History of the study of religion

Early attempts to study religion

One of the earliest attempts to systematize the seemingly conflicting Greek myths and thereby bring order into this rather chaotic Greek tradition was the Theogony of the Greek poet Hesiod (flourished c. 700 bce), who rather laboriously put together the genealogies of the gods. His work remains an important source book of ancient myth. The rise of speculative philosophy among the Ionian philosophers, especially Thales of Miletus, Heracleitus, and Anaximander, led to a more critical and more rationalistic treatment of the gods. Thus, Thales (6th century bce) and Heracleitus (flourished c. 500 bce) considered water and fire, respectively, to be the first substance, out of which everything else is made, though Aristotle reported mysteriously in the 4th century bce that Thales believed that everything was filled with the gods. Anaximander (6th century bce) called the primary substance the infinite (apeiron). In these various schemes of religious belief, there is a unitary something that transcends the many clashing forces in the world and in fact transcends even the gods. Heraclitus refers to the controlling principle as logos, or reason, though the philosopher, poet, and religious reformer Xenophanes (6th–5th century bce) directly assailed the traditional mythology as immoral, out of his concern to express a monotheistic religion. This theme of criticism of the myths was taken over and elaborated in the 4th century bce by Plato. More conservatively, the poet Theagenes (6th century bce) allegorized the gods, treating them as standing for natural and psychological forces. To some extent, this line was pursued in the works of the Greek tragedians and by the philosophers Parmenides and Empedocles (5th century bce). Criticism of the ancient Greek tradition was reinforced by the reports of travelers as Greek culture penetrated widely into various other cultures. The historian Herodotus (5th century bce) attempted to solve the problem of the plurality of cults by identifying foreign deities with Greek deities (e.g., those of the Egyptian Amon with Zeus). This kind of syncretism was widely employed in the merging of Greek and Roman culture in the Roman Empire (e.g., Zeus as the Roman god Jupiter).

The plurality of cults and gods also induced skepticism, as with the Sophist Protagoras (c. 481–411 bce), who was driven from Athens because he dared to question the existence of the gods. Prodicus of Ceos (5th century bce) gave a rationalistic explanation of the origin of deities that foreshadowed Euhemerism (see below Later attempts to study religion). Another Sophist, Critias (5th century bce), considered religion to have been invented to frighten humans into adhering to morality and justice. Plato was not averse to providing new myths to perform this same social function—as is seen in his conception of the “noble lie,” or the invention of myths to promote morality and order, in the Republic. He was strongly critical, however, of the older poets’ (e.g., Homer’s) accounts of the gods and substituted a form of belief in a single creator, the Demiurge, or supreme craftsman. This line of thought was developed in a stronger way by Aristotle in his conception of a supreme intelligence that is the “unmoved mover.” Aristotle combined elements of earlier thinking in his account of the genesis of the gods (coming from the observation of cosmic order and stellar beauty and from dreams).

Later attempts to study religion

Later Greek thinkers tended to vary between the positions adumbrated in the earlier period. The Stoics (philosophers of nature and morality) opted for a form of naturalistic monotheism, whereas the philosopher Epicurus (341–270 bce) was skeptical of religion as ordinarily understood and practiced, though he did not deny that there were gods who, however, had no transactions with human beings. Of considerable influence was Euhemerus (c. 330–c. 260 bce), who gave his name to the doctrine called Euhemerism—namely, that the gods are divinized humans. Although Euhemerus’s own argument was based largely upon fantasy, there are certainly some examples, both in Greek religion (e.g., Heracles) and elsewhere, of the tendency to make humans into gods, but it is obviously not universal.

Most of the Greek concepts about religion proved to be influential in the Roman world also. The atheistic Atomism of the Roman natural historian Lucretius (c. 95–55 bce) owed much to Epicurus. The eclectic thinker and politician Cicero (106–43 bce), in his De natura deorum (“Concerning the Nature of the Gods”), criticized Stoic, Epicurean, and later Platonic ideas about religion, but the book remains incomplete. Much of the skepticism about the gods in the ancient world was concerned with the older traditional religions, whether of Greece or Rome. But in the early empire the mystery cults, ranging from the Eleusinian mysteries of Greece to those of the Anatolian Cybele and the Persian Mithra, together with philosophically based religions such as Neoplatonism and Stoicism, had the greatest vitality. The patterns of religious belief were complex and of different levels, with various kinds of religion existing side by side.

Into this situation Christianity was injected, and in its encounter with classical civilization it absorbed a number of the critiques of the gods of the older thinkers. In particular, Euhemerism was fashionable among the Church Fathers (the religious teachers of the early church) as an account of paganism. On the “pagan” side, there were persistent attempts to justify the popular cults and myths by the extensive use of allegory—a technique well adapted to the synthesis of philosophical and popular religion. Christianity’s own contribution to theories of the genesis of polytheism was through the doctrine of the Fall of Man, in which pure monotheism was believed to have become overlaid by demonic cults of the gods. This account could help to explain some underlying similarities between the Jewish and Christian traditions on the one hand and the Greek and Roman traditions on the other. In this view lies the germ of an evolutionary account of religion. On the whole, however, the theories of religion in the ancient world were naturalistic and rationalist.

Theories of the Middle Ages

The spread of Christianity into northern Europe and other places outside the Roman Empire presented problems similar to those encountered in the pagan world. Similar solutions were offered—for example, the identification of northern and Roman and Greek gods, sometimes using etymologies that owed much to superficial resemblances of names. Thus, the Icelandic historian Snorri Sturluson (1179–1241) made use of this method in his handbook of Icelandic mythology—a work that was necessary to pass on the myth-laden Norse poetic lore that had survived the Christianization of the north—by adding to it Euhemeristic elements.

Meanwhile, Islamic theology had had an impact on Western Christianity, notably upon medieval Scholastic philosophy, in which the values of both reason and revelation were maintained. Muslim knowledge of other religions was more advanced than European knowledge, notably in the work of the theologian Ibn Ḥazm (994–1064). Nevertheless, the reports of some European travelers, such as the Italian Marco Polo (c. 1254–1324) and also Odoric of Pordenone (14th century), gave Westerners some knowledge of Asian religions. This knowledge opened the way toward a more factual, less speculative treatment of the phenomena of other religions. Although most Christian, as well as Islamic and Jewish, theologians tended to consider the question of whether natural religion gives insight into God’s nature—treating religion as a relation to the first cause of the universe—the English philosopher Roger Bacon (c. 1220–c. 1292) preferred to categorize the various manifest kinds of religion as a preliminary effort to establishing a true theology. Theorists of the medieval period continued to accept the thesis that polytheism had its origin in the Fall of Man, but two new theories modified attitudes of Christians to other faiths. First, the theory arose that God adapts customs and rites to a pagan style in order to combat paganism itself—as a concession to the human condition. This theory could be used to explain the divergencies of practice within Christendom and to show points of contact between Christianity and paganism. Second, the doctrine of humanity’s innate capacity to know God by reason enabled thinkers to discern some measure of truth in other religions. The questions raised by these theories were further explored during the Renaissance.

Theories of the Renaissance and Reformation

The Renaissance consisted in the invigoration of European culture through the rediscovery of Greek and Roman art, literature, and philosophy and thus was bound to set up tensions between Christians about paganism. The Italian Humanist Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–75) attempted to resolve these tensions in a medieval way by extensively allegorizing the ancient myths. The Dutch Humanist Desiderius Erasmus (1469–1536) and others, however, went farther in stating that the ancient thinkers had a direct knowledge of the highest truth and sometimes in comparing them favourably with Scholastic theologians. One of the interlocutors in his Convivium religiosum suggests that it would be better to lose the Scholastic theologian Duns Scotus than the ancient Roman thinkers Cicero or Plutarch, and another speaker restrains himself with difficulty from praying to the Greek philosopher Socrates (c. 470–399 bce) as if he were a Roman Catholic saint. But a new turn to the arguments about idolatry, which were essentially apologetic, was given by the Protestant Reformers’ attack on idolatry within the Roman Catholic Church and by their comparison between what they took to be the Christianity of the New Testament and the religion of Rome.

The need for a comparative treatment of religion became clear, and this need prepared the way for more modern developments. Also preparatory for the modern study of religion was the new trend toward more or less systematic compilations of mythological and other material, stimulated partly by the Renaissance itself and partly by the discovery of the Americas and other lands. Europeans were introduced to the richness and variety of human customs and beliefs. The most important figures in the exploration of the religions of the non-European world were the Spanish monk Bernardino de Sahagún (c. 1499–1590), who conscientiously gathered information in New Spain, J. Lafitau (1685–1740), a French missionary in Canada, and the Italian Jesuits Roberto De Nobili (1577–1656) and Matteo Ricci (1552–1610). The last two, who brought to bear a deep understanding of Indian and Chinese cultures, were unparalleled in that area of study until modern times. Thus, some of De Nobili’s discussions with Brahmans (priests) were probably the first profound dialogues between Hindus and Christians. The inquiries of the 16th to 18th century thus initiated an accumulation of data about other cultures that stimulated studies of the religions of other cultures.

The late 17th and 18th centuries

Attempts at a developmental account of religion were begun in the late 17th and 18th centuries. Notable was the scheme worked out, though not in great detail, by the Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico (1668–1744), who suggested that Greek religion passed through various stages: first, the divinization of nature; second, the divinization of powers that human beings had come to control, such as fire and crops; third, the divinization of institutions, such as marriage; and finally, the process of humanizing the gods, as in the works of Homer. The Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711–76) gave another account in his Natural History of Religion, which reflected the growing rationalism of the epoch. For Hume, original polytheism was the result of a naïve anthropomorphism (conceiving the divine in human form) in the assignment of causes to natural events. The intensification of propitiatory and other forms of worship, he believed, led to the exaltation of one infinite divine Being. His “Essay upon Miracles” was also important in posing vital questions about the historical treatment of sacred texts, a set of problems that was to preoccupy Christian theologians starting in the 19th century.

The rationalism of the period often involved a rejection of both paganism and dogmatic Christianity in the name of “natural religion.” This natural religion, also called deism, was the intellectual counterpart to the more emotional antidogmatic faith of the Pietists, who advocated “heart religion” over “head religion.” Among the French philosophes and Encyclopaedists, Voltaire (1694–1778) espoused an anticlerical deism, which viewed the genesis of polytheism in the work of priests—a point also developed by another Encyclopaedist, Denis Diderot (1713–84). Voltaire was, incidentally, somewhat influenced and impressed by reports of the ethics of the Chinese social and religious sage Confucius (6th century bce).

The culmination of 18th-century Rationalism was found in the works of the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), but his was a rationalism modified to leave room for religion, which he based essentially on ethics. Kant held that all humans, in their awareness of and reverence for the categorical imperative (i.e., the notion that one must act as though what one does can become a universal law), share in the one religion and that the preeminence of Christianity lay in the conspicuous way in which Jesus enshrined the moral ideal. A series of reactions against the highly influential Kantian account paved the way for the various approaches to religion in the 19th century. In the meantime, the first beginnings of the development of Oriental studies and of ethnology and anthropology were making available more data about religion, though discussion in the 18th century continued to conceive religions other than Judaism and Christianity largely in terms of the paganism of the ancient world. The French scholar and politician Charles de Brosses (1709–77) attempted to explain Greek polytheism partly through the fetishism (belief in the magical powers of certain objects) found in West Africa. This approach was pioneering in its comparison of Greek myths with “primitive” ones. The French Abbé Bergier (1718–90) explained primitive religions by means of a belief in spirits arising from a variety of psychological causes; his view was thus a precursor of animism, or belief in the existence of souls in persons and in things.

One of the critics of Kant’s view of religion was the German philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803), who adopted an evolutionary account of the human race and who saw in mythology something much deeper than a record of follies. His concern with symbolic thinking makes him the first modern student of myth. The German philosopher Friedrich Schelling (1775–1854) continued this positive approach, in the tradition of Romanticism. Furthermore, the advances in the knowledge of non-European, especially Indian, religion gave a wider perspective to discussions of the nature of religion, as was clear in the work of the German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel (1770–1831). Hegel’s self-confident supposition that his philosophy represented the culmination of the history of philosophy may amuse contemporary scholars. Hegel was, nevertheless, immensely influential over a wide range of scholarship, including the study of religion. His followers were in large measure the founders of modern scientific history. Admittedly his theory of the historical dialectic—in which one movement (the thesis) is countered by another (the antithesis), the interplay giving rise to a third (the synthesis), which now becomes the thesis of a new dialectical interplay, and so on—has been viewed as too artificial. But in providing a theoretical skeleton, the dialectic inspired attempts to make sense of the multitude of historical data, so scholars were driven to the investigation and discovery of particular facts that might exhibit the universal patterns postulated. Hegel also had a modified relativism, which implied that each phase of religion has a limited truth. This, together with his dialectic scheme, led to a general theory of religions, which though dated, much too neat, and based on imperfect information, nevertheless represents an important attempt at a comparative treatment, and one that was evolutionary.

The early 19th century

Hegel, as an idealist, stressed the formative power of the spiritual on human history. By contrast, the French social philosopher Auguste Comte (1798–1857), from a positivistic and materialist point of view, devised a different evolutionary scheme in which there are three stages of human history: the theological, in which the supernatural is important; the metaphysical, in which the explanatory concepts become more abstract; and the positivistic—i.e., the empirical. A rather different positivism was expressed by the English philosopher Herbert Spencer (1820–1903); in it religion has a place beside science in attempting to refer to the unknown (and unknowable) Absolute. Evolutionary accounts, which antedated Charles Darwin and focused as much on the survival of the outdated as on the survival of the fittest, were much boosted in the latter part of the 19th century by the new theory of biological evolution and had a marked effect on both the history of religions and anthropology.

Meanwhile, the German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–72) propounded, in his Lectures on the Essence of Religion, a view of religion as a projection of the aspirations of humans. His understanding of religion as a form of projection—an explanation that goes back to the ancient Greek thinker Xenophanes—was taken up in various ways by, among others, Marx, Freud, and Barth. These various movements were supplemented by the growth of scientific history, archaeology, anthropology, and other sciences. The rise of the social sciences provided for the first time systematic knowledge of cultures worldwide.

Although the 19th-century theories that form the starting point of the modern study of religion were often based directly on metaphysical schemes in competition with Christian and other theologies, there was an atmosphere notably different from that of preceding periods, and the stage was set for a more complex understanding of the history and nature of religion.