Defined most straight-forwardly, the term
refers to a subject matter. By this definition, religious studies is confined to no
specific discipline and encompasses the contributions of psychologists, sociologists,
anthropologists, economists, literary critics, art historians, and philosophers. Religious
studies so defined is an area studies. It is the subject area of a library card
catalog.
When religious studies is defined this broadly, the
distinctive contribution of members of departments of religious studies—scholars of
religion—is limited. Their task is merely to amass and classify data about religions
and to leave to psychologists, sociologists, and others the analysis of the data. Just as
the role of a subject librarian is to assemble the books for others to read, so here the
role of scholars of religion is to assemble the data for others to analyze. A library is
judged by how many books it has collected on a subject, not by what the subject librarian
thinks of the subject. The categorization of books as "religious" is the
responsibility of the subject librarian, but even the chief subject librarian of the
Library of Congress ordinarily defers to the author. A book by a psychologist purportedly
analyzing religion psychologically would get categorized under religion, even if also
cross-catalogued under psychology.
A second, slightly bolder way of defining religious
studies is to entrust scholars of religion with not merely gathering data but also
presenting them from the worshiper's point of view. Scholars of religion here record the
actor's point of view, but they do not assess it. They present the worshiper's view of the
origin, function, and meaning of religion, but they leave to psychologists, sociologists,
and others the determination of the "actual" origin, function, and even meaning
of religion.
The third, far bolder way of defining religious studies
is to grant it the status of a discipline and not merely a subject matter. Defined this
way, religious studies is the distinctive prerogative of scholars of religion. To
study religion is now to study a distinctively, or "irreducibly," religious
subject. Some scholars of religion bar others from studying religion on the grounds that
what others study is by definition psychology or sociology rather than religion.
Most scholars of religion allow others to participate in the study of religion, but they
still demarcate one aspect of the subject as irreducibly religious. Psychologists and
sociologists, it is granted, decipher the psychological and sociological aspects of
religion, but there remains an irreducibly religious aspect. Scholars of religion who
insist on an irreducibly religious aspect of religion are sometimes called
"religionists."
What is this irreducibly religious aspect of
religion? Most often, it is claimed to be the object of religious worship: god,
divinity , or, to use the preferred term, the sacred . Religious studies alone,
argue religionists, can grasp the sacred, precisely because the sacred is unlike anything
else. To study the sacred is to study something that by nature is not psychological,
sociological, or otherwise nonreligious.
The other aspect that is claimed to be distinctively
religious is the origin and function of religion. Religionists assert that persons
become and remain religious to satisfy an irreducibly religious need. To be irreducibly
religious, that need cannot be merely one satisfied by religion, as might be said of the
need for food, health, victory in battle, explanation of the world, or purpose in life.
The need must itself be irreducibly religious. It is the need to experience the sacred
. Many religionists deem this need universal, even if it goes unfulfilled in some persons.
The function of religion is exactly to provide opportunities for experiencing the sacred.
Criticisms
Criticisms of religious studies defined in any of these
ways abound. As commendable as the ecumenism of the definition of religious studies as a
subject area is, religious studies is thereby demoted to a mere repository of data for
full-fledged disciplines to scrutinize. Taking this consequence as a criticism is, of
course, to beg the question about the real nature of religious studies. At the same time,
religious studies defined meekly as a mere subject area does not possess even the limited
autonomy of other area studies. For religious studies seen in this way harbors only a
provisional subject matter, one awaiting translation into the terms of whichever
disciplines turn to it. For example, the psychology of religion translates religious
phenomena into psychological ones. Worshipers may think that they are praying to their
god, but from a Freudian point of view, they are praying to their fathers. The subject
matter becomes psychology rather than religion. Books currently catalogued under
"religion" get recatalogued under "psychology."
Religious studies credited with at least presenting the
worshiper's point of view is one step beyond religious studies restricted to a mere
subject area, but here too religious studies constitutes less than a discipline and is
permitted to take no stand on the actual origin, function, and meaning of religion.
Religious studies defined this way does not presume to say why human beings are in fact
religious, only why they think they are.
Religious studies defined as an outright discipline has all
the virtues that religious studies defined as anything less lacks. It is entitled to make
its own claims about the origin, function, and meaning of religion. It is on par with
other disciplines that do the same. The question here, however, is whether religious
studies can justify itself as an independent discipline. Too often the justification
offered for an irreducibly religious approach to religion is simply an appeal to the
worshiper's point of view. But other disciplines do not deny the worshiper's point of
view. Rather, they seek to account for it. For psychologists, sociologists, and others,
the analysis of religion begins with the worshiper's point of view but does not end
there. For religionists to invoke the worshiper's point of view against psychologists,
sociologists, and others—as if religionists alone take that point of view into
account—is to invoke a straw man (see Segal 1989:1-36, 1992:35-49).
Origin of the Discipline of
Religious Studies:
Müller and Otto
The chief figure in the establishment of religious studies
as a discipline and not merely a subject matter was the Indologist Friedrich Max Müller.
According to Müller, everyone is religious: "Wherever there is human life, there is
religion" (1910:7). Religion originates in the experience of the sacred, which he
calls the "Infinite." Because the experience of the Infinite is spontaneous,
Müller postulates no religious need. Human beings experience the Infinite not directly
but through nature—most of all through celestial phenomena, especially the sun:
The object of worship is not, however, the sun itself but
the Infinite, which transcends the natural world through which it manifests itself. The
Infinite is experienced through the senses but lies beyond the senses.
This distinctive subject matter requires a distinctive
discipline to study it. Hence the autonomy of religious studies: It alone studies the true
object of worship, which is beyond the ken of other disciplines. Books on religion
currently cross-listed under "psychology" and other disciplines are recatalogued
under "religion" exclusively.
The theologian Rudolf Otto (1923) went even further than
Müller in isolating the sacred, which Otto prefers to call the "Holy." For
Müller, the sacred, while distinct from the profane, is manifested through it and is
therefore akin to it. For Otto, the sacred is the opposite of the profane and must be
experienced directly. While Otto's concern is not disciplinary, his emphasis on the
radical other-ness of the sacred only reinforced the call for a separate discipline to
comprehend it.
Wach and Eliade
Whereas Müller wanted to encompass all of religious
studies in a single "science of religion," his successors more often have sought
to extricate individual strands within it. The strands most commonly singled out have been
the phenomenology of religion, which is equivalent to comparative religion, and the
history of religions, which focuses on individual religions. Some scholars have pitted
phenomenology against history (see van der Leeuw 1963: 686); others have sought to
reconcile the two (see Pettazzoni 1954:215-219, Bleeker 1963:1-15).
It was above all the historian Joachim Wach (1944, 1958,
1968, 1989a, 1989b) who strove to establish the autonomy of the history of religions.
According to Wach, the history of religions leaves to theology and philosophy the
determination of both the essence and the truth of religion, and leaves to the social
sciences the determination of the origin and function of religion. The distinctive issue
left for the history of religions is for Wach the "meaning" of religion, or its
significance for the worshipers themselves:
Far more enamored of sociology than of psychology, Wach
grants that sociology can account for both the origin and the function of religion:
"A wide field is open for the sociologist of religion in the examination of the
sociological roots and functions of myths, doctrines and dogmas, of cultures and
association in general and in particular (hic et nunc )." Sociology can even
account for the particular form a religion takes: "To what extent are the different
types of the expression of religious experience in different societies and cultures
socially conditioned (technological, moral, cultural level)?" (1989b:100).
Yet Wach is still prepared to pronounce the essence of
religion irreducibly religious: "A religious manifestation must be understood as a
religious manifestation" (1989a:162). The heart of religion is, as for Müller and
Otto, the experience of the sacred. Sociology can account for the form religion
takes, but it can never grasp the common pristine experience expressed through that form:
"There can be no doubt that it is characteristic of religious experience to transcend
cultural conditions" (1989b:135). The origin and intended function of religion turn
out to be irreducibly religious, and even sociology can tackle only the unintended
functions of religion: "We have tried to show that social integration is not the
'aim' or 'purpose' of religion. Religion is sound and true to its nature only as long as
it has no aim or purpose except the worship of God" (1944:381). Wach, like Müller,
assumes religion to be both universal and spontaneous, and thereby more easily seen as
self-explanatory.
Following Wach, the historian of religions Mircea Eliade
(1958, 1959, 1968a, 1968b, 1969) strove to distinguish the history of religions from at
once theology and the social sciences. Like Wach, Eliade declares religion universal,
deems the core of religion the experience of the sacred, and castigates the reduction of
religion to something nonreligious. Acknowledging that the social sciences can identify
the historical context of religion, he seems to be granting them the determination of the
origin and function of religion. But, in fact, he confines them to only the preconditions
of religion. The direct origin and function of religion remain, as for Wach, irreducibly
religious:
As for Wach, so for Eliade, the social sciences can,
moreover, say nothing of the meaning of religion: "Like it or not, the scholar has
not finished his work when he has reconstructed the history of a religious form or brought
out its sociological, economic, or political contexts. In addition, he must understand its
meaning" (1969:2). Unlike Wach, Eliade accords no special place to sociology or to
any other social science. The egalitarian Eliade abhors all social sciences equally.
Whereas Müller and Otto stress the spontaneous encounter
with the sacred, Eliade emphasizes the actual need for the sacred and sees religion as the
fulfillment of that need. Myths and rituals are the prime ways in which religion provides
contact with the sacred. Myths return one to the time when the sacred was near. Rituals
open one up to the continuing presence of the sacred. Because Eliade postulates a panhuman
need for the sacred, he is eager to show how self-professed atheists and agnostics are
really religious at heart: "The majority of the 'irreligious' still behave
religiously, even though they are not aware of the fact. . . . [T]he modern
man who feels and claims that he is nonreligious still retains a large stock of
camouflaged myths and degenerated rituals" (1968b:204 f). Venturing far beyond his
predecessors, Eliade seeks to show that all humans are actually, not merely potentially,
religious. He gleefully uncovers the religious dimension in seemingly profane activities
such as reading novels, seeing movies, celebrating holidays, and moving house. Religious
studies thus is no longer confined to explicit cases of religion but now encroaches on
secular domains and disciplines. The disciplinary tables have turned. (On the history of
religious studies, see Jastrow 1901, Jordan 1905, Kita- gawa 1985, Preus 1987, Rudolph
1985, Sharpe 1986.)
The legacy of the tradition from Müller to Eliade has been
the isolation of the discipline of religious studies from other disciplines, which are
seen as threatening to the autonomy of religious studies. While the field of religious
studies is indisputably ever more and more open to interdisciplinary approaches, the fear
of a hostile takeover by, above all, the social sciences remains. It is not coincidental
that in the United States the social scientific study of religion occupies a minor place
in the American Academy of Religion, the umbrella organization for scholars of religious
studies, and is instead carried out by separate organizations such as the Society for the
Scientific Study of Religion, the Association for the Sociology of Religion, and the
Religious Research Association.
—Robert A. Segal
References
C. J. Bleeker, The Sacred Bridge
(Leiden: Brill, 1963)
M. Eliade Patterns in Comparative
Religion (Cleveland, Ohio: Meridian, 1958)
M. Eliade, Cosmos and History
(New York: Harper, 1959)
M. Eliade, Myth and Reality
(New York: Harper, 1968a)
M. Eliade, The Sacred and the
Profane (New York: Harvest, 1968b)
M. Eliade, The Quest (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1969)
M. Jastrow, Jr., The Study of
Religion (London: Scott, 1901)
L. H. Jordan, Comparative Religion
(Edinburgh: Clark, 1905)
J. M. Kitagawa (ed.), The History
of Religions (New York: Macmillan, 1985)
G. van der Leeuw, Religion in
Essence and Manifestation (New York: Harper, 1963 [1933])
F. E. Manuel, The Eighteenth
Century Confronts the Gods (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959)
F. M. Müller, Chips from a German
Workshop (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1867-1875)
F. M. Müller, Lectures on the
Origin and Growth of Religion (New York: Scribner, 1910)
R. Otto, The Idea of the Holy
(London: Oxford University Press, 1923)
R. Pettazzoni, Essays on the
History of Religions (Leiden: Brill, 1954)
J. S. Preus, Explaining Religion
(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1987)
K. Rudolph, Historical
Fundamentals and the Study of Religions (New York: Macmillan, 1985)
W. Schmidt, The Origin and Growth
of Religion (London: Methuen, 1931)
R. A. Segal, Religion and the
Social Sciences (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1989)
R. A. Segal, Explaining and
Interpreting Religion (New York: Lang, 1992)
E. J. Sharpe, Comparative Religion
, 2nd ed. (LaSalle, Ill.: Open Court, 1986)
J. Wach, Sociology of Religion
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1944)
J. Wach, The Comparative Study of
Religions (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958)
J. Wach, Understanding and
Believing (New York: Harper, 1968)
J. Wach, Introduction to the
History of Religions (New York: Macmillan, 1989a)
J. Wach, Essays in the History of
Religions (New York: Macmillan, 1989b). |
