Considerable progress toward more scientific classifications of religions was marked by the emergence of morphological schemes, which assume that religion in its history has passed through a series of discernible stages of development, each having readily identifiable characteristics and each constituting an advance beyond the former stage. So essential is the notion of progressive development to morphological schemes that they might also be called evolutionary classifications. Trends in the comparative study of religions have retained the interest in morphology but have decisively rejected the almost universal 19th-century assumption of unitary evolution in the history of religion. The crude expression of evolutionary categories such as the division of religions into lower and higher or primitive and higher religions has been subjected to especially severe criticism.

The pioneer of morphological classifications was Edward Burnett Tylor, a British anthropologist, whose Primitive Culture (1871) is among the most influential books ever written in its field. Tylor developed the thesis of animism, a view that the essential element in all religion is belief in spiritual beings. According to Tylor, the belief arises naturally from elements universal in human experience (e.g., death, sleep, dreams, trances, and hallucinations) and leads through processes of primitive logic to the belief in a spiritual reality distinct from the body and capable of existing independently. In the development of the idea, this reality is identified with the breath and the life principle; thus arises the belief in the soul, in phantoms, and in ghosts. At a higher stage, the spiritual principle is attributed to aspects of reality other than human beings, and all things are believed to possess spirits that are their effective and animating elements; for example, primitive peoples generally believe that spirits cause sickness and control their destinies.

Of immediate interest is the classification of religions drawn from Tylor’s animistic thesis. Ancestor worship, prevalent in preliterate societies, is obeisance to the spirits of the dead. Fetishism, the veneration of objects believed to have magical or supernatural potency, springs from the association of spirits with particular places or things and leads to idolatry, in which the image is viewed as the symbol of a spiritual being or deity. Totemism, the belief in an association between particular groups of people and certain spirits that serve as guardians of those people, arises when the entire world is conceived as peopled by spiritual beings. At a still higher stage, polytheism, the interest in particular deities or spirits disappears and is replaced by concern for a “species” deity who represents an entire class of similar spiritual realities. By a variety of means, polytheism may evolve into monotheism, a belief in a supreme and unique deity. Tylor’s theory of the nature of religions and the resultant classification were so logical, convincing, and comprehensive that for a number of years they remained virtually unchallenged.

The morphological classification of religions received more sophisticated expression from Cornelius Petrus Tiele, a 19th-century Dutch scholar and an important pioneer in the scientific study of religion. His point of departure was a pair of distinctions made by the philosophers of religion Abraham Kuenen and W.D. Whitney. In the Hibbert Lectures for 1882, National Religions and Universal Religions, Kuenen had emphasized the difference between religions limited to a particular people and those that have taken root among many peoples and qualitatively aim at becoming universal. Whitney saw the most marked distinction among religions as being between race religions (“the collective product of the wisdom of a community”) and individually founded religions. The first are the result of nature’s unconscious working through long periods of time, and the latter are characterized by a high degree of ethical awareness. Tiele agreed strongly with Whitney in distinguishing between nature and ethical religions. Ethical religion, in Tiele’s views, develops out of nature religion,

but the substitution of ethical religions for nature-religions is, as a rule, the result of a revolution; or at least of an intentional reform.

Each of these categories (i.e., nature or spiritualistic–ethical) may be further subdivided. At the earliest and lowest stage of spiritual development was polyzoic religion, about which there is no information but which is based on Tiele’s theory that early human beings must have regarded natural phenomena as endowed with life and superhuman magical power. The first known stage of the nature religions is called polydaemonistic (many spirits) magical religion, which is dominated by animism and characterized by a confused mythology, a firm faith in magic, and the preeminence of fear above other religious emotions. At a higher stage of nature religions is therianthropic polytheism, in which the deities are normally of mixed animal and human composition. The highest stage of nature religion is anthropomorphic polytheism, in which the deities appear in human form but have superhuman powers. These religions have some ethical elements, but their mythology portrays the deities as indulging in all sorts of shocking acts. None of the polytheistic religions, thus, was able to raise itself to a truly ethical point of view.

Ethical religions fall into two subcategories. First are the national nomistic (legal) religions that are particularistic, limited to the horizon of one people only and based upon a sacred law drawn from sacred books. Above them are the universalistic religions, qualitatively different in kind, aspiring to be accepted by all men, and based upon abstract principles and maxims. In both subtypes, doctrines and teachings are associated with the careers of distinct personalities who play important roles in their origin and formation. Tiele found only three examples of this highest type of religion: Islam, Christianity, and Buddhism.

Tiele’s classification enjoyed a great vogue and influenced many who came after him. Nathan Söderblom, a Swedish archbishop who devoted much energy to problems of classification, accepted the division of higher religions into two great groups but used a varied terminology that pointed to some of the characteristics of the two types of religion. In addition to natural religion and revealed religion, or religions of nature and religions of revelation, Söderblom spoke of culture religions and prophetic religions, of culture religions and founded religions, and of nature religions and historical religions. The highest expression of the first category is the “mysticism of infinity” that is characteristic of the higher aspects of Hindu and Buddhist religious experience. The apex of genuine prophetic religion is reached in the “mysticism of personality.” All these distinctions mean the same thing, and all are indebted to Tiele’s thought. Söderblom, however, sharply disagreed with Tiele’s thesis of continuous development in the history of religion. In Söderblom’s view, the line between nature religion and prophetic religion is a deep and unbridgeable chasm, a qualitative difference so enormous that one type could never evolve by natural historical processes into the other. Prophetic religion can be explained only as a radical and utterly new incursion into history. As Söderblom was a churchman and theologian as well as a distinguished historian of religion, there is without doubt an element of theological judgment influencing his stand on this matter. Söderblom was eager to defend the uniqueness of biblical religion, and he believed that his historical and scientific studies provided an objective basis for asserting not only the uniqueness but also the superiority of Christianity.

Tiele’s enduring influence may also be seen in the classification of religions advanced by Mircea Eliade, a Romanian-American scholar who was one of the most prolific contemporary students of religion. Eliade, who in other respects might be considered among the phenomenologists of religion, was interested in uncovering the “structures” or “patterns” of religious life. The basic division that Eliade recognized is between traditional religions—including primitive religions and the archaic cults of the ancient civilizations of Asia, Europe, and America—and historical religions. The distinction is better revealed, however, in the terms cosmic religion and historical religion. In Eliade’s estimation, all of traditional religion shares a common outlook upon the world—chiefly, the deprecation of history and the rejection of profane, mundane time. Religiously, traditional humans are not interested in the unique and specific but rather exclusively in those things and actions that repeat and restore transcendental models. Only those things that participate in and reflect the eternal archetypes or the great pattern of original creation by which cosmos came out of chaos are real in the traditional outlook. The religious activities of traditional human beings are the recurring attempts to return to the beginning, to the Great Time, to trace again and renew the process by which the structure and order of the cosmos were established. Traditional religions may, therefore, find the sacred in any aspect of the world that links man to the archetypes of the time in the beginning; thus, their typical mode of expression is repetitive. Further, their understanding of history, as far as they are concerned with it at all, is cyclical. The world and what happens in it are devalued, except as they show forth the eternal pattern of the original creation.

Modern, postarchaic, or historical religions (e.g., Judaism, Christianity, Islam) show markedly other features. They tend to see a discontinuity between God and the world and to locate the sacred not in the cosmos but somewhere beyond it. Moreover, they hold to linear views of history, believing it to have a beginning and an end, with a definite goal as its climax, and to be by nature unrepeatable. Thus, the historical religions are world affirming in the double sense of believing in the reality of the world and of believing that meaning for human beings is worked out in the historical process. By reason of these views, the historical religions alone have been monotheistic and exclusivist in their theologies. Although Eliade outstripped his predecessors in delineating the qualities of traditional religion in particular, much of his thought was anticipated in Söderblom’s descriptions of nature religion and prophetic religion.