be familiar to present-day readers—even if they have never engaged with his work itself. It is probably not going too far to claim that, into the present day, Hume’s hypotheses are key components, indeed core tropes of the critique of religion. This applies, for example, to the hypotheses that there is no natural disposition for monotheism and that religion emerges from the attempt to cope with experiences of contingency. Today, hypotheses inaugurated by Hume are sometimes discussed with reference to other critics of religion from Feuerbach to Freud. Yet it is beyond dispute that the ideas of anthropomorphism and projection are already present in Hume’s work. Moreover, we can even discern the Nietzschean motif of an anti-Christian valorization of the heroic vis-à-vis the sacred in Hume, when he compares forms of religion with respect to courage and humiliation, while bringing out the difference “between the maxims of a Greek hero and a Catholic saint” (p. 164) when it comes to their approach to bugs and the “lower” animals. Finally, and irritatingly, the hypothesis on monotheism’s potential for violence is now known in Germany as the “Assmann hypothesis,” despite the fact that it was already present in the work of Hume in a very similar form two and a half centuries earlier. It is fascinating to see the early formulations of all these ideas gathered together as if in a compendium. Meanwhile, a rich empirical and theoretical literature has been produced on all four hypotheses since Hume’s day. Taking a quick look at this literature, as I am going to do now, can certainly not do full justice to the complexity of the subject matter. But my intention here is not to deliver a definitive empirical judgment, but rather to demonstrate the potential for the empirical study of religion beyond the conflict between belief and nonbelief.
Within research on the history of religion, when it comes to the first hypothesis the crucial step consisted in overcoming the simplistic alternative of polytheism versus monotheism. Hume operated within the framework of this alternative as if it exhausted the range of possibilities, and as if it offered a self-evident schema for the classification of religions. This was because, even for him, despite all the emphasis he placed on the passions and emotions, religions were predominantly belief systems, as evident in his polemic against the role of stories, “loose and precarious fictions” in “pagan religion” (p. 173). In the nineteenth century, however, this changed on a number of fronts.
Of most importance to the issue of polytheism were the writings of French historian Fustel de Coulanges on religion in Greco-Roman antiquity.16 He demonstrates that we completely fail to understand this religion if we think of it as a belief in a vast and unwieldy pantheon. Instead we need to radically redirect the focus of our attention, away from beliefs and toward the practice of ancient rituals. Central for him, for example, was the cult surrounding the domestic hearth, as a cult of house and family, as well as rituals in which the polis or the state or the empire could celebrate itself. Quite regardless of how accurate these analyses were, the key point is that they were a tremendously important stimulus to considering other religions as well in a quite new way with respect to the constitutive role of ritual practices. This also made an impact on the study of the history of the “Semitic” religions, as they were called at the time,17 and later, outside the field of religious history, within ethnology or anthropology. At the close of the nineteenth century, Robert Ranulph Marett, for example, refers to “theoplasm” in connection with ritual practices and the associated experiences,18 a kind of substance out of which the most varied ideas of God come into being—as attempts by human beings to interpret their experiences, initially in mythical narratives, and later perhaps even in abstract belief systems. Around 1900, these studies flowed into the broader discourse on the “sacred” in the disciplines concerned with religion, particularly in the school established by the French founder of sociology, Émile Durkheim, who happened to have been a student of Fustel de Coulanges. As the sacred became the definitional characteristic of religion, the focus on one God or several gods lost its central position. It now became possible to think in terms of apersonal, sacred forces, and to imagine a range of ways for the sacred to be embodied in persons.19
With his second hypothesis, that religion has psychological roots, Hume could build on the writings of predecessors from antiquity onward (such as Lucretius) and thinkers such as Hobbes, Mandeville, and Spinoza. But we can scarcely describe him as a source of inspiration for the developing empirical psychology of religion, because the simple idea of a misguided desire to comprehend unexpected or feared events proved far too narrow to be of much use in this context. The emphasis on negative contingency (fear and suffering) is itself one-sided; the later literature, to a far greater extent than Hume’s writings, highlights positive experiences of contingency, such as ecstatic enthusiasm or overflowing gratitude—for the beauty of creation or the certainty of being loved—as just as important if not more important. This occurred, for example, in the brilliant synthesis of early research in the
psychology of religion produced by William James (1902) in his book The Varieties of Religious Experience, 20 and in the work of Émile Durkheim, who underlines that “in sum, joyful confidence, rather than terror or constraint, is at the root of totemism.”21 The picture became far richer still as soon as scholars began to take seriously the interplay between experience and interpretation, of which Hume makes no mention—in other words, attempts to give creative expression to experience and religions’ important role in making experiences possible in the first place, or in preventing them.
As for the third hypothesis, and thus the alleged oscillation between monotheism and polytheism, the studies by the great church historian and biographer of Augustine, Peter Brown, on the emergence of the Christian cult of the saints have blazed a particularly useful trail.22 Grappling directly with Hume and Gibbon, he has sought to demonstrate that we should not think of the growth of this cult as a regression to paganism. First, Hellenistic Judaism already featured the veneration of martyrs and, as Christoph Markschies emphasizes, the personalization of good (and evil) forces, as for example in the doctrine of angels and archangels and the entire divine assembly.23 Second, it is simply empirically wrong to state that it was chiefly the uneducated who were behind the cult of the saints. The educated elite and leading theologians played a major part as well. The hypothesis of regression, meanwhile, would imply that the most recently Christianized are more susceptible to repaganization, but there is no evidence of this. Today, therefore, the view has become established that the cult of the saints should be seen as part of a newly constituted social order, in which expectations of patronage and clientelism, of a kind common in late antique society, were transferred— distanced from world and state—to martyrs or other holy figures.
The fourth hypothesis—tolerant polytheism and intolerant monotheism— has been taken up by German philosophy, initially in a rather playful way, over the last few decades.24 It came to prominence, as mentioned above, through Egyptologist Jan Assmann, who wrote of the “mosaic distinction” between truth and untruth in the field of religion.25 Assmann sets great store by the claim that his hypothesis is not merely a recapitulation of Hume. He refers to the latter’s thesis as an “age-old argument,” which he “had no intention of revisiting” in his original book on Moses.26 It is not monotheism, he asserts, but the orientation toward truth that is decisive when it comes to the issue of intolerance and violence. This shift of emphasis results in a more plausible thesis. It would, after all, be absurd to ascribe to mythical cultures an ethos of tolerance. The point is that mythic narratives can coexist without
