Thinking about Religion, Instead of Just Believing - Ivan Strenski
节选出处：Ivan Strenski, Thinking about Religion: An Historical Introduction to Theories of Religion (Blackwell Publishing, 2006), pp. 1-6.
Thinking about Religion, Instead of Just Believing
From Religion to the 'Problems of Religion'
In George Eliot's Middlemarch, the ardent Dorothea Brooke confronts Will Ladislaw with a question embracing an essential option reflected in Thinking about Religion: "What is your religion?," Dorothea asks. But, then adding immediately lest her pious query be misunderstood – "I mean not what you know about religion, but the belief that helps you most?" (Eliot 1872, p. 381). However, as the title Thinking about Religion indicates, unlike Miss Brooke, I would have much preferred to ask Will the other question and a follow-up – what did he know about religion and how did he come to think about religion as he did? Still, in that simple yet forceful question Eliot's fervent heroine captures a perennial distinction in the life of religion itself. Unlike the purpose of Thinking about Religion, Dorothea wants to know about how Will has tended to be 'religious' or to have practiced a 'religion.' She cares not at all for the central concerns of Thinking about Religion – how religion itself has become a problem as well as the focus of 'theorizing' about religion. Much as all readers of Middlemarch come, thus, to admire Dorothea Brooke, I, for one, wish she had asked my question!
For better or for ill, Thinking about Religion takes its stand squarely on the importance of understanding how and why people have come to think about religion – how people have sought to “know about religion,” how they have made of religion an area of human curiosity by submitting religion to endless interrogation, understanding, and explanation. Thinking about Religion then rests on the view that knowing about religion is, therefore, inseparable from having questions about religion, from interrogating religion, from seeing religion as an arena of problems. What, for example, was the first religion? How many religions are there? Are all religions equally true, or is there only one, and so on? Even more recently, certain thinkers responded to these problems by proposing ‘theories’ that aim to solve these problems.
It is true that from place to place, in rare outbursts of creative curiosity, people have asked such basic questions about the nature, value, and justification of religion. But these were fleeting episodes in the spotty history of human curiosity, that left behind no major books or treatises, no sustaining institutions or 'schools,' no lasting cultural influences in the forms of lines of inquiry or major questions about religion. On the contrary, religion did not become a real arena of problems, rigorously interrogated and systematically researched, until fairly late in the history of the West. There would never have been the study of religion as we know it, unless religion itself had first become a problem in some sustained way. This book tells the 'story' of important attempts to raise and solve many of the chief problems of religion by inventing what we can call ‘theories’ of religion.
As the British cultural critic Terry Eagleton explains, the appearance of 'theories' indicates the existence of perceived problems – the sense that "something is amiss." Theories aim to fix these problems by explaining how and why they occur. Problems of religion pop up like dreaded "small bumps on the neck," warning us that "all is not well" in the religious world (Eagleton 1990, p. 26). In the modern West, we have experienced a rash of such 'problems' – what Eagleton calls "a really virulent outbreak of theory," something indeed "on an epidemic scale" (Eagleton 1990, p. 25). This 'epidemic' of problems of religion has ignited intense theorizing about religion that has conspicuously engaged practically every major Western thinker of any note since the 1500s – Spinoza, Locke, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Durkheim, Max Müller, Freud, and many others. Thinking about Religion proceeds from the main premise that both this 'epidemic' and the attempts of 'theories' to address it cry out for understanding. Thinking about Religion seeks to provide an understanding of both some main problems of religion and the theories constructed to deal with those problems. The present study is committed to understanding both the intellectual and cultural causes of our theorizing about religion and the theories themselves. This book is, then, about how our 'theories' about religion – theories about its nature, truth, utility, value, and such – emerged in the history of the modern West. This book is about the ways some remarkable thinkers tried to understand and explain religion as a result of its becoming a problem, and about why they thought they were right in coming to their theoretical answers to these problems.
Religion is not unique in having emerged from what we take for granted in ordinary life, only then to become the subject of theories. Ordinary people have engaged in everyday artistic or economic behaviors for a long time and in many places. Artistic and economic life was just lived, without becoming the subject of academic study, such as esthetic or economic theories. Something special must happen to raise these commonplace features of everyday life to the level of academic, intellectual, or theoretical discourse. Something special must happen in order to link these everyday activities with academic programs or government departments and ministries. It is a very long way from the more or less unexamined economic life of that vendor of “parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme” at Scarborough (market) fair in the folk song, to the theory of supply-side economics, or to economic ‘problems’ under the consideration of the US Council of Economic Advisors. Certain faint continuities are recognizable, but the science of economics was a product of modern thinkers in the modern world, not a persistent feature of human history. So too have departments of religious studies created their own buzz with the ‘theories’ of religion they both teach and create.
So, like art and economic life, religion became the object of a disciplined academic or systematic program of self-reflection – what can be called ‘science.’ Only in the past century and a half has there been anything called a “science of religion.” Although we tend not to use the term ‘science of religion’ these days, it is still the normal way the study of religion is identified, for example, in France, where the “sciences religieuses” can claim a solid history of over a century and a half. Likewise, in the German-speaking world, under its formidable-sounding title, Religionswissenschaft holds sway, as it does in the Netherlands, as we will see, in the title of the Dutch scholar Cornelis P. Tiele’s major work, Elements of the Science of Religion, itself inspired by Max Müller’s project for a “Science of Religion” at Oxford. All these represent major and deliberate efforts to go beyond belief, and even to go beyond everyday curiosity about religion. If this situation were otherwise, we would have to explain why the documentary evidence for a ‘natural’ or much earlier disciplined and systematic study of religion is simply non-existent.
Up to the time when thinkers started studying religion in terms of scientific ideals, critical or radical self-reflection about religion was the main business of the religions themselves, and served the special needs of religious communities. Shakers, for example, worried about how they might expand their membership. Muslims meditated about whether their chief leadership should be confined to blood relatives of Muhammad. Roman Catholics disputed among themselves about how to deal with the role of women and the like.
While the problems that the individual religions wrestled with were real problems, they were ‘in-house’ problems. They were not the kind of problems that mattered to any and all religions, or for religion as religion. Shakers, Muslims, Catholics may well have had their problems, but they were those only afflicting Shakers, Muslims, and Catholics respectively. As such, the answers offered for their problems were not like scientific theories, since they did not need to appeal to the broad range of human belief and experience. Shakers did not have to satisfy Catholics about the answer they gave to their own ‘in-house’ Shaker problems, and vice versa. But the theories provoked by the general problems of religion did need to speak across sectarian and religious lines. These theories needed to speak in the manner of ‘science’ and try to appeal to the broadest consensus about the nature of facts, evidence, and such that they could. The new scientific studies of religion had therefore to be comparative, and never allow one individual religious perspective to hold a privileged place.
Therefore, in the West, beginning no more than 300 years or so ago, religion in this general and comparative sense became theorized. As a consequence, religion thus became the object of many sorts of concerted inquiry or disciplined study. In this critical and inquiring mode, people typically ask of religion a series of questions, mentioned at the beginning of the introduction: What is religion? What was the first religion? Does it make sense to inquire about the chronological origins of religion at all? How many religions or kinds of religion are there? Do religions change? If so, do they change according to any regular principles we might discover, such as evolution or degeneration? Is religion essentially private or instead essentially social? Do all religions require a belief in god? Afterlife? The supernatural? What makes a religion simple? What makes it complex, and so on? (Strenski 2003). These are only some of the myriad questions that stimulated the curiosity of some of the bravest and most adventurous thinkers of our history. They took a fateful step and dared to imagine that they could offer explanations of what is commonly thought to be the epitome of the unexplainable in human life – religion. Thinking about Religion seeks to help students of religion understand what these thinkers said about the nature of religion, and how and why they had the courage to think they were right in doing so.
But, Why Did They Think That They Were Right?
By focusing on the question of why the great theorists in the study of religion thought they were right about the ultimate meaning of religion, Thinking about Religion differs fundamentally from most of the ways we have tended to approach the theories in the study of religion. This book does not seek exclusively or even primarily to assemble a series of devastating criticisms of the major methods and theories in religious studies. This book is not about targeting a theory or theorist for 'execution.' This is not a book that primarily shows how one can do a neat 'butchering' job on theories of religion by 'cutting them up.' To be sure, readers will find criticism and analysis enough in the pages to follow. And, thus, readers will find ample discussion of why a given theory may be said to be wrong.
Thinking about Religion concentrates on why thinkers thought they were right, rather than on why they may have been wrong, because I think we can learn much more by approaching theories this way. I should add that I am not some kind of relativist who believes that all theories and methods are equally true. I believe that we should not delude ourselves about the shortcomings of any theory of religion. All are flawed in some way, and it would be foolish to think otherwise. No perfect Prince Charming of theories waits to carry us off to some intellectual paradise. It is not likely that some single theory of religion just waits to be discovered or created to solve all the problems encountered with religion. Thinking about Religion does not operate from assuming the likelihood of the arrival of Prince Charming.
But just because Prince Charming is not on his way, it is another thing entirely to make the flaws in theories our main preoccupation in the study of theories of religion. For that reason, while this book notes the weaknesses of theories, I believe that it is not productive simply to dwell upon the shortcomings of theories. Such a self-satisfied and negative position surely cannot be the end of critical inquiry into our theories of religion! It is just too easy making a career out of showing how any theory falls short by leaving things out, or does not match up well with the 'facts,' and thus cannot meet the standards of being 'true.' Once we have exposed the weaknesses or fatal flaws of a theory, what have we finally accomplished? Do we draw the conclusion that theorizing is a relatively worthless activity, since any theory can have holes shot in it? Do we scorn theorizing in the same way biblical Creationists disparage Darwinian evolution, because it is, after all, 'only theory'? Or, if we still think theorizing may be a worthy activity, what have we learned about how theories actually come to be – and thus perhaps how we ourselves might construct them – merely by shooting holes in them, or by cutting them up? Every course in methods and theories that I know seems to conclude by leaving a trail of wreckage – a littered scene of disabled or terminated theories breathing their last. Is this what we really want as the end result of our critical inquiry into theories of religion? Thinking about Religion was written and conceived in the belief that those who value theorizing in the study of religion want more.
Leading Questions: On Seeing Both the Forest and the Trees
This ‘more’ is to deepen our understanding of past theorizing so that we get the point of what the great theorists were trying to achieve – even when they failed to achieve it. This process involves a delving into the contexts of the creation and formation of theories, so that we can begin to see what the theorists were really trying to achieve, and how the theories they created measure up to what they hoped to produce.
As such, this effort at understanding theories of religion essentially entails something of an historical approach to theories and theorizing about religion. Understanding the development of the study of religion reminds me of what it was like finding my way around my present home city of Los Angeles. There is no ‘pole star’ against which to set a straight and single course across an otherwise simple expanse of land. Like such a great and often random-seeming city, the development of the study of religion presents us rather with a sprawl of historical details, frustrating encounters with grid-locked arguments, broad boulevards of ignorance across which no easy crossing is obvious. Learning how to navigate such a city requires getting one's bearings with respect to different and shifting landmarks and, as our position in the cityscape changes, against new points of reference again.
Thinking about Religion offers us at least two such major orienting points of reference that the great theorists seemed to use to focus their efforts. The first is their repeated search for Natural Religion, whether conceived as the 'first' religion, the common denominator of all religions, or some fundamental human capacity for religiousness, analogous to a moral sensibility or the esthetic sense. The answers given for the quest for Natural Religion by the first wave of great theorists dominate the polemic of Parts I and II of Thinking about Religion. The second way this book finds its way through the landscape of theoretical thinking about religion is by noting how the a second wave of more modern thinkers in Part II tend to address the central problem of the ultimate nature and status of religious experience. Long gone is the historical quest for an absolute beginning point, now replaced by attempts to explain how and why the proclaimed experiences of religious folk have come to be. Is the feeling of absolute dependence upon a great power, often constituting the essence of the reports of encounters with the sacred by believers, to be taken at face value? Or, as Freud would suggest, are we not rather in the presence of mythologized versions of our childhood memories of parental power? Or, again, to follow Durkheim, are we better advised to trace these indubitable feelings to the even more indubitable fact of our absolute dependence upon society? Part III of the present volume seeks to lay out some of the more influential accounts of the real nature of so-called religious experiences.
One final suggestion for students as they read through the book. Be alert to three steps I tried to follow as I wrote each chapter. First, each chapter tends to be organized around a basic problem of religion emergent at a particular time because of various changes that occur in a society. Such a change might be the discovery of heretofore unknown prehistoric societies of Europe, and the way they put into question the Bible's version of the human past. This, in turn, put into question the account of the world and humanity given in the sacred scripture of the West, and thus of the religious life led in accord with its guidance. Or, such a change might be the 'discovery' of the Freudian unconscious, and the revision this has caused in many quarters, of our sense of our own ability to know ourselves – and especially to know if we can trust our religious experiences. Second, once these 'shocks' to the religious self-consciousness are felt, what reactions by way of new theories of religion emerged? What, for example, did Robertson Smith have to say about modern Christianity, with it strong emphasis on belief in God, once what he took to be the earliest levels of biblical religion seemed totally devoid of beliefs as such? What was Freud to make of the prevalence of modern Christian religious experience of absolute dependence upon God the father, when to him it seemed as if this might be based on childhood memories of the power of our own human fathers? Third, and finally, no matter whether we find that thinkers like Robertson Smith or Freud were wrong or not about their conclusions about religion, the job of understanding these (and all the other) theories is only complete when we have satisfied ourselves that we understand why the theorists thought that they were right! How and why, for example, could anyone, like Robertson Smith to take a case in point, think that there could even be people, much less religious people, who lacked beliefs!? How could he have thought such things? Whatever else students take from this book, I at least hope they will feel that they understand how and why some remarkable folk thought about religion. And, that, incidentally, is why I titled this book Thinking about Religion.
References
Eagleton, T. 1990. The Significance of Theory. Oxford: Blackwell.
Eliot, G. 1872. Middlemarch. New York: New American Library.
Strenski, I. 2003. Why It Is Better to Have Some of the Questions than All of the Answers. Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 15, 169–86.
The Prehistory of the Study of Religion: Responses to an Expandin