Geographical
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A common and relatively simple type of classification is based upon the geographical distribution of religious communities. Those religions found in a single region of the earth are grouped together. Such classifications are found in many textbooks on comparative religion, and they offer a convenient framework for presenting religious history. The categories most often used are: (1) Middle Eastern religions, including Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Zoroastrianism, and a variety of ancient cults; (2) East Asian religions, comprising the religious communities of China, Japan, and Korea, and consisting of Confucianism, Daoism, the various schools of Mahayana (“Greater Vehicle”) Buddhism, and Shintō; (3) Indian religions, including early Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism, and Sikhism, and sometimes also the Theravada (“Way of the Elders”) Buddhism and the Hindu- and Buddhist-inspired religions of South and Southeast Asia; (4) African religions, or the cults of the tribal peoples of Sub-Saharan Africa, but excluding ancient Egyptian religion, which is considered to belong to the ancient Middle East; (5) American religions, consisting of the beliefs and practices of the Indian peoples indigenous to the two American continents; (6) Oceanic religions—i.e., the religious systems of the peoples of the Pacific islands, Australia, and New Zealand; and (7) classical religions of ancient Greece and Rome and their Hellenistic descendants. The extent and complexity of a geographical classification is limited only by classifiers’ knowledge of geography and their desire to seek detail and comprehensiveness in their classification scheme. Relatively crude geographical schemes that distinguish Western religions (usually equivalent to Christianity and Judaism) from Eastern religions are quite common.
Although religions centred in a particular area often have much in common because of historical or genetic connections, geographical classifications present obvious inadequacies. Many religions, including some of the greatest historical importance, are not confined to a single region (e.g., Islam), or do not have their greatest strength in the region of their origins (e.g., Christianity, Buddhism). Further, a single region or continent may be the dwelling place of many different religious communities and viewpoints that range from the most archaic to the most sophisticated. At a more profound level, geographical classifications are unacceptable because they have nothing to do with the essential constitutive elements of religion. The physical location of a religious community reveals little of the specific religious life of the group. Though useful for some purposes, geographical classifications contribute minimally to the task of providing a systematic understanding of human religions and religiousness.
Ethnographic-linguistic
Max Müller, often called the “Father of the history of religions,” stated that “Particularly in the early history of the human intellect, there exists the most intimate relationship between language, religion, and nationality.” This insight supplies the basis for a genetic classification of religions (associating them by descent from a common origin), which Müller believed the most scientific principle possible. According to this theory, in Asia and Europe dwell three great races, the Turanians (including the Ural-Altaic peoples), the Semites, and the Aryans, to which correspond three great families of languages. Originally, in some remote prehistory, each of these races formed a unity, but with the passage of time they split up into a myriad of peoples with a great number of distinct languages. Through careful investigation, however, the original unity may be discerned, including the unity of religion in each case. Müller’s principal resource in developing the resulting classification of religions was the comparative study of languages, from which he sought to demonstrate similarities in the names of deities, the existence of common mythologies, the common occurrence of important terms in religious life, and the likeness of religious ideas and intuitions among the branches of a racial group. His efforts were most successful in the case of the Semites, whose affinities are easy to demonstrate, and probably least successful in the case of the Turanian peoples, whose early origins are hypothetical. Müller’s greatest contribution to scholarship, however, lay in his study of Indo-Aryan languages, literatures, and comparative mythology.
Because Müller was a scholar of the first rank and a pioneer in several fields, his ethnographic-linguistic (and genetic) classification of religions has had much influence and has been widely discussed. The classification has value in exhibiting connections that had not been previously observed. Müller (and his followers) discovered affinities existing among the religious perspectives of both the Indo-Aryan-speaking and Semitic-speaking peoples and set numerous scholars on the path of investigating comparative mythology, thus contributing in a most direct way to the store of knowledge about religions.
There are, nevertheless, difficulties with the ethnographic-linguistic classification. To begin with, Müller’s evidence was incomplete, a fact that may be overlooked given the state of knowledge in his day. More important is the consideration that peoples of widely differing cultural development and outlook are found within the same racial or linguistic group. Further, the principle of connection among race, language, and religion does not take sufficiently into account the historical element or the possibility of developments that may break this connection, such as the conversion of the Indo-European-speaking peoples of Europe—who were viewed as being not only linguistically, as the Indo-Aryan languages continue to be classified among the Indo-European language family, but also racially connected to the Indo-Aryan speakers—to a Semitic religion, Christianity.
Other scholars have developed the ethnographic classification of religion to a much higher degree than did Müller. The German scholar Duren J.H. Ward, for example, in The Classification of Religions (1909) accepted the premise of the connection between race and religion but appealed to a much more detailed scheme of ethnological relationship. He says that “religion gets its character from the people or race who develop or adopt it” and further that
the same influences, forces, and isolated circumstances which developed a special race developed at the same time a special religion, which is a necessary constituent element or part of a race.
In order to study religion in its fullness and to bring out with clarity the historical and genetic connections between religious groups, the ethnographic element must thus have adequate treatment. Ward devised a comprehensive “Ethnographico-historical Classification of the Human Races to facilitate the Study of Religions—in five divisions.” These major divisions were (1) the Oceanic races, (2) the African races, (3) the American races, (4) the Mongolian races, and (5) the Mediterranean races, each of which has its own peculiar religion. The largest branch, the Mediterranean races, he subdivided into primeval Semites and primeval Aryans, in order to demonstrate in turn how the various Semitic, Indo-Aryan, and European races descended from these original stocks.
Philosophical
The past 150 years have also produced several classifications of religion based on speculative and abstract concepts that serve the purposes of philosophy. The principal example of these is the scheme of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, a seminal German philosopher, in his famous Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion (1832). In general, Hegel’s understanding of religion coincided with his philosophical thought; he viewed the whole of human history as a vast dialectical movement toward the realization of freedom. The reality of history, he held, is Spirit, and the story of religion is the process by which Spirit—true to its own internal logical character and following the dialectical pattern of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis (the reconciliation of the tension of opposite positions in a new unity that forms the basis of a further tension)—comes to full consciousness of itself. Individual religions thus represent stages in a process of evolution (i.e., progressive steps in the unfolding of Spirit) directed toward the great goal at which all history aims.
Hegel classified religions according to the role that they have played in the self-realization of Spirit. The historical religions fall into three great divisions, corresponding with the stages of the dialectical progression. At the lowest level of development, according to Hegel, are the religions of nature, or religions based principally upon the immediate consciousness deriving from sense experience. They include: immediate religion or magic at the lowest level; religions, such as those of China and India plus Buddhism, that represent a division of consciousness within itself; and others, such as the religions of ancient Persia, Syria, and Egypt, that form a transition to the next type. At an intermediate level are the religions of spiritual individuality, among which Hegel placed Judaism (the religion of sublimity), ancient Greek religion (the religion of beauty), and ancient Roman religion (the religion of utility). At the highest level is absolute religion, or the religion of complete spirituality, which Hegel identified with Christianity. The progression thus proceeds from human immersed in nature and functioning only at the level of sensual consciousness, to human beings becoming conscious of themselves in their individuality as distinct from nature, and beyond that to a grand awareness in which the opposition of individuality and nature is overcome in the realization of Absolute Spirit.
Many criticisms have been offered of Hegel’s classification. An immediately noticeable shortcoming is the failure to make a place for Islam, one of the major historical religious communities. The classification is also questionable for its assumption of continuous development in history. The notion of perpetual progress is not only doubtful in itself but is also compromised as a principle of classification because of its value implications.
Nevertheless, Hegel’s scheme was influential and was adapted and modified by a generation of philosophers of religion in the Idealist tradition. Departure from Hegel’s scheme, however, may be seen in the works of Otto Pfleiderer, a German theologian of the 19th century. Pfleiderer believed it impossible to achieve a significant grouping of religions unless, as a necessary preliminary condition, the essence of religion were first isolated and clearly understood. Essence is a philosophical concept, however, not a historical one. Pfleiderer considered it indispensable to have conceptual clarity about the underlying and underived basis of religion from which all else in religious life follows. In Die Religion, ihr Wesen und ihre Geschichte (“Religion, Its Essence and History”), Pfleiderer held that the essence of religious consciousness exhibits two elements, or moments, perpetually in tension with one another: one of freedom and one of dependence, with a number of different kinds of relationships between these two. One or the other may predominate, or they may be mixed in varying degrees.
Pfleiderer derived his classification of religions from the relationships between these basic elements. He distinguished one great group of religions that exhibits extreme partiality for one over against the other. The religions in which the sense of dependence is virtually exclusive are those of the ancient Semites, the Egyptians, and the Chinese. Opposite these are the early Indian, Germanic, and Greek and Roman religions, in which the sense of freedom prevails. The religion of this group may also be seen in a different way, as nature religions in the less-developed cultures or as culture or humanitarian religions in the more advanced. A second group of religions exhibits a recognition of both elements of religion, but gives them unequal value. These religions are called supernatural religions. Among them Zoroastrianism gives more weight to freedom as a factor in its piety, and Brahmanism and Buddhism are judged to have a stronger sense of dependence. The last group of religions is the monotheistic religions: Islam, Judaism, and Christianity, which are divided again into two sub-groups, i.e., those that achieve an exact balance of the elements of religion and those that achieve a blending and merging of the elements. Both Judaism and Islam grant the importance of the two poles of piety, though there is a slight tendency in Islam toward the element of dependence and in Judaism toward freedom. It is Christianity alone, he claimed, that accomplishes the blending of the two, realizing both together in their fullness, the one through the other.
The intellectual heritage that lies behind this classification will be immediately apparent. The classification reflects its time (19th century) and place (western Europe) of conception in the sense that the study of religion was not yet liberated from its ties to the philosophy of religion and theology.
