Interreligious Comparisons in Religious Studies and Theology Comparison Revisited 9781474285131, 9781350058729, 9781474285148, 9781474285155

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Interreligious Comparisons in ­Religious Studies and Theology

Also available from Bloomsbury: Interreligious Studies, Oddbjørn Leirvik Meditation in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, edited by Halvor Eifring Contemporary Muslim-Christian Encounters, edited by Paul Hedges Ritual Participation and Interreligious Dialogue, edited by Marianne Moyaert and Joris Geldhof

Interreligious Comparisons in Religious Studies and Theology Comparison Revisited Edited by Perry Schmidt-Leukel and Andreas Nehring

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square 1385 Broadway London New York WC1B 3DP NY 10018 UK USA www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2016 Paperback edition first published 2018 © Andreas Nehring, Perry Schmidt-Leukel and Contributors, 2016 Andreas Nehring, Perry Schmidt-Leukel and Contributors have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-1-4742-8513-1 PB: 978-1-3500-5872-9 ePDF: 978-1-4742-8514-8 ePub: 978-1-4742-8515-5 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

Contents Contributors Acknowledgements

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Introduction  Andreas Nehring, Perry Schmidt-Leukel

1

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Part 1  Comparison: Contestation and Defence

 1 Comparative Methodology and the Religious Studies Toolkit  Paul Hedges 17  2 Comparison in the Maelstrom of Historicity: A Postcolonial Perspective

on Comparative Religion  Michael Bergunder 34

 3 Modes of Comparison: Towards Creating a Methodological Framework

for Comparative Studies  Oliver Freiberger 53

 4 Comparison as a Necessary Evil: Examples from Indian and Jewish

Worlds  Philippe Bornet 72

Part 2  Phenomenology and the Foundations of Comparison

 5 Camouflage of the Sacred: Can We Still Branch Off from Eliade’s

Comparative Approach?  Andreas Nehring 95

 6 The Singular and the Shared: Making Amends to Eliade after the

Dismissal of the Sacred  Kenneth Rose 110

 7 Religious Practice and the Nature of the Human  Gavin Flood 130  8 On All-Embracing Mental Structures: Towards a Transcendental

Hermeneutics of Religion  Fabian Völker 142

Part 3  Reciprocal Illumination and Comparative Theology

 9 Comparative Theology and Comparative Religion  Klaus von Stosch 163 10 Reciprocal Illumination  Arvind Sharma 178 11 On Creativity, Participation and Normativity: Comparative Theology in

Discussion with Arvind Sharma’s Reciprocal Illumination  Ulrich Winkler 191

12 Christ as Bodhisattva: A Case of Reciprocal

Illumination  Perry Schmidt-Leukel 204

Index

221

Contributors Michael Bergunder is Professor of Religious Studies and Intercultural Theologies at the University of Heidelberg. His areas of interest are theories and methods in religious studies, Tamil religious history since the eighteenth century, the history of the Theosophical Society and the study of global Pentecostalism. His books include Ritual, Caste, and Religion in Colonial South India (as co-editor) and The South Indian Pentecostal Movement in the Twentieth Century. Philippe Bornet is Senior Lecturer at the University of Lausanne, in the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations. After stays in Tübingen and at the University of Chicago, he completed a PhD in the comparative history of religions on rituals of hospitality in Jewish and Indian texts. His current research deals with interactions between India and Europe and, more specifically, Swiss missionaries in South India in the beginning of the twentieth century. Recent publications include Rites et pratiques de l’hospitalité (2010), Religions in Play (2012) (ed. with M. Burger) and L’orientalisme des marges (2014) (ed. with S. Gorshenina). Gavin Flood is Yap Kim Hao Professor of Comparative Religious Studies, Yale-NUS College, National University of Singapore and Senior Research Fellow, Campion Hall Oxford. He was formerly Professor of Hindu Studies and Comparative Religion at Oxford University and Academic Director of the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies. He is a member of the British Academy and has published widely in the field. Among his recent books are The Importance of Religion: Meaning and Action in Our Strange World (2011) and The Truth Within: A History of Inwardness in Christianity, Hinduism and Buddhism (2014). Oliver Freiberger is Associate Professor of Asian Studies and Religious Studies at The University of Texas at Austin, United States. His main research interests are Indian Buddhism, asceticism and comparative methodology in the study of religion. Among his books are Asceticism and Its Critics: Historical Accounts and Comparative Perspectives (2006), Der Askesediskurs in der Religionsgeschichte: Eine vergleichende Untersuchung brahmanischer und frühchristlicher Texte (2009), Kanonisierung und Kanonbildung in der asiatischen Religionsgeschichte (2011), and Buddhismus: Handbuch und kritische Einführung, 2nd edn. (2015) (together with Christoph Kleine). Paul Hedges is Associate Professor in Interreligious Studies at the Studies in InterReligious Relations in Plural Societies Programme, RSIS, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He has previously worked or lectured for universities in Asia, Europe and North America. He researches, teaches and publishes widely in such areas

Contributors

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as the theology of religions, theory and method in religious studies, interreligious relations, contemporary theologies, interreligious encounters in social, political and cultural contexts, and comparative theology. Recent books include Contemporary Muslim-Christian Encounters (Bloomsbury, 2015), Controversies in Contemporary Religion (3 volumes, Praeger, 2014), and Controversies in Interreligious Dialogue and the Theology of Religions (SCM, 2010). Andreas Nehring is Professor of Religious Studies and Intercultural Theology at the University of Erlangen in Germany since 2005. He has previously worked and studied in India and Japan. He researches, teaches and publishes in areas such as modern Hinduism, Western Buddhism, method and theory of religion, postcolonial studies, intercultural theology and mission-history. Among his publications are Orientalismus und Mission (2003) and Religious Turns – Turning Religions (2008). One of his recent publications is a German volume on Postcolonial Theology (2013), and another a German translation of Gayatri Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (2013). Kenneth Rose is Professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Christopher Newport University, Virginia, United States. His major research foci are pluralist philosophies and theologies of religions and comparative mysticism and contemplative methods. His publications include Knowing the Real. John Hick on the Cognitivity of Religions and Religious Pluralism (1996), Pluralism: The Future of Religion (2013) and Yoga, Meditation, and Mysticism: Contemplative Universals and Meditative Landmarks (2016). Perry Schmidt-Leukel is Professor of Religious Studies and Intercultural Theology and one of the principal investigators of the Cluster of Excellence ‘Religion and Politics’ at the University of Muenster, Germany. His research focuses on theology of religions, inter-faith relations, Buddhist–Christian dialogue and interreligious theology. Among his more recent books are Transformation by Integration. How Inter-Faith Encounter Changes Christianity (2009); Buddhism and Religious Diversity, 4 vols. (2013) (edited) and Religious Diversity in Chinese Thought (2013) (co-edited). Arvind Sharma is the Birks Professor of Comparative Religion in the Faculty of Religious Studies at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. His research has focused on the Indic religious tradition, the philosophy of religion, and religion and human rights. He is currently engaged in promoting a Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the World’s Religions. His books include Religious Studies and Comparative Methodology: The Case for Reciprocal Illumination (2005), Are Human Rights Western?: A Contribution to the Dialogue of Civilizations (2006), and Gandhi: A Spiritual Biography (2013). Klaus von Stosch is Professor of Systematic Theology and Head of the Centre of Comparative Theology and Cultural Studies at the University of Paderborn, Germany. His research is mainly in the fields of comparative theology, faith and reason, the problem of evil, Christian theology responsive to Islam, especially Christology, and

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Contributors

theology of the Trinity. His recent publications include Komparative Theologie als Wegweiser in der Welt der Religionen (2012), Theodizee (2013) and Handeln Gottes – Antwort des Menschen (2014) (co-edited). Fabian Völker is Research Assistant at the Institute for Religious Studies and Intercultural Theology and member of the graduate school of the Cluster of Excellence ‘Religion and Politics’ at the University of Münster, Germany. His main research interests are contemporary and classical Buddhism, Vedānta and transcendental philosophy. His articles include Der Ursprung und Sinn des Bösen und des Seins der Welt. Zu einer theodizeeanalogen Frage im Vedānta und Buddhismus (2014), Der präreflexive Grund des Bewusstseins. Eine transzendentalphilosophische Interpretation Nāgārjunas (forthcoming) and Der Advaita-Vedānta als Proto-Transzendentallehre. Prolegomenon zu einer transkulturellen Transzendentalphilosophie (forthcoming). Ulrich Winkler is Professor of Systematic Theology and Co-Director of the Centre for Intercultural Theology and the Study of Religions at the University of Salzburg, Austria. His major research interests are in the fields of Jewish-Christian theological studies, theology of religions and comparative theology. He is the author of Wege der Religionstheologie. Von der Erwählung zur komparativen Theologie (2013), editor of the German theological journal Salzburger Theologische Zeitschrift and co-editor of Contested Spaces, Common Ground? The Spatial Turn in Intercultural Theology and Interreligious Studies (forthcoming).

Acknowledgements The idea for this book goes back to a small expert symposium organized by the ‘Religious Studies and Intercultural Theology’ section of the  Wissenschaftliche Gesellschaft für Theologie (Berlin). The symposium, which took place in May 2013, focused on Arvind Sharma’s concept of ‘reciprocal illumination’, and Arvind himself participated in the lively discussions. As a result of the symposium, it became clear that the whole topic of interreligious comparison is worthy and in need of being reconsidered, and the plan for this publication was born. Andreas Nehring and Perry Schmidt-Leukel, by then president and vice-president of the section, were commissioned to develop the concept of the publication and identify the contributors, some of whom had been among the participants of the initial meeting. Our warmest gratitude goes to all the authors of the present volume, who readily accepted our invitation to write a contribution. We would like to thank them for their patience during the long editorial process, which was heavily delayed by some of the hardships in human life. We are also very grateful to Andrea Gutierrez, who did a splendid job in giving the contributions of Bergunder, Nehring, Völker, SchmidtLeukel, von Stosch and Winkler a linguistic edit.  We would like to thank the Wissenschaftliche Gesellschaft für Theologie for their financial support of the initial symposium from which the idea of this publication emerged, and the University of Erlangen, which supported the preparation of the manuscript. At Bloomsbury, our thanks go to Lalle Pursglove for her enthusiastic support of the project, to Production Editor Giles Herman and everyone else and also to Deanta Project Manager Grishma Fredric and her team for their highly professional support. Working with all of you was smooth and efficient. Perry Schmidt-Leukel Andreas Nehring

Introduction Andreas Nehring, Perry Schmidt-Leukel

‘Religion is a phenomenon that has accompanied humanity since its early days and is found around the globe.’ To the ordinary educated person, a statement like this will appear so obvious that it would sound rather strange to him or her if someone were seriously inclined to deny it. He or she would presumably be very puzzled to hear that especially scholars of religious studies find it difficult to speak of religion as a phenomenon that pervades space and time. And puzzlement may likely turn into bewilderment if he or she is told by such scholars that a sentence like ‘the people of a certain nation are religious’ does not give us any information whatsoever about those people, because ‘religion’ is a term devoid of any substantial meaning.1 Yet, are terms like ‘religion’ or ‘religious’ really lacking any meaningful content? Are these words as empty as Rudolf Carnap’s famous neologism ‘babig’, which tells us nothing as long as it cannot be specified under which conditions someone or something may or may not be called ‘babig’?2 Is it really true that people whom we are inclined to call ‘religious’ have nothing at all in common? If so, the term ‘religion’ would indeed be an ‘inferencepoor concept’,3 a concept not referring to any commonly applicable features. Or is it, perhaps, only difficult for the observer to identify the commonality of people from various contexts as being ‘religious’? What are the methodological difficulties behind the affirmation or denial of any meaning for the term ‘religion’? To be sure, not all scholars of religion share such radical doubts. At the opposite end of the spectrum, we still find scholars – though currently apparently a minority – endorsing versions of a ‘common core’ theory, according to which religions share a significant number of features which give the concept ‘religion’ specific content. Such features may include belief in an ‘ultimate reality’ which is considered by the believers as ‘holy, eternal, and of supreme value’, which stands in a significant relationship with the human self, which can be experienced in some way or another, and which forms the basis for some ultimate fulfilment of human existence.4 Others, however, who these days appear to be in the majority camp (although there is no official census on this), problematize the view that religions are about an ‘Ultimate Reality, God or the Transcendent, who is ontologically outside the world but who gives meaning and purpose to human relationships, to history, and to suffering’, making ‘itself known to human individuals in special kinds of experiences … implanting in them an awareness of moral codes and an underlying purpose in human life’.5 They reject this view either as being expressive of a perspective which is not accessible to the scholar or because they take it as a ‘modern myth’ created or, rather, ‘invented’6 by the West, a myth which

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does not capture reality because it is either ‘too narrow’ if given any more specific sense or, if understood more broadly, ‘too general’ and ‘meaningless’ because ‘it picks out nothing distinctive’.7 Behind the dispute about the meaningfulness or emptiness of the term ‘religion’ lies the question of whether ‘religion’ captures a generic human phenomenon with genuinely common features or whether the term was, more or less unconsciously but mistakenly, transferred from Western cultures to the rest of the world by arbitrarily reading features of a specific Western phenomenon (called ‘religion’) into rather different phenomena of other cultures. On the basis of the first assumption, scholars of religion pursued their studies in the hope that a broad comparison of religious phenomena would not only substantiate their assumption but also lead to an identification and specification of religion’s global characteristics. The second assumption came from scholars who felt that comparative work had failed in establishing such commonalities, or who even held that cultural phenomena are incommensurable, that they are too disparate to be able to be compared at all. The issue between those two camps is crucial for the conception of religious studies as a unified discipline. And this has been an issue from the very first days of religious studies in the late nineteenth century. ‘Religious studies’, or the ‘science of religions’, as it was sometimes called in a futile attempt to render the German Religionswissenschaft into English, arose out of several developments in the West around the turn of the twentieth century. These developments had not much more in common than the following: first, the more formal interest in establishing an academic study of religion and religions that was ‘non-theological’ in the sense of not being under the influence and control of ecclesial institutions, and second, the more substantial interest in exploring the nature of religion and religions as human phenomena. Some scholars who fostered the establishment of this new discipline assumed an explicitly naturalist understanding of religion and tried to interpret it as a cultural reality that could be entirely explained by social, psychological, economic, climatic and similar causes. Others were more cautious towards such efforts, which they called ‘reductionist’, and felt that in understanding religion one should reckon with at least the potentiality of a transcendent factor, or better, with the human mind’s receptivity to a transcendent reality, putative or real. While scholars within the second group had a closer affinity to the theological study of religion, they were nevertheless equally determined to explore the nature of religion in ways which did not start from such unquestionable presuppositions as those found in the various confessional creeds. At this early stage, the establishment of Religionswissenschaft as an autonomous and integral academic discipline was thus marked by a non-theological or non-confessional interest, guaranteeing the discipline’s autonomy. By considering the question of how to understand ‘religion’ as a coherent phenomenon found around the globe and, supposedly, as old as humanity, these scholars also guaranteed the discipline’s integrity through a unifying objective. The pioneers had different ideas about how the new discipline’s task should be carried out methodologically, which reflected the variety of backgrounds from which the scholars came: philology, comparative linguistics, sociology, social anthropology, psychology, history and, last but not least, theology. One of the first influential attempts at forging a coherent epistemology and methodology (wissenschaftstheoretische

Introduction

3

Grundlegung8) was presented by Joachim Wach (1898–1955) in 1924.9 According to Wach, the aim of Religionswissenschaft was ‘to explore, understand and interpret religions’.10 In order to do so, it should stand on the two legs of the historical (Religionsgeschichte) and systematic (Systematische Religionswissenschaft) study of religion. While the function of the first would be the careful excavation and preparation of the discipline’s data, the second would be to organize and analyse the data in order to achieve a proper understanding. Key to both approaches was the method of comparison. The history of religions was meant to focus not only on the elucidation of selected religious traditions and topics (spezielle Religionsgeschichte) but also on the reconstruction of a general or global religious history (allgemeine Religionsgeschichte), which inevitably involved a comparative perspective.11 In this systematic study of religion, comparison moved to the centre.12 By means of comparing religious phenomena from around the globe, the discipline was meant to develop both a better understanding of individual particularities (which can be achieved only through comparison) and, especially, a comprehensive idea of the common nature, laws and key features of ‘religion’ in specific religions, that is, of the universal within the particular. It is in this sense that the so-called ‘phenomenology of religion’ was virtually identified with Wach’s conception of the systematic branch of Religionswissenschaft. The search for the universal nature of religion has always been subject to objections. Even before the boom of phenomenology, strong criticism came from some theological quarters, which insisted on the distinctiveness and uniqueness of the Christian faith and refused to see Christianity as just one expression of a global phenomenon called ‘religion’. The most sophisticated form of this type of criticism was produced by so-called ‘dialectical theology’, most closely associated with the work of Karl Barth (1886–1968), which, on the one hand, admitted that Christianity is just a religion like any other, but at the same time insisted that only within Christianity are genuine divine revelation (identified by Barth as ‘the name Jesus Christ’) and the true human response to it (‘faith’) found, so that in the end the Christian Gospel stands in radical discontinuity with the human phenomenon of religion. Theologians who understood Christianity in continuity with the wider phenomenon of religion came under heavy critique. In his last lecture, given after two years of joint seminars with Mircea Eliade (1907–86) and ten days before his own death, Paul Tillich (1886–1965) deplored ‘the theological isolation of historians of religion like my very highly esteemed friend, the late Rudolf Otto, and even today the similar situation of a man like Friedrich Heiler’.13 He recalled the attacks on his own attempts to understand Christianity in continuity with the larger phenomenon of religion, ‘an approach which was considered a crime at that time’.14 While the critique of comparativism from dialectical theologians largely referred to the beginnings of phenomenology, a far more influential criticism developed several decades later, that is, after phenomenology had reached and passed its climax in the work of Mircea Eliade. This wave of criticism arose within social anthropology. In particular, the work of Clifford Geertz put intercultural and interreligious comparisons under heavy suspicion of distorting rather than furthering understanding. According to Geertz, the proper interpretation of any phenomenon could only be achieved by a careful study and analysis of its own home context; looking at it from a different

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perspective would most likely lead to misunderstanding. Any generalization produced by comparison would inevitably miss the particular, and it is only the particular that gives a certain phenomenon its specific meaning. Religion, like any other cultural expression, generates its meaningfulness by its own performance. Yet, obviously, this kind of argumentation still presupposes a comparative perspective, for how could the particularity and speciality of any phenomenon or context be identified as such if not by some explicit, or more usually implicit and tacit, comparative consideration? Geertz’s caution against false generalizations that might result from the comparative method has ‘been superseded by the uncompromising repudiation of the method by postmodernists’,15 as Robert Segal states: Postmodernism has been especially influential in anthropology, preoccupied as the discipline is with ‘the other,’ but it has spread to all of the social sciences, including fields traditionally committed to the comparative method like sociology and economics. Certainly religious studies has been smitten with it. In light of the postmodernist focus on the unique, the eccentric, the exotic, the marginal, the neglected, and the excluded, the ‘modernist’ concern with the general is anathema.16

The repudiation of comparison as a means of obtaining a better understanding of religion in the wake of postmodernism was supplemented by a ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’, particularly cultivated within the field of postcolonial studies. Proceeding from Edward Said’s (1935–2003) famous premise ‘that all academic knowledge about India and Egypt is somehow tinged and impressed with, violated by, the gross political fact’,17 postcolonial studies increasingly raised questions about hidden agendas in the substrata of religious studies, where the rules, norms, categories and goals of comparative studies served specific interests that were far from neutral. Tomoko Masuzawa, for example, situates her widely read study of the emergence of the concept of ‘world religions’ in the tradition of Said’s ‘insight’,18 trying to uncover the ‘Eurohegemonic perspective’19 behind this conceptual development. These recent turns have left the method of trans-religious comparison in disrepute and have often led to its entire abolition. As Kimberley Patton and Benjamin Ray point out, ‘If we are to take the philosophical claims of postmodernism seriously, the possibility of describing religious systems with integrity or comparing them to one another is … permanently compromised.’20 According to the charge emerging from the political perspective of postcolonial studies, ‘to compare is to abstract, and abstraction is construed as a political act aimed at domination and annihilation; cross-cultural comparison becomes intrinsically imperialistic’.21 Yet Patton and Ray also show that neither all of the postmodern and postcolonial premises nor all of the conclusions are inevitable. Even when accepting some of the postmodern and postcolonial challenges, one can still ‘claim for the continuing necessity  – and relevance – of the comparative study of religion’.22 Some scholars in religious studies would, therefore, probably agree with Corinne Dempsey’s statement that after postmodernism and postcolonialism the ‘remaining question … is not whether but how to compare’.23 We might add: whom or what to compare. It has often been only a dominant aspect of a culture that was considered worthy of comparison with aspects of another religion(s), while other aspects or strands of

Introduction

5

culture (folk religion, oral traditions, subaltern religion, subjugated knowledges) have been more or less neglected by most Western religious scholars. Although the answers given to the question of ‘how to compare’ differ, it seems clear that the changes in our comparative methods will primarily reflect a heightened sensitivity in relation to the process of comparison itself, especially regarding the nature and impact of comparative categories, as well as to the location and impact of the comparativist. Like no other recent development, postcolonial studies have sensitized the academic community to the fact that scholars and their specific contexts exert (consciously or unconsciously) an influence on their studies which must not be ignored. In his discussion of what one should learn from postcolonial studies for the methodology of comparative religion, James L. Cox calls for a drastic revision of the traditional assumption that scholarly neutrality could be produced by simply requiring researchers to bracket their personal views about the subject of their research. Instead, ‘researchers should attempt to bring to their own consciousness their personal and academic assumptions, while making these assumptions transparent to the communities they are studying’.24 In making this methodological demand, Cox ‘acknowledges that academic neutrality is impossible’.25 As early as 1959, in a visionary essay called ‘Comparative Religion: Whither – and Why?’, Wilfred Cantwell Smith (1916–2000) pertinently suggested that comparative religion will have a future only if it pays sufficient attention to the fact that both the researcher and the ‘object’ of research are not abstract entities but people with a very specific context, history and perspective. If full justice is done to the fact that behind ‘religions’ are concrete human beings and that the researcher is not a ‘detached academic intellect’,26 comparative studies will assume a dialogical nature: The traditional form of Western scholarship in the study of other men’s religion was that of an impersonal presentation of an ‘it’. The first great innovation in recent times has been the personalization of the faiths observed, so that one finds a discussion of a ‘they.’ Presently the observer becomes personally involved, so that the situation is one of a ‘we’ talking about a ‘they.’ The next step is a dialogue, where ‘we’ talk to ‘you.’ If there is listening and mutuality, this may become that ‘we’ talk with ‘you.’ The culmination of this progress is when ‘we all’ are talking with each other about ‘us.’27

Comparative studies have indeed moved in that direction, but more so within theology than within religious studies. In particular, the movement of comparative theology28 (or, rather, the ‘new comparative theology’, in order to distinguish it from the use of this label in the nineteenth century) is developing an understanding of comparison which is essentially of a dialogical nature. According to Francis Clooney, one of the leading theorists of comparative theology, the comparative theologian will ‘theologize as it were from both sides of the table, reflecting personally on old and new truths in an interior dialogue’.29 On such grounds, Hugh Nicholson could even claim that ‘the new comparative theology, in fact, serves as the paradigm for this recent trend towards an acknowledgement of the situated nature of comparison in religion’.30 Nevertheless, when it comes to the more specific question of how to undertake comparison, comparative theologians have not developed anything that would even

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remotely look like an accepted standard practice. While some comparative theologians deliberately focus on micrological comparisons, other pursue major topics like ‘the human condition’, ‘ultimate reality’ or ‘religious truth’ on a global scale.31 But there is no general practice in either camp of how to proceed in doing comparison, so that Clooney even suggested that the individual comparativist might ‘go forward by intuitive leaps, according to instinct’.32 In this situation, new approaches to the method of comparison as they emerge in religious studies may enter into a mutually fruitful interaction with comparative theology. One promising method is Arvind Sharma’s suggestion of comparison as ‘reciprocal illumination’.33 It basically entails that comparison should be done in such a way that through comparison, the compared data will appear in a new light that the data themselves shed upon each other. If this principle is not taken in an objectified or reified sense, the altered appearance of the data in the light of comparison will not mean anything more than a transformation in their perception by those who perform the comparison and learn to view the data in a new way. This understanding allows an exciting cross-fertilization between the theological and non-theological employment of comparative methods. The structure of the present book reflects the status of comparative methods in contemporary religious studies and theology. All four chapters in the first section contribute to the ongoing discussion about the possibility, academic fertility and possible design of comparative methods within religious studies and theology in light of the various critiques to which they have been exposed during recent decades. The first two chapters focus on conceptual issues. Paul Hedges suggests that critics of religious comparison have not provided definitive arguments against all forms of comparative study. In particular, he addresses contemporary critiques of the category of ‘religion’ itself, according to which the concept is primarily an invention of modern Western scholarship rather than a descriptive analytic category. Against the argument that comparison is, therefore, simply an invented imaginary, he holds that such criticism is far from conclusive if ‘religion’ is employed strategically rather than in essentialist terms. While agreeing that much of the concept’s usage may rely upon problematic assumptions, he nevertheless defends it as a category that can help highlight areas of human culture and experience which can also be meaningfully discussed in relation to one another. Hedges also explores comparative theology as a contemporary phenomenon in which representatives of different religious traditions understand themselves as meeting in a comparative perspective. Such work, he argues, provides data for the scholar of religion which cannot simply be dismissed as theologically biased or naively undertaken, but, rather, points to examples of actual meetings of religions. In conclusion, Hedges thus argues that the comparative method should still have a place within the contemporary study of religion as part of a larger toolkit. The current crisis of comparison in religious studies is usually blamed on the so-called ‘postmodern critique’. Yet, as Michael Bergunder argues, the crisis of comparison goes much deeper: it relates to the crisis of the theoretical justification of religious studies in general and to Eurocentric practices in particular. Bergunder highlights Chakrabarty’s objection to using European history as the prototype for conceptualization, which Bergunder sees as highly relevant to comparative religion. Each point of comparison has a history that needs critical reflection, but has not yet

Introduction

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received the necessary attention within religious studies. The historical genealogy of today’s comparative concepts is thus in need of deeper investigation, which could profit greatly from utilizing postcolonial perspectives. One result could be a global religious history from the nineteenth century that fully acknowledges the impact of colonialism and understands European knowledge as being entangled with the colonies and the colonized. Realizing the importance of historicity might thus change our future practice of comparison. In the end, says Bergunder, we might come to the conclusion that comparative religion should be, first and foremost, a historical enterprise. The next two chapters turn from conceptual issues to questions of methodology. Oliver Freiberger offers a first step towards a comprehensive methodological framework of comparison in the face of its current controversial discussion. He presents and discusses three different typologies of modes of comparison developed by Jonathan Z. Smith, Jeffrey R. Carter and David M. Freidenreich. According to Freiberger, such typologies may fulfil a double function: they help to analyse and evaluate existing comparative studies in a more profound way, and they also provide a methodological backdrop for designing future comparative studies. He identifies two modes that appear to him the most promising for the study of religion: the illuminating and the taxonomic mode. Studies conducted in the illuminating mode attempt to illuminate a particular historical datum, especially assumed blind spots, by drawing on other cases. Studies in this mode are asymmetric in the sense that their goal is to understand one datum, while the other cases merely function to illuminate that datum. Studies conducted in the taxonomic mode classify religious items and thus contribute to the taxonomic effort in the study of religion. Such studies are symmetric, meaning that all ‘species’ get equal analytical attention in the comparative process. Exploring modes of comparison may thus contribute to developing a broader methodological framework that will help to analyse and refine the comparative method in the study of religion. In a similar way, Philippe Bornet, too, examines different types of comparison, assessing both their risks and their benefits in the study of religions. He contrasts the mode of comparison that deals with two contexts that are historically and spatially connected (genealogical) with the mode of comparison that addresses two historically unrelated contexts (analogical). While genealogical comparison can lead to the reconstruction of tendentious genealogies, it also usefully undermines ideas of incommensurability of a religious tradition or cultural artefact. Similarly, while analogical comparison can lead to an ‘authoritative’ projection of idiosyncratic (e.g. Christian-centric) categories onto remote cultural contexts, it also provides important clues to critically rework the scholarly vocabulary. This ambivalence is illustrated by the example of bringing together Jewish and Indian texts under the lens of social rituals. Their comparison reveals difficulties and possible results on three levels: the respective socio-historical contexts of the two texts (e.g. the mechanisms by which social practices that create solidarity and hierarchies in each context are authorized by references to tradition); the level of general or socio-anthropological processes (e.g. revisiting E. Goffman’s notion of ‘interaction rituals’); and a reflexive level that questions the scholarly vocabulary itself (e.g. making evident the idiosyncratic aspect of certain categories and theories, such as R. Girard’s views on sacrifice). In conclusion, Bornet reaffirms the validity of comparison for the study of religions, arguing that

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under certain conditions, such as direct access to sources in their own languages, it can act as a powerful tool to ‘de-provincialize’ the discipline. The chapters in the second section of the book readdress the theoretical foundations on which comparative methods can be based, particularly after the critical discussions on phenomenology in recent decades. The section begins with two chapters reviewing the role of Mircea Eliade. Andreas Nehring argues that Eliade’s approach to comparative religion, although heavily criticized by many and from various angles, can still be read as a creative contribution to religious studies if seen from a specific perspective of postmodern cultural studies. It is not the comparison of religious phenomena, texts or practices from different religions that, according to Nehring, is at the heart of Eliade’s approach, but the comparison of different worldviews that determine the perception of what Eliade calls ‘hierophanies’. Eliade’s critique of reductionist approaches to religious studies is reflected in some ways in the cultural studies critique of Western rationalism and objectivism. What Eliade aims at is, per Nehring, a change of perspective; yet it can be argued that an epistemological shift in the subject’s point of view always reflects an ontological shift in the object of comparison itself, that is a shift in the presumed nature of the object. Kenneth Rose begins with the somewhat paradoxical observation that Eliade’s ideas have spread far beyond the academy while being largely neglected in contemporary academic religious studies. Equally neglected is Eliade’s comparative method of ranging widely over the global phenomena of religion in search of recurring religious ideas, or ‘religious universals’, that give religion its meaning as religion. Yet, as Rose argues, the generalizing approach to religious meaning has recently re-emerged in the evolutionary cognitive science of religion (ECSR), the neurobiology of religion, and contemplative neuroscience. Should religious studies accept the challenge posed by these rising fields and add its own disciplinary competencies to these newfound scientific resources, it would resume its long-neglected role of producing spiritually and religiously sensitive academic knowledge about humanity’s varied religious response to life. It would also provide its public audiences with insights into how humanity’s many religions have dealt with life’s deepest and most baffling mysteries, and work in its many forums to ameliorate religious conflicts through a critically purified and pluralistic understanding of the full spectrum of human religiosity. The likely criticism – that a turn to the generic features of religion undercuts a scholarly focus on particular religious traditions – should be met with the suggestion that a scholarly preference for the singular in religion does not negate or undermine the search for the shared in religion. Undoubtedly, highly focused idiographic studies of individual aspects of individual traditions will remain central to religious studies, even as room is made for nomothetic quests for the study of those generic aspects of religious traditions that give them their specifically religious significance. Should we learn once again as a discipline to pursue the shared as well as the singular, we will make belated amends with Eliade, who, according to Rose, has unjustly been sidelined to the margins of the field. In partial response to recent developments in the study of religions, Gavin Flood sketches an argument that comparative religion needs to develop theoretical models for the explanation of religion which, per Flood, need to begin with the nature of the human, and that we need to see comparative religion as a fundamentally humanistic

Introduction

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enterprise. He develops his argument in three stages: first, that we need to highlight religious practices as the focus of inquiry; second, that hermeneutical phenomenology opens up the broader humanistic dimension of comparative religion; and third, that this dimension provides a philosophical basis for the explanation of religion in terms of the harder science of social cognition. The last chapter in this section explores a transcendental approach to the hermeneutics of religion. According to Fabian Völker, central questions in the comparative study of religions cannot be treated adequately within a hermeneutics dominated by empiricism. A hermeneutics based on transcendental philosophy, however, may contribute to the comparative study of religions in two important ways. First, it accounts for a strictly scientific methodological basis without restricting such a study to the empiricist criterion of meaning. The comparative study of religions can thus become truly interdisciplinary, no longer excluding theology and the philosophy of religion. Second, it accounts for the heuristic assumption of universal reason as enabling intercultural comparability and intelligibility. As Völker shows, seminal scholars in the phenomenology of religion such as Rudolf Otto, Gerardus van der Leeuw, Joachim Wach and Mircea Eliade assumed a basis for transcultural and trans-religious understanding that was predicated on the universality of human reason and its transcendental structure. After discussing postmodern and postcolonial objections to this alleged transcendental pretence, Völker suggests distinguishing between the general anthropological standpoint of life and the universal standpoint of transcendental philosophy. The chapter concludes by arguing that a hermeneutics based on transcendental philosophy may contribute to the comparative study of religions in two further ways. While not only constituting the tertium comparationis that enables intercultural comparability and intelligibility, the transcendental grid that determines our thinking irrespective of place, time, history and culture can itself become the object of cross-cultural analysis and comparison. Finally, a transcendental hermeneutics of religion may also shed new light on the understanding of the ‘religious a priori’ that was claimed to be an irreducible datum of human experience and an element of the structure of consciousness by Otto, Eliade and other figures in the phenomenology of religion. The third section of the book deals with two recent developments in comparative methodology which pay tribute to the heightened sensitivity to the comparativist’s role and the specific nature of comparison as a transformative act: comparative theology and the method of ‘reciprocal illumination’. Klaus von Stosch presents an overview of the relationship between comparative theology and comparative religion. Comparative theology is sensitive to the inner heterogeneity of religious traditions and seeks to cultivate an awareness of the richness of religions. Moreover, comparative theology connects theological deliberation with the practice of interreligious dialogue. It not only proposes to think and talk about the other, but also to enter into conversation with the other and allow the other’s self-understanding to obtain a central place in the comparativist’s own thinking. Finally, comparative theology develops a hermeneutical awareness of its own normative presuppositions within such conversations, and cultivates a willingness to critically question its own assumptions. In a second step, von Stosch addresses the issue of truth as a criterion to distinguish between comparative

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theology and comparative religion. Whereas comparative religion refrains from discussing truth claims and remains neutral with regard to oppositions between different religions, comparative theology seeks to offer tools that can help decide the question of truth and explores religion through active involvement. Von Stosch, however, is more sceptical about the attempt to distinguish the two disciplines by their differing perspectives on the observer and the participant. He sees both perspectives involved in both approaches, and suggests a cooperation of comparative religion and comparative theology that would enable both ways of approaching religion to learn from each other in terms of method, attitude and philosophical structure.  In the next chapter, Arvind Sharma introduces his understanding of comparison in terms of reciprocal illumination by placing it into his own analysis of the discipline’s development. Diachronically comparing one period in the history of certain religions with a previous or succeeding one, or both, gave rise to the historical method. Synchronically comparing similar phenomena, such as sacrifice, ritual and so on, across various religions gave rise to the phenomenological method. Once some knowledge of various religions had been consolidated in this way, comparison assumed a new role, and attempts were made to formulate generalizations about human religiosity across the board. This marked an important trend in the study of religion from around the middle of the twentieth century, represented by such scholars as Mircea Eliade, Wilfred Cantwell Smith and Ninian Smart. However, other branches in the study of religion, such as the sociology and psychology of religion, had also been using comparison, albeit in more restricted and specialized ways. As a result, the generalists’ use of comparison was increasingly challenged by its more specialized application. Thus, comparison, while remaining central to the academic study of religion, has also emerged as a site of contestation within the study of religion. Against this background, Sharma proposes a new way of comparing religions by a method that he identifies as reciprocal illumination. With this approach, compared data are not used to generate generalizations beyond the self-understanding held by a certain religion’s own believers. Nor is the intention to formulate specialized theories which might violate the self-understanding of a religion. Rather, the data from one religion are compared with those of other religions to gain a deeper understanding of the data themselves. He illustrates the method with a number of examples, showing how to apply it and the kind of results it is likely to produce. According to Ulrich Winkler, reciprocal illumination does not only occur between different faith traditions. It may also occur in the comparison of Sharma’s approach and comparative theology. Usually, the science of religions (Religionswissenschaft) and theology have been understood as antagonistic disciplines. According to Winkler, this might have been appropriate while theology was shaped by a polemical and apologetic attitude to other religious traditions. Within Roman Catholic theology, this approach changed with the Second Vatican Council’s turn from suspicion to appreciation and from apologetics to learning. A pluralistic theology of religions assumes potential or actual equality between belief systems, and sometimes even partial superiority of the other’s beliefs, thereby providing a precondition for the possibility of learning from them through comparative theology. Such changes in theological attitudes to other religions enable comparative religion and comparative theology to shed new light on each other

Introduction

11

without playing down their differences. They may share creativity in finding points of comparison by which to understand religious traditions. Nonetheless, normativity remains a theological topic that is, so far, not widely used within comparative theology. Postcolonial thought can aid these studies by highlighting concepts of identity as a matter of negotiation that moves in differentiated dimensions, such as power, beyond dichotomous distinctions (e.g. of true or false or black and white). In the concluding chapter, Schmidt-Leukel discusses Sharma’s methodological ideas against the background of Buddhist–Christian dialogue. Schmidt-Leukel understands reciprocal illumination as implying an illumination of the data in the comparativist’s mind. Given that Sharma himself cites the comparison of the religious epithets of ‘Christ’ and ‘Bodhisattva’ as an example, Schmidt-Leukel presents a brief survey of Buddhist–Christian dialogue regarding the extent to which these epithets are capable of shedding new light upon each other. He concludes that this is indeed the case, but that the approach seems to create a reciprocal challenge instead of reciprocal confirmation. In any case, according to Schmidt-Leukel, the example shows that religious comparison, if done in the right way, can be a powerful tool in altering the respective religions’ perception of religious diversity.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

See Alles 2010: 66. Carnap 1931–2: 223. Alles 2010: 64. See, for example, Davis 1989: 191. Fitzgerald 2000: 31. Masuzawa 2005. Fitzgerald 2000: 26. That is, the methodological foundation ‘of how best to engage in the study of religion within an academic framework’, as Christian Wedemeyer neatly renders this typically German sesquipedalian. Wedemeyer 2010: XVIII. Wach [1924] 2001. ‘Die Religionswissenschaft will die Religionen erforschen, verstehen und deuten’. Wach [1924] 2001: 192. According to Wach, the task of the general history of religions is to discern common laws within the historical development of individual strands in religions’ histories. See Wach [1924] 2001: 80. See Wach [1924] 2001: 179–92. Tillich 1966: 80f. Ibid.: 87. Segal 2001: 344. Ibid. Said [1978] 2003: 11. Masuzawa 2005: 21. Ibid.: 28. Patton and Ray 2000b: 2. Ibid.

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22 Ibid.: 1. On this, see the various contributions to Patton and Ray 2000a as well as the issue of Numen 48.3 (2001). 23 Dempsey 2012: 12. 24 Cox 2006: 235. 25 Ibid. 26 Smith 1959: 44. 27 Ibid.: 34. 28 For an overview, see Clooney 2010a,b, Clooney and Berthrong 2014. 29 Clooney 2010a: 13. 30 Nicholson 2009: 635. 31 For a brief overview, see Stosch 2014; see also the discussion in the thematic issue of Studies in Interreligious Dialogue 24 (2014). 32 Clooney 2010a: 96. 33 Sharma 2005.

References Alles, Gregory D. (2010), ‘After the Naming Explosion: Joachim Wach’s Unfinished Project’, in C. K. Wedemeyer and W. Doniger (eds), Hermeneutics, Politics, and the History of Religions. The Contested Legacies of Joachim Wach and Mircea Eliade, 51–78, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Carnap, Rudolph (1931–2), ‘Überwindung der Metaphysik durch logische Analyse der Sprache’, Erkenntnis, 2: 219–41. Clooney, Francis X. (2010a), Comparative Theology. Deep Learning across Religious Borders, Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Clooney, Francis X., ed. (2010b), The New Comparative Theology. Interreligious Insights from the Next Generation, London and New York: T&T Clark. Clooney, Francis X. and John Berthrong, eds (2014), European Perspectives on the New Comparative Theology, Basel: MDPI. Cox, James L. (2006), A Guide to the Phenomenology of Religion. Key Figures, Formative Influences and Subsequent Debates, London and New York: Continuum. Davis, Caroline Franks (1989), The Experiential Force of Religious Experience, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Dempsey, Corinne G. (2012), Bringing the Sacred Down to Earth. Adventures in Comparative Religion, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fitzgerald, Timothy (2000), The Ideology of Religious Studies, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Masuzawa, Tomoko (2005), The Invention of World Religions. Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Nicholson, Hugh (2009), ‘The Reunification of Theology and Comparison in the New Comparative Theology’, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 77 (3): 609–46. Patton, Kimberley C. and Benjamin C. Ray, eds (2000a), A Magic Still Dwells. Comparative Religion in the Postmodern Age, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press. Patton, Kimberley C. and Benjamin C. Ray (2000b), ‘Introduction’, in Kimberley C. Patton and Benjamin C. Ray (eds), A Magic Still Dwells. Comparative Religion in the

Introduction

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Postmodern Age, 1–19, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press. Said, Edward W. ([1978] 2003), Orientalism, London: Penguin. Segal, Robert A. (2001), ‘In Defense of the Comparative Method’, Numen 48: 339–73. Sharma, Arvind (2005), Religious Studies and Comparative Methodology. The Case for Reciprocal Illumination, Albany: State University Press of New York. Smith, Wilfred Cantwell (1959), ‘Comparative Religion: Whither – and Why?’, in Mircea Eliade and Joseph M. Kitagawa (eds), The History of Religions. Essays in Methodology, 31–58, Chicago: The University Press of Chicago. Stosch, Klaus von (2014), ‘Comparative Theology as Liberal and Confessional Theology’, in Francis X. Clooney and John Berthrong (eds), European Perspectives on the New Comparative Theology, 31–41, Basel: MDPI. Tillich, Paul (1966), ‘The Significance of the History of Religions for the Systematic Theologian’, in Paul Tillich (ed.), The Future of Religions, ed. Jerald C. Brauer, 80–94, Westport: Greenwood Press. Wach, Joachim ([1924] 2001), Religionswissenschaft. Prolegomena zu ihrer wissenschaftstheoretischen Grundlegung (reproduction of the Leipzig 1924 edition), Waltrop: Verlag Hartmut Spenner. Wedemeyer, Christian K. (2010), ‘Introduction I’, in C. K. Wedemeyer and W. Doniger (eds), Hermeneutics, Politics, and the History of Religions. The Contested Legacies of Joachim Wach and Mircea Eliade, XVI–XXVI, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Part One

Comparison: Contestation and Defence

1

Comparative Methodology and the Religious Studies Toolkit Paul Hedges

Introduction For much of the twentieth century, the comparative method not only predominated in the study of religion; it could almost be said to have been the defining feature of that study, such that Eric Sharpe’s classic survey of the field was simply named Comparative Religion: A History1; the second edition notably included a new final chapter entitled ‘From Comparative Religion to Religious Studies’. To study one religious tradition in isolation, it could be said, was not to undertake a balanced scientific analysis, because it was impossible to make properly theoretical or meta-level judgements about common patterns or aspects of the varied traditions. Factors in academia and changing theoretical paradigms, however, meant that the comparative approach fell from favour. It is not possible to explore all of these factors here, although we will address some important ones, but primarily I will offer a variety of reasons why we can restore comparative methodology once again to its rightful place within the interdisciplinary toolkit of the scholar of religion. This is not to deny that there were some good reasons why suspicion of the comparative method arose; nevertheless, these do not provide insurmountable obstacles to its usage; it was more bad practice than bad paradigm that was the problem. I begin by looking at some of the reasons why comparative religion fell from grace, starting with its association with phenomenological methodology, which has likewise suffered a decline from its once pre-eminent position. In particular, I will look at two scholars who employed both comparative and phenomenological methodology, Mircea Eliade and Ninian Smart, although space does not permit me to expound at length upon them. Rather, I will seek to show that the reasons for suspicion of their approach came from factors particular to their way of thinking and operating, and are not inherent in the methodology they employed. I next address the narratives of suspicion around the category ‘religion’ itself, which scholars like Russell McCutcheon (2003), Timothy Fitzgerald (2000, 2007), Talal Asad (1993) and Jonathan Z. Smith (1982) have argued is but a product of academic fantasy, with no grounding in

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concrete evidence or experiential data. If there is no such category as ‘religion’, then, the comparative study of it is meaningless a priori. Against such an argument I will show that, as the aporia in the arguments of such scholars makes clear, religion remains a useful analytic category; and, if we employ religion with nuance and care, perhaps we can approach it comparatively. These initial stages of my argument are primarily negative, so I then argue positively for comparative study. Two important factors in this will be, first, the practice and discipline of comparative theology, and second, the renewed practice of comparative religion by scholars like Gavin Flood. The former may seem contentious, for many within religious studies have long struggled against a theological method and ethos, seeing theologians as part of the data of the scientific and secular study of religion rather than a methodological foundation. However, it is at least for the first reason that it can be useful: if the data of religious activity suggests that comparative practice exists, then at least it gives scholars pause for thought, while there is a growing recognition that seeking to demarcate theology and religious studies as two polar disciplines unconnected to each other is simply naive. Flood, meanwhile, has striven to create a post-critical comparative method aware of the critique of phenomenology, thus continuing the earlier argument, relating to Eliade and Smart. I finally make some practical suggestions for readmitting comparative methodology into the religious studies scholar’s toolkit, a term often associated with Wendy Doniger but widely employed to speak of the interdisciplinary and methodologically diverse approach to that messy and diverse set of phenomena we term religion.

Eliade and Smart: Comparativists and phenomenologists For several decades, the comparative method was seen as, at best, a backwater of the study of religion, a place occupied by a dying breed of theoretical dinosaurs or simplistic dilettantes who had not really grasped the rigours of the academic study of religion. In part, this was due to the association of the area with scholars who were seen as having been superseded by later critical scholarship. Among this breed, the names of Mircea Eliade and Ninian Smart are two of the most distinguished, grandees of the phenomenological comparative methodology. Mircea Eliade bestrode the twentieth-century study of religion as a towering figure, and it is no exaggeration to call him the single most significant scholar in the field’s development in that century. A generation, or more, of scholars were brought up on his books or under his guidance, although today and for some decades a veritable industry exists debunking his ideas, or in some cases seeking to build upon his retrievable legacy. As such, Eliade’s shadow still hangs over the discipline, and certainly his advocates, such as Bryan Rennie (2006), will argue, I would suggest with good reason, that there is still much that we can learn from him, and certainly his text Yoga remains one of the best expositions ever written on this subject.2 However, in a problematic series of works such as Patterns in Comparative Religion, Eliade set out both a framework and what he saw as a set of methodological tools for approaching comparative study, arguing that a quest for meaning underlay much of humanity’s search for what he would quite happily term the sacred.3

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Eliade’s studies clearly distinguished ‘the sacred and religious’ as ‘the opposite of the profane and secular’,4 with the former being associated with some revelatory event which he termed a ‘hierophany’.5 Speaking of the hierophany, he says: ‘It reveals [both] some modality of the sacred … [and] some attitude man has towards the sacred.’6 The former is because it is an act of revelation or some expression of the sacred itself, the latter because it happens in history and so can be studied as a phenomenological event. Here, we clearly see a point for which Eliade has been criticized by later scholars for his quasi-theological assumptions, not only that we see the sacred as an almost objective fact that can be known, but also for mixing religious belief statements with scholarly analysis of human traditions of religiosity, to which we turn below. However, even where we see Eliade making phenomenological statements, it has been convincingly argued that he is making the evidence fit into his prearranged systems, which work on the basis of something like archetypal patterns7; thus, in Patterns in Comparative Religion, he gives us a list of many of these archetypes or patterns into which he believes the various mythologies or theologies of the world can be divided, such as ‘The Sky and Sky Gods’, ‘The Sun and Sun-Worship’, ‘The Earth, Woman and Fertility’ and ‘Agriculture and Fertility Cults’, with perhaps one of his best known being the concept of the Axis Mundi.8 As critics observed, Eliade often made the evidence fit his own schemata rather than actually observing the phenomena and building a theory on that basis.9 However, what is perhaps, for many, the key reason for Eliade’s fall from grace is the almost explicit theological agenda which underlay his work, and which would always create problems in a discipline striving to establish itself as a ‘properly scientific’ and ‘secular’ discipline that was distanced from theology. Behind Eliade’s methodology was an assumption that there truly existed a sacred sphere, the source of hierophany, and that it was the role of the comparative scholar to reveal this and lay it open for investigation, as we have mentioned above. I would suggest that religious studies, in so far as it sees itself as a discipline that teaches about religion, cannot take what, in effect, is a specific sectarian stance (which is what, in effect, Eliade does through adopting what we may gloss as a form of perennialist theology). Of course, this is not to suggest that it should adopt a naturalist position either, which, again, would be a sectarian stance.10 Moreover, as noted above, he sought to show the patterns that linked all of these and revealed a common spirituality within and behind all religious traditions and phenomena. We must remember, though, that this endeavour, for which scholars heap criticism upon him, was also part of his success and that of the discipline, as popularizers like Jonathan Campbell took up his themes of universal mythology in various books, which, of course, inspired George Lucas and the Star Wars movies. As such, the scholarly study of religion, through Eliade, reached an audience far larger than most of his critics have ever obtained; this, of course, is no indication of his accuracy or validity, but maybe scholarship should think about how it can inspire those beyond the ivory towers. Indeed, while Eliade’s approach was, in some ways, naive and too simplistic – assuming, as noted above, that clear patterns of similarity could be drawn by fairly surface-level analysis which neglected context – it may be that we are throwing the baby out with the bathwater when we wish to deny the possibility of any cross-cultural or cross-tradition comparison. However, I will cover this later.

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We come now to our second character, Smart, who, it may be said, was the most important foundational figure for religious studies as an academic subject in the later twentieth century in the UK. A leading phenomenologist, he is also widely influential for his family resemblance typology of religion, or, more specifically, worldviews.11 It is probably fair to say that his phenomenological modernism, which sought to clearly define the limits and nature of religion, was critiqued by postmodern or critical theory trends that sought to distance themselves both from the possible essentialism of phenomenology and also from the colonial and theological associations that may cling to it. In brief, following Husserl, Smart was one of those who sought to found phenomenology based upon the notions of epoche (bracketing or suspension of judgement) and the eidetic step (seeing the essence). Smart believed in empathy as part of the methodology, or what he termed ‘moccasin walking’, where by empathetic engagement one would place oneself imaginatively in the place of the Other, a move closely associated with his phenomenology. Recent scholarship, following the reflexive turn, has heavily argued that the bracketing and empathy that Smart sought are entirely illusory, and follow in part from a particular reading or tradition of Enlightenment rationalism which sees a universal ‘reason’ and ‘human nature’ as foundational.12 Of course, Smart was not so naive as to believe that perfect empathy was possible, but certainly his work can seem injudicious by today’s standards. (It is not the place to argue the point here, but I would also contend that such critiques often unfairly or by caricature portray an Enlightenment rationalism that plays to its worst excesses, and certainly part of Immanuel Kant’s argument was the contextual nature of our reasoning, a point ‘post-Enlightenment’ critiques often tend to ignore.) As Smart set out his comparative studies, he could certainly be seen as being far too sweeping; indeed, he was perhaps the last of a generation of scholars who would attempt sweeping surveys of all religions or all philosophies across the globe, assuming that a single expert could have the required expertise.13 Turning to his typology of religions or worldviews, it is fair to say that this has been the single most influential and widely used definition of religion, and still makes up part of the basic classic curricula delivered to many students today.14 It is so well known that I will not spend time outlining it in any detail, but Smart argued that all religions had a set of six or more (he expanded the typology over the years) factors, or dimensions. These included such things as the material, ethical and narrative dimensions. In part, his dimensions fell prey to the critique of the terms ‘religion’ and ‘world religion,’ which were held to be the product of specific discourses, and to which I will turn next. While providing a simple tool for students, it is questionable whether his typology did much more than provide something so generic it became meaningless as an analytic category, as almost anything could be explored through it, making it less than analytic. However, perhaps the principal critique, which led to Smart’s being almost ridiculed by scholars, but was in some ways ahead of its time, was that his definition of religion applied to other worldviews as well. As discussed below, a major critique of religion as a category is that it is, qua Eliade, constructed as an essentialist and sui generis area, a critique also applied to Smart. Contrarily, it can be argued that Smart’s dimensions showed no ‘essence’ of religion, and denied that it was a distinct and discrete sui generis area, for, as mentioned, he felt it was applicable not just to religions but all worldviews,

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including nationalism and Marxism. Indeed, he was quite explicit about this aim, and so when critics berate him for failing in his definition of religion by not providing an area that excluded secular worldviews, they entirely mistake his intention. (This is not to say that I find his definition workable or unproblematic; simply that it means that he does not – certain critiques to the contrary – make religion a special sui generis category). With this point, it is time to turn to the critique of religion as a whole.

Religion: Contested category of comparison For those outside the study of religion, the term ‘religion’ is one of those taken-forgranted common-sense categories; however, for scholars within the discipline and in cognate areas, the term is highly contested, with some even suggesting it has no meaningful reference.15 Indeed, in the late twentieth century and into the early twentyfirst century, it may be said that the theoretical high ground has rested with those contesting and denying the existence of religion. However, as with much else that we may associate with the deconstructive force that has been termed postmodernism, the once fashionable force of critique has lost its bite as scholars have started to take time to reflect and assess more soberly: the postmodern deconstruction of religion has been shown both to lead to something of a dead end theoretically, and to be rather less methodologically sound than has been assumed. There are good reasons for classifying the variety of things which we, in everyday speech, call ‘religions’ together; I, and others, have argued this at length.16 Notably, though, this is not to deny two principal points of the critique: first, that ‘religion’ is a constructed term; second, that as generally employed, the term is problematic. I would contend, though, that it can become a conceptually useful signifier – although it is not the only way the things we call ‘religion’ can or should be classified or analysed. This brief summary of recent debates is not something we need to unpack fully here, so I will emphasize only those aspects of the issues that are most relevant to discussing comparative approaches. First, against those who have argued that every religious tradition is unique and distinct, what may be termed a ‘cultural islands’ approach, whereby to suggest similarity is seen as not understanding or respecting the distinct identity of each, an answer lies in the history of religions. While we may readily think of ‘Islam’, ‘Buddhism’, ‘Christianity’ and ‘Zoroastrianism’ as discrete entities in their own right, with doctrines and rituals which are separate and a cause of division between them, this ignores the history of encounter between them. Religions as systems of thought and practice are, and always have been, syncretic fusions of different influences and traditions. Instead of understanding each religion as its own unique monolithic block, we have a shared history whereby each has been influencing the others over time.17 Certain links are easy to see: for instance, Judaism, Islam and Christianity are commonly referred to as the ‘Abrahamic religions’, referring to their common descent, as they see it, from the biblical figure of Abraham, and with origins in ancient Israelite sources (which is not to dismiss the often ‘political’ employment of the term ‘Abrahamic’, as some critics have noted18). Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism grew up in response to events in the early centuries ce, as what is known as Second Temple Judaism came to an end, and Islam

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developed its teachings in dialogue with both earlier traditions. Those traditions we term Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism likewise shared similar origins from debates and trends in South Asia. It is clear, though, that movement between these two ‘groups’ of religions also happened over time, and the legend of Josaphat and Barlaam is an example of a story that originated in India and ended up as a popular medieval fable, with the two central characters evolving from their historical origins as Gautama Buddha and one of his teachers into a Sufi master and disciple, and eventually into Christian saints included in the calendar of the Catholic Church.19 While this story is far from being evidence of deep-seated influence and learning between traditions, it demonstrates that religious ideas and spiritual traditions were in movement across Asia and Europe,20 and that, to some extent at least, enough common currency existed for a story from one tradition to resonate so strongly with another that it was taken up and reshaped by that other tradition to find a new home. It may be objected that the message and origins were lost, so that, for instance, the Christian saints Josaphat and Barlaam were not teachers of the Buddhist message; however, this overlooks the fact that religious traditions are always in constant evolution over time: what Siddhartha Gautama taught in the Ganges plains is not identical to the teachings and practices of Ch’an monasteries in contemporary Taiwan, nor is the Theravada of Sri Lanka. That deeper and more significant similarities and transfer of ideas existed and occurred between traditions and across continents is certainly the subject of stringent research today. Therefore, claiming that each religion is somehow inherently different, and that religion means something different and operates differently in diverse cultural contexts, while almost a truism, is hardly grounds to dismiss serious comparative studies. Second, even if we supposed that the historical connections were not present, a solid case for comparative work could potentially be argued from common human responses, at a species level, to the world. That is to say that there may well be a certain range of possibilities, or patterns, in how essentially identical instinctual or reasoned responses will arise as (human) animals work out their relationship to the world around them, and of which they are a part. Quite a bit of work in the relatively new sphere of psychological and scientific approaches to religious origins is carried out on something like this level, so arguments are put forward that religion is a natural response to the world.21 While I would not endorse all aspects of the argument for biological explanations for the origins of religion, which often seem to take on a somewhat naive ontology, I would argue that they do usefully suggest that (as a species) humans will typically, across different contexts, exhibit a level of similarity in their response to the world. As such, rather than using an Eliadean comparison, which explicitly argues that what he saw as patterns within religions provide evidence of a common quest or response to one central spiritual experience, it may be possible to revive a comparative study that understands patterns as part of a species-level instinctive reaction. Obviously, such a comparative analysis would need to be alert to the very considerable differences between systems over which Eliade’s work often ran roughshod; nevertheless, I suspect it would be meaningful to speak about notions like ritual washing, the symbolism of mountains/ascent, and responses to and use of caves as being in some ways similar. To some extent, Flood’s work on ‘inwardness’22 is suggestive of a common human sense of an inner life, although he does not push

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his work towards arguing for a common human nature in any simplistic way, and certainly we would need to recognize that concepts like ‘human nature’ are always culturally constructed and laden with meaning; nevertheless, this does not mean that no similarity of species reaction exists. Finally, I turn to the issue of whether what may be termed the ‘common-sense’ or ‘folk’ notion of religion has any usefulness. Part of the work of scholars like Fitzgerald and McCutcheon has been to dismiss such usage, arguing that popular and common usage is simply misguided and has no place as part of scholarly and analytical critique; nevertheless, the need for the term, or some synonym, returns and haunts their work: Fitzgerald, for instance, in arguing that we should do away with the language of ‘religion’ and ‘secular’ as socially and culturally constructed, nevertheless insists that we need to use the terms ‘sacred’ and ‘profane’ so that we can distinguish between, for example, temples and post offices.23 While agreeing with him that much of the common usage of ‘religion’, especially in Western societal usage, is indebted to a Christian past, such that we commonly think of it as being about a deity, texts and specific doctrinal positions, this does not entail dismissing the idea that certain areas of life (or even all of it) can be seen as related to something somehow ‘set apart’ (the ‘sacred’ in his usage). Certainly, there are many issues with any usage, but some sense of religion as referring to the realm of cultural transaction where humanity relates to that which it perceives to be the ‘transcendent’ (that which transcends the phenomenological thisness of life, and so involves the imminent, deities, endowing nature with spiritual intent, speaking to ancestors, etc.) remains as a meaningful category. The fact that this is something common to, as far as I am aware, all human cultures and societies that have existed suggests that to view it in comparative ways makes sense, just as we will speak of comparative politics without suggesting that every society understands ‘politics’ to mean it in the way that we see it, or even that they have an equivalent word, or comparative linguistics, without the sense that every language functions in similar ways or has words which directly equate to ours. Indeed, as with many comparative studies, it is the fact of differences, and so expanding our own understanding, that gives much of the value to comparative study. Just as, when we learn a foreign language and discover that there are words that have no direct translation into our own language, this opens up new ways of looking at the world, or new linguistic worlds, so comparative religion can open up new religious worlds to us: diverse ways of exploring and understanding. Indeed, of course, this, takes us back to the nineteenth-century origins of the discipline, when F. Max Müller observed of religion (coming from his linguistic experience) that ‘to know one, is to know none’.24

Comparative theology: Data for the religious studies scholar? I turn now to quite a different area, which we may more easily open up now we have suggested that it is not simply naive, or just a liberal Christian imaginary; that we live in a world where it is meaningful to speak of many religions. Here we come to the contemporary practice of comparative theology, which, I will argue, provides data for

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the scholar of comparative religion.25 Briefly, my argument is simple: if meaningful connections take place across religious worlds in the activity of certain traditions, then scholars can study and compare the connections that religious insiders believe exist. Before I turn to this argument, I will address a couple of potential criticisms. First, one argument against comparative religion (and against the category ‘religion’) is that the notion of ‘religion’ being a meaningful cross-cultural term originates from primarily liberal and nineteenth-century theological presuppositions that there is a single common religious experience or source which all traditions respond to. Among scholars of comparative theology today, therefore, attempts have been made to show that current practice is different in type and practice from nineteenth-century forebears, and certainly, as practised by figures like Francis Clooney (2010), Michelle Voss Roberts (2010), and John Thatamanil (2006), it is a very different exercise.26 Importantly, however, far from even the old comparative theology simply furthering Christian hegemonic discourse, as critics suggest, it can cogently be argued that it actually disrupted and changed Christian discourse, so it is not so much that Christian narratives and categories were imposed on new data (notwithstanding that this occurred), but that the actuality of other religions caused Christian understandings of what ‘religion’ was (i.e. ‘Christian truth’) to be dramatically altered and changed, so that the developing discourse on religions became something else.27 On the other hand, some theologians would argue that a particularist discourse, which properly understands Christian belief and practice to be always ‘other’ than that found in different religions, disavows such comparison a priori. Space does not allow a full response, or even explication, of such a theory; however, it will suffice here to note that it relies upon the deeply problematic ‘cultural island’ model we have discussed above, while also raising its own theological and philosophical problems, which entails it becoming a deeply reactionary and patronizing discourse.28 Therefore, criticisms against comparative theology which would affect our employment of it as data for comparative religion are flawed. While comparative theology enjoins empathetic and deep study across religions from (often) a specifically Christian frame (although transcending narrow sectarian limits strictly drawn), the practice of comparative religion seeks a way to perform comparison outside a theological agenda (of any tradition), and to employ the methodologies proper to its own area (which is not to say that they cannot crossfertilize in meaningful ways, and in relation to a figure like Clooney, it is because he is a scholar of Hinduism of the first rank that such authority attaches to his own attempts at comparative theology, as someone who understands both traditions with depth and empathy, employing the tools of scholarship proper to any study – historical, philological, hermeneutical, etc.). That is to say, a thorough and systematic analysis of the religions on their own terms is undertaken so that Hinduism, for instance, is not simply read through a Christian lens, and for a scholar like Clooney it is natural, of course, that we cannot simply speak of Hinduism and Christianity compared – the two are essentially imaginaries of convenience: rather, specific figures within specific traditions are the focus of analysis and comparison, so often theologians of specific bhakti traditions (generally Sri Vaishnavism) and his own Roman Catholic tradition are compared. For the scholar of comparative religion, however, it is significant that

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within specific religious worlds such comparative analysis is understood to make sense and can be done; suggesting that, at some level, meaningful exchanges and meetings are taking place across traditions where worlds of meaning meet, and providing data for this analysis. Another comparative example is Kimberley Patton’s work concerning debates in sixteenth-century Sri Lanka between Roman Catholics and Theravada Buddhists about the status of relics.29 This reinforces the notion that ‘religion’ is not just an ‘arbitrary’ category (contra Smith), but one which adheres meaningfully to practitioners and devotees within the traditions it is applied to.30 The importance the scholar of comparative religion attaches to such connections may, of course, be quite different from that of the comparative theologian or the insider. It is not necessary to see them as relating to a shared common hierophany (to use Eliade’s term), or a strict identity of meanings or substance. Nevertheless, it does point to the fact, as argued above in relation to ‘religions’ being meaningful categories of comparison, that those within the specific traditions understand and relate to each other as being engaged in work that may relate to some ‘transcendent’ (however diversely conceptualized), and so in spheres of human cultural endeavour: that is to say, the Hindu family of traditions (or at least, in Clooney’s analysis, Sri Vaishnava traditions) and Christian traditions (again, for Clooney, Roman Catholicism) become areas which it is legitimate to look at together. Indeed, specific areas of comparison by the comparative theologians, I argue, become legitimate areas of research for the scholar of comparative religion, while meetings of traditions in other forms are also data. For instance, there is a thriving tradition of what is termed ‘intermonastic dialogue’, where monastics from Christian lineages (often Benedictines and Trappists) and other traditions, often Hindu and Buddhist (especially Tibetan Vajrayana and Japanese Zen), meet to share ways of praying and live alongside each other to share practices of meditation and asceticism. In this way, those who live lives deeply imbued by their own religious tradition engage in practices which suggest that they believe and understand the life of prayer, meditation and devotion which they lead to be comparable to and capable of mutual enrichment from those engaged in what we can identify as somewhat similar ways of life in other traditions. Certainly, critiques of comparison and exchange have suggested that Christian and other monastic ways of life are embedded in their own specific traditions and lineages, meaning that they cannot be compared; however, such a suggestion is arguably belied by the actual exchanges, which, as I have suggested, thereby become for the scholar of comparative religion fertile soil for looking at similarities and comparative data to which the practice of the religious traditions themselves give rise.31

Revivals of comparative religion: Gavin Flood and others My specific claim here, that the comparative method within the study of religion is quite legitimate and in need of reviving, does not lie simply at a theoretical level, but, as I have suggested already, is already being renewed by some within the discipline of religious studies. Arguably, most significant in this regard is the scholar of Hinduism, Professor Gavin Flood. In a number of books,32 he has argued that comparative work

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may meaningfully be done across religious traditions. However, he is not alone, for others have undertaken or suggested such work.33 Perhaps the most notable defenders of the comparative method have been the contributors to the edited collection A Magic Still Dwells,34 which includes the theoretician Jonathan Z. Smith (discussed above as a significant contributor to criticisms of the category ‘religion’, which many have seen as a major cause for suspicion of comparative ventures), while the various contributors to the current collection may also be mentioned; it should be observed, though, that J. Z. Smith’s contribution suggests that any comparative study must be done with such care that it makes the act almost meaningless, if not impossible; nevertheless, he does cede that comparative work across religions is, in principle, possible.35 Among these, arguably Flood’s work has done more than any other to enshrine the basis for a theoretically rigorous and scholarly credible comparative religious methodology once more within the study of religion. Flood’s work here is notable, as he was once a scholar highly critical of the phenomenological methodology,36 but has now moved through the critique to once again see the value in both phenomenology and comparative methodology (when done with due care). It is not my aim here to outline his method (which he ably does himself within this volume), in part because I do not see it as the only, or even the best, grounding for comparative studies, although it is certainly one very solid and influential approach. Rather, my aim here is to point to the variety of work done by critical and reflexive scholars within the field, arguing, therefore, that, far from being a naive or outdated venture, comparative work is capable of making a serious and valuable contribution to work within the study of religion. To this end, I turn in my final section to some recommendations for comparative religion as a vital and living praxis in religious studies scholarship.

Comparative religion in the toolkit While I would not suggest that comparative methods are the only, or even the best, tool available to scholars of religion – or those elements of culture relating to human orientations to that perceived or configured as ‘transcendent’ – they are, surely, one of the valuable parts of the toolkit. Certainly, I have argued so far that in our contemporary context there are reasons for scholars to cease viewing the practice of comparison with suspicion or disdain, and that on various grounds it can once again take its place among the plethora of methods within religious studies’ interdisciplinary toolkit; of course, academic trends come and go, and no doubt at some future date comparison will once again become a dirty word among the bright young things and most cutting-edge scholarship – it is always necessary in academia to say something new and different, even shocking, if you are to establish your name and reputation – however, I believe that it would be a mistake to jettison it. I will, therefore, set out now something of an agenda for returning comparative work to a central place within the study of religion. First, it is, I maintain, essential to understanding ‘religion’. As outlined above, this is a problematic term, but it can be used strategically to help assess certain phenomena in the world, even if only inadequately (this, of course, is true of all language, and

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the fact that our words do not absolutely envelop that which they speak of but only provide culturally bounded expressions that allow meaningful communication is true of everything; if we abandon ‘religion’, we may as well abandon words like ‘table’, ‘love’ and ‘scholarship’ itself – none of these refer clearly and distinctly to the essence of something; they are always contested and have unclear boundaries). Indeed, when we speak of the range of things we term ‘religions’, it is only by comparison that we have our horizons challenged, and recognize the variety that allows us to make meaningful corrections to our existing concepts, and even to rethink altogether what we may mean by the term. For Fitzgerald, his own study of Japanese religion led to the realization of the inadequacy of the Christian underpinning of the general usage of ‘religion’; therefore, his own comparative study led to his critique.37 Indeed, as Wendy Doniger has observed by employing William Dilthey’s theory of hermeneutics, it is only through recognizing ‘sameness’ that we can come to discuss ‘difference’, for without any possible meeting place, interpretation is simply impossible.38 Second, there are many and competing voices about how we should study religion and what good, even ‘proper’, scholarship is, but, returning to Müller’s phrase, one way we will bring our students to understand religion is through comparison. As noted, I do not see comparison as a controlling narrative; nevertheless, it remains important: comparison challenges our existing categories and perspectives, and so to cut off this opportunity for learning will mean that we cannot adequately introduce students to what religion is as a global phenomenon. Of course, I am not suggesting that we return to the days when we assumed that common patterns could be found which simply illuminated the common archetypes of religious data, and it is as much through the dissimilarities as through any potential similarities that students will learn. There is, of course, a vexed question here about the way that ‘world religions’ have traditionally been taught through common entry points (e.g. scriptures, founders, sacred spaces, deities) which is problematic.39 Interestingly, Barbara Holdrege’s comparative work on Hinduism and Judaism can be seen as illuminating tropes across what are often seen as two contrasting ends of the ‘world religions’ spectrum, and so it may destabilize our common perceptions of what are the common points and meeting places within and between religions.40 As such, I am not making a call for ‘business as usual’; however, even the old pedagogical tropes may be useful tools if they help to show that actually the comparison is about difference and lack of resonances between these things we call ‘religions’ rather than showing varieties of the common type; it is not the place here to launch an argument around introductory pedagogy, and so I will leave this point hanging. What is important, though, is that comparison is a valuable tool for introducing students to the problematic and contested nature of religion. Third, having already suggested that we cannot return to Eliade’s ‘patterns’ and the archetypes of religious phenomena, I would once again want to keep the baby while ejecting the dirty bathwater. Returning to my point above, I think it basic that showing students that the Vedas are not like the Qur’an, which is not like the Tripitaka, which in turn is not like the Hebrew Bible, can be taken for granted; nevertheless, it does not mean that the category of ‘texts/scriptures’ is completely meaningless, because an awful lot of religious traditions (but not all, of course) use books which have some customary or revelatory significance. Likewise, when I have taught death studies, similar theories

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and patterns can be used when looking at the funerary rites of Hindus, Buddhists, Christians, Muslims or Jews.41 (The same, no doubt, holds true for Humanist funerals.) Quite simply, to reject any comparative study of patterns, like the blanket rejection of ‘religions’, is a monolithic and essentialist act. Returning to Flood’s work, he has with depth and nuance shown that notions like ‘asceticism’ and ‘inwardness’ are capable of meaningful comparative study, without any naive assumptions of hierophanies, or supposing that some common archetype/essence is being referred to. Limits of space do not allow the development of any specific theory, but for comparison to be meaningful we must permit the creation of categories, even if only in strategic and limited ways. Indeed, as Holdrege has noted in discussing comparison, even Smith has admitted that comparison is a ‘constitutive aspect of human thought’.42 Fourth, one reason why we may assume that speaking about ‘religions’ as related categories is meaningful is that the historical data which exists shows us that many traditions have syncretically permeated each other.43 To oppose comparative analysis is, therefore, itself rash. The tale of Josaphat and Barlaam was noted above, while, for instance, there is evidence to suggest that the use of prayer beads from India to Europe is a related practice. Such evidence does not, of course, lead to rash claims that any seemingly similar practise or concept must be related, or share some common functions; indeed, the way that any shared practices or stories operate differently in diverse contexts is a meaningful part of comparison (always remembering that such practices are often just as diverse and operate quite differently intra-religiously as well as interreligiously). Nevertheless, it may suggest that we could examine comparative devotional practices or hagiographies as meaningfully related categories. It may lead us to suggest that looking comparatively at, for instance, fourteenthcentury Japanese Shinshu Buddhist devotional practices and fifteenth-century Italian Franciscan Catholic devotional practices is not simply naive and ill-informed, but something which may illumine both: not for showing historical connections, or for common essences, but simply for what it may tell us about traditions which may be meaningfully spoken of together. Indeed, as Patton has suggested, and contra Smith’s argument that only certain fields and ways of doing comparison have yielded good results, Michael Polanyi’s work on salt crystals indicates that we can make meaningful comparisons with clear results where we cannot prove empirical relations.44 Further, I do not, by the previous example, want to limit comparison always to areas where only those with quite narrow or specific historical or linguistic expertise can comment; if it is to be an area we expect students to engage with, then we cannot suppose such competencies. Indeed, even for scholars, a certain amount of more conceptual envisioning may be part of the comparative analysis, which I see as beneficial. For instance, few, if any, scholars would possess the skills and knowledge to compare every ritual of purification across the globe’s religious traditions, but that is not to say that, based upon sound secondary material, they could not undertake an analysis and study of such an area. Of course, we must beware the dangers of past scholars, like Eliade, who have read their own agendas into material they are not familiar with,45 but, as I have argued, it is very much the specific way that his work was carried out, rather than the comparative aspect itself, that seems to indicate the problems. Rather, if we take seriously the notion that understanding other contexts helps illuminates the limits of what we are studying, or could open up new insights into areas, then comparison

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offers much to scholars, not simply in precise and localized specific studies, but also in bringing understanding across broader and wider areas of study. As Sullivan noted, comparison can help illuminate by bringing insights which go beyond the immediate context, or showing things in new ways, employing examples of ikebana and jazz to suggest that new ‘artistic’ arrangements may help us see the world again in new ways.46 As such, I would argue that, both historically and conceptually, comparative work is helpful. Indeed, it is useful to show that comparison is not just one thing: what links Josaphat and Barlaam may be a careful historical comparison of one story across time and traditions; but it may also entail the more conceptual ‘suggestive arrangement of diverse and distinct parts’ (ibid.) that allows us to see the familiar through new eyes, and so lead to rethinking and reassessment.47

Conclusions As the conclusion to the first edition of Comparative Religion, Sharpe quoted his lecture at the 1970 International Association for the History of Religions Conference, speaking about conflicting methods in the study of religion: What the comparative study of religion needs these days is not a rigid methodological ‘either-or’, though there will continue to be those who cultivate one method rather than another; far more will be achieved if scholarship refuses to stagger from one methodological extreme to another, and resists the temptation to anathematize currently or locally unfashionable approaches. … Great harm has been done to the study in the past by those who have insisted that their approach excludes every conceivable alternative. Let us hope that such dogmatism is a thing of the past.48

Unfortunately, the dogmatism Sharpe spoke of is not a thing of the past. Many in religious studies today decry any meaningful comparative study, but I argue that such embargos have little theoretical or methodological validity. Here, I have not been able to explore at length how such comparison might be undertaken; rather, I have made a manifesto call for a return to careful and mature comparative analysis as central to religious studies. Against today’s powerful voices that seek to delimit and denounce comparison, my plea to fellow scholars and students is to realize that the naysayers have not shown us that comparison is illegitimate, but that a broader view that encompasses comparison as one tool among many can allow religious studies to flourish as part of the contemporary academy.

Notes

1 2 3 4 5 6

See Sharpe 1991 (1st edn 1975, 2nd edn 1986). See Eliade [1954] 1969. Eliade [1958] 1979. Ibid.: 1. Ibid.: 2–3. Ibid.: 2.

30 7 8 9 10

11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

Interreligious Comparisons in Religious Studies and Theology See Eliade [1957] 1960: 54. See Eliade [1958] 1979: 3, 298–300. Olson 2001; Smith 2000a. Entering into the debate about what the study of religion should entail goes beyond the limits of this present chapter. However, I would suggest that religious studies, as opposed to a theological or sectarian approach, teaches and studies religions as traditions open to a variety of interpretations. Adopting, for instance, a secular Marxist narrative or a perennialist Eliadism as the lens to understand religion is, therefore, not religious studies. This is not to say that students should not be taught about Eliade, Marx or other approaches as tools or methods by which religion can be understood. It must also be understood, therefore, that I see criticism of Eliade by many later scholars as well placed, because what he was doing was not simply studying religion from what I would see as a religious studies stance but advocating a specifically theological/sectarian position to interpret it. Religious studies today, as a reflexive discipline, is also, I would suggest, critical of its own methods and prejudices, which I do not believe was true of Eliade. For a more detailed discussion of the state of the debate, see Hedges and King 2014; Wedemeyer and Doniger 2010. See, for example, Smart 1996; King and Hedges 2014. I would suggest, as argued below, that some critique goes to opposite extremes by rejecting the possibility of any universality. For a discussion around the issues in the methodology of religion, see Hedges and King 2014. See Smart 1996, and for discussion, Hedges 2010a; King and Hedges 2014. For a general survey of these discussions, see Hedges 2010b: 64–87 or King and Hedges 2014. For example Hedges 2010, 2014; King and Hedges 2014. For a critique of ‘cultural islands’ in theological employment, see Hedges 2008: 122–5. For example Levenson 2012. Cambrai 2014. For further exploration of this, see Krech and Steinicke 2012. See, for example, Bulbulia 2004. Flood 2013. See Fitzgerald 2007; Hedges 2014. Hedges and King 2014: 47. A related argument is made by Flood 2013: 22–3, 254–5. For a discussion of the differences and the issue of ‘religion’ as a category, see Hedges 2012. See Hedges 2012. See Hedges 2008: 127–30. Patton 2000: 161. I realize that I have not attended to many problematic issues here, especially how what we term ‘secular’ and ‘religious’ spheres are not clearly distinct but elide (contra Eliade), and that our usual usages of religion do not work well for many indigenous and other traditions, and I am not attempting to sweep this under the carpet and proclaim that we can keep on using the term ‘religion’ as simple and unproblematic; rather, I am here refuting the equally problematic (monolithic and historically falsifiable) assertion that what we term ‘religion’/ ‘religions’ is so meaningless that no comparative endeavour can be undertaken.

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31 On intermonastic exchanges, and wider spiritual exchanges across traditions, see Blée 2014; Hedges 2010b: 178–82. 32 Flood 2004, 2013. 33 For example Gwynne 2014; Kripal 2014; Krech and Steinicke 2012. 34 Patton and Ray 2000. 35 Smith 2000b. 36 Flood 1999. 37 Fitzgerald 2000; Cox 2009. 38 Doniger 2000: 65. 39 On this see, for example, Masuzawa 2005; King and Hedges 2014. 40 Holdrege 2000: 86. 41 See Davies 2002. 42 Holdrege 2000: 85. 43 See, for example, Hedges 2010b; Krech and Steinicke 2012. 44 Patton 2000: 160. 45 In saying this, I in no way wish to diminish Eliade’s vast erudition; however, in attempting a global theory that encapsulated all traditions across history, his project made it necessary for him to include many traditions about which he did not have the expertise that he had in many areas within his schemata, ignoring contextual data. However, as I have suggested, I do not wish to suggest that only limited-area experts can employ comparison in very detailed local studies. We need, though, to be aware of a careful balancing act between overarching theories and specific knowledge and contexts. 46 Sullivan 2000: 224. 47 I realize that critics may suggest that my latter suggestion is too much like the ‘magic’ that Smith has criticized, whereby scholars employ intuition or comparison not clearly grounded in a rigorous methodology. My response would be twofold: first, we could look at the assumption that ‘magic’ is a negative thing and the use of language and rhetoric to dismiss our opponents; second, I am not suggesting that such comparison leads to new grand theories or shows us ‘the way things are’ (that is, perhaps, more properly the arena of historical comparison?); rather, I would suggest that what we may see as creative juxtaposition (call it ‘intuition’ or ‘magic’ if you wish) can help us look again at the world. I believe my arguments throughout this chapter justify a judicious rationale as to why this would be possible, so I will not repeat them here. 48 Sharpe 1991: 292–3, citing Sharpe 1971: 12.

References Asad, Talal (1993), Genealogies of Religion: Disciplines and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam, Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press. Bleé, Fabrice (2014), ‘Can Christians Engage in Non-Christian Practices? Eastern Meditations and Contemplative Prayer’, in Paul Hedges (ed.), Controversies in Contemporary Religion, vol. 3, 277–304, Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger. Bulbulia, Joseph (2004), ‘The Cognitive and Evolutionary Psychology of Religion’, Biology and Philosophy, 19: 655–86. Cambrai, Gui de (2014), Barlaam and Josaphat: A Christian Tale of the Buddha, trans. Peggy McCracken, London and New York: Penguin Books.

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Chryssides, George (2013), ‘Phenomenology and Its Critics’, in Ron Geaves and George Chryssides (eds), The Study of Religion, 2nd edn, 157–82, London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Clooney, Francis (2010), Comparative Theology: Deep Learning across Religious Boundaries, Chichester: Wiley. Cox, James (2009), An Introduction to the Phenomenology of Religion, London and New York: Continuum. Davies, Douglas (2002), Death, Ritual and Belief: The Rhetoric of Funerary Ritual, 2nd edn, London and New York: Continuum. Doniger, Wendy (2000), ‘Post-Modern and -Colonial -Structural Comparison’, in Kimberley Patton and Benjamin Ray (eds), A Magic Still Dwells: Comparative Religion in the Postmodern Age, 63–74, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Eliade, Mircea ([1957] 1960), Myths, Dreams and Mysteries, trans. Philip Mairet, London: Harvill Press. Eliade, Mircea ([1954] 1969), Yoga: Immortality and Freedom, trans. Willard R. Trask, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Eliade, Mircea ([1958] 1979), Patterns in Comparative Religion, London: Sheed and Ward. Fitzgerald, Timothy (2000), The Ideology of Religious Studies, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fitzgerald, Timothy (2007), Discourse on Civility and Barbarity: A Critical History of Religion and Related Categories, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Flood, Gavin (1999), Beyond Phenomenology, London and New York: Cassell. Flood, Gavin (2004), The Ascetic Self: Subjectivity, Memory and Tradition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Flood, Gavin (2013), The Truth Within: A History of Inwardness in Christianity, Hinduism and Buddhism, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gwynne, Paul (2014), Buddha, Jesus, and Muhammad: A Comparative Study, Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Hedges, Paul (2008), ‘Particularities: Tradition-Specific Post-Modern Perspectives’, in Paul Hedges and Alan Race (eds), Christian Approaches to Other Faiths, 112–35, SCM Core Texts, London: SCM. Hedges, Paul (2010a), ‘Can We Still Teach “Religions”? Towards an Understanding of Religion as Culture and Orientation in Contemporary Pedagogy and Metatheory’, in Gloria Durka, Liam Gearon, Marian DeSouza and Kath Engebretson (eds), International Handbook for Inter-Religious Education, Vol. I, 291–312, New York: Springer Academic Publishers. Hedges, Paul (2010b), Controversies in Interreligious Dialogue and the Theology of Religions, London: SCM. Hedges, Paul (2012), ‘The Old and the New Comparative Theologies: Discourses on Religion, the Theology of Religions, Orientalism and the Boundaries of Traditions’, Religions, 3 (4): 1120–37. Hedges, Paul (2014), ‘Discourse on Discourses: Why We Still Need the Terminology of “Religion” and “Religions”’, Journal of Religious History, 38 (1): 132–48. Hedges, Paul and Anna King (2014), ‘Is the Study of Religion Religious? How to Study Religion and Who Studies Religion?’ in Paul Hedges (ed.), Controversies in Contemporary Religion, vol. 1, 31–56, Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger. Holdrege, Barbara (2000), ‘What’s Beyond the Post? Comparative Analysis as Critical Method’, in Kimberley Patton and Benjamin Ray (eds), A Magic Still Dwells: Comparative Religion in the Postmodern Age, 77–91, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

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King, Anna and Paul Hedges (2014), ‘What Is Religion? Or, What Is It We’re Talking About?’ in Paul Hedges (ed.), Controversies in Contemporary Religion, vol. 1, 1–30, Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger. Krech, Volkhard and Marion Steinicke, eds (2012), Dynamics in the History of Religions between Asia and Europe: Encounters, Notions and Comparative Perspectives, Leiden: Brill. Kripal, Jeffrey (2014), Comparing Religions, Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Levenson, Jon D. (2012), Inheriting Abraham: The Legacy of the Patriarch in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Masuzawa, Tomoko (2005), The Invention of World Religions, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. McCutcheon, Russell (2003), Manufacturing Religion: The Discourse on Sui Generis Religion and the Politics of Nostalgia, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Olson, Carl (2001), ‘Eliade, the Comparative Method, Historical Context, and Difference’, in Bryan Rennie (ed.), Changing Religious Worlds: The Meaning and End of Mircea Eliade, 59–76, Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Patton, Kimberley (2000), ‘The Magic in Miniature: Etymological Links in Comparative Religion’, in Kimberley Patton and Benjamin Ray (eds), A Magic Still Dwells: Comparative Religion in the Postmodern Age, 153–71, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Patton, Kimberley and Benjamin Ray, eds (2000), A Magic Still Dwells: Comparative Religion in the Postmodern Age, Berkley, CA: University of California Press. Rennie, Bryan, ed. (2006), Mircea Eliade: A Critical Reader, Durham: Acumen. Roberts, Michelle Voss (2010), Dualities: A Theology of Difference, Louisville, KN: Westminster JKP. Sharpe, Eric (1971), ‘Some Problems of Method in the Study of Religion’, Religion, 1 (1): 1–14. Sharpe, Eric (1991), Comparative Religion: A History, 2nd edn, La Salle, IL: Open Court. Smart, Ninian (1996), Dimensions of the Sacred: An Anatomy of the World’s Beliefs, London: HarperCollins Publishers. Smith, Jonathan Z. (1982), Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown, Chicago: Chicago University Press. Smith, Jonathan Z. (2000a), ‘Acknowledgements: Morphology and History in Mircea Eliade’s Patterns in Comparative Religion (1949-1999), Part 1: The Work and its Contexts; Part 2: The Texture of the Work’, History of Religions, 39 (4): 315–51. Smith, Jonathan Z. (2000b), ‘Prologue: In Comparison a Magic Still Dwells’, in Kimberley Patton and Benjamin Ray (eds), A Magic Still Dwells: Comparative Religion in the Postmodern Age, 23–44, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Sullivan, Lawrence (2000), ‘The Net of Indra: Comparison and the Contribution of Perception’, in Kimberley Patton and Benjamin Ray (eds), A Magic Still Dwells: Comparative Religion in the Postmodern Age, 206–36, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Thatamanil, John (2006), The Immanent Divine, Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress. Wedemeyer, Christian K. and Wendy Doniger, eds (2010), Hermeneutics, Politics and the History of Religions: The Contested Legacies of Joachim Wach and Mircea Eliade, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Comparison in the Maelstrom of Historicity: A Postcolonial Perspective on Comparative Religion Michael Bergunder

‘Postmodernist Critique’ of comparative religion In the field of religious studies and related disciplines, there is widespread agreement among scholars that comparison has become deeply problematic. Kimberley Patton gives a drastic assessment of the current situation: For a number of years, comparative method in the study of religion has been under fire so heavy that there are few of us left standing. Those who cling gasping to the spars are often unwilling to compare religious phenomena, theologies, or artefacts outside of footnotes or less heavily policed ‘epilogues’.1

Gavin Flood even concludes: ‘The critique (and condemnation) of comparative religion has almost become a new orthodoxy.’2 Many scholars agree on the reasons for this crisis and attribute it to the so-called ‘postmodern critique.’3 They invoke a notion of ‘postmodernism’ that is painted in broad strokes indeed: ‘Postmodernism denounces order and ordering principles’4 and argues that ‘the wholes are bad because they produce terror’5 but that ‘differences, by contrast, are good and should be activated’.6 This notion stems from the provocative contributions of Jean-Francois Lyotard and of the famous volume Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (1986).7 However, postmodernism is also lumped together with post-structuralist philosophy. Jacques Derrida has allegedly proclaimed that ‘words appear no longer to be connected to the world but to be merely unrooted signifiers,’8 and Foucault is thought to have dissolved truth in ‘little more than a power play.’9 These sweeping and arguably misleading remarks on Derrida and Foucault make clear that in this discussion, ‘postmodernism’ serves as a kind of simple antithetical stereotype. There has been no interest in discussing the complex and diverse epistemological approaches and theories regarding history within current post-structuralist and postcolonial thought. With regard to comparative religion, it has all been about black and white contrasts. Accordingly, postmodernism,

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established in this way, charges the comparative method with ‘intellectual imperialism, universalism, theological foundationalism, and anti-contextualism’.10 In Corinne Dempsey’s opinion, ‘postmodern critique’ can be reduced to the one central accusation that the comparative approach applies universal and abstract categories: ‘It conjures and imposes categories that too often erase culturally embedded distinctions and realities.’11 In the same way, Robert Segal explains that ‘for the postmodernist focus on the unique … the “modernist” concern with the general is anathema.’12 Hence, it follows that postmodernism is associated with the rejection of any kind of generalization. This peculiar framing of the ‘postmodern critique’ is not limited to religious studies, but is also echoed in other disciplines. From a social sciences perspective, Pauline Rosenau ascribes the following position to postmodernism: The very act of comparing, in an effort to uncover similarities and differences, is a meaningless activity because postmodern epistemology holds it impossible ever to define adequately the elements to be contrasted or likened. The skeptical postmodernists’ reservations about the possibility of generalizing and their emphasis on difference … form the basis of rejecting the comparative method.13

In this debate, the allegedly postmodernist position has been driven to such an extreme that it sounds rather ridiculous. However, invoking it as an abstract counterargument, even if more or less imaginary, helps to discuss the criticism of comparative religion in a more profound way. It shifts the debate to the epistemological foundation of scholarly generalizations and of the use of universal categories, which is not limited to comparative religion but concerns many kinds of research. Of course, this is not a new insight. The German sociologist Joachim Matthes already pointed out that ‘“comparison,” epistemologically speaking, is a variation of conception, the forming of a concept’.14 William Paden made the same argument from the perspective of religious studies: Knowledge in any field advances by finding connections between the specific and the generic, one cannot even carry out ethnography or historical work without utilizing transcontextual concepts. Like it or not, we attend to the world not in terms of objects but in terms of categories. Wherever there is a theory, wherever there is a concept, there is a comparative program.15

One crucial point thus arises from ‘postmodern critique’ of comparative religion: the crisis of comparative religion is a crisis of the epistemological foundation of religious studies in general and of its concepts in particular. Comparativists should not be singled out while historians and philologists are let off the hook as if they were not affected. If religious studies wants to overcome this crisis, it has to look for a better theoretical justification of its basic concepts. This means, first of all, clarifying the meaning of ‘religion’ as the subject matter of the whole discipline.16 In short, the crisis of comparative religion attributed to ‘postmodern critique’ is, first and foremost, a crisis of the theoretical justification of religious studies in general.

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Debates in social sciences on Eurocentrism and comparison Whereas the invocation of ‘postmodern critique’ is helpful to get to the bottom of the epistemological problem of comparative religion, it downplays another critical point regarding the actual comparative practice: the issue of Eurocentrism, which should not be transferred to general epistemology too quickly. Corinne Dempsey notes the accusation of ‘intellectual imperialism’ because comparison is seen by ‘postmodern critique’ as ‘a process that imposes universal categories that distort or disregard locally embedded meanings and differences’.17 Framing the accusation of ‘intellectual imperialism’ in such a general way is missing a crucial problem. There is a specific practice in comparative religion that shows an inherent Eurocentrism and needs to be addressed. Comparison frequently occurs as an operation that relates an element A with element B and investigates the similarities and differences between the two. Jonathan Smith makes clear that this is not the case in religious studies: The statement of comparison is never dyadic, but it is always triadic; there is always an implicit ‘more than’, and there is always a ‘with respect to’. In the case of academic comparison, the ‘with respect to’ is most frequently the scholar’s interest, be this expressed in a question, a theory, or a model.18

Smith emphasizes the point of comparison – the tertium comparationis of classical formal logic – that precedes any comparison. It establishes a common ground between at least two elements to make them comparable, and its prior fixation is the prerequisite of any comparison. Hence, the justification of any kind of comparison is identical with the justification of the point of comparison, and, as Smith rightly points out, this has ‘“political” implications’19 in the sense that the point of comparison is dependent on the respective research interests. These political implications open up a vast field of theoretical issues, including the question of conceptualization. However, there is at least one aspect that merits consideration in its own right. It concerns cross-cultural reach as a distinguishing feature in comparative religion. Elements compared will usually be taken from various ‘cultures’ and/or ‘religions’ that are conceptualized, at least to some extent, as being different from each other. Yet, what is taken as the kind of common ground that permits their comparison? In an analysis of the comparative procedure, the negotiation of difference and commonality is thus a crucial issue. This cross-cultural dimension has received increasing attention in sociological and postcolonial debates. The German sociologist Joachim Matthes criticized the mechanism of cross-cultural comparison in the following way: The logic of such ‘comparisons’ follows the principle first to determine similar units for the comparison on both sides, and, then, to relate them to each other through the tertium comparationis. Because the establishment of the respective unit on the other side is already done by the tertium which was retrieved as projective abstraction from the unit of the one side, such ‘comparisons’ work easily – subtracting all that which doesn’t fit into it as marginal differences.20

In other words, Matthes is saying that the point of comparison is usually formed as an abstraction of one element, and, before the comparison actually begins, another

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element has to be identified as similar to the first one. This means that the point of comparison usually has a privileged relationship to one of the two or more elements that are to be compared, and the other element is predicated on that relationship. This results in the following combination of circumstances: if the general term A', which serves as the point of comparison, is only an abstraction of element A, then A is the prototype for A'. Prior to the comparison, B (or C, D, etc.) must be declared similar to A via A' in order to make the comparison possible. The actual act of comparison that establishes relative difference and relative similarity between elements A and B has to be preceded by an act of establishing similarity. Without this act of establishing similarity, A and B would remain in absolute difference to each other and would not share any point of comparison. It is important to understand that this prior creation of a point of comparison by making A'/A similar to B needs special attention. Naoki Sakai speaks of ‘two moments in the act of comparison’ to underscore this point: The first is the postulation of the class of genus among compared items. Comparison is performed between or among unified objects, preliminarily identified as belonging to two species, while at the same time comparison is constitutive of the logical dimension of genus where species difference (diaphora) is discovered, measured, or judged. … The second moment is the occasion or locale where we are obliged to compare. Comparison takes place because the determination of species difference is needed.21

Any discussion on comparison should differentiate between these two successive acts. Moreover, the second act of comparison retroactively affirms the validity of the point of comparison that was established in the first act. Through comparison, the validity of a general term A' will be reinforced and not tested, because the point of comparison is the prerequisite of the comparison and not part of it. This would also be the case if the comparison of A and B exclusively resulted in a statement of differences, because the comparison would only bring forth relative differences. Absolute difference would lead to the conclusion that both elements have nothing – absolutely nothing – to do with each other with regard to the point of comparison and, hence, would not be comparable at all. Absolute difference would deny the possibility of a point of comparison and, hence, of any comparison. If the validity of A' is reaffirmed by comparison, then comparison also reaffirms element A as the prototype of A'. Matthes argues that this is the starting point of an inherent Eurocentric praxis: The tertium comparationis will be retrieved from one element that stands in one’s own society. Its apparently essential features are elevated to a higher level of abstraction, and, on this level, a ladder of ‘development’ is outlined retrospectively. Then, the projectively retrieved ‘theoretical’ point of comparison as well as the retrospectively constructed ladder become the yardstick of the ‘other’.22

He calls this a ‘cultural way of interpretation’ (kulturelles Interpretament) that took shape in the nineteenth century in the wake of European colonial domination and has been of formative influence since the particular history of Europe transcended itself and became the center of world history, pulling into it all other particular histories. … The western European type

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The Indian Marxist historian Dipesh Chakrabarty argues in exactly this same direction. For him, most of the universal concepts applied by the social sciences in cross-cultural comparison have a hidden relationship to a prototype that is European in nature, from which all general terms have been derived: For generations now, philosophers and thinkers who shape the nature of social science have produced theories that embrace the entirety of humanity. As we well know, these statements have been produced in relative and sometimes absolute, ignorance of the majority of humankind.24

Like Matthes, he identifies a certain European self-understanding as the cause for this phenomenon, because these European philosophers and thinkers ‘have read into European history an entelechy of universal reason’25: ‘Europe’ remains the sovereign theoretical subject of all histories, including the ones we call ‘Indian’, ‘Chinese’, ‘Kenyan’ and so on. There is a peculiar way in which all these other histories tend to become variations on a master narrative that could be called ‘the history of Europe’.26

If European history has been the prototype of the general terms for the social sciences, then all non-European contexts face a structural handicap. The element B, which is to be compared with A, can never be as adequate or similar to A' as A is. In relation to A' and in comparison with A, it will always show ‘a lack, an absence, or an incompleteness that translates into “inadequacy”’.27 The force of Chakrabarty’s argument draws from his self-criticism. His previous works, as well as the subaltern studies group of which he was part, showed the strong influence of Marxist theory. Only later did Chakrabarty realize that central Marxist concepts, though represented as universal, were prototypically shaped by European history. For instance, the working class was a central abstract category in Marxist thinking, but only the historical working class of nineteenth-century European industrialization fulfilled all its key criteria. The Indian working class which Chakrabarty analysed always lacked its full development and remained inadequate because of inherent ‘precapitalist’ factors in Indian society. Consequently, the subaltern study group spoke of a ‘historic failure of the [Indian] nation to come to its own, a failure due to the inadequacy of the bourgeoisie as well as the working class to lead into … a bourgeois-democratic revolution of the classic nineteenth-century type’.28 For Chakrabarty, this application of Marxist theory needs critical revision, because ‘Europe works as a silent referent’29 in it. Moreover, he argues that it is not only Marxism but social sciences and history in general that have the same problem with regard to their key concepts, which have been aggregated since the nineteenth century. Chakrabarty’s criticism is so important because he insists on the global and, notably, historical nature of the problem. Even if social sciences and history have developed their key concepts with reference to a European prototype, they are not exclusively European sciences in the geographical sense:

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The dominance of ‘Europe’ as the subject of all histories is a part of a much more profound theoretical condition under which historical knowledge is produced in the third world. … The everyday paradox of third world social science is that we find these theories, in spite of their inherent ignorance of ‘us’, eminently useful in understanding our society.30

Since the nineteenth century, the European prototype has permeated the sociological and historical enterprise and has become globalized. Chakrabarty demands a ‘provincializing of Europe’ that reflects this historical development: The project of provincializing Europe … cannot be a project of cultural relativism. It cannot originate from the stance that the reason/science/universals that help define Europe as the modern are simply ‘culture-specific’, and therefore only belong to the European cultures.31

It is important to note that this project of provincializing Europe does not support two conceivable options that initially may appear to be attractive solutions. First, one might consider abandoning any general term that is dependent on a European prototype. As most academic disciplines usually rely on general terms based on European prototypes, this is hardly a feasible strategy. Further, what then could serve as the new prototype, as post-structuralist theory holds that any general term shows an inherent tension between the particular and the general?32 Second, the re-designation of the current general terms as ‘European’ or ‘Western’ concepts does not help either. Using these terms with the reservation that they arose from a European or Western perspective would only be another way of stating the problem, not offering a solution. Moreover, as a consequence, A' is transformed back into A. Without A’, however, there is no point of comparison, no B can be established, and comparison would become impossible. This re-designation would also ignore the most important fact, that is that nowadays these general terms are used globally. It is not solely in the possession of ‘Europe’ or the ‘West’ to (re)claim them exclusively. Instead, Chakrabarty suggests a third way when he pleads for a strict historicization of the point of comparison, including a thorough study of its globally entangled expansion: The project of provincializing Europe has to include certain additional moves: first, the recognition that Europe’s acquisition of the adjective ‘modern’ for itself is an integral part of the story of European imperialism within global history; and second the understanding that this equating of a certain version of Europe with ‘modernity’ is not the work of Europeans alone; third-world nationalisms, as modernizing ideologies par excellence, have been equal partners in the process … one cannot but problematize ‘India’ at the same time as one dismantles ‘Europe.’33

In short, Chakrabarty demands that general terms in social sciences and history should no longer be used without critically exploring their globally entangled histories since nineteenth-century colonialism, which gave rise to European prototypes: ‘I ask for a history that deliberately makes visible, within the very structure of its narrative forms, its own repressive strategies and practices. … To attempt to provincialize this

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“Europe” is to see the modern as inevitably contested.’34 This kind of historicization will initiate a process of self-reflection that might hopefully change our understanding of these general terms. They are never just universal categories; they have a global history that inherently informs their meaning and plausibility. Reconstructing this globally entangled history and investigating the role that European prototypes played in it will hopefully change the future usage of comparative categories and combine them with historical narratives that no longer camouflage European hegemony in the name of scientific thinking and the Enlightenment’s universalism.

Historicizing the point of comparison in comparative religion Whereas Matthes’ and Chakrabarty’s critiques are mainly aimed at social sciences and history, their insights are directly relevant for religious studies and comparative religion. There is already a common perception that the classical concepts of religious studies were derived from European prototypes. This is most obvious for the term ‘religion’ itself that marks the subject matter of the discipline, but it also applies to concepts like ‘God’,35 ‘monotheism/polytheism’,36 ‘myth’,37 ‘experience’,38 ‘mysticism’39 and ‘ritual’.40 All these classical comparative terms are nowadays widely used across the globe in many cultural contexts. One explanation for their global and cross-cultural usage is the frequent, repeated previous comparisons in which the point of comparison identified similar elements in other ‘cultures’ or ‘religions’. By repeating it each comparison had reaffirmed the point of comparison each time because, even if the comparison established differences, these were only relative differences. In this way, every new comparison has increased the plausibility of the point of comparison. In the wake of European colonialism and the overwhelming dominance of European sciences, this process has become a global one, and the point of comparison has established itself as global knowledge.41 A crucial point in this line of argument is that this process has not been limited to scholarly discourses but has become part and parcel of broader public identity discourses. Religion itself is the best case study.

‘Religion’ and historicity In his monumental four-volume work on the history of the concept of religion, the German Catholic theologian Ernst Feil arrived at the conclusion that, in European philosophy and theology from antiquity up to the eighteenth century, the word religion (Lat. religio) for the most part stood for a concept that comprised a certain way of acting. This concept of religion depicted ‘the scrupulous diligence …, to carry out those acts that were owed to a God (as a superior) because of the cardinal virtue of “justitia.”’42 Besides this, Feil identified less specific ways of using ‘religion’; for example, as a synonym for the four ‘laws’ (Lat. lex) or ‘sects’ (Lat. secta) of the Christians, Jews, Muslims and Heathens. He considered that the middle of the eighteenth century represented ‘a significant break’.43 ‘Religion’ now received a completely new understanding, becoming

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the name of a ‘modern basic concept’ (neuzeitlicher Grundbegriff) that has held sway since the nineteenth century. Feil identified this with a specific Protestant theological variant of an understanding of religion: the religion of inwardness44 attributed to Schleiermacher.45 It is important to note that Schleichermacher’s version of religion is a new concept that has no continuity with the older Christian usage of the term.46 Ernst Feil provides massive and convincing historical evidence for his findings, and he significantly modifies the genealogy that William Cantwell Smith had suggested earlier. Smith was of the opinion that ‘Renaissance humanists’ and ‘Protestant Reformers’ had ‘adopted a concept of religion to represent an inner piety’ that ‘was largely superseded by a concept of schematic externalization’ in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.47 Other studies also located the modern concept of religion in the early modern period.48 Feil’s findings do not support Smith’s historical development since the fifteenth century. However, Feil and Smith agree that an important shift in the concept was brought about by Schleiermacher, even if their assessment is different.49 Feil’s historicization stops at the beginning of the nineteenth century without following the further development of the concept during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.50 In contrast, Smith had suggested that the final formulation of the modern concept of religion happened ‘in the decades before and after 1900’.51 What is urgently needed is a more detailed historicization of the concept of religion for the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries which would also show that its final formulation occurred globally.52 Despite all these problems in the current state of research, there is consensus that the modern concept of religion derived from a historical European prototype. It is instructive to see how previous discussions in religious studies have tried to cope with this issue, and how this relates to Chakrabarty’s approach. I have identified at least four strategies:

1. One strategy has been to make the prototypical structure of the concept of religion explicit, either by making the prototype part of the definition or by reducing the meaning of religion to the prototype itself. The first option is connected to polythetic definitions that have become popular recently. The most comprehensive discussions of the polythetic approach have been provided by Benson Saler.53 Saler presents fifteen features of religion in an additive approach that ‘consists of all the features that our cumulative scholarship induces us to attribute to religion’.54 The crucial point is that these features are usually justified through the explicit establishment of prototypes. These prototypes are concrete exemplars which, according to the judgement of the scholar, are considered especially typical for the particular polythetic category. For Saler, ‘our most prototypical cases of religion’ are ‘the Western monotheisms’, by which are understood ‘Judaism’, ‘Christianity’ and ‘Islam’.55 The defined contents of these Western monotheisms are directly assigned to the ‘western’ anthropologist of religion and the ‘western’ scholar of religion as a part of the process of socialization. This key formative notion, together with that of the connected consensus of ‘many contemporary academic students of religion’, brings Judaism and Christianity into the stated prototypes, which provide the polythetic model with their empirical reference.56 Saler adds Islam as a third prototypical exemplar, since it is also looked

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upon as ‘fundamentally Western’ with its ‘theologies’, ‘eschatologies’ and ‘rituals’, as well as mentioned ‘personages’, all standing in close relationship to Judaism and Christianity.57 He combines these three prototypical exemplars together, then, as the ‘Western monotheisms’. According to the logic of prototypical constructions, only Western monotheisms contain all the fifteen features of religion, and all other religions contain fewer of the designated features. The idea of ‘Western monotheisms’ remains completely vague, and Saler does not support his use of this term with any historical argument.58 Even if his historical derivation of ‘Western monotheisms’ were not deeply flawed, the prototypical construction itself would remain problematic. As Chakrabarty has shown, explicit reference to a European prototype is hardly a solution to the crisis of comparative religion. It intensifies the problem rather than solving it. 2. Another option for explaining the prototypical structure of the concept of ‘religion’ is to reduce the meaning of religion to the prototype itself. Hence, it has been suggested that religion should be considered ‘a western folk concept’,59 a ‘European invention’60 or simply a ‘European concept’. In place of ‘European’, ‘western’, ‘Christian’ or ‘western Christian’ can be found, which certainly does not contribute any clarity to the argument. As already discussed, if A' is reduced to A, the term loses its comparative potential and nothing is achieved. 3. In this line of thought, it would be more consistent to abandon the term ‘religion’ altogether, and this third option has recently been vehemently presented by Timothy Fitzgerald. ‘Religion’, he says, is ‘thoroughly imbued with Judeo-Christian monotheistic associations and world religions ecumenism’ and inseparably bound to a Christian theological agenda.61 For this reason, religion is not meaningfully employable for other non-Christian contexts. In the course of colonialism, it was newly ‘invented’ for the colonized societies and then forced upon colonial cultures.62 Fitzgerald’s plea is that religion as an independent academic category should be abandoned. He does not stand alone in this demand.63 However, Fitzgerald’s position has met severe opposition. The critics argue that it is beyond the power of religious studies to renounce the concept of religion. Thus, David Chidester wrote: After reviewing the history of their colonial production and reproduction on contested frontiers, we might happily abandon religion and religions as terms of analysis if we were not, as the result of that very history, stuck with them.64

With a similar choice of words, Richard King argued: The idea that there are ‘religions’ out there in the real world is such an embedded part of our social imaginary that it seems premature to talk of abandoning the notion altogether.65

It is important to emphasize that we are ‘stuck’ with ‘religion’ globally and on all levels. All over the world today, outside Europe and in all non-European languages, an equivalent to ‘religion’ has been well established.66 The comparative discourse on religion left the perimeters of scholarly comparison early on, and itself became part of religious identity formations.

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In an amazing convergence with Chakrabarty’s approach, a rigorous historicization has been suggested for coping with the problem instead of abandoning the term ‘religion’. Russell McCutcheon speaks of the need to explore the ‘the history of “religion”’67 and suggests, with reference to Tomoko Masuzawa, that ‘we ought to consider studying why naming part of the social world as religion has caught on so widely among diverse human communities, each with their own prior systems of self-designation, in just the past few hundred years’.68 It is noteworthy that even Timothy Fitzgerald has apparently modified his position recently and argued in exactly the same direction: ‘The proper study of “religion” is the category itself in its discursive relationship to “state”, “politics”, “secular”, “sacred”, “profane”, “civility”, and “barbarity”.’69 This all shows a consensus on keeping the term ‘religion’ and critically researching its historical usage instead of abandoning the term. 4. Of course, the problem with religion as a comparative category would be solved once and for all if it could be reduced to a ‘natural’ (‘material’) non-discursive reference. So, it is no wonder that cognitive and neurobiological approaches have attracted growing attention, although it is highly unlikely that they will meet with broader acceptance in religious studies.70 Michael Stausberg makes it clear that, while these ‘recent theories rightly point to the relevance of biological and cognitive processes largely beyond the control of consciousness, concepts and representations are difficult to conceive of in social terms without taking meaning into account’.71 As a result, these theories only perpetuate previous essentialist notions of religion, and ‘most, if not all, contemporary theories of religion carry theories of ritual and myth in their baggage’.72 Despite their naturalist claims, they are still heirs to the traditional cross-cultural categories of religious studies, and that means that they are themselves in need of historicization.

Comparative religion and historicity The debate about ‘religion’ in religious studies shows remarkable convergence towards Chakrabarty’s approach of ‘provincializing Europe’, but this has had no apparent effect on the practice of comparative religion so far. In my opinion, this is a missed opportunity, as can be shown by a closer look at a major work on comparative religion that has been published recently. In Bringing the Sacred down to Earth (2011), Corinne Dempsey defends comparative religion exclusively against the postmodern critique, as discussed at the beginning of this chapter. Moreover, she accuses the ‘Foucauldian analysis … [of] understand[ing] the sacred as an entity solely used as a pretext for power and as a socially constructed tool for hegemonic interests’ and ‘[of] ignor[ing] understandings of the sacred put forward by practitioners, those most dynamically engaged with the practices and expressions under consideration’.73 Instead, Dempsey wants to revive the category of ‘“the sacred” as a category that implies ties to transcendent meaning and power yet is not limited to or divided against the unempirical or metaphysical’.74 ‘The sacred’ describes ‘religiously ordained power sources, manifest and interpreted in a variety of ways, from a variety of angles, emerging sometimes as forming and controlled by systems of authority, sometimes defying and superseding the same’.75 Dempsey

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reinstates the sacred as the defining element for religion, though the philosophical foundation of the concept remains rather vague. At least it becomes clear that her return to the sacred is a return to a sui generis understanding of religion. It comes with a certain immunity to postmodern critique, per her (mis)reading. However, it does not address the sharp criticism of sui generis definitions of religion put forward in recent decades by McCutcheon, Fitzgerald and many others. It also ignores the postcolonial challenge to ‘provincialize Europe’. Instead, she wants to get back to the comparative religion of the old days: Departing from past tendencies to analyze religious traditions side by side, their proximities creating mutual influences that naturally call for comparison, the following chapters juxtapose decidedly nonproximate conceptions and practices.76

From a postcolonial perspective, her operation of establishing similarity in applying the sacred as a point of comparison attracts the most attention. In the book, she compares:

Indian Catholicism and Irish Catholicism ‘Christian and Hindu theologies of liberation’ ‘Rajneeshees and Diasporic Hindu Settlers and Unsettlers’ in the United States Neo-Vedanta in India and Icelandic spiritualism.

The crux of the matter is that it is not the sacred that establishes similarity, but, against her own theoretical outline, some references to a shared history. This is most obvious with her comparison of Rajneeshees and Hindu migrants to the United States, which does not even fulfil her criterion of ‘nonproximate’. When she relates Christian liberation theology to a Hindu tradition, she chooses the philosophy of the priest of a Hindu temple in the United States. The priest is a Tamil Brahman from Sri Lanka who was a Marxist in his youth and worked for some time in Southern Africa as an architect before permanently settling down in the United States.77 Obviously his notion of the Hindu tradition, which seems to combine a peculiar interpretation of Srividya, Neo-Saiva Siddhanta and other elements, was informed by the agenda of reformist Tamil Saivism.78 In any case, his socio-critical ideas about Hinduism and those of Christian liberation theology are part of the same contemporary global discourse on social justice and social equality, and, hence, are interrelated. Most strikingly, in two other case studies, Dempsey herself explicitly emphasizes the common historical background as justification for her comparison. When she explains why she compares ‘the suffering nun and the wandering priest of India and Ireland’, she specifically refers to a shared colonial history: their suffering and wandering represent Orientalist and Celticist colonial stereotypes that their respective Churches seem to have adopted and inverted. British colonial portrayals of the irrational, nonmodern Indian and the rootless Irish become for an anticolonial Indian and Irish Church … a means for demonstrating religious and nationalist efficacies.79

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When it comes to Neo-Vedanta and Icelandic spiritualism, she declares the importance of a shared history even more vocally: Planting Neo-Vedanta and Spiritualism most sturdily in ideological proximity is the fact that both traditions arose in response to a late-nineteenth-century scientific revolution that appeared, to many, to pose a threat to religion. … They emerged during an era of heightened global interaction between India, Britain, and the United States in which Hindu reformers and Spiritualists frequently exchanged ideas and arguments with Theosophists, Christian missionaries, and scholars of religion … Given the intertwined roots of Neo-Vedanta and Icelandic Spiritualism, it is not surprising that the philosophical proclivities and aims of these two movements overlap as well.80

This all shows that Dempsey does not justify the point of comparison – the operation of establishing similarity that precedes the actual comparison – with regard to ‘the sacred’ as she is supposed to do. Her comparison is based on previous comparative operations that were part of a common global religious history since the nineteenth century, in which different phenomena were made compatible and comparable. Contrary to her theory, she refers to historical arguments, but without reflecting further on them. Her sweeping description of postmodern critique and her simple defence of traditional comparison apparently leave no room for historiographical questions. It is time to address this blind spot.

Towards a global religious history As the previous discussion has shown, it is too easy to attribute the crisis of comparative religion solely to reasons cited as ‘postmodern critique’. This misses Chakrabarty’s objection to using European history as the prototype for conceptualization, which is highly relevant to comparative religion. The intensive debates on the idea of ‘religion’ in religious studies show many links to Chakrabarty’s ‘provincializing Europe’ and suggest a historicization of the point of comparison. Even a study like Dempsey’s, which proposes a return to the classical paradigms of comparative religion, applies historical arguments to justify the selection of elements for comparison. Nonetheless, religious studies is stuck with its comparative terminology, which cannot be abandoned at will. If we cannot simply return to the old days, and if there is no viable alternative at present, it might be worth considering a third method. The simple suggestion is that we learn to accept that our comparative concepts have a history that needs to be disclosed as a prerequisite for any further use. Religious phenomena are comparable because history has made them so. This raises a whole set of fundamental questions that have to be addressed. To start with, a theoretical foundation is needed that explains how general terms have been historicized and, at the same time, kept as key concepts of the discipline. As has been shown elsewhere, a post-structuralist epistemology combined with Foucault’s approach to historiography as genealogy could do just that.81

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Apart from a theoretical foundation, there is also a more practical side to the problem. The current global usage of comparative terms can usually be traced back no earlier than the nineteenth century. What we need, then, is an appropriate form of historiography that analyses the role of the European prototype and looks for the mechanisms of its global acceptance and reception. Recent historiographical debates can help to develop such a narrative of global religious history since the nineteenth century.82

The global history approach and the debate on Orientalism As a starting point, one could look at the British historian Christopher A. Bayly,83 who some time ago presented a comprehensive outline of a global history. Connected to this is a particular view of the long nineteenth century as decisive for setting the course of modernity and globalization. Bayly detects the ‘rise of global uniformities’ in the nineteenth century, related to a complex process of the ‘ambivalent relationship between the global and the local’.84 He gives plenty of space to the question of religion, and names the homogenization and standardization of ‘world religions’ as one of the central phenomena of the nineteenth century. Further global history outlines have since been published that also thematize religion in a detailed way.85 It is noteworthy that within the global history approach there is an observable trend that considers the idea of ‘religion’ and, as a consequence, other central comparative concepts as ‘Western’ inventions of the eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries, which have been globalized since the nineteenth century.86 The global history thesis meets with the central insight of the so-called debate on Orientalism, which claims that nineteenth-century colonialism forced European and North American knowledge upon colonized cultures and societies. This theoretical framework was largely formulated by the Palestinian-American literary scholar Edward Said.87 Said presented the thesis that the ‘Orient’ is a monological product of ‘Western’ knowledge, constructed as a discourse of alteration of one’s own culture and religion. The Orient was always the space of the ‘other’, and it was this distinction which served to guarantee one’s own identity. In the course of nineteenth-century colonialism, this ‘Western’ construction of the Orient was imposed upon the colonized, who were forced to define their identity within this framework. Using Said’s approach, the cultural consequences of colonialism can be engaged. The encounter of the colonized with colonizers was not a dialogue between equals, but, rather, a negotiation process within a discourse of power, in which the positions of the speakers were unequal to the extreme. When comparative concepts became understood as a part of ‘Western’ knowledge about the ‘Orient’, then, as the discourses of colonial power developed, they were also correspondingly forced upon the colonized. At its core, an approach critiquing Orientalism resembles a global history methodology, and both justify, to a certain extent, the talk of the ‘Western invention’ of concepts.

Postcolonialism and entangled histories The debate on Orientalism prompted a wider discussion about how the role of the colonized is to be more precisely understood within the discourse of colonial power,

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since Edward Said did not enter further into this area. This matter is mostly debated under the name of postcolonial studies or postcolonialism.88 Postcolonialism also assumes that the colonized subjects are subjected to Orientalism as part of European knowledge and, thus, do not possess any autonomous prior subjectpositions. The discussion goes an important step further by drawing inspiration from post-structuralist discourses on the social and the political. Accordingly, every incident of fixing a meaning occurs as one concrete articulation, and the durability or sedimentation of that meaning is only guaranteed through the repetition of this articulation. Yet, no repetition is identical to another and, as a re-signification, it opens up space for transformation (Butler, Laclau).89 It is precisely here that postcolonialism comes in. It is interested in the specific forms of reception of ‘Western’ knowledge, and understands these not merely as their identical adoption. Colonial discourses, therefore, are anything but monolithic or invariable; rather, they are of a polyphonic and unstable nature. They possess a considerable dynamic, a substantial potential for transformation.90 This is exactly what postcolonialism wants to capture historically; hence the discipline’s interest in the complete breadth of articulation of the colonized. If all articulations in a discourse refer to others, insofar as they are ‘citations’, then they are dependent on one another. From this, the claim can be derived that global history must be comprehended as ‘entangled histories’, since ‘the related entities are themselves in part a product of their entanglement’.91 The emphasis, here, is that the ‘West’, through its entanglement with the colonies, did not experience an autonomous history; rather, its identity formation was entangled with the colonized. The sedimentation of ‘Western’ knowledge is also dependent on the repetition of the colonized. Even if Western knowledge held a hegemonic position, it was, at the same time, a product of entanglement. As was exemplarily shown in the case of religion, the comparative terms of religious studies are of historical and global character. If religious studies wants to continue using them, it should accept them as such. Global religious history provides a helpful narrative to describe them adequately.

Conclusion It has not received the necessary attention within religious studies that the point of comparison always has a history. To increase our understanding of the comparative problem, more research on the global religious history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is urgently required. This is a hitherto neglected field of religious studies, yet it needs special attention if we wish to advance, not only in our discussion of comparative religion but in religious studies in general. This endeavour can profit from trends in the study of modern Buddhism and Hinduism that increasingly apply a global perspective, often explicitly examining the ways in which comparative terms, including religion, have been appropriated since the nineteenth century.92 In the end, we might come to the conclusion that comparative religion should be first and foremost a historical enterprise.

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Notes 1 Patton 2000: 153. 2 Flood 2013: 22. 3 Patton and Ray 2000: 1. 4 Ibid.: 2. 5 Smith 2000: 178; Patton and Ray 2000: 10. 6 Ibid. 7 See, for example, Patton and Ray 2000: 2–3, 7, 10; Smith 2000: 178. 8 Patton and Ray 2000: 2. 9 Ibid.: 10; Smith 2000: 179. 10 Patton and Ray 2000: 1. 11 Dempsey 2011: 5. 12 Segal 2001: 344. 13 Rosenau 1992: 105. See also Segal 2001: 344–5. 14 Matthes 1992: 88–9. (‘ “Vergleichen” ist, epistemologisch betrachtet, eine Variante des Vorgangs der Begriffsbildung, der Konzeptualisierung’.) 15 Paden 2000: 182. 16 Bergunder 2014a. 17 Dempsey 2011: 7. 18 Smith 1990: 51. 19 Ibid.: 52. 20 Matthes 1992: 88. (‘Die Logik solchen “Vergleichens” folgt dem Prinzip, gleichartige Einheiten für den “Vergleich” zunächst auf beiden Seiten zu ermitteln, um sie dann unter einem tertium comparationis zueinander ins Verhältnis zu setzen. Da die Ermittlung der jeweiligen Einheit auf der anderen Seite immer schon erfolgt ist über das tertium, das also projektive Abstraktion aus der Einheit der einen Seite gewonnen wird, “gelingt” solches Vergleichen leicht, – unter Abbuchung all dessen, was sich ihm nicht zu fügen scheint, als Randdifferenz.’) 21 Sakai 2013. 22 Matthes 1992: 81. (‘Nach dieser Vorstellung vom “Vergleichen” … geht die Folie, vor der “verglichen” wird, in der geläufigen Ausdrucksweise also das tertium comparationis, aus einer Projektion einer Vergleichsgröße, wie sie an der eigenen Gesellschaft abgelesen wird, hervor. Sie wird in ihren als wesentlich erscheinenden Zügen auf eine höhere Ebene der Abstraktion gehoben, und auf dieser Ebene wird retrospektiv eine Stufenleiter von “Entwicklung” entworfen. Die projektiv gewonnene “theoretische” Vergleichsgröße wie die retrospektiv konstruierte Stufenleiter zu ihr hin werden dann als Maße für “anderes” gesetzt.’) 23 Matthes 1992: 82. (‘Diesem kulturellem Interpretament zufolge wächst in der europäischen Moderne die partikulare Geschichte des Okzidents über sich selbst hinaus und wird zum Zentrum der Weltgeschichte, in die alle anderen partikularen Geschichten hineingezogen werden. Der Typus der westlich-europäischen Gesellschaft erstarrt in diesem Interpretament gleichsam zu einem abstrakten Modell von “moderner” Gesellschaft, die an der Spitze einer Entwicklungslinie steht.’) 24 Chakrabarty 2000: 29. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid.: 27. 27 Ibid.: 32, 34. 28 Ibid.: 31–2.

Comparison in the Maelstrom of Historicity 29 Ibid.: 28. 30 Ibid.: 29. 31 Ibid.: 43. 32 Bergunder 2014a. 33 Chakrabarty 2000: 43. 34 Ibid.: 45–6. 35 Fiorenza and Kaufman 1998. 36 Bergunder 2006. 37 McCutcheon 2000. 38 Sharf 1998. 39 King 1999. 40 Bergunder 2011. 41 For the epistemological justification of this argument, see Bergunder 2014a. 42 Feil 1986–2007: IV.14. 43 Ibid. 44 Ibid.: I.25–9. 45 Ibid.: IV.880. 46 Feil 2000; Bergunder 2009. 47 Smith 1963: 44. 48 Harrison 1990; McCutcheon 1997; Dubuisson 2003. 49 Smith 1963: 45–6. 50 For a critique on Feil, see Bergunder 2014a: 257–9. 51 Smith 1963: 47. 52 Chidester 1996; King 1999; McMahan 2009. 53 Saler 2000, 2008. 54 Saler 2008: 222. 55 Saler 2000: 225. 56 Ibid.: 199. 57 Ibid.: 212. 58 For a deeper discussion of Saler’s approach, see Bergunder 2014a: 248–52. 59 Greil 2009. 60 Haußig and Scherer 2003. 61 Fitzgerald 2000: 19. 62 Ibid.: 8–9, 29–30. 63 Smith 1963; Feil 1986–2007; Sabatucci 2000; Dubuisson 2003. 64 Chidester 1996: 259. 65 King 2004: 256–7. 66 Peterson and Walhof 2002. 67 McCutcheon 2007a: 15–19. 68 McCutcheon 2007b: 976. 69 Fitzgerald 2007: 312. 70 Stausberg 2009; Greil 2009. 71 Stausberg 2009: 291. 72 Ibid.: 292. 73 Dempsey 2011: 10, with reference to Patton 2000. It is curious to note that neither Dempsey nor Patton engages in any way with the writings of Foucault, whom they harshly criticize. 74 Dempsey 2011: 14. 75 Ibid.: 15.

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50 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92

Interreligious Comparisons in Religious Studies and Theology Ibid.: 12. Ibid.: 53. Ibid.: 52–66. Ibid.: 21. Ibid.: 109, 111, 120. Bergunder 2014a. The following is based on Bergunder 2014a: 275–9. Bayly 2004. Ibid.: 1–2. Beyer 2006; Osterhammel 2009. Osterhammel 2009: 1242. Said 1994. Young 2001. Butler 2011; Laclau 2005. Bhabha 1994; Spivak 1994. Conrad and Randeria 2002: 17. Pennington 2005; McMahan 2009; Josephson 2012; Kollmar-Paulenz 2013; Bergunder 2014b.

References Bayly, Christopher A. (2004), The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914. Global Connections and Comparisons, Oxford: Blackwell. Bergunder, Michael (2006), ‘ “Östliche” Religionen und Gewalt’, in Friedrich Schweitzer (ed.), Religion, Politik und Gewalt, 136–57, Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus. Bergunder, M. (2009), ‘Art. Religion’, in Enzyklopädie der Neuzeit, 10: 1048–62, Stuttgart: Verlag J. B. Metzler. Bergunder, M. (2011), ‘Global History, Religion, and Discourse on Ritual’, in Axel Michaels (ed.), Ritual Dynamics and the Science of Ritual, IV: 219–35, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz. Bergunder, M. (2014a), ‘What is Religion? The Unexplained Subject Matter of Religious Studies’, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, 26: 246–86. Bergunder, M. (2014b), ‘Experiments with Theosophical Truth. Gandhi, esotericism, and global religious history’, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 82: 398–426. Beyer, Peter (2006), Religions in Global Society, London: Routledge. Bhabha, Homi K. (1994), The Location of Culture, London: Routledge. Butler, Judith ([1993] 2011), Bodies That Matter. On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’, London: Routledge. Chakrabarty, Dipesh (2000), Provincializing Europe. Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Chidester, David (1996), Savage Systems. Colonialism and Comparative Religion in Southern Africa, Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Conrad, Sebastian and Shalini Randeria (2002), ‘Einleitung. Geteilte Geschichten – Europa in einer postkolonialen Welt’, in: S. Conrad and S. Randeria (eds), Jenseits des Eurozentrismus. Postkoloniale Perspektiven in den Geschichts- und Kulturwissenschaften, 9–49, Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag. Dempsey, Corinne G. (2011), Bringing the Sacred down to Earth. Adventures in Comparative Religion, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Dubuisson, Daniel (2003), The Western Construction of Religion. Myths, Knowledge, and Ideology, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Feil, Ernst (1986–2007), Religio. Die Geschichte eines neuzeitlichen Grundbegriffes, 4 Bde, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck. Feil, E., ed. (2000), Streitfall ‘Religion’. Diskussion zur Bestimmung und Abgrenzung des Religionsbegriffs (Studien zur systematischen Theologie und Ethik; 21), Münster: Lit. Fiorenza, Francis Schüssler and Gordon D. Kaufman (1998), ‘God’, in Mark C. Taylor (ed.), Critical Terms for Religious Studies, 136–59, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Fitzgerald, Timothy (2000), The Ideology of Religious Studies, New York: Oxford University Press. Fitzgerald, T. (2007), Discourse on Civility and Barbarity. A Critical History of Religion and Related Categories, New York: Oxford University Press. Flood, Gavin (2013), The Truth Within. A History of Inwardness in Christianity, Hinduism, and Buddhism, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Greil, Arthur L. (2009), ‘Art. Defining Religion’, in Peter B. Clarke and Peter Beyer (eds), The World’s Religions. Continuities and Transformations, 135–49, London: Routledge. Harrison, Peter (1990), ‘Religion’ and Religions in the English Enlightenment, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Haußig, Hans-Michael and Bernd M. Scherer, eds (2003), Religion – eine europäischchristliche Erfindung? Berlin: Philo. Josephson, Jason Ananda (2012), The Invention of Religion in Japan, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. King, Richard (1999), Orientalism and Religion. Postcolonial Theory, India and ‘The Mystic East’, London: Routledge. King, R. (2004), ‘Cartographies of the Imagination, Legacies of Colonialism. The Discourse of Religion and the Mapping of Indic Traditions’, Evam, (3)1–2: 245–62. Kollmar-Paulenz, Karénina (2013), ‘Lamas und Schamanen. Mongolische Wissensordnungen vom frühen 17. bis zum 21. Jahrhundert. Ein Beitrag zur Debatte um aussereuropäische Religionsbegriffe’, in Peter Schalk (ed.), Religion in Asien? Studien zur Anwendbarkeit des Religionsbegriffs, 151–200, Uppsala: Uppsala University. Laclau, Ernesto (2005), On Populist Reason, London: Verso. McCutcheon, Russell T. (1997), Manufacturing Religion. The Discourse on Sui Generis Religion and the Politics of Nostalgia, New York: Oxford University Press. McCutcheon, R. T. (2000), ‘Myth’, in Willi Braun and R. T. McCutcheon (eds), Guide to the Study of Religion, 190–208, London: Cassell. McCutcheon, R. T. (2007a), Studying Religion. An Introduction, Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press. McCutcheon, R. T. (2007b), ‘Words, Words, Words (Review Essay)’, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 75: 952–87. McMahan, David L. (2009), The Making of Buddhist Modernism, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Matthes, Joachim (1992) ‘The Operation Called “Vergleichen”’, in J. Matthes (ed.), Zwischen den Kulturen? Die Sozialwissenschaften vor dem Problem des Kulturvergleichs, 75–99, Göttingen: Otto Schwartz. Osterhammel, Jürgen (2009), Die Verwandlung der Welt. Eine Geschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts, München: C. H. Beck. Paden, William E. (2000), ‘Elements of a New Comparativism’, in K. C. Patton and B. C. Ray (eds), A Magic Still Dwells. Comparative Religion in the Postmodern Age, 182–92, Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Patton, Kimberley C. (2000), ‘Juggling Torches. Why We Still Need Comparative Religion’, in K. C. Patton and B. C. Ray (eds), A Magic Still Dwells. Comparative Religion in the Postmodern Age, 153–71, Berkeley: University of California Press. Patton, K. C. and Benjamin C. Ray (2000), ‘Introduction’, in K. C. Patton and B. C. Ray (eds), A Magic Still Dwells. Comparative Religion in the Postmodern Age, 1–19, Berkeley: University of California Press. Pennington, Brian K. (2005), Was Hinduism Invented? Britons, Indians, and the Colonial Construction of Religion, New York: Oxford University Press. Peterson, Derek R. and Darren R. Walhof, eds (2002), The Invention of Religion. Rethinking Belief in Politics and History, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Rosenau, Pauline Marie (1992), Post-Modernism and the Social Sciences. Insights, Inroads, and Intrusions, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Sabatucci, Dario (2000), La Prospettiva storico-religiosa, Formello: Edizioni SEAM. Said, Edward W. ([1978] 1994), Orientalism, New York: Vintage Books. Sakai, Naoki (2013), ‘The Microphysics of Comparison. Towards the Dislocation of the West’, Transversal, EIPCP multilingual webjournal, eipcp.net. (Nr. 6). Saler, Benson ([1993] 2000), Conceptualizing Religion. Immanent Anthropologists, Transcendent Natives, and Unbounded Categories, 2. Aufl. New York: Berghahn Books. Saler, B. (2008), ‘Conceptualizing Religion. Some Recent Reflections’, Religion, 38: 219–25. Segal, Robert A. (2001), ‘In Defence of the Comparative Method’, Numen, 48: 339–73. Sharf, Robert H. (1998), ‘Experience’, in M. C. Taylor (ed.), Critical Terms for Religious Studies, 94–116, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Smith, Huston (2000), ‘Methodology, Comparisons, and Truth’, in K. C. Patton and B. C. Ray (eds), A Magic Still Dwells. Comparative Religion in the Postmodern Age, 172–81, Berkeley: University of California Press. Smith, Jonathan Z. (1990), Drudgery Divine. On the Comparison of Early Christianities and the Religions of Late Antiquity, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Smith, Wilfred Cantwell (1963), The Meaning and End of Religion, New York: MacMillan. Spivak, Gayatri C. ([1998] 1994), ‘Can the Subaltern Speak? (1988)’, in Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (eds), Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory. A Reader, 66–111, New York: Columbia University Press. Stausberg, Michael (2009), ‘Back and Forth’, in M. Stausberg (ed.), Contemporary Theories of Religion. A Critical Companion, 283–95, London: Routledge. Young, Robert J. C. (2001), Postcolonialism. An Historical Introduction, London: Blackwell.

3

Modes of Comparison: Towards Creating a Methodological Framework for Comparative Studies Oliver Freiberger

Comparison, understood in the most basic sense, is a natural feature of cognition and of scholarship.1 Scholars of all disciplines, like all human beings on a daily basis, constantly compare the new with the already known. Yet, as a method in the humanities and social sciences, including the study of religion, comparison has provoked, in the last few decades of the twentieth century, scepticism, discomfort, deep criticism or flat-out rejection. The target of that criticism was hardly its basic cognitive and academic function, but, rather, particular forms of cultural comparison – those that decontextualize, essentialize and universalize in ways that were regarded as problematic on a scale from being unhelpful and misleading to being colonizing and imperializing. Eventually, comparativists responded in defence of the comparative method, on a scale from accepting much of the critique and thus restricting the comparative effort to rehabilitating even the most heavily criticized comparative approaches.2 The debate has been useful in the sense that it forces comparativists to justify what they are doing, both intellectually and methodically. In the course of these discussions, a number of important points emerged that certainly need to be addressed. Yet, it seems surprising that the attack on the comparative method had such drastic paralysing effects – to the degree that comparison was widely shunned in the study of religion for decades. The main reason for this crisis, in my view, is that the discipline lacks an established methodology of comparison that is thoroughly structured and wellgrounded. The existence of such a methodology – or of several competing ones, as is common for other methods – would have enabled comparativists to plausibly reject some critical objections and integrate others by modifying the method accordingly, rather than becoming paralysed. That is not to say that scholars of religion have not discussed comparison methodologically, but if they do, it is mostly either in a short section of the introduction to a comparative study or in more theoretical articles that often are too distant from the actual comparative work to provide structured methodical guidelines. Established guidelines of that sort do not exist – let alone

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a comprehensive methodology. As Jonathan Z. Smith noted, ‘In no literature on comparison that I am familiar with has there been any presentation of rules for the production of comparisons.’3 A good starting point for thinking about a methodological framework for comparison is to revisit the ways in which previous comparative studies were conducted. While several aspects need to be considered, it seems useful to begin with classifying general styles, or modes, before turning to more specific points. Luckily, we do not have to start from scratch. Some scholars have suggested typologies of modes of comparison, which I wish to present and discuss in this chapter. As we will see, such typologies fulfil a double function: they help to analyse and evaluate existing comparative studies in a more profound way, and they also provide a methodological backdrop for designing future comparative studies. The chapter will discuss three suggested typologies of modes of comparison – by Smith, Carter and Freidenreich – and then identify two modes that appear most promising for the study of religion.

Smith’s model: Ethnographic, encyclopaedic, morphological and evolutionary modes To distinguish comparative approaches, I will speak of ‘modes of comparison’, a term coined by Jonathan Z. Smith. The generic character of the term ‘mode’ indicates that these are hardly sophisticated and carefully designed techniques, but, rather, styles of comparison that capture the spirit in which scholars compare and that reflect, to a certain degree, the goals of the individual study. In his article ‘Adde Parvum Parvo Magnus Acervus Erit’, originally published in 1971, Smith suggests four modes of comparison.4 In his assessment, most comparative studies of religion that had been produced by that time were conducted in one of these four modes. He labels them ‘ethnographic’, ‘encyclopaedic’, ‘morphological’ and ‘evolutionary’. According to Smith, the first writings expressing the ethnographic mode of comparison are those of the Greek historian Herodotus in the fifth century bce. In  describing about fifty other cultures of his time, Herodotus arranged, according to categories, what Smith calls ‘traveler’s impressions’: ‘Something other has been encountered, and it is surprising either in its similarity or dissimilarity to what is familiar “back home”.’ Smith calls this impressionistic approach ‘ethnographic’ because it shares, in his view, a lot with twentieth-century ethnographic studies, including its problems. He describes this style of comparison as ‘idiosyncratic, depending upon intuition, a chance association, or the knowledge one happens to have at the moment of another culture’.5 This comparing-on-the-spot lacks a systematic framework and a substantial factual basis, which makes it difficult to build any form of generalization upon it. The encyclopaedic approach has its roots in antiquity too, namely, in the description of curious, exotic and anomalous phenomena, or, as Smith says, ‘contextless lists of strange things done by strange peoples in strange lands’. The key phrase for defining this approach is ‘contextless lists’. Such works provide an enormous and sometimes

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overwhelming amount of data in the form of lists, but the data are removed from their contexts and simply listed side by side under certain broad categories. A prime example in modern times is James George Frazer’s massive work, The Golden Bough, which started as a two-volume work in 1890 and expanded into twelve volumes over the next decades. But also later works, especially out of the phenomenological school of religious studies, display encyclopaedic features.6 Some books tend to present ‘cross-cultural religious phenomena’ by providing contextless lists of data, as if the sheer amount of these examples could validate the universality of the phenomenon. The problem with this approach is that it is, strictly speaking, not comparative. Or, to be more precise, the comparative act itself is presupposed and obscured, and only the result of the comparison is revealed, namely, having listed a certain item under a certain category. A closer look at particular examples, by recovering their actual contexts, often reveals that the comparison itself had been disappointingly superficial and impressionistic. Smith provides a telling example taken from Frazer’s description of ‘taboo’: Burial grounds were taboo; and in New Zealand a canoe which had carried a corpse was never afterwards used, but was drawn on shore and painted red. Red was the taboo colour in New Zealand; in Hawaii, Tahiti, Tonga and Samoa it was white. In the Marquesas a man who had slain an enemy was taboo for ten days: he might have no intercourse with his wife and might not meddle with fire; he had to get some one else to cook for him. A woman engaged in the preparation of cocoa-nut oil was taboo for five days or more, during which she might have no intercourse with men.7

This quote illustrates well, I think, why the encyclopaedic approach can cause fascination in general Western readers. Not only may the listed facts appear exotic, but they also seem all to be connected in a fascinating way. In his brief analysis of this quote, Smith shows, however, how these interesting connections are simply the result of Frazer’s impressionistic gathering. Frazer jumps from one example to the next without studying any one of them in detail or discussing how he arrived at the conclusion that they actually belong to the same category of ‘taboo’. Smith contends that such contextless lists are ‘held together by mere surface associations rather than careful, specific, and meaningful comparisons’.8 Smith traces the morphological mode of comparison back to the German polymath Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) who coined the term ‘morphology’ to describe his classificatory system of plants. This system featured, on the one hand, the (ideal or arche)type of a plant, and, on the other, the concrete empirical plant. ‘The type is by definition ahistorical, yet it stands in a complex relationship to the historical.’9 Comparison can thus be done in two ways: by comparing the individual, empirical item with the archetype; or by comparing empirical items with other items of the same class. In the study of religion, Smith finds the most striking exemplar of the morphological mode of comparison in Mircea Eliade’s work Patterns in Comparative Religion.10 Here, too, we find archetypes, limited in number, and their many empirical manifestations or, as Eliade called them, hierophanies, ‘manifestations of the sacred’. A similar approach can be found in other works of the phenomenological school. Friedrich Heiler’s massive book bears the telling title Manifestations and Essence of

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Religion (Erscheinungsformen und Wesen der Religion),11 and it was likely no coincidence that the English translation of Gerardus van der Leeuw’s Phänomenologie der Religion (1933) was published under a title that is almost identical with Heiler’s, namely, Religion in Essence and Manifestation.12 We typically find in these works descriptions of the ‘essence’ of a religious phenomenon followed by a list of its ‘manifestations’. To give only one example, Eliade introduces the chapter on ‘The Sky and Sky Gods’ in his Patterns with this remark: ‘We shall look at a series of divine figures of the sky, but first it is necessary to grasp the religious significance of the sky as such’ (my emphasis). He discusses the latter and concludes: ‘The sky “symbolizes” transcendence, power and changelessness simply by being there. It exists because it is high, infinite, immovable, powerful. … The whole nature of the sky is an inexhaustible hierophany.’13 Then Eliade lists and briefly describes instances of how this hierophany is manifest in religions of native Americans, Australians, Africans, Indo-, Poly- and Melanesians, Maoris and North and Central Asian peoples, in religions of Mesopotamia, Indo-Aryan religion, religions of Iran, Greece and the Roman empire, Nordic religion, Judaism, Chinese and Egyptian religions, Islam and many more.14 It is important to note that, according to Smith, Goethe’s original morphological approach created hierarchical series of items (in a sequence from elementary to complex) without presuming a temporal development, let alone passing a moral judgement on simpler forms. The scholars of religion who deploy this mode equally insist that even the simplest (or ‘most primitive’) variants are manifestations of the phenomenon’s essence (or ‘the sacred’) and therefore must not be depreciated. In spite of this principle, the Christian variant of a phenomenon often appears as the most complex and developed one. But the two more fundamental problems with the morphological approach are that it remains entirely unclear how the (arche)types or patterns (‘the sky as such’) have been identified (or created) – as they are explicitly and fundamentally distinct from any empirical data – and that the ‘manifestations’ tend to appear severed from their individual historical contexts and developments. Smith says about the two comparative operations in this mode of comparison: ‘One may only compare within the system or between the pattern and a particular manifestation. Comparisons within the system do not take time or history into account; comparisons between the pattern and manifestation are comparisons as to the degree of manifestation and its intelligibility and do not take historical, linear development into account.’15 Finally, the evolutionary mode is based on the evolutionary approach in the natural sciences of the nineteenth century. Unlike the morphological mode, it focuses on historical developments, but combines this – illegitimately, for Smith – with an ahistorical, morphological approach. The cultural evolution of mankind is laid out by comparing cultural phenomena and arranging them according to their respective stage in this development. This type of classification has a broad historical frame, namely, the general, temporal evolution of culture, but each individual datum is morphologically and ahistorically placed next to seemingly analogous data. Smith quotes E. B. Tylor’s 1871 work Primitive Cultures: Little respect need be had in such comparisons for date in history or for place on the map; the ancient Swiss lake-dweller may be set aside the medieval Aztec, and the Ojibwa of North America beside the Zulu of South Africa. As Dr Johnson

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contemptuously said when he had read about the Patagonians and South Sea Islanders in Hawkesworth’s Voyages, ‘one set of savages is like another.’ How true a generalization this really is, any Ethnological Museum may show.16

Again, each item’s particular historical context is mostly lost in this approach, while the arrangement of items is primarily governed by an evolutionary theory. With the concept of cultural evolution and social Darwinism going out of fashion, Smith notes, influential anthropologists became suspicious of generalizing comparison and abandoned it altogether. The same applied, says Smith, to religious studies. It is remarkable that this article by Smith, which is now more than forty years old and was included, only seven years after its first publication, in his widely read collection Map is Not Territory, is rarely quoted. Granted, like many of his articles, it is no light read, it has loads of references to perhaps unfamiliar examples, and its title is in Latin, which might be slightly off-putting too. But one would think that a careful – and clearly critical – analysis of comparative approaches by one of the most sophisticated contemporary theorists in the study of religion should receive a wider recognition, especially among critics of comparison. Much more influential and, to this day, a common reference in the debate about comparison was his follow-up article ‘In Comparison a Magic Dwells.’17 In it, Smith summarizes the four modes and then reviews a few newer approaches in the study of Judaism, only to conclude that they each represented merely variants of one of the four modes. Yet this article did not receive attention because of the typology – which ‘Adde Parvum …’ had laid out in much greater detail – but because it was read as a critique of comparison as such, a ‘cogent and eloquent challenge to the very possibility of responsible comparison’.18 Likely the most memorable point for many readers is Smith’s analogy of comparison and magic, which, perhaps unfortunately, also made it into the article’s title. As evidence of this reception, I wish to quote Kimberley Patton’s and Benjamin Ray’s introduction to A Magic Still Dwells, a book that includes many constructive responses to the postmodern and postcolonial challenges to comparison and can be regarded as an important milestone in the debate. While the book’s title directly echoes Smith’s article, which is also reprinted in the book, I wish to argue that Smith may not be the right opponent when it comes to defending comparison. Patton and Ray, who are committed comparativists, summarize his argument as follows: Smith’s essay argues that comparison in the human sciences has been problematic and unscientific and lacking in any specific rules. It contains a kind of ‘magic,’ he asserts, like Frazer’s idea of homeopathic magic, ‘for, as practiced by scholarship, comparison has been chiefly an affair of the recollection of similarity. … The procedure is homeopathic. … The issue of difference has been all but forgotten.’ For Smith, the unfortunate ‘magic’ of previous comparative studies lies in their resemblance to Frazer’s notion of primitive magic, the association of ideas by superficial similarity, thus confusing subjective relationships with objective ones. Smith finds wanting several types of comparison in the history of religions for their confused, impressionistic, and unscientific character.19

While the content of this summary is certainly accurate, I would argue that it gives the rather playful analogy of magic too much weight. Certainly, one can be easily

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carried away by Smith’s rhetoric: if the options are magic or science, as he summarizes the issue,20 which self-respecting scholar would want to end up on the side of magic? If comparison is magic, we had better shun it entirely! It seems ironic that this conclusion would presuppose the acceptance of the theory of homeopathic magic by James George Frazer, who is not exactly a role model for critics of comparison.21 Rather than claiming that comparison was, in principle, a form of magic, Smith merely holds that previous comparative efforts in the study of religion resembled the Frazerian idea of homeopathic magic insofar as they were associative ‘recollection[s] of similarity’. He then also states that ‘thus far, comparison appears to be more a matter of memory than a project for inquiry; it is more impressionistic than methodical’.22 And, again: ‘In no literature on comparison that I am familiar with has there been any presentation of rules for the production of comparisons; what few rules have been proposed pertain to their post-facto evaluation.’23 Rather than saying that such rules  – or, for that matter, a successful comparative method – can and will never exist, he implicitly calls for them. Smith’s is a retrospective critique, not a principled rejection of comparison. This is most obvious in the conclusion of the article, which, by the way, does not return to the analogy of magic.24 Instead, it suggests that the methodological problems of comparison are serious and fundamental and need to be addressed: We must conclude this exercise in our own academic history in a most unsatisfactory manner. Each of the modes of comparison has been found problematic.  … We know better now how to evaluate comparisons, but we have gained little over our predecessors in either the method for making comparisons or the reasons for its practice. There is nothing easier than the making of patterns; from planaria to babies, it is done with little apparent difficulty. But the ‘how’ and the ‘why’ and, above all, the ‘so what’ remain most refractory. These matters will not be resolved by new or increased data. In many respects, we already have too much. It is a problem to be solved by theories and reasons, of which we have too little. So we are left with the question: ‘How am I to apply what the one thing shows me to the case of two things?’ The possibility of the study of religion depends on its answer.25

Note the urgency in the final sentence, which is also the final sentence of the article. Addressing the problem of comparison, through new ‘theories and reasons, of which we have too little’ – and, I might add, by developing robust methodological models – is, for Smith, the most fundamental task for scholars of religion. So, again, the criticism of earlier comparative scholarship, which Smith chose to frame also with the ‘magic’ analogy, does not imply a general rejection of comparison at all. On the contrary, for Smith, the very ‘possibility of the study of religion’ presupposes a sound comparative method. Rather than the reference to magic, to me the most interesting and fruitful aspect of ‘In Comparison a Magic Dwells’ and, even more, of ‘Adde Parvum Parvo Magnus Acervus Erit’, is the typology of modes of comparison. In fact, Smith seems to acknowledge this contribution when he correctly claims in his conclusion that ‘we know better now how to evaluate comparisons’. The modes can, indeed, serve to analyse and evaluate existing comparative studies, but they can also be useful as

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methodological signposts for aspiring comparativists. To be sure, Smith would not recommend applying any one of them. He states: We stand before a considerable embarrassment. Of the four chief modes of comparison in the human sciences, two, the ethnographic and the encyclopaedic, are in principle inadequate as comparative activities, although both have other important and legitimate functions. The evolutionary would be capable in principle of being formulated in a satisfactory manner, but I know of no instance of its thorough application to cultural phenomena. … This leaves only the morphological.  … Yet, few students of religion would be attracted by this alternative. Because of the Romantic, Neoplatonic Idealism of its philosophical presuppositions, because for methodologically rigorous and internally defensible reasons, it is designed to exclude the historical. The only option appears to be no option at all.26

In spite of the slightly pessimistic note at the end, this should not be the end but the beginning of methodological reasoning. The four modes can continue to serve as analytical tools for analysis, and there are other useful typologies as well, as I will discuss below. But first, I wish to suggest some slight modifications to Smith’s model. A minor but important point is the name of the ethnographic mode. While Smith argues that it has much in common with certain earlier ethnographic approaches, today ethnography means something else, and labelling that mode ‘ethnographic’ seems misleading. I  suggest the term ‘spontaneous-associative mode’ instead, which seems to capture what Smith has in mind, including a hint at its problematic nature. Another point is the fact, not explicitly addressed by Smith, that the modes are not mutually exclusive. As the examples above show, the spontaneous-associative mode and the encyclopaedic mode overlap in works like Frazer’s, and studies in the phenomenology of religion (van der Leeuw, Heiler, etc.) have both encyclopaedic and morphological features. Further, the morphological mode, while being applicable to works like Eliade’s,27 seems too confining to cover the variety of classificatory approaches that exist in the study of religion. Like biological morphology, which has evolved since Goethe’s time,28 the study of religion has developed various ways of classifying religious phenomena. Smith himself substantially contributed to the discussion on classification and taxonomy,29 to which I will return below. It should also be noted that identifying certain (problematic) modes in a study need not disqualify that study altogether. The modes should be used strictly as heuristic instruments for analysing the deployed comparative method; even if the comparison has weaknesses, that study may well have other important qualities. Finally, we may want to revisit Smith’s claim that his four modes covered virtually all comparative efforts in the study of religion before 1971.30 Apart from the fact that some more recent comparative studies, including his own,31 can hardly be classified by using that model, there may also be earlier studies that are outside its scope – and less problematic.32 Qualified in this way, the model of the four modes seems useful for the analysis and evaluation of comparative studies. Apart from problems that concern the respective field of the study, such as the evolutionary mode for the study of cultural evolution,

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the modes highlight particular methodological defects that comparativists should avoid, especially an undue use of intuition (spontaneous-associative mode), superficial categorization (encyclopaedic mode), decontextualization (morphological mode) and an unfounded positing of analogies based on a broader theory (evolutionary mode).

Carter’s model: Descriptive and explanatory comparison There are other ways of identifying modes of comparison that are equally useful in analysing comparative studies. Jeffrey Carter distinguishes ‘descriptive’ and ‘explanatory’ comparison.33 The former is generally employed in the description of phenomena. To describe a thing, one compares it with its environment as well as with pre-given categories that one brings to the material. Carter’s example is a particular ritual mask which can be classified as belonging to the Yoruba people only by distinguishing it from other West African masks. And it can be described as a ‘bearded mother’ only by comparing it with what one knows about beards and mothers. This basic twin-technique, which underlies all academic description, Carter finds also in two of Smith’s four modes. The ethnographic and the encyclopaedic modes, he argues, are descriptive comparisons that hold ‘too firmly to the particular without balancing it with statements of generality’.34 Explanatory comparison, on the other hand, champions generality. By positing correspondences, it connects and combines phenomena in a generalized superstructure, a ‘meaningful whole’. This superstructure is a theory that is placed over unorganized facts and that thus organizes and ‘explains’ them. Carter lists Smith’s morphological and evolutionary modes as examples of explanatory comparison, which, in their respective ways of generalization, also fail to balance the particular and the general. In order to achieve this balance and to be able to evaluate comparative studies more accurately, Carter suggests that comparativists should be aware of the variety of logical types involved in comparisons. Applying a theory of logical types that was first developed by the philosopher Bertrand Russell, he argues that descriptive and explanatory comparisons are two different, but related, logical types. This relation is that of a member of a class (e.g. grackle) and the class (bird) or, perhaps more palpable, that of territory and map. While territory is manifest in particular and individual data (hills, lakes, forests, roads, buildings, etc.) which can be ‘described’ by showing how each differs from its environment, a map ‘explains’ by connecting and organizing the data in a specific way and with a certain purpose. The latter process becomes particularly obvious when we think of a treasure map. But recalling various types of maps may suffice: maps produced for truck drivers, cyclists, wanderers and restaurant seekers can wildly differ from each other even when they ‘explain’ one and the same territory. Criticizing a map for not being identical with the territory would be absurd. Thus, explanatory, generalizing comparisons, too, must not be criticized for the fact that they generalize but, if need be, for the inappropriate degree of their abstraction in relation to its purpose. (Just as badly produced, misleading maps exist too, of course.) Carter notes that the gap between the logical types – the gap between description and explanation, and thus the degree of generalization – can vary in size.

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Scholars must consciously determine this gap, and in this process four factors come into play: the purpose of the comparative work (instruction, prediction, exploration, etc.); the audience (scholars of religion and/or scholars beyond religious studies, students, the general public, etc.); the scale (various levels of detail and generalization); and the theory one employs at the level of explanation.35 As mentioned, each of Carter’s two modes of comparison (descriptive and explanatory) corresponds to two of Smith’s modes. Both scholars agree that each mode, deployed individually, yields unsatisfactory results. Carter, therefore, suggests a meaningful combination of his two modes that reflects an awareness of the four factors by which the scholar sensibly determines the gap between the two logical types (i.e. purpose, audience, scale and theory).

Freidenreich’s model: Similarity and difference; genus and species David Freidenreich suggests yet another model of classifying comparative studies of religion.36 He reviews selected studies that appeared in the years between the publication of Smith’s ‘In Comparison a Magic Dwells’ (1982) and of the volume A  Magic Still Dwells (2000). Freidenreich arranges the selected studies according to four categories: (1) The comparative focus on similarity. Here, scholars restrict their comparison to stressing similarities of religious phenomena or even asserting their identity. Differences are played down or not addressed at all. One example is a study of religious fundamentalists among Palestinian and Lebanese Muslims as well as Sikhs that limits itself to identifying similar features without further discussion or explanation.37 Some authors also try to explain similarities by suggesting a historical relationship (i.e. ‘influence’) or conceptual commonalities (e.g. monotheism). (2) The comparative focus on difference. Analogous to the first type, most such studies merely list differences without further analysis. One example given by Freidenreich is a study that compares Buddhism and Christianity primarily by demonstrating how they are different.38 Sometimes differences are explained by simply referring to diverging historical developments or a lack of conceptual commonalities. Both the similarity and the difference approaches are often related to religious, theological, social or political debates that take place outside the academic study of religion. For example, focusing on the similarity of two religions might help to rationalize a conflict (e.g. between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland), and it might also remind the public of the existence of potentially dangerous movements within various traditions (e.g. fundamentalist extremism). Focusing on difference can help facilitate a deeper interreligious dialogue, and it can also posit the superiority of one religion over the other. Apart from the fact that neither of these is a popular or primary objective in the academic study of religion, Freidenreich points out that a comparative study that

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stresses only the similarities or the differences produces few new conclusions and does not contribute much to a better understanding of religion more generally. (3) Works with a comparative focus on genus–species relationship ‘explore the relationship of a general aspect of religion with the similar yet distinct specific manifestations of that aspect in the religious traditions under examination’.39 Some works construct (or deconstruct) a genus (e.g. religious nationalism, myth, scripture) by comparing species found in the history of religions and identifying similarities between them. Others use a top-down approach by comparing multiple species of the same genus in order to identify how they differ from each other. One example is a study that chooses the genus ‘religious conservative women’ and examines the views of orthodox Jewish, conservative Catholic and evangelical Protestant women (three species of that genus) regarding their respective attitudes towards feminist issues.40 In general, Freidenreich’s third category has much in common with Smith’s ‘morphological mode’. The studies he mentions, however, try to avoid postulating ahistorical archetypes. Rather, the genus, as a category, appears as an abstraction that displays shared characteristics of various species. (4) The use of comparison to refocus. Studies belonging to this category use comparison to understand phenomenon A better by examining it in the light of B, that is, with a ‘refocused lens’. Blind spots in the conventional description of one religious phenomenon can be illuminated by comparing it with a similar phenomenon elsewhere. As this approach tries to learn from parallel cases to arrive at a better understanding of the case at hand, the two compared things do not appear on an equal level. Some scholars utilize an ‘imaginative approach’ which generates hypotheses rather than final conclusions. For example, the comparison of the Peoples Temple Christian Church in Jonestown, whose members committed mass suicide in 1978, with Dionysiac cults of antiquity and an early twentieth-century cargo cult in the South Pacific may generate hypotheses about the religious motives of the suicidal community without aspiring to develop a new interpretation of the Dionysiac or the cargo cults or to construct a broader genus.41

Modes with potential: The illuminative mode and the taxonomic mode The three models summarized here may suffice for capturing the most common comparative styles in the study of religion. Considering a variety of typologies is useful because the three models offer different perspectives on the comparative modes, each highlighting different things. Yet we also saw that the models clearly overlap in many respects and that even the lines between categories cannot always be neatly drawn. Other typologies of comparison exist – for example in comparative history – that provide slightly different perspectives but also overlap considerably with the typologies discussed here.42 Note that it is not the purpose of the present chapter to present the ultimate and universal typology. Rather, looking from various angles at modes of comparison helps to clarify the practical implications of choosing comparison as a

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method. This awareness enables us to avoid common pitfalls in our own comparative efforts by adopting a mode of comparison that seems responsible and fruitful. We saw that some variants of the presented modes are problematic or, at best, not helpful for advancing a better understanding of religion. The fact that some of these are still appearing today should not discourage us from trying to develop a more adequate method. Considering the criticism discussed above, the two most promising modes of comparison for the academic study of religion seem to be what I wish to call the illuminative mode and the taxonomic mode, which largely correspond to Freidenreich’s fourth and third type of comparison, respectively.43 Comparison in the illuminative mode is used for illuminating a particular historical datum, especially assumed blind spots, by drawing on other cases. Studies in this mode are asymmetric in the sense that their goal is to understand one item while the other cases merely function to illuminate that phenomenon.44 Scholars who study religion in a particular place and time use the illuminative mode of comparison regularly, often drawing on comparative data from the spatial and temporal vicinity – and mostly without bothering to discuss their comparative methodology. Using this mode of comparison in both directions may lead to what Arvind Sharma calls ‘reciprocal illumination’.45 Comparative studies conducted in the taxonomic mode classify religious items and thus contribute to the taxonomic effort in the study of religion. Such studies are symmetric, meaning that all ‘species’ get equal analytical attention in the comparative process. They are based on empirical data and do not assume an inaccessible archetype which ‘manifests’ itself in history (like studies in the morphological mode). Rather, their categories are consciously constructed abstractions that are modifiable and, as such, subject to scholarly debate. While it is rarely put in these terms, the study of religion has a strong taxonomic interest. It creates, deploys, discusses and constantly modifies metalinguistic terms and their relations to each other. Classifying a certain activity as a ‘life-cycle ritual’, a certain building as a ‘shrine’, a certain table as an ‘altar’ or a certain narrative as a ‘cosmogonic myth’ is such a normal activity for scholars of religion that some, who are critical of the taxonomic effort, do not even seem to realize that they classify too.46 Aside from the taxonomy of objects, actions or narratives, the study of concepts, structures, systems, processes, etc., also requires classification, which is expressed in more abstract terms such as ‘transmigration’, ‘hybridity’, ‘secularity’, ‘canonization’, etc. Each such term can be assigned a certain rank (e.g. class, order, family, genus or species) within a hierarchical classification and thus put in relation to other terms. Let me illustrate this by locating ‘life-cycle rituals’ in a (highly simplistic) taxonomic hierarchy. Looking upwards in the hierarchy, ‘life-cycle rituals’ can be viewed as one family within the order of ‘rituals’, which, in turn, form just one order in the class of ‘religious actions’. Looking downwards, within the family of life-cycle rituals several genera can be distinguished, such as birth, maturity, reproduction and death rituals. Within each of these, a large number of species in the history of religions can be identified. We may rarely see it this way, but the classifying work in the study of religion appears to be not unlike that of biology, the discipline with the most sophisticated and advanced systems of taxonomy. Serious reservations against classification expressed by postcolonial scholars because of its potential for exercising power may certainly cause modifications of existing categories, but can hardly result in the rejection of

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classification altogether, which would be, to quote Smith, no less than a ‘rejection of thought’.47 Contemporary biological taxonomists, too, are aware of potential pitfalls of classification, such as the risks of relying on inflexible categories and of underestimating convergence and change over time. They therefore stress the required flexibility and non-static nature of scientific taxonomies.48 Exploring the forms, the role and the value of taxonomy in the study of religion and also the usefulness of discussions in other disciplines like biology (or linguistics, or archaeology, or library science) is an important, yet rarely addressed task. Jonathan Z. Smith provided a good starting point in his short, but rich, article on classification.49 Since any classifying act is comparative – whenever we put one item in relation to another item or a category, we compare – comparison is the very basis of the taxonomic effort. Thus, the term ‘taxonomic mode’ seems appropriate for comparative studies whose primary purpose is to create, deconstruct and reconstruct, or refine and improve classifications in the study of religion. To be sure, suggesting the category ‘taxonomic mode’ does not answer the deeper epistemological questions that J. Z. Smith raises, and on the grounds of which he rejects the morphological mode: Where do the categories originate from? How can I know that two items may be selected for a fruitful comparison before actually comparing them? ‘How am I to apply what the one thing shows me to the case of two things?’ Clearly, these are important questions that need further discussion and exploration. For the purpose of the present chapter, it may suffice to observe that at least in one respect, the taxonomic work in the study of religion has been successful: classifications, some of them sophisticated, keep being suggested and are critically discussed within the academic discourse of the discipline. Some of these classifications are more explicitly theorized than others, but it is also important to note that the act of theorizing itself does not guarantee sophistication. Some great scholars have suggested well-respected classifications with little explicit theoretical justification. But, surely, adopting a pragmatic approach that grants the disciplinary discourse some value does not absolve us from the responsibility for simultaneously developing a more robust epistemological foundation for the comparative method.50 Finally, while the terms ‘illuminative mode’ and ‘taxonomic mode’ may be new, the scholarly activities that they describe are not.51 As mentioned above, the illuminative mode is fairly common for comparisons within one historical context, but some studies also draw on more distant cases to illuminate the item at hand.52 Comparisons conducted in the taxonomic mode, especially book-length studies, are sparser, but their number has started to grow again.53

Conclusion What can an aspiring comparativist learn from this pondering over modes of comparison? First, the discussion has shown that an overemphasis on particularity seems just as unsatisfactory as an overemphasis on generalization. Using Carter’s terms, the spontaneous-associative (or ethnographic) and encyclopaedic modes, in their pure forms, ‘describe’ too much and ‘explain’ too little – as does any study that solely focuses on differences. The reverse is true for the morphological and evolutionary modes,

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and for any study that solely emphasizes similarities – such approaches ‘explain’ too much and lack proper attention to detail and context. In other words, restricting oneself to studying particular spots in the ‘territory’ and abandoning the ‘map’ means forgoing generalization altogether and failing to contribute to a general theorizing of religion. Conversely, producing a map without having thoroughly studied the territory seems like a rather futile endeavour too. Perhaps the most fundamental conclusion we can draw from the typologies discussed above is that there is a crucial need for a meaningful combination of contextual, empirical work, on the one hand, and some level of classification and generalization, on the other. Such a combination still allows for various degrees of generalization. Indeed, classifying modes of comparison not only helps to identify problematic approaches; it also reveals diversity among the more promising ones. This diversity can be mapped onto a scale that measures the degree of generalization, with the illuminative mode being located towards the ‘lower’ end and the taxonomic mode towards the ‘higher’ end. Clearly, to be useful for the academic study of religion, a comparative study must generalize, but the degree of generalization depends on the specific goals of the individual study. The illuminative mode generalizes to a degree that appears useful for illuminating the item at hand (e.g. studying a particular ‘baptism’ practice in light of other ‘initiation rituals’). For some studies in the taxonomic mode, the genus and the species may be narrowly defined (e.g. ‘baptism’ in two Christian parishes), while others may choose a higher degree of generalization (e.g. ‘initiation rituals’ in Christianity, Judaism and Hinduism). Put in terms of biological taxonomy, the scope of addressing the classificatory ranks (class, order, family, genus, species, etc.) can be configured in many different ways. Thus, in this perspective, the distinction between taxonomic and illuminative mode is gradual, not substantial. The purpose of this chapter was to discuss criteria for assessing and designing comparative studies. Asking in which mode(s) of comparison an existing study was conducted helps to highlight its strengths and weaknesses with regard to the comparative method. And reflecting upon the modes while designing one’s own comparative study may result in sounder methodical work. Besides modes, as I plan to discuss elsewhere, other criteria may be defined to enrich the methodological analysis of comparisons: the scope of the study, which determines its temporal and spatial parameters; its scale, which determines whether it compares at a micro, meso or macro level; the various steps in its comparative process; and its goal and disciplinary orientation. By exploring such categories, we may not be able to formulate firm ‘rules for the production of comparisons’, which Smith found missing, but we may at least develop a methodological framework that helps to analyse and refine the comparative method in the study of religion.

Notes 1 This chapter was written during my stay as a visiting fellow at the Käte Hamburger Kolleg ‘Dynamics in the History of Religion’ at Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany. I am grateful for the support. 2 This debate is complex and certainly needs to be studied carefully, with some distance, at some time in the future. It features different visions of what the study of

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3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

22 23 24

25 26 27 28 29

Interreligious Comparisons in Religious Studies and Theology religion is about, different philosophical, epistemological and ethical approaches, and different disciplinary orientations, all of which will need to be sorted out. In its darker moments, it also features heavy polemics, low-quality empirical scholarship, superficial and unfair analyses of older studies that were produced by scholars who are too dead to reciprocate, and, of course, ordinary academic politics and power play. To get an impression of the breadth and depth of the debate, see the introduction and the contributions to Patton and Ray 2000; Segal 2001, 2006. Smith 1982a: 21. Smith 1978. Ibid.: 248–9. For example van der Leeuw 1967; Heiler 1961. Smith 1978: 252; Frazer 1894: 16. Smith 1978: 253. Ibid.: 257. Eliade 1958. Heiler 1961. Van der Leeuw 1967. Eliade 1958: 38–40. Ibid.: 40–111. Smith 1978: 259. Smith 1978: 261–2; Tylor 1958: 6. Smith 1982a. Patton and Ray 2000: 3. Ibid.: 3. The quotation is from Smith 1982a: 21. ‘We are left with a dilemma that can be stated in stark form, is comparison an enterprise of magic or science?’ (Smith 1982a: 22). Smith, too, is very critical of Frazer, both in ‘Adde Parvum …,’ as seen above, and in his analysis of The Golden Bough (Smith 1973). This alone should raise doubts as to whether he wishes to claim, without further discussion, that Frazer’s theory of magic is so established and undisputed that it can even be transferred and applied to academic methodology. Rather, it appears as a playful, or even sarcastic, analogy that is meant to make a point, as Smith’s short and easy transition indicates too: ‘It requires but a small leap to relate these considerations of the Laws of Association in memory and magic to the enterprise of comparison in the human sciences’ (Smith 1982a: 21). Smith 1982a: 22. Ibid.: 21. In fact, the whole discussion of this analogy covers only two and a half pages towards the beginning of his sixteen-page article. The remainder includes a discussion of the four modes and how they may be applied to three more recent approaches. Thus, in Patton and Ray’s summary quoted above, the actual bulk of Smith’s article is, quite disproportionately, summarized only in the final short sentence. The reference to magic rarely shows up again in the article. Smith 1982a: 35. The quotation is from Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 215. Smith 1982a: 24f. See Smith’s careful analysis of Goethe’s influence on Eliade in Smith 2000b, c. See, for example, LaPensee 2009; Aberdein 2009; Cain 2014. After (Goethe’s) ‘idealistic morphology’, approaches of ‘comparative’, ‘functional’ and ‘experimental morphology’ have been developed. Smith 2000a, 2004.

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30 Smith says in ‘In Comparison a Magic Dwells’ that this paradigm was ‘based on a survey of some 2500 years of the literature of anthropological comparison’ (Smith 1982a: 22). 31 For example Smith 1982b. 32 See, for example, the early work of Joachim Wach, who, in his book Religionswissenschaft, lays out the programme for a ‘systematic study of religion’ that is empirical, inductive and based on comparison (Wach 1924: 165–92). His comparative method is sensitive to context and non-essentialistic. He also mentions the benefits of morphology in category formation, but in a much less idealistic way than Eliade will do later and with reference to the typological work of Max Weber (189). A reason why this book, which is also significantly different from Wach’s later work, is rarely cited in the English-speaking world may be its rather inelegant and at times misleading English translation, Introduction to the History of Religions (New York: Macmillan, 1988). 33 Carter 1998. 34 Ibid.: 136. 35 Ibid.: 146. 36 Freidenreich 2004. 37 Sahliyeh 1995. 38 Lefebure 1993. 39 Freidenreich 2004: 88. 40 Manning 1999. 41 See Smith 1982b. 42 See Skocpol and Somers 1980, who distinguish three types: comparative history as ‘parallel demonstration of theory’, as ‘the contrast of contexts’ and as ‘macro-causal analysis’. Tilly 1984 speaks of four types: the individualizing, the universalizing, the variation-finding and the encompassing. See also Braembussche 1989; Kaelble 1999: 25–47; Green 2004; Elliott 2012: 168–95; and also the useful historical survey of comparative history in Kedar 2009. 43 In some sense, they also reflect, yet complicate, Kaelble’s general distinction of individualizing and generalizing comparison in comparative history, which goes back to Marc Bloch (1928). Individualizing comparison focuses on differences between individual comparands, generalizing comparison on discovering common rules in human societies (Kaelble 1999: 26–30). 44 The term ‘asymmetrical comparison’ is used in the same way by comparative historian Jürgen Kocka. He explains: By asymmetrical comparison I mean a form of comparison that is centrally interested in describing, explaining, and interpreting one case, usually one’s own case, by contrasting it with others, while the other case or cases are not brought in for their own sake, and are usually not fully researched but only sketched as a kind of background. The questions one asks and the viewpoints one has are derived from case A and transferred to case B. Case B is instrumentalized for insights into case A, but not studied in its own right. One of Kocka’s examples of asymmetrical comparison is Max Weber’s work on the rise of Western institutions and capitalism by contrasting it with other societies and religions (Kocka 2009: 33f). 45 Sharma 2005. 46 According to Smith’s observation, many students of religion, with their exaggerated ethos of localism and suspicion of generalization, tend to treat their subject in an Adamic fashion

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Interreligious Comparisons in Religious Studies and Theology as if they were naming entities, often exacerbated by their insistence on employing native terminology which emphasizes the absolute particularity of the data in question rather than deploying a translation language which already suggests that the data are part of a larger, encompassing category. … Such approaches give every appearance of rejecting explicit taxonomic enterprises, although the use of geographical or linguistic nomenclatures, the deployment of categories such as ‘living religions,’ ‘monotheism’ or ‘mysticism’ suggest the presence of implicit taxonomies (Smith 2000a: 36).

47 ‘For many in the study of religion, when not asserting some ethos of uniqueness and locality (J.Z. Smith 1990; Moran 1992), classification is seen as an instrument of power (Foucault 1970), a point clearly illustrated in that rich series of studies of the Indian Census (Appadurai 1996) that build on the pioneering researches of B.S. Cohn (1987). But this is to present the study of religion with an occasion for rectification, not resignation or renunciation. For the rejection of classificatory interest is, at the same time, a rejection of thought’ (Smith 2000a: 43). The wellknown fact that taxonomic systems are not ‘objective’ or independent of the scholars’ cultural context, as Lincoln points out (Lincoln 1989: 7f.), should certainly not result in trying to avoid classification altogether. 48 For a recent survey of biological taxonomy, see Cain 2014, from which I quote just a few remarks: The goal of classifying is to place an organism into an already existing group or to create a new group for it, based on its resemblances to and differences from known forms. To this end, a hierarchy of categories is recognized. … The number of ranks that is recognized in a hierarchy is a matter of widely varying opinion. … The number of ranks is expanded as necessary by using the prefixes sub-, super-, and infra- (e.g., subclass, superorder) and by adding other intermediate ranks, such as brigade, cohort, section, or tribe. … It cannot be too strongly emphasized that there are no explicit taxonomic characters that define a phylum, class, order, or other rank. A feature characteristic of one phylum may vary in another phylum among closely related members of a class, order, or some lower group. … An order in one authority’s classification may be a superorder or class in another. Most of the established classifications of the better known groups result from a general consensus among practicing taxonomists. It follows that no complete definition of a group can be made until the group itself has been recognized, after which its common (or most usual) characters can be formally stated. As further information is obtained about the group, it is subject to taxonomic revision. … Some taxonomists insist that in an evolutionary classification every group must be truly monophyletic – that is, spring from a single ancestral stock. Usually, this cannot be ascertained; the fossil material is insufficient or, as with many soft-bodied forms, nonexistent. Definite convergence must not be overlooked if it can be detected. How far groups should be split to show phyletic lines and what rank should be given each group and subgroup thus are matters for reasonable compromise. … If sufficient fossils are available, the resulting classification may be consonant with what is known about the evolution of the group or with what is merely conjectured. In reality, many classifications are conjectural or tendentious, and simpler and more natural ones might be closer to the available facts. See also Aberdein 2009.

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49 Smith 2000a. 50 One practical solution to the apparently inescapable conundrum that the selection of comparands needs foreknowledge about their comparability may be a reciprocal procedure in which examining and narrowing down both potential sources and thematic categories inform each other until they are determined for that particular study. Making the selection criteria transparent by documenting this process enables the scholarly community to properly evaluate its plausibility. This needs further exploration, but for an outline and example, see Freiberger 2009: 33–7. 51 Nor are they mutually exclusive, as will be argued below. 52 See, for example, Schopen’s use of Peter Brown’s work on the cult of the saints in Mediterranean late antiquity for his study of Indian Buddhism (Schopen 1997) or Patton’s study of Indian, Zoroastrian and Norse mythology to understand worshipping gods depicted on ancient Greek vases (Patton 2009). See also Bynum 2014 on studying the ritual treatment of Hindu statues for a better understanding of the Christian Eucharist. 53 Recent examples are the studies by McClymond on sacrifice (2008), Shushan on conceptions of the afterlife (2009), Bornet on rites of hospitality (2010), Freidenreich on identity formation through food restrictions (2011), and my own study on ascetic discourses (Freiberger 2009; see also Freiberger 2010).

References Aberdein, Andrew (2009), ‘Biology: Classification Systems’, in K. Lee Lerner and Brenda Wilmoth Lerner (eds), Scientific Thought: In Context, 167–76, Detroit: Gale. Bloch, Marc (1928), ‘Pour une histoire comparée des sociétés européennes’, Revue de synthèse historique, 46: 15–50. Bornet, Philippe (2010), Rites et pratiques de l’hospitalité: Mondes juifs et indiens anciens, Stuttgart: Steiner. Braembussche, A. A. van den (1989), ‘Historical Explanation and Comparative Method: Towards a Theory of the History of Society’, History and Theory, 28 (1): 1–24. Bynum, Carolyn W. (2014), ‘Avoiding the Tyranny of Morphology; or, Why Compare?’, History of Religions, 53 (4): 341–68. Cain, Arthur J. (2014), ‘Taxonomy’, Encyclopædia Britannica. Available online: www. britannica.com s.v. (last updated 26 August 2014; accessed 4 January 2015). Carter, Jeffrey R. (1998), ‘Description Is Not Explanation: A Methodology of Comparison’, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, 10: 133–48. Eliade, Mircea (1958), Patterns in Comparative Religion, New York: Sheed & Ward. Elliott, John H. (2012), History in the Making, New Haven: Yale University Press. Frazer, James George (1894), ‘Taboo’, Encyclopædia Britannica, 9th edn, Vol. 23, 16–18, Chicago: Werner. Freiberger, Oliver (2009), Der Askesediskurs in der Religionsgeschichte: Eine vergleichende Untersuchung brahmanischer und frühchristlicher Texte (Studies in Oriental Religions 57), Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz. Freiberger, Oliver (2010), ‘Locating the Ascetic’s Habitat: Toward a Micro-Comparison of Religious Discourses’, History of Religions, 50 (2): 162–92. Freidenreich, David M. (2004), ‘Comparisons Compared: A Methodological Survey of Comparisons of Religion from “A Magic Dwells” to A Magic Still Dwells’, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, 16: 80–101.

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Freidenreich, David M. (2011), Foreigners and Their Food: Constructing Otherness in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic Law, Berkeley: University of California Press. Green, Nancy L. (2004), ‘Forms of Comparison’, in Deborah Cohen and Maura O’Connor (eds), Comparison and History: Europe in Cross-National Perspective, 41–56, New York: Routledge. Heiler, Friedrich (1961), Erscheinungsformen und Wesen der Religion, Stuttgart: Kohlhammer. Kaelble, Hartmut (1999), Der historische Vergleich: Eine Einführung zum 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, Frankfurt am Main: Campus-Verlag. Kedar, Benjamin Z. (2009), ‘Outlines for Comparative History Proposed by Practicing Historians’, in Benjamin Z. Kedar (ed.), Explorations in Comparative History, 1–28, Jerusalem: Hebrew University Magnes Press. Kocka, Jürgen (2009), ‘Comparative History: Methodology and Ethos’, in Benjamin Z. Kedar (ed.), Explorations in Comparative History, 29–35, Jerusalem: Hebrew University Magnes Press. LaPensee, Kenneth T. (2009), ‘Biology: Comparative Morphology: Studies of Structure and Function’, in K. Lee Lerner and Brenda Wilmoth (eds), Scientific Thought: In Context, 177–9, Lerner, Detroit: Gale. Leeuw, van der, Gerardus (1967), Religion in Essence and Manifestation, Gloucester, Massachusetts: Peter Smith. [Translation of Phänomenologie der Religion, first published in 1933.] Lefebure, Leo D. (1993), The Buddha and the Christ: Explorations in Buddhist and Christian Dialogue, Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books. Lincoln, Bruce (1989), Discourse and the Construction of Society: Comparative Studies of Myth, Ritual, and Classification, New York: Oxford University Press. Manning, Christel J. (1999), God Gave Us the Right: Conservative Catholic, Evangelical Protestant, and Orthodox Jewish Women Grapple with Feminism, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. McClymond, Kathryn (2008), Beyond Sacred Violence: A Comparative Study of Sacrifice, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Patton, Kimberley C. (2009), Religion of the Gods: Ritual, Paradox, and Reflexivity, New York: Oxford University Press. Patton, Kimberley C. and Benjamin C. Ray (2000), ‘Introduction’, in Kimberley C. Patton and Benjamin Ray (eds), A Magic Still Dwells: Comparative Religion in the Postmodern Age, 1–19, Berkeley: University of California Press. Sahliyeh, Emile (1995), ‘Religious Fundamentalisms Compared: Palestinian Islamists, Militant Lebanese Shi‘ites, and Radical Sikhs’, in Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby (eds), Fundamentalisms Comprehended, 135–152, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Schopen, Gregory, ed. (1997), ‘On Monks, Nuns, and “Vulgar” Practices: The Introduction of the Image Cult into Indian Buddhism’, in Bones, Stones, and Buddhist Monks: Collected Papers on the Archaeology, Epigraphy, and Texts of Monastic Buddhism in India, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Segal, Robert A. (2001), ‘In Defense of the Comparative Method’, Numen, 48: 339–73. Segal, Robert A. (2006), ‘Postmodernism and the Comparative Method’, in Thomas A. Idinopulos, Brian C. Wilson and James C. Hanges (eds), Comparing Religions: Possibilities and Perils? 249–270, Leiden: Brill. Sharma, Arvind (2005), Religious Studies and Comparative Methodology: The Case for Reciprocal Illumination, Albany: State University of New York Press. Shushan, Gregory (2009), Conceptions of the Afterlife in Early Civilizations: Universalism, Constructivism and Near-Death Experience, London: Continuum.

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Skocpol, Theda and Margaret Somers (1980), ‘The Uses of Comparative History in Macrosocial Inquiry’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 22 (2): 174–97. Smith, Jonathan Z. (1973), ‘When the Bough Breaks’, History of Religions, 12 (4): 342–71. Smith, Jonathan Z. (1978), ‘Adde Parvum Parvo Magnus Acervus Erit’, in Jonathan Z. Smith (ed.), Map Is Not Territory: Studies in the History of Religions, 240–64, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Smith, Jonathan Z., ed. (1982a), ‘In Comparison a Magic Dwells’, in Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown, 19–35, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Smith, Jonathan Z., ed. (1982b), ‘The Devil in Mr. Jones’, in Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown, 102–20, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Smith, Jonathan Z. (2000a), ‘Classification’, in Willi Braun and Russell T. McCutcheon (eds), Guide to the Study of Religion, 35–44, London: Cassell. Smith, Jonathan Z. (2000b), ‘Acknowledgments: Morphology and History in Mircea Eliade’s Patterns in Comparative Religion (1949–1999), Part 1: The Work and Its Contexts’, History of Religions, 39 (4): 315–31. Smith, Jonathan Z. (2000c), ‘Acknowledgments: Morphology and History in Mircea Eliade’s Patterns in Comparative Religion (1949–1999), Part 2: The Texture of the Work’, History of Religions, 39 (4): 332–51. Smith, Jonathan Z., ed. (2004), ‘A Matter of Class: Taxonomies of Religion’, in Relating Religion: Essays in the Study of Religion, 160–78, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Tilly, Charles (1984), Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons, New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Tylor, Edward B. (1958), The Origins of Culture, New York: Harper (originally published as vol. 1 of Primitive Culture, London: Murray, 1871). Wach, Joachim (1924), Religionswissenschaft: Prolegomena zu ihrer wissenschaftstheoretischen Grundlegung, Leipzig: J.C. Hinrichs’sche Buchhandlung.

4

Comparison as a Necessary Evil: Examples from Indian and Jewish Worlds Philippe Bornet

Introduction In what is often considered the founding text of the study of religions as an academic discipline, Introduction to the Science of Religion (1873), Friedrich Max Müller (1823– 1900) included an essay on ‘False Analogies in Comparative Theology’.1 He writes in the introduction: Very different from the real similarities that can be discovered in nearly all the religions of the world, and which, owing to their deeply human character, in no way necessitate the admission that one religion borrowed from the other, are those minute coincidences between the Jewish and the Pagan religions which have so often been discussed by learned theologians.2

He goes on to survey different instances of comparison that he perceived as paradigmatic of the method’s risks or ‘evils’. Müller takes his examples from the history of studies on India, emphasizing in particular the tendency to look for Christian motives, such as the Trinity or biblical names, in the Indian material. He traces this tendency to Christian missionaries, looking for both proof of a primeval revelation that would have spread all over the world (in order to preserve a biblical view of global history) and arguments for evangelizing. Müller insists that such a method is both inadequate and ideologically dangerous,3 and criticizes scholars from the Asiatic Society of Calcutta for perpetuating this type of highly compromised comparison.4 Adding further examples, Müller targets more recent works guilty of the same ‘superficiality’, such as the book Tree and Serpent Worship (1868) by James Fergusson (1808–86). Its author, a specialist of architecture who spent a major part of his life in India, brings together comparative evidence for a ritual centred on trees and snakes that would have spread in ancient times from India to different regions, as far as Scandinavia.5 A last example is Louis Jacolliot’s (1837–90) popular study on Jesus in India, La Bible dans l’Inde, vie de Iezeus Christna (1869), in which the author enumerates similarities in names (e.g. Christus and Kṛṣṇa) and in narrative motifs (Isaac’s vs. Śunaśepa’s sacrifice) to suggest real historical contacts. Jacolliot concluded that a number of biblical stories,

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from both the Hebraic Bible and the New Testament, were nothing more than borrowings from Indian mythology. All the examples put forward by Müller mirror and reinforce the scholar’s own convictions by substantially deforming (or, in some cases, inventing) the compared data, inscribing it in a grand diffusionist scheme. As expected, Müller is extremely virulent against such approaches, and writes: But when coincidences between different religions and mythologies are searched out simply in support of preconceived theories, whether by the friends or enemies of religion, the sense of truth, the very life of all science, is sacrificed, and serious mischief will follow without fail.6

At the same time, in the same collection of essays, Müller declares that comparison is essential for Religionswissenschaft as an academic discipline, transposing Goethe’s famous formula about the knowledge of languages to religions: ‘Knowing one was knowing none.’7 In the first ‘lecture on the science of religion’, comparison is recognized as an essential operation that characterizes ‘scientific knowledge’ in general: ‘All higher knowledge’, writes Müller, ‘is acquired by comparison, and rests on comparison.’8 Of course, by modern standards, Müller’s own comparative approach is equally problematic for a number of reasons, not least because it still operates from within a Christian-centric model that informs his classification of religions and his categories.9 However, it is remarkable that Müller felt the need to legitimize his method by simultaneously warning against the risks of comparison. Since then, the concern of comparison remained both vital for the study of religions (because without comparison, no generalization or theorization is possible) and controversial (because comparison can easily lead the scholar astray), to the point that one might wonder whether this very debate is one of the distinctive traits of the discipline. The present contribution first briefly identifies distinct conceptions of comparison in the study of religions, before outlining recent debates and assessing possible uses of comparison through an actual example. We conclude with a few insights about what comparative works can yield for the study of religions in the future.

Comparing comparisons Genealogical comparison Roughly following Jonathan Z. Smith’s categorization, it is possible to distinguish two fundamentally distinct modes of comparison: analogical and genealogical.10 In the genealogical mode – seen, for example, in the background of Fergusson’s work – compared elements are considered to be genetically derived one from another, and the focus is on similarities within a common historical framework. The rationale involves processes of diffusion, borrowing and transmission of cultural or religious traits from one culture to another and/or from one period to another. In the study of religions, this is the comparison of biblical scholars, linguists such as Müller himself, Indo-Europeanists (Georges Dumézil) and most evolutionist thinkers (Edward B. Tylor).

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With this form, at least three major risks are immediately perceptible. First is the tendency to systematically interpret similarities in terms of cultural (or biological) diffusion, whereas similar anthropological, religious, cultural and literary traits can very well appear independent from each other. A second risk consists of positing a theory of history privileging Culture A as the exclusive source of influences observed in Culture B – as in the cases of Fergusson or Jacolliot, with reified conceptions of cultures and unidirectional diffusion. This view often mirrors a concern with attaching a prestigious ‘pedigree’ to a specific cultural or political artefact.11 The third risk is to privilege similarities and discard divergences, because they do not reveal any ‘influence’ and hence are considered of lesser significance. This mode of comparison remains, however, central to undermining a conception of cultures as closed worlds by focusing on the flows that connect and shape them. Examples include comparative analysis of Greek and Near Eastern epics, shedding light on the various influences that shaped The Iliad and The Odyssey,12 or, more recently, historical works interested in ‘entangled’ or ‘connected histories’, such as Sidney Mintz’s cultural history of sugar13 or Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s study of millenarisms at the end of the Middle Ages in the Eurasian area.14 An attention to processes of interaction (as opposed to unidirectional flows or evolutions) and an equal treatment of sources from both contexts can successfully limit the aforementioned risks.

Analogical (or homological) comparison Another mode of comparison is analogical, in which elements that are not geographically and historically related are brought into relation. Most works attempting to develop a ‘morphology of religion’, like those of Cornelis Tiele, Gerardus van der Leeuw, Mircea Eliade and other phenomenologists of religion, rely on this type of comparison. They find in historical data instances of general categories, be it ‘mystic prayer’, ‘sacred’ or ‘religious feeling’ – as witnessed in Eliade’s Patterns in Comparative Religion (1958). In some form, the strong version of this approach survives today in certain cognitive studies of religion, in the works of Harvey Whitehouse or Ilkka Pyysiäinen, for example, who look for similar religious traits and experiences – rooted this time in human nature – in the most varied of sociocultural contexts.15 A similar comparative scheme is at work in ‘reductionist’ approaches, such as those of Durkheim, Freud or, more recently, Boyer, which rely on a universal and trans-historical point of comparison from which ‘religion’ is thought to originate, be it society, the human psyche or the brain. Of course, the risks of such an approach are many. First, there is the question of the ontological status of the tertium comparationis; to what degree can it be considered a universal datum that has ‘trans-historical’ value – especially given the highly idiosyncratic (Euro- and Christian-centric) history of the concepts related to ‘religion’?16 Second, related to this, the scholar’s own interests have often failed to be recognized as being necessarily reflected in the abstract categories, resulting in the creation of implicit, Eurocentric taxonomies. An extreme example of this bias is Tiele’s taxonomy of religions, in which religions are classified according to an essentially Christian, Troeltschian categorization.17 Third is the decontextualization of compared items, which are frequently extracted from their respective historical and discursive

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contexts, especially if a large number of items are being compared. Fourth and finally, the search for similarities – or, rather, identities – between the compared entities can lead to a tautological methodology, in which instances of the tertium comparationis are systematically brought to light in the compared contexts, focusing on examples ‘which work’ and strategically forgetting those which do not, concurrently obliterating the contextual, discursive specificities of each case.

Recent approaches Recent approaches have tried to address the issues mentioned under each mode of comparison, discussing in particular the nature of comparative categories and the goal of comparison as an intellectual operation. To avoid essentializing comparative categories, a strategy may consist of conceiving comparative categories such as ‘religion’, ‘ritual’ or ‘myth’, after a Wittgensteinian ‘family resemblance’. This is the method employed by Benson Saler in his Conceptualizing Religion (1993), where he suggests defining the category of ‘religion’ in a polythetic way for use in anthropological studies – thus eschewing the need for a permanent or universal comparative category.18 This strategy might seem appealing at first, but is not without its own limits: according to Saler, the tertium comparationis is a polythetic ‘prototype’, conceptualized ‘in terms of a pool of elements that more or less tend to occur together in the best exemplars of the category’ (225). Looking for ‘exemplars’ of the category in the actual data, Saler seems to imply that the contexts studied by the scholar will present characteristics allowing an easy categorization in the terms of one of the prototype’s possible combinations. This top-down view is, therefore, not entirely devoid of normativity. Moreover, Saler insists that the prototype is conceived in reference to Western religions, essentially accepting, and even owning, the ethnocentrism of the method – a move that is understandable and pragmatic, but that might also sound like a circular (and resolutely pessimistic) strategy.19 Finally, Saler focuses almost exclusively on the concept of ‘religion’, thus creating boundaries with non-religious domains and suggesting that this is the most productive comparative entry for a comparative study of religions, which may or may not be the case, depending on the context of a given study. A whole issue of the journal Method and Theory in the Study of Religion (1996) focused on the question of a ‘new comparativism’ as theorized by the American scholar William Paden, consisting of morphological comparisons between ‘patterns of religion’. Patterns are themes (purity, mythic time), generic topics (power, authority), classes of religious practices (rites of passage), specific institutions (Passover), common functions (maintaining order), characteristic religious forms (relics), etc. that do not presuppose any universal religious element.20 Paden, moreover, insists that patterns are freely chosen and that the comparative process entails interaction between theoretical and empirical levels. As he writes, somewhat provocatively, When I hear a Sioux spokesman say that the buffalo are not gone because they can never die, I hear a stream of associations like, ‘there was never a time when He was not,’ or ‘the holy cemetery of Najaf has always existed,’ or ‘the Vedas (or the Qu’ran

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Interreligious Comparisons in Religious Studies and Theology or the Torah) are the eternal blueprint of the world,’ or, according to President Bush, ‘Freedom is given by God from the beginning.’ No one would say these are all the same, but they all do bear a point of resemblance relative to the theme of mythicizing sacred objects by understanding them as existing at the foundation of the world. They are all something ‘we’ve seen before.’21

In response to Paden’s exposition, Donald Wiebe observes that this approach is mostly constructed in opposition to an Eliadean concept of comparison – a critique that does not do much more than rehearse Edmund Leach’s criticism of Eliade in the 1960s.22 Moreover, Paden maintains that comparing patterns permits general explanations about religion, but he does not exactly explain how to go from the specific to the general.23 Related to this, one might add the concern that Paden does not indicate where his patterns come from, and tends to isolate them from their context of occurrence without paying much attention to the specific situations in which they appear – a factor that can influence their meaning radically. At a higher level of abstraction, the historian of religions J. Z. Smith sees in the comparative categories mere scholarly construction and, in comparison, an intellectual operation that is crucial for theorizing. ‘Map is not territory’,24 he argued, meaning that the academic study of religion needs an analytical vocabulary – a vocabulary built and revised through comparison-to which is assigned an essentially heuristic purpose. In a personal interview a few years – Smith still insisted that comparison is to historians of religions what experimentation is to researchers in biology or chemistry: For someone in the human sciences, comparison is our form of experimentation. We are not allowed to experiment on human beings, fortunately. But if I am right, what we do with comparison is to take something out of its place, something else out of its place, and put them in a place that is in our head. That results in disturbing the environment of that thing, as the scientists do when they alter the environment in an experiment. They torture the elements so as to make them speak. Our way to doing it is by putting them by neighbors that they never intended to have, and to see what happens.25

For such a project, it is by no means necessary to postulate reified comparative categories that are universal, such as ‘religion’, ‘magic’, ‘sacred’ or ‘mysticism’. On the contrary, the tertium comparationis is elaborated – or imagined – specifically for the purpose of the research. However, comparing ‘to see what happens’, in Smith’s words, is certainly not satisfactory: specific intellectual goals need to be assigned to the comparative work. Equally unsatisfying, or partially so, is Smith’s famous and provocative claim that ‘religion is only the product of the scholar’s imagination’.26 If many contemporary scholars of religion have uncritically endorsed this claim (perhaps in haste to oppose an Eliadean concept of religion), it is crucial to stress that the scholar is not imagining his or her object out of nothing, and that there is no possible tabula rasa. The object is, rather, carefully constructed, taking into account the history of the concept’s uses as well as its inscription in pre-existing semantic networks – it is more about rejoining a debate than imagining an object. While these theoretical insights might sound promising, it is more complicated to examine how exactly comparison should work in practice: by one scholar or a team of

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specialists? Focusing on one or several traditions? Comparing what (texts, practices, images, etc.)? And expecting what results exactly? Theoretical models of comparison need to be actually tested with examples – otherwise, the theory remains just theory and is virtually useless. To get a closer view of the problems, intellectual operations and possible results entailed by a study comparing independent corpuses, I would like to present a few elements from recent work.27

Comparison in practice: Hospitality in rabbinic and brahmanical normative literature Building a comparison This study starts with a working definition of the category in the role of tertium comparationis. The present case focuses on the notion of ‘hospitality’, a notion that is not immediately or obviously related to ‘religion’ but that intersects with ‘religious’ and ‘ritual’ issues in significant ways. Hospitality is defined as ‘the temporary reception of a guest in a home’, with an intended indetermination concerning the notions of ‘temporary’, ‘guest’ and ‘home’, which can take different meanings depending on the sources. A recurring question is, then, why, under one set of circumstances, a text encourages hospitality, whereas under another set of circumstances, hospitality is perceived as a concern. The topic is studied in normative texts that stem from two historically and geographically disconnected traditions: rabbinic Judaism and brahmanism. For the rabbinic context, the focus is primarily on the Mishna, but also on the rich discussions recorded in later rabbinic literature, in the Palestinian and Babylonian Gemaras. To this are added the short tractates dealing with etiquette and ‘decorum’, mainly Derekh Erets Rabbah and Derekh Eretz Zuta. The date of composition of those texts is highly debated: for the Mishna, the terminus post quem is probably around the beginning of the third century. The other texts can be situated in a timespan of approximately 200–600 ce. On the brahmanic side, the work deals with dharma tractates – that is, the various dharmasūtra and dharmaśāstra, dated between 300 bce and 300 ce, with more recent additions. All authored within brahmanical circles, the texts are originally ‘school literature’ belonging to specific Vedic schools, but seem to have progressively made their way into broader audiences. Given this corpus, the following methodological considerations guided the work: 1. The two compared contexts (A and B) are concrete arrays of sources (in the present case, written texts, but they could very well be pictures or oral testimonies) that are studied independently, respecting their inner logic, and are given an equal attention. The work is not about comparing religions or traditions, but, rather, discourses: documents stemming from one group and addressing (and attempting to produce an effect on) a specific audience. 2. Such a corpus removes any ambiguity concerning the interpretation of similarities or differences: it is taken for granted that the two contexts are not genetically related and that the comparison is ‘analogical’. Methodologically,

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the study of elements belonging to traditions that diverge significantly from a Christian (or Protestant) model of religion provide leverage to question certain ‘traditional’ assumptions in the study of religions, making this choice somewhat strategic – much as Barbara Holdrege argued in her book Veda and Torah.28 3. All sources belong to a similar literary genre: they teach proper modes of behaviour, not only in ritual matters but also for tasks carried out in everyday life, including hospitality, which is specifically conceptualized as such;29 they describe a social world as it should be, and not as it actually was.30

Hospitality: Practices and discourses A passage from the Babylonian Talmud speaks in detail about hospitality received by Sages who travelled to and were hosted by a local community. The text apparently traces back to tannaitic/Roman imperial times31 and is formulated in the post Bar-Kokhba context of a ‘synod’, gathering the most eminent figures of rabbinic Judaism.32 The passage is composed in the form of a ‘farewell benediction’ from the rabbis, thanking their hosts before departing, proceeding with a series of a fortiori arguments (qal wa-h.omer): the text first associates a mitigated example of hospitality with a positive result before listing the consequences of a generous demonstration of hospitality, such as the one shown by the locals to the tannaim. For example: 1 R. Eliezer, the son of R. Yose the Galilean33 began to speak in praise of hospitality (´akhsanya), expounding the verse: ‘And the Lord blessed Oved-Edom and all his house … because of the Ark of God’.34 Have we not here an argument a fortiori? If such was the reward for attending to the ark which did not eat or drink, but before he merely swept and laid the dust, how much more will it be for one who entertains a scholar in his house (talmid h.akham) and gives him to eat and drink and allows him the use of his possessions (nekhasim)!35

Comparing the intendance work for the ark (which does not eat nor drink) with the hosting of the Sages (who are more demanding than the ark), the text praises ‘hospitality’ as an important value. The reasoning entails an almost literal equation between the Torah and the Sages who spread their knowledge by travelling. The text shows, on the one hand, that the Sages tend to look at themselves as the incarnated Torah and, on the other hand, that a deed consisting of receiving the Torah in one’s house will be duly rewarded. The same text assumes a particularly generous conception of hospitality, since it includes not only a meal and lodging, but also the sharing of belongings (nekhasim).36 It is revealing that the Sages felt the need to compose such homilies, as if it were not evident that the locals would invite them – and some texts, indeed, suggest that the Sages were not always welcome everywhere.37 This kind of narrative can probably be read in the light of the hypothesis of a relatively marginalized group of rabbis, representing one group among several, but invariably depicting themselves as the most authorized representatives of Israel and Jewish groups in general.38 In any case, the domestic practice of hospitality is integrated into a cosmological complex and retributive system that may (also) explain the absence of reciprocity, in particular when rabbis are involved. Other texts connect hospitality

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with more elaborate lists of rewards, distinguishing between actions that are expected as duties and supererogatory acts.39 With a similar mechanism, a second text – also referring to a Palestinian tradition but compiled in the Babylonian Talmud – establishes an explicit link between the social practice of hospitality and a sacrificial deed: That passeth by us continually (tamid) (2 R 4, 9). R. Jose son of R. Ḥanina40 said in the name of R. Eliezer b. Jacob41: If a man (´adam) entertains (me´areah. ) a scholar (talmid h. akham) in his house and lets him enjoy his possessions, Scripture accounts it to him as if he had sacrificed the daily burnt-offering (temidin).42

The text proceeds in a typically Talmudic style, proving a statement using a biblical wordplay on tamid (which concurrently means ‘perpetual’ as an adjective and ‘perpetual sacrifice’, one kind of sacrifice performed daily at the Jerusalem Temple, as a substantive). The text presents, therefore, a possible substitute for the ritual and, at the same time, legitimates a social practice involving ‘laics’ (´adam) and ‘scholars’ (talmid h. akham). It must be noted, however, that other activities, such as prayer or study, are equally considered valid substitutes for sacrifices. But the principle of a ‘ritualization’ of the domestic space by the association with abrogated sacrificial practices comes up consistently in the texts. In other situations, however, hospitality can lead to various dangers. Typically, intercourse with people who do not observe the Torah is strongly discouraged. This is the case for many texts dealing with the social category of the `ammei ha-´ares. , the ‘people of the land’, the ‘ignorants’. Whereas one may wonder whether the frequentation of learned men could not contribute to educating those ignorants, the texts show a concern for purity and interpersonal contact. Thus, a curious text from the Mishna warns that a h. aver (‘companion’) should not entertain in his domain a `am ha-´ares. (in this context, a person who does not scrupulously observe prescriptions of purity and tithes) who is wearing clothes: 3 He who undertakes to be a h. aver, … does not accept the hospitality of an `am ha-´ares. [we´eno mit´areah. ´es.el `am ha-´ares. ] and does not receive him when he [the am ha-´ares. ] is wearing his own clothes.43

The prescription concerning the clothes implies that not the interpersonal contact itself but purity concerns44 are the problem. Such specific and technical rules were variously reinterpreted and extrapolated to apply to different situations. Progressively, the h. aver will represent the rabbi and the `am ha-´ares. will represent a Jewish person outside of the rabbinic circle, who stands out for his/her ignorance of the Torah. A text from a later context45 illustrates this point perfectly: in a time of hardship, Rabbi Yehuda ha-Nasi (traditionally considered to be the compiler of the Mishna) invited people for a meal at his home and explicitly excluded the `amme ha-´ares. from the list of guests. One person came and admitted not knowing anything about the Torah. Rabbi Yehuda feeds him, but almost immediately regrets his action: having shared food with an ignorant. The text soon reveals that the person was none other than Rabbi Yonathan b. ´Amran,46 who had hidden his knowledge out of modesty. Both passages emphasize the sensitivity of contacts with members of the literate elite, for reasons that pertain

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to rules of purity (the context of our first text) or, later, to concerns related to the preservation of a tradition that conforms with the wishes of its guardians. Other problematic situations of hospitality arise in the intercourse with ‘idolaters’ (nŏkhri, `oved `avoda zarah, etc.) or non-Jewish people (goy). Critical factors are here related to questions of purity/impurity and the risk of intermarriages, but also friendship and the necessity to preserve good social relations among neighbours. In general, the situation of a Jewish guest invited by a non-Jewish host is more problematic than the opposite – because the guest is not in a position to control the framework of the interaction. In a number of situations, however, pragmatic compromises between strict observance of the rules and the preservation of social relations are found (a principle called darkhe shalom, ‘the ways of peace’, ‘social peace’): probably the sign of certain concessions from the rabbinic circle, in an effort to reach out to larger audiences and avoid complete isolation.47 This overly succinct survey of a limited number of cases already shows that hospitality is related to sensitive issues, such as the spread of the rabbinic movement itself, the relation to the Torah, the observance of purity rules, social hierarchies, etc. It also clearly witnesses a process of ‘ritualization’ of the social practice through its recurring association with either past ritual practices (sacrifices) or merits to be obtained in this world or in the next. Even if not spectacular, practices of hospitality can be considered under the umbrella of highly ritualized actions that have major social consequences. Turning now to the Indian context, the majority of dharma texts present hospitality as an even more sensitive practice, explicitly connected not only to the identity of the brahmanical group, but also to the performance of rituals. A text from the Āpastamba Dharmasūtra emphasizes, for example, the technical and restricted meaning of the word for guest, atithi: 3 A guest (atithi) comes blazing like a fire. 4 When someone has studied one branch from each of the Vedas in accordance with the Law, he is called a ‘vedic scholar’ (śrotriya). 5 When such a man comes to the home of a householder devoted to the Law proper to him – and he comes for no other purpose than to discharge the Law – then he is called a ‘guest’ (atithi).48

In this passage, a householder (gr.hastha) is required to welcome any learned scholar (śrotriya). The notion of atithi is restricted here to the śrotriya, defined as someone – a Brahmin, to be sure – having put a particular emphasis on the study of the Veda. The comparison with fire (sūtra 3) certainly does not primarily mean that the unsatisfied guest could burn his host’s house (an explanation found among certain classical commentators). Rather, the text alludes to the fact that hospitality can be viewed, quite literally, as a sacrifice. As fire is the regular place for a ‘real’ sacrifice, the mouth of a śrotriya Brahmin will consecrate and burn the food given to him. The social practice works as a full sacrifice, and a number of texts describe, in an extremely precise way, analogies between various gestures of hospitality (the greeting, the washing of the feet, the preparation of food, etc.) and sacrificial gestures. For example: 1 This is the sacrifice to Prājapati that a householder offers incessantly. … 4 When milk is poured over it, that food is equal to an agnis. t.oma  sacrifice; when ghee

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is poured over it, it is equal to an ukthya sacrifice; when honey is poured over it, it is equal to an atirātra sacrifice; when meat is poured over it, it is equal to a dvādaśāha sacrifice; and when water is poured over it, it procures the increase of progeny and a long life.49

As a sacrifice, the correct exercise of hospitality is a way either to accomplish duties (vidhi) or to gain rewards (vikalpa) – sometimes (but not always) included in a system entailing the principle of rebirths. Conversely, a deficient demonstration of hospitality brings a range of negative consequences, as clearly stated in the following text: 6 When a Brahmin who has come to someone’s house seeking a place to stay is given nothing to eat, he leaves taking with him all the good works of that man.50

The association of hospitality with a complex retributive system is also evident in the notion of the five ‘great sacrifices’ (pañca mahāyajña) that are prescribed daily to any householder (gr.hastha) and which explicitly include hospitality (to a Brahmin, surely) as the sacrifice specifically accomplished for humans (nr.-/manus. ya-yajña). From this perspective, the unfolding of hospitality as a full ritual has wide consequences for both parties of the interaction. At the same time, hospitality is not without its dangers and anxieties. That every atithi should be welcomed does not mean (as seen in the first text) that every ‘guest’ should be equally treated. As can be guessed on the basis of the analogy, the consequences associated with the reception of a Brahmin differ radically from members from other varn.a, for only Brahmins can play the role of the fire. Persons belonging to other varn. a are technically not ‘guests’ (atithi), but can be received, provided they are not heretics: 110 A ks. atriya is not called ‘guest’ [atithi]; nor is a vaiśya, a śūdra, a friend, a relative, or an elder. If, however, a ks.atriya comes to his [of a Brahmin] house fulfilling the conditions of a guest, he should show kindness and feed him (bhojayet) after the Brahmins have finished their meal.51

A householder can certainly invite them, but it is a possibility and not an actual duty. As we see, the modalities of the reception reflect the social status of the guests: Vaiśya and Śūdra (considered here to be on the same level) can share a meal with the householders’ servants, and will only eat leftovers (as the wife usually does) after everybody else has eaten. Thus, the hierarchical structure of the society is mirrored and reinforced in practical rules concerning the unfolding of hospitality.52 Finally, a number of texts exclude certain classes from any interaction altogether: 29 No guest should stay at his house without being honored with a seat, food, and a bed, or with water, roots, and fruits, according to his ability. 30 He must [however]  never honor the following even with a word of welcome:  ascetics of heretical sects (pās.an.d.inah.), individuals engaging in improper activities (vikarmasthān), observing the ‘cat vow’ (baid.ālavratikān), or following the way of herons (bakavr.ttīn), hypocrites (śat.hān), and sophists (haitukān).53

The detailed aspect of this passage shows clearly the extreme sensitivity of hospitality. Fully assimilated into a ritual in some cases, it can also negatively affect the worldview

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represented by the texts’ composers and their position in society. We are left with the impression that practices of hospitality as prescribed in these texts represent a powerful tool in the hands of the literate elite to promote their view of an ideal society by intervening at the ‘intimate’ level of domestic households.

Comparative analysis From here, one might ask the provocative question: ‘What then?’ How can this lead us further in the research? Taking this question seriously, the first element to observe before even attempting a comparative analysis is that texts are discourses, presupposing intentionality and an audience. This simple element can explain why a topic is more or less developed, is given more or less weight in one or another context. Thus, while rabbinic texts discuss the question of different classes of foreigners at length, naming them with sophisticated categories (ger, nŏkhri, `oved `avodah zarah, goy, min, etc.), those questions are virtually ignored by the dharma texts, in which the categories of mleccha or yavana (different classes of ‘foreigners’ from a brahmanical point of view) are not extensively dealt with, to say the least. It seems that the horizon of rabbinic texts is broader than that of the brahmanical dharma texts. Similarly, nuances in the literary genres need to be taken into account. For example, the notion of ‘guest’ in Sanskrit, atithi, is not defined in the same way in purely normative statements or in versified quotations that are inserted into the sūtra; similar variations can be observed between halakhic and aggadic texts in Hebrew – aggadic texts tending to be hyperbolic and not meant to be interpreted literally. Beyond such considerations, our example sheds light on three different contexts: the respective socio-historical, the socio-anthropological and the reflexive level.

At the level of each context: Comparison as a hermeneutic device On one level, comparison is used as a device for developing new insights on a topic that has already been studied.54 In the present case, notwithstanding numerous and important divergences, there is a process that appears remarkably similar between both sets of texts: the process of the ‘domesticization’ of ritual gestures, or, symmetrically, of the ritualization of domestic practices – a process that the texts strive to enact. In both contexts, the references to the sacrificial tradition contribute to making specific social behaviours authoritative. Around the second and third centuries, rabbis related a number of social and domestic practices to past ritual gestures; along with study and prayers, domestic hospitality underwent a process of ‘ritualization’ and could even be considered as one valid substitute for sacrifices once offered in the Jerusalem Temple (among others). At the same time, hospitality was related to a system of ‘merits’, making it more pressing and sensitive. This emphasis on the ritual aspect of hospitality can hint towards the centrality of such social practices in rebuilding a tradition centred on the rabbis and their teachings. Arguably, travels and domestic hospitality played a major role in the very constitution of a ‘rabbinic movement’, structuring a group and its identity against

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competing groups, making it relevant and authoritative – in its legal and religious functions, for example.55 In quite a similar way, but for different socio-historical reasons, brahmanical texts put an emphasis on domestic rituals, asserting that domestic sacrifices (such as hospitality) performed by a householder (gr.hastha) achieve, in the end, an effect equivalent to more complicated and expensive sacrifices, such as the śrauta sacrifices. This focus could hint at an actual need from the brahmanical side to reassert its authority when important changes occur in the society. In this light, the theological construct of the five ‘great sacrifices’ that are prescribed daily to every householder, and that include hospitality, is a powerful tool to spread practices at a domestic level. Asserting with authority that a single domestic sacrifice achieves the same result as a costly ‘solemn sacrifice’ represents a tremendous discount, probably as an attempt to fight the growing influence of competition from Buddhist, Jain and other groups.56 The genius of the religious elites – which function in both contexts as ‘textual communities’57 – consists in presenting this reconfiguration in such a way that it is perceived as natural or transparent. The exegetical tools developed in each tradition precisely contribute to preserve a tight relation with a corpus of texts conceived as revealed, despite the major changes that intervened in their respective socio-historical contexts.58 In this sense, and as noted by Lincoln in a recent essay on comparison, the similarities between the two sets of texts ‘reflect similar points of tension in the social structure of the people among whom the stories circulated.’59 Those similar trajectories need, however, to be contrasted with substantial differences. Diverging from sacrifices in the rabbinic context, classical or elaborated forms of sacrifice (śrauta) did not suddenly disappear in the brahmanical context but were partly continued and partly replaced with more elementary rites.60 Similarly, domestic practices prescribed in brahmanical texts are not a particularly ‘recent’ creation; they are already mentioned in older texts, such as the Atharva Veda or the Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa. Another major difference appears in the respective visions of the ideal society mediated by the texts. Rabbinic texts defend a principle of equality and encourage the study of Torah among all – study being, at least in theory, a value related to a personal choice and not one’s social condition at birth. This principle is reflected in practices of commensality, in which a whole group partakes in a meal  – even if simultaneously reinforcing hierarchies. By contrast, the ideal brahmanical society is defined by social roles acquired by birth and in a strict hierarchy that is mirrored in practices of precedence (guest and host not eating ‘together’) or in the chain of leftovers.

On a socio-anthropological level On a more general level, the comparative work provides a way to reflect on issues that may be of interest in contexts other than those specifically studied, thus joining current discussions in the study of religions or anthropology. The comparative category or problem becomes the explicandum, and the contexts are in the posture of explicans. For example, in the present case, situations described in the sources can be used to refine the model of Marcel Mauss,61 who insists on the role of gifts in the creation of a

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network of mutual obligations. Mauss’s model can be improved by taking into account a larger number of temporal, spatial or social factors, and, above all, the issue of the asymmetries of power among the actors involved. Similarly, it is possible to emphasize key anthropological elements in a guest–host relationship, emphasizing their sociological implications. Specific cases (such as greeting and farewell formulae, seating arrangements, precedence, the preparation of food, menu, number of guests, duration of the stay, access to specific domestic spaces) can relate to Erving Goffman’s category of ‘interaction rituals’.62 Practices of hospitality appear as mirrors of a socio-religious organization and entail major symbolical consequences – an aspect that can push Goffman’s analyses further. On the same level, the ritualizing process of practices related to hospitality – including rules about conducting formal meals – can contribute to a reassessment of theories such as Norbert Elias’s analysis of the ‘civilization process’. In particular, examples from Jewish and Indian worlds make a powerful case against any European exceptionalism in this domain.63

On a reflexive level Finally, firmly grounded in the data, comparison leads to a critical assessment of analytical categories themselves and the way they are defined or constructed: did the study bring elements that prompt one to reconsider classical or standard conceptions in the study of religions? Did the analysis find idiosyncrasies (which?) of a research tradition in one of the compared contexts? Is it possible to propose amendments to the analytical vocabulary, pointing to dimensions that have not received enough attention so far? In the present case, the traditional association of ‘sacrifice’ with violence and its need for the ritual creation of social solidarity (seen, for example, in René Girard’s work) can be questioned on several bases.64 Another point for discussion is the nonmissionary (and immobile) character often associated with both brahmanical and rabbinic traditions: by contrast, the example of hospitality points to traditions that are highly dynamic and attempt to spread influence through travel and temporary stays away from home. Yet another aspect is the frequent equation of the notions of ‘charity’ and ‘hospitality’: these notions were, on the contrary, shown as embedded in very different sets of issues and should, therefore, be carefully distinguished analytically. This approach attempts to avoid a hasty reification of the compared entities, proceeding (as much as possible) in an inductive way, bottom-up, from the texts to the theory and not the other way around. Not only does the study attempt to grant equal attention to both contexts: it deals with two different historiographical traditions, each of which is studied according to its own logic. In this sense, and even if the present case deals with independent contexts, we can subscribe to the notion of a ‘histoire à parts égales’, as developed by Romain Bertrand.65 However, such a method also has limitations, because we do not have the same amount of historical data for the contextualization of each case, because the topic itself is not equally conceptualized as a stand-alone topic, and because of the complexity of each case taken individually: often, a single document displays contradictory statements, and this should be fully acknowledged before proceeding with a

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comparison. It is, therefore, perfectly reasonable to wonder whether this kind of work would not be better achieved in the framework of a collaborative team of scholars, each specialized in a specific field, ready to discuss general and comparative issues with their colleagues. A single scholar has, however, the advantage of better controlling the way his or her work is constructed, contributing to a more balanced handling of each context.

Comparison as a tool for ‘de-provincializing’ the study of religions From here, I would like to conclude with three points related to the possible use of comparison as a tool for ‘de-provincializing’ the academic study of religions. 1. A first thought is that categories such as ‘religion’, ‘canon’, ‘myth’ and ‘sacrifice’ have a long history that progressively uprooted them from their original contexts and broadened their scope. As such, using them in a scholarly discourse configures a specific set of data as comparable to other sets that have been similarly named (by the same or by different scholars, past or present). In this sense, even Religionsgeschichte (as conceived by J. Wach) is never entirely descriptive, and in the worst case, comparison will implicitly linger in the scholarly interpretations, as analytical vocabulary will be used to redescribe data.66 2. Second, it is certainly not possible to replace the analytical vocabulary with a set of ‘neutral’ categories. As Chidester observed in his study on the circulation of concepts of religion in South Africa (and the same holds true for India), After reviewing the history of colonial productions and reproductions on contested frontiers, we might happily abandon religion and religions as terms of analysis if we were not, as the result of that very history, stuck with them.67

Looking at the same argument from the other side, it can be argued that categories such as ‘ritual’, ‘religion’, ‘myth’, ‘mysticism’, etc., are not hopelessly Eurocentric. The study of religions did not grow out of a purely Christian and European context. Arguably, it also developed by exposition to other cultural contexts, and often recycled the works of non-European elites in so doing. Most historical surveys of the discipline have emphasized the purely European genealogy of the field without paying much attention to the dialogical construction of discourses about religion, at least since the nineteenth century and probably long before.68 It is, however, clear that in all of these cases, translations or comparisons – even those that are biased and compromised – introduced semantic dissonances into mainstream discourses about religion. Comparison contributed to building perspectives that were in tension with religious orthodoxies, gradually turning ‘religion’ into an academic problem and making it increasingly complex.69 3. Finally, accepting the possibility (and need) of broadening the horizons of analytical concepts and recognizing an affinity between object and method, a comparative historical work that strives to grant equal attention to its different sources brings new perspectives that speak from different centres, from different

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In the end, the genealogical and analogical modes of comparison remain not only valid but also vital for today’s study of religions. On the one hand, the study of historically related phenomena (genealogical approach, ‘connected’, ‘entangled’ histories) helps to discern the web of influences and borrowings of which tradition is made, undermining any claim related to its ‘purity’. On the other hand, the study of a specific topic through different contexts that are not historically or geographically related (analogical approach) substantiates a theoretical discussion and a critical examination of the analytical vocabulary. In this sense, comparison is at the same time an enterprise that is absolutely necessary to ‘de-provincialize’ the study of religions, and a highly risky intellectual operation that needs to be carefully constructed and closely controlled.71

Notes 1 Müller 1873b. 2 Ibid.: 283. Emphasis mine. 3 Since its ‘results’ can easily be used to demonstrate the opposite thesis (such as Holwell’s or Voltaire’s use of speculations on the correspondences between Indian mythologies and the Bible). 4 One of the figures of the Asiatic Society of Calcutta mentioned by Müller is Francis Wilford (1750?–1822), who was convinced that biblical names and stories were appearing in Sanskrit manuscripts before realizing that the texts had been forged by clever pandits. 5 Fergusson writes: ‘If the two religions [Indian and Scandinavian] come anywhere in contact, it is at their base, for underlying both there existed a strange substratum of Tree and Serpent Worship’, quoted by Müller 1873b: 305–6. Fergusson’s theory was also informed by a typically colonial view, according to which ancient India owed most of its genius and techniques (in particular architectural) to the Greeks. On Fergusson’s colonial undertones, see Cohn 1996: 89–96. 6 Müller 1873b: 319. 7 Müller 1873a: 15–16. Goethe’s formula is: ‘Wer fremde Sprachen nicht kennt, weiß nichts von seiner eigenen’, Goethe [1833] 2006: 188. 8 Müller 1873a: 12. 9 For critical views on Müller’s own comparative method, see Gladigow 1997 and Masuzawa 2005: 207–56. 10 Smith 1990: 36–53. See also Smith 1971 and the distinction between comparison that works on processes of assimilation, diffusion or borrowing, and comparison that is conceived as a hermeneutic device (70–1). This distinction echoes recent debates in historiography concerning the respective roles (and problems) of ‘comparative history’ and ‘entangled history’ (or ‘connected histories’ or Transfergeschichte). See here the classical essay of Bloch (1928) and the critical evaluation of Espagne (1994), contrasting with Detienne’s polemical essay rehabilitating the role of ‘comparative

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11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

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histories’ to fight against nationalist historiographical tendencies, Comparing the Incomparable (Detienne [2000] 2008). On this point, see Smith 1971: 70, in particular fn 12. For details, see Burkert 1992. Mintz 1985. Subrahmanyam 2001. See Whitehouse 2000 and Pyysiäinen 2001. Among many other studies, see King 1999. On C. Tiele and comparison, see Bornet 2009. Saler 1993. See the review of Wiebe 1995: 81–2. Our conception of comparison is diametrically opposed to this choice. Paden 1996: 7. Paden 2013: 98. Leach 1966. Wiebe 1996. Smith 1978. Smith 2011: 26–7. Smith 1982: xi. The following case is a brief summary of my study, Bornet 2010. Holdrege 1996 and more recently, Holdrege 2010. Among those diverging traits, the following aspects are particularly striking in the present corpus: (1) the presence of elite textual communities that have codified their respective norms in the form of scriptural canons, and that derive their authority precisely from this role; (2) a focus on practice rather than belief, with (among others) a special relation to sacrificial traditions, comprehensive legal systems, complex dietary laws, and regulations concerning purity and impurity; (3) a concern with issues of family, ethnic and cultural integrity, blood lineages, and the intergenerational transmission of traditions: in both contexts, there is a special relation with one language (Sanskrit, Hebrew) and with one specific territory (Āryāvarta and Israel). Hospitality is designated by specific terms in both sets of texts: hakhnasat ha-´oreh.in or ´akhsanya in Hebrew/Aramaic and ātithya in Sanskrit, along with many derivatives, meaning ‘host’, ‘guest’ etc. Thus, Neusner 1989: 31: Books of an ancient world, one remote from our own, teach us not what happened then but how people who wrote books wanted their contemporaries and continuators to think about what happened. That sort of learning about religion leads us deep into the imagination, concerning society and the social world, of people who wrote a given book and people who valued and preserved that book and put it together with other such books to form a canon of truth: the scheme of a social world as it should be (emphasis mine).

31 Babylonian Talmud Berakhot 63b. It is a baraita. It has a parallel in Song of Songs Rabbah 2.17–2.18. 32 The names mentioned are R. Yehuda, R. Neḥemyah, R. Me´ir, R. Yose, R. Sim`on b. Yoḥai, R. ´Eli`ezer son of R. Yose the Galilean and R. ´Eli`ezer b. Jacob. 33 According to tradition, tanna of the end of the second century ce. 34 2 Samuel 6, 12. 35 Babylonian Talmud Berakhot 63b, trans. Epstein 1978: 402.

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36 cf. Neusner 1970: 1–5, who notes: ‘[The rabbi] was Torah, not merely because he lived by it, but because at his best he constituted as compelling an embodiment of the heavenly model, as did a Torah scroll itself ’ (3, emphasis by the author). 37 For example Palestinian Talmud Shabbat 6:9, 8c (about Bar Qappara) or Babylonian Talmud Berakhot 60b–61a (hospitality denied to R. `Aqiva when arriving in a village). 38 This conception of the rabbinic movement, which differs radically from the ideal image that the rabbis want to give (as the heads of Jewish communities), is pictured by Schwartz 2001: 103 sqq, among others. 39 See, for example, the list of Tosefta Soṭah 4.1–6 (ed. Zuckermandel: 298–9) where actions related to Abraham’s hospitality are followed by major consequences for Abraham and his people in the present life, for the future in this world and in an eschatological future (le`atid lavo´). 40 According to tradition, the late third-century ce Palestinian amora, disciple of R. Yoḥanan in Tiberiades. 41 According to tradition, the second-century ce tanna, a disciple of R. `Aqiva and a colleague of Sages of the ´Usha generation. 42 Babylonian Talmud Berakhot 10b, trans. Epstein 1978: 58. 43 Mishna Demai 2.3, trans Sarason 1982: 79. 44 Because the `am ha-´ares. is assumed not to pay attention to contact with impure items. 45 Babylonian Talmud Bava Bathra 8a. 46 According to the tradition, a disciple of Rabbi Yehuda ha-Nasi, rarely mentioned in rabbinic literature. 47 See, for instance, the discussion in Babylonian Talmud Beṣah 21b (is it possible to invite a ‘pagan’ [nŏkhri] to a yom tov (festival))? cf. Schwartz 2001: 174. Neusner points to this specific example to emphasize the gap between the recommendations of the rabbinic elite and popular practice, which is – in his opinion – particularly wide in the Persian Sassanid context (Neusner 1965–70, vol. 5: 26–9). 48 Āpastamba Dharma Sūtra 2.(3).6.4–5, trans. Olivelle 2005: 83. 49 Āpastamba Dharma Sūtra 2.(3).7.4, trans Olivelle 2000: 85 (see also Atharva Veda 9.6.40–44). All sacrifices mentioned here are related to soma pressings and are derived from the sacrifice of agnis. t.oma – a major sacrifice performed for Agni, requiring the presence of sixteen priests, lasting five days and involving three soma pressings. Even if the correspondences are not all obvious, the text proceeds in an increasing order: ghee is better than milk, honey is better than ghee, and meat – associated with the particularly long and costly dvādaśāha sacrifice – is better than honey. 50 Vasiṣṭha Dharma Sūtra 8.6, trans Olivelle 2000: 383. 51 Mānava Dharma Śāstra 3.110; Mānava Dharma Śāstra 3.112, trans Olivelle 2005: 114. 52 On hierarchies and leftovers, see Malamoud 1989: 20. 53 Mānava Dharma Śāstra 4.29–30, trans Olivelle 2005: 125. 54 Conclusions reached at this level are not far from the conception of comparison expressed by B. Lincoln in his recent ‘theses on comparison’ (Lincoln 2012: 123). Lincoln gives a concrete example and compares a scene from a Persian myth (the Greater Bundahišn) with a passage from an Anglo-Saxon epic (Beowulf). Lincoln discerns similar argumentative schemes that reflect a similar intention to influence human behaviours by relating them to a cosmological framework.

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55 The scholar of rabbinic Judaism, Catherine Hezser, has recently analysed the role of ‘personal alliance networks’ and emphasized the importance of travels (and hence temporary stays) for the development of the rabbinic movement. See Hezser 1997, 2011. 56 On the defensive posture perceivable in most brahmanical normative texts, see, for example, Olivelle 2005: 39 (‘Reading the MDh one cannot fail to see and to feel the intensity and urgency with which the author defends Brahmanical privilege’), and before him Meyer 1927. 57 On this concept, cf. Stock 1983: 90–1, who defines a textual community as a ‘relatively small group of literati whose fellowship and communal life is based not on ethnic heritage or doctrinal confession, but on a shared devotion to – perhaps an obsession with – an authoritative text or set of texts’. 58 On this aspect, see Lubin 2002. 59 Lincoln 2012: 129. 60 cf. Lubin 2002: 450. 61 Mauss 1985. 62 Goffman 1967. 63 cf. the criticism expressed by Goody 2007: 154–79 towards Norbert Elias’s ‘absolutist European’ characterization of the ‘civilizing process’. A similar observation can be made in reference to a Mediterranean specificity of ‘societies of honor and shame’, as stated in Pitt-Rivers 1997. 64 For a similar reassessment, developed from comparison between Vedic and Jewish sacrificial practices, see McClymond 2007. 65 Bertrand 2011. 66 Thus, Lincoln 2012: 121: ‘The only alternatives [to comparison] are (a) a discourse whose generalizations remain intuitive, unreflective, and commonsensical, that is without basis, rigor, or merit; and (b) a parochialism that dares speak nothing beyond the petty and the particular.’ 67 Chidester 1996: 259. 68 See, for example, Kippenberg 1997. 69 On the semantic evolution of ‘religion’, see, for example, Smith 1998. 70 The expression is borrowed from Rocher 1995: 52. 71 A few recent examples that are fully aware of the ‘classical’ evils of comparison and proceed as inductively as possible include Holdrege 1996; McClymond 2007; Freiberger 2009 and Pollock (2009).

References Bertrand, Romain (2011), L’histoire à parts égales, Paris: Seuil. Bloch, Marc (1928), ‘Pour une histoire comparée des civilisations européennes’, Revue de Synthèse, XLVI: 15–50. Bornet, Philippe (2009), ‘L’histoire des religions est-elle le destin de la théologie? Réflexions sur les taxinomies des religions de Tiele (1830–1902) et Troeltsch (1865– 1923)’, Asdiwal: Revue genevoise d’histoire des religions, 3: 41–54. Bornet, Philippe (2010), Rites et pratiques de l’hospitalité: mondes juifs et indiens anciens, Stuttgart: Steiner.

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Burkert, Walter (1992), The Orientalizing Revolution: Near Eastern Influence on Greek Culture in the Early Archaic Age, Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. Chidester, David (1996), Savage Systems: Colonialism and Comparative Religions in Southern Africa, Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Cohn, Bernard S. (1996), Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Detienne, Marcel ([2000] 2008), Comparing the Incomparable, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Eliade, Mircea (1958), Patterns in Comparative Religion, London: Sheed and Ward. Epstein, Isidore, ed. (1978), The Babylonian Talmud: Seder Zera`im, London: The Soncino Press. Espagne, Michel (1994), ‘Sur les limites du comparatisme en histoire culturelle’, Genèses: Sciences sociales et histoire, 17 (1): 112–21. Freiberger, Oliver (2009), Der Askesediskurs in der Religionsgeschichte: eine vergleichende Untersuchung brahmanischer und frühchristlicher Texte, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz. Gladigow, Burkhard (1997), ‘Vergleich und Interesse’, in H. -J. Klimkeit (ed.), Vergleichen und Verstehen in der Religionswissenschaft, 113–30, Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von ([1833] 2006), Maximen und Reflexionen, Munich: Beck. Goffman, Erving (1967), Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-face Behavior, New York: Doubleday. Goody, Jack (2007), The Theft of History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hezser, Catherine (1997), The Social Structure of the Rabbinic Movement, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. Hezser, Catherine (2011), Jewish Travel in Antiquity, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. Holdrege, Barbara (1996), Veda and Torah: Transcending the Textuality of Scripture, Albany, New York: State University of New York Press. Holdrege, Barbara (2010), ‘The Politics of Comparison: Connecting Cultures Outside of and in Spite of the West’, International Journal of Hindu Studies, 14 (2–3): 147–75. King, Richard (1999), Orientalism and Religion: Post-Colonial Theory, India and ‘The Mystic East’, London: Routledge. Kippenberg, Hans G. (1997), Die Entdeckung der Religionsgeschichte: Religionswissenschaft und Moderne, München: C.H. Beck. Leach, Edmund R. (1966), ‘Sermons from a Man on a Ladder’, The New York Review of Books, 20 October: 7/6. Lincoln, Bruce (2012), ‘Theses on Comparison’, in B. Lincoln (ed.), Gods and Demons, Priests and Scholars, 123–30, 193–7, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lubin, Timothy (2002), ‘The Virtuosic Exegesis of the Brahmavādin and the Rabbi’, Numen, 49: 427–59. Malamoud, Charles (1989), Cuire le monde: Rite et pensée dans l’Inde ancienne, Paris: La Découverte. Masuzawa, Tomoko (2005), The Invention of World Religions, or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Mauss, Marcel ([1924] 1985), ‘Essai sur le don: Forme et raison de l’échange dans les sociétés archaïques’, in M. Mauss (ed.), Sociologie et anthropologie, 143–279, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. McClymond, Kathryn (2007), Beyond Sacred Violence: A Comparative Study of Sacrifice, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press. Meyer, Johann Jakob (1927), Über das Wesen der Altindischen Rechtsschriften und der Verhältnis zu einander und zu Kaut. ilya, Leipzig: Otto Harrassowitz.

Comparison as a Necessary Evil: Examples from Indian and Jewish Worlds

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Mintz, Sidney (1985), Sweetness and Power: the Place of Sugar in Modern History, New York: Viking. Müller, Friedrich Max (1873a), ‘Lectures on the Science of Religion’, in F. M. Müller (ed.), Introduction to the Science of Religion: With Two Essays on False Analogies, and the Philosophy of Mythology, 1–282, London: Longman/Greens. Müller, Friedrich Max (1873b), ‘On False Analogies in Comparative Theology’, in F. M. Müller (ed.), Introduction to the Science of Religion: With Two Essays on False Analogies, and the Philosophy of Mythology, 283–334, London: Longman/Greens (reprinted from ‘A Chapter of Accidents in Comparative Theology’, Contemporary Review, April 1870). Neusner, Jacob (1965–70), A History of the Jews in Babylonia, vol. 5, Leiden: E. J. Brill. Neusner, Jacob (1970), ‘The Phenomenon of the Rabbi in Late Antiquity: II. The Ritual of “Being a Rabbi” in Later Sasanian Babylonia’, Numen, 17 (1): 1–18. Neusner, Jacob (1989), The Ecology of Religion: From Text to Religion in the Study of Judaism, Nashville: Abingdon Press. Olivelle, Patrick (2000), Dharmasūtras: The Law Codes of Āpastamba, Gautama, Baudhāyana, and Vasis. t. ha, Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass. Olivelle, Patrick (2005), Manu’s Code of Law. A Critical Edition and Translation of the Mānava-Dharmaśāstra, Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press. Paden, William (1996), ‘Elements of a New Comparativism’, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, 8(1): 5–14. Paden, William (2013), ‘Tracks and Themes in a Shifting Landscape: Reflections on 50 Years of the Study of Religion’, Religion, 43 (1): 89–101. Pitt-Rivers, Julian (1997), Anthropologie de l’honneur, Paris: Hachette. Pollock, Sheldon (2009), The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Pyysiäinen, Ilkka (2001), How Religion Works: Towards a New Cognitive Science of Religion, Leiden: Brill. Rocher, Rosane (1995), ‘Weaving Knowledge: Sir William Jones and the Indian Pandits’, in G. Cannon and K. Brine (eds), Objects of Enquiry: The Life, Contributions and Influences of Sir William Jones (1746–1794), 51–91, New York, New York University Press. Saler, Benson (1993), Conceptualizing Religion: Immanent Anthropologists, Transcendent Natives, and Unbounded Categories, Leiden: Brill. Sarason, Richard S. (1982), The Talmud of the Land of Israel: A Preliminary Translation and Explanation. Volume 3: Demai, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Schwartz, Seth (2001), Imperialism and Jewish Society: 200 B.C.E. to 640 C.E., Princeton: Princeton University Press. Smith, Jonathan Z. (1971), ‘Adde Parvum Parvo Magnus Acervus Erit’, History of Religions, 11 (1): 67–90. Smith, Jonathan Z. (1978), Map Is Not Territory: Studies in the History of Religions, Leiden: Brill. Smith, Jonathan Z. (1982), Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown, Chicago, London: The University of Chicago Press. Smith, Jonathan Z. (1990), Drudgery Divine, London: School of Oriental and African Studies (University of London). Smith, Jonathan Z. (1998), ‘Religion, Religions, Religious’, in M. Taylor (ed.), Critical Terms for Religious Studies, 269–84, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Smith, Jonathan Z. (2011), ‘Entretien avec Jonathan Z. Smith’, Asdiwal, 6: 23–37, reprinted Genève: Labor et Fides, 2014.

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Stock, Brian (1983), The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Subrahmanyam, Sanjay (2001), ‘Du Tage au Gange au XVIe siècle: une conjoncture millénariste à l’échelle eurasiatique’, Annales HSS, 56 (1): 51–84. Whitehouse, Harvey (2000), Arguments and Icons: Divergent Modes of Religiosity, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wiebe, Donald (1995), ‘Benson Saler, “Conceptualising Religion”’, Numen, 42 (1): 78–82. Wiebe, Donald (1996), ‘Is the New Comparativism Really New?’ Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, 8 (1): 21–9.

Part Two

Phenomenology and the Foundations of Comparison

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Camouflage of the Sacred: Can We Still Branch Off from Eliade’s Comparative Approach? Andreas Nehring

Pascal sagte ungefähr: das ganze Elend kommt daher, daß man immerfort glaubt, sich mit Unendlichem vergleichen zu müssen. Und ein anderes Elend – das sagte nicht Pascal – kommt daher, dass man glaubt, überhaupt vergleichen zu müssen. Peter Handke1

Comparison and the comparative method With the emergence of specific academic research on religion during the nineteenth century, comparison has become the pre-eminent approach to the study of religious phenomena and religious traditions in general. No doubt, throughout history, encounters of people from different cultural contexts have been accompanied by comparison. Comparison has been the explicit or implicit method of missionaries, travellers and colonial officers to identify cultural similarities as well as differences; furthermore, it has served to mark identity positions when confronted with the ‘Other’. Max Müller, who is commonly credited with the creation of the term ‘comparative religion’ for the newly emerging academic discipline,2 published the essay ‘Comparative Mythology’ (1856) and later claimed that the comparative method should be the basis of all religious studies: A Science of Religion, based on an impartial and truly scientific comparison of all, or at all events, of the most important, religions of mankind is now only a question of time. It is demanded by those whose voice cannot be disregarded.3

Over a century later,4 Jonathan Z. Smith triggered a debate that continues until this day by fundamentally criticizing the comparative method in religious studies.5 Smith argues that the comparison of religion, as it has been developed by the phenomenologists and is prominent in the writings of Rudolf Otto,6 Gerardus van der Leeuw,

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­ riedrich Heiler and Mircea Eliade, has predominantly emphasized the commonaliF ties of the c­ omparativa, through which differences have been more or less neglected. Furthermore, Smith makes the criticism that the methodology of comparison ­ ­developed in religious studies so far resembles a form of magic and is therefore not adequate for systematic research in the field of religions. The German author Peter Handke presented another fundamental criticism of comparison in the 1960s which has haunted religious studies until today. In an essay on theatre and film titled ‘Das Elend des Vergleichens’ (‘The Calamity of Comparison’), Handke argues that comparison first of all obliterates a subject matter, since any subject is only accounted for as an object of comparison and not for its own value. Comparison neglects the singularity of the subject because any object is only perceived as being always already comparable. This general critique of Handke, aimed at any attempt to compare, in my view presents a serious challenge for religious studies in particular. Nevertheless, regardless of this critique, if religious studies is not to be limited to research on only one assumed or imagined cultural context, comparison remains unavoidable. Max Müller has already articulated this challenge in the field of Hinduism: Do you think it is possible to lecture on religion, even on natural religion, without giving offence either on the right or on the left? And do you think that a man would be worth his salt who, in lecturing on religion, even on natural religion, were to look either right or left, instead of looking all facts, as they meet him, straight in the face, to see whether they are facts or not; and if they are facts, to find out, if possible, what they mean, and what they are meant to teach us?7

As far as I see, the discussion of comparison in religious studies in part revolves around the opposition between contextualism and universalism, in other words, around the problem of difference and identity. Are other forms of living so essentially or radically different that any comparison, which is always undertaken from a culturally bounded perspective, can only mean an assimilation of the Other, on the one hand, or an Othering of the Other, on the other? Reflexive anthropology, like poststructuralist and postcolonial cultural studies, has for many years criticized European, or more generally Western, approaches to understanding and describing the Other as hegemonic, colonial and oppressive Eurocentric enterprises. This critique is to a large extent based on linguistic textualism, which has contributed to an understanding of historiographic, ethnological, sociological and religious studies texts as rhetorical products that represent the Other without reference to real existing entities. The thesis of the factual historical assimilation of the Other via ethnographic and comparative representation goes hand in hand with the general assertion of the incommensurability of cultural perspectives.8 According to this argument, which is the key argument to the whole debate on Orientalism, comparison is a twofold process of cognitive and political appropriation. As mentioned above, Jonathan Z. Smith has made the criticism that the scholarly approach to comparison has been predominantly an enterprise of ‘the recollection of similarity’, while ‘the issue of difference has been all but forgotten’.9 It is not clear, following the textualist argument, exactly what Smith means by mentioning difference as an important yet neglected aspect of comparison, but I argue that, if we see the

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scholarly enterprise of religious studies as part of a wider history of intercultural encounter, the perception of cultural difference has been in the background of all approaches to comparative religion. As I will elaborate in the remaining part of this chapter, it is very much present in the work of Mircea Eliade, who is often seen as the prototype of scholars who can be accused of ‘intellectual imperialism, universalism, theological foundationalism, and anti-contextualism’.10

The end of the Eliadean era? Regardless of many problematic aspects in the work of Mircea Eliade, I hope to show that his writings provide a set of concepts and promote an attitude of thought that is useful not only for discerning the religious aspects ‘camouflaged’ (as Eliade would put it) within the profane, but also for highlighting the role of difference in comparative religion. The following is in no way a straightforward application of Eliade’s theories of the phenomena we can call religious to comparative religion. This has already been done several times in comparative studies.11 On the contrary, I aim to rethink Eliade through some post-structuralist approaches that, in interesting ways, resemble some of his considerations about the sacred and the profane. This might lead one to reconsider comparative methods in the study of religion and find new paths for further research. In doing so, I suggest a critical reading and, at times, radical modifications of Eliade’s ideas. As I read Eliade’s methodological reflections on comparison, they culminate in the very broad statement that ‘any confrontation with another person leads to enlightenment of one’s own situation’,12 which I will analyse as a change in perspective. Although Eliade remains widely read today and is considered a central figure in the discipline of the history of religions, in the years since his death in 1986, his work has been subject to considerable critique, especially among representatives in the field of religious studies. Others, consciously or unconsciously, work with Eliadean concepts of hierophanies, homo religiosus, sacred and profane, and archaic symbolism to this day. The critique of his early political involvements within the Romanian nationalist movement has influenced much of the critique of his methodology, or lack of methodology, as well. Eliade has been accused of being a religious author instead of a scholar in the field of religious studies. Furthermore, his work bears signs of Christian influence, which has led critics to confirm Eliade’s prejudices based on his own religious disposition. One of the major criticisms advanced against Eliade has been that he neglected differences in the interest of establishing broader structures,13 or ‘patterns in comparative religion’, and a romantic, ontological construction of the sacred. Moreover, he has focused exclusively on central aspects of religions and neglected the margins. Russell McCutcheon, one of the strongest critics of Eliade, has recently called for ‘a closing of the Eliadean era in the study of religion with dignity’.14 According to McCutcheon, if scholars want to make room for a newly invigorated field of study, then it means that we must retool the field from top to bottom – from our curricula, to our public presence, the structures of our scholarly meetings, and our research agendas and publications.15

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All of these criticisms have been repeated several times by various critics and have been supported or refuted by opponents or followers of Eliade. I have no intention of engaging in this ongoing debate. Most of these criticisms might be, at least to some degree, applicable and valid. Nevertheless, religious studies discourse today has still not managed to leave Eliade behind, although the necessity of distancing oneself from Eliade remains explicit in most recent publications. It is striking that the discourse in which Eliade was a major figure has been so effectively criticized by present-day scholars of religion that, to take one example from the German scene, Hans-Georg Kippenberg does not even make reference to Eliade in his obligatory introductory publications on religion, even in the footnotes or as a counter-approach. On the other hand, Eliade’s concepts, terms and ideas, and even his diffused differentiation of sacred and profane, are adopted, extended, praised and almost taken for granted in many areas of academia, such as ethnology, literary studies or history, and even more so in popular culture. Regardless of all critical moments, I am concerned with engaging in some aspects of Eliade’s thought, with the specific aim of discussing elements from the field of religious studies in the light of some cultural expressions that are not, at first glance, religious. Therefore, I will re-examine Eliade's methods in the study of the history of religions, and his comparative methods in particular.

Eliade’s comparison: Comparing two modes of being in the world Eliade, in bringing the religious phenomena of various religious traditions into one framework, attempts to distinguish basic and timeless patterns of religious life, in order to arrive at what is constant beyond the transitory aspects of time. For Eliade, religion is basically the experience of the sacred related to ideas of being, the real, meaning and truth. In line with Emile Durkheim, who introduced the sacred/profane dichotomy into the discourse of religious studies, Eliade gives the basic ‘definition of the sacred  … that it is the opposite of the profane’.16Any act of manifestation of the sacred is designated by Eliade as a ‘hierophany’. Eliade argues that the history of religions can best be interpreted as a history of such hierophanies: The history of religions – from the most primitive to the most highly developed – is constituted by a great number of hierophanies, by manifestations of sacred realities. From the most elementary hierophany – e.g., manifestation of the sacred in some ordinary object, a stone or a tree – to the supreme hierophany (which, for a Christian, is the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ) there is no solution of continuity. In each case we are confronted by the same mysterious act – the manifestation of something of a wholly different order, a reality that does not belong to our world, in objects that are an integral part of our natural ‘profane’ world.17

Eliade’s contribution to comparative religions and his few reflections on comparative methodology indicate that it is not the comparison of religious phenomena of different cultural contexts that is the focus of his interest, but, rather, a comparison of two modes

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of being in the world: the sacred and the profane. According to Eliade, any historian of religions uses an empirical method of approach and begins by collecting religious documents, which in a second step, need to be interpreted. Therefore, the point of departure in Eliade’s approach is the historical data that express religious experiences. These data have to be described and interpreted by the historian of religion; further, they have to be deciphered as expressions of the life experience of homo religiosus. For, if the ‘phenomenologists’ are interested in the meanings of religious data, the ‘historians,’ on their side, attempt to show how these meanings have been experienced and lived in the various cultures and historical moments, how they have been transformed, enriched, or impoverished in the course of history.18

While Eliade sees the profane more or less as a negation of the sacred, it is the experience of the sacred in its qualitative aspects that is of foremost interest. Therefore, the interpretation of symbols and myths is central to Eliade’s methodology. Eliade believes that the sacred as a universal dimension plays a significant role in the history of humanity, and he argues that the beginnings of culture are rooted in religious experiences and beliefs.19 For Eliade, evidence for the ‘morphology of the sacred’ is given in archaic cultures. For the ‘archaic’ man, ‘the sacred always manifests itself as a reality of a wholly different order from natural realities’.20 Eliade elaborated his hermeneutical approach to the sacred in Patterns in Comparative Religions, probably his most influential work, where he offered an overview of his conceptualization of the structure and morphology of the sacred and of the emergence of the sacred as experienced within human communities. This emerges as a gradual, conscious progression from the profane to the sacred. Because homo religiosus represents the ‘total man’, as Eliade argues, the science of religions can never be reductionist, but must become a total discipline in the sense that it must use, integrate and articulate the results gained from various methods of approaching a religious phenomenon. The historian of religions is in a position to grasp the permanence of what has been called man’s specific existential situation of ‘being in the world’, for the experience of the sacred is its correlate. In fact, man’s becoming aware of his own mode of being and assuming his presence in the world together constitute a ‘religious’ experience.21

Since Eliade argues that it depends first of all on the perspective of whether an experience is considered as sacred or profane, his comparative approach as a historian of religion, as he prefers to call himself, is more concerned with the dialectic of the sacred and the profane than with the comparison of religious elements from various cultures. In Myths, Dreams, and Mysteries, an early book in which he analyses the ‘encounter between contemporary faiths and archaic reality’, he asks: ‘To what purpose, then, should we compare this historic moment in which we live with the symbolisms and religious ideologies of other epochs and other civilisations long since past?’22 In the closing chapter of his volume, Eliade develops a concept of interreligious comparison by emphasizing the importance of the perspective of the other for one’s own perception of oneself. Eliade intends to study the ‘anxiety of modern time in the perspective of

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the history of religions’.23 He proposes to reverse the terms of comparison, by placing oneself as scholar outside of one’s own tradition and time, taking the position of the other. Our aim will be to see ourselves just as an intelligent and sympathetic observer, from the standpoint of an extra-European civilisation, might see and judge us … an observer who belongs to another civilisation and judges us according to his own scale of values.24

If such a perspective can be adopted, ‘European values will lose their privileged status as universally recognised norms: they will be back at the status of local spiritual creations.’25 What Eliade aims at is not a phenomenological method that strives to identify essences of the sacred as an ontological entity, but a change of perspective in the process of comparison that leads to a different view of things: Sacred and profane are two modes of being in the world, two existential situations assumed by man in the course of his history. … In the last analysis, the sacred and profane modes of being depend upon the different positions that man has conquered in the cosmos; hence they are of concern both to the philosopher and to anyone seeking to discover the possible dimensions of human existence.26

The discovery of hierophanies in profane objects requires a change of perspective, since in modern societies the sacred, as Eliade puts it, is often camouflaged in the object. Two aspects are of importance for my attempt to reread Eliade at this point, which I will discuss in more detail for the remainder of this chapter: 1. The sacred for Eliade is ‘an element within the structure of consciousness, not a stage in the history of consciousness’.27 Sacred and profane for Eliade are not realities in the sense of an essence. 2. Eliade claims that everything is potentially hierophanic; according to him, it depends on one’s perspective whether one is able to realize something as a manifestation of the sacred. A change of perspective implies a change in the object.

Consciousness as the Locus of the Sacred and the Profane One difficulty with Eliade is that his statements on the dialectic of the sacred are often ambivalent and can be read as articulations that contradict each other. Eliade interprets religion as an object of study and a category sui generis by categorizing it as the sacred, but he refrains from making clear references to the sacred as an essence or as an objective reality. Hierophanies, in Eliade’s view, are manifestations of an objectified sacred and are human perceptions at the same time: Each must be considered as a hierophany in as much as it expresses in some way some modality of the sacred and some moment in its history; that is to say, some

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one of the many kinds of experience of the sacred man has had. Each is valuable for two things it tells us: because it is a hierophany, it reveals some modality of the sacred; because it is a historical incident, it reveals some attitude man has had towards the sacred.28

Eliade claims that religious studies has to attempt to understand religion at its own level of existence and not on the level of politics, social structures, cultural expressions or economics. He himself sees the task of a scholar of religions as one of unveiling the transcendent and its significance for modern man, who has lost his comprehension of both the sacred and its meaning.29 This he can do, he argues, by recapturing the way in which ‘primitive’ and ‘archaic’ cultures, as well as ancient and modern traditions outside mainstream religions, use symbols to establish a patterned, harmonized view of reality beyond space and time. Nevertheless, he also emphasizes that religious phenomena such as myths should be studied as both religious and cultural phenomena: A religion as phenomenon will only be recognized as such if it is grasped at its own level, that is to say, if it is studied as something religious. To try to grasp the essence of such a phenomenon by means of physiology, psychology, sociology, economics, linguistics, art or any other study is false; it misses the one unique and irreducible element in it – the element of the sacred. Obviously there are no purely religious phenomena; no phenomenon can be solely and exclusively religious. Because religion is human it must for that very reason be something social, something linguistic, something economic – you cannot think of man apart from language and society. But it would be hopeless to try and explain religion in terms of any one of those basic functions which are really no more than another way of saying what man is.30

Both Eliade’s critics and his sympathizers agree that Eliade’s presuppositions include statements about the ‘essence’ of religion, about the nature of reality, about the ways that religion operates in human life and how religious experience influences the mode of being in the world. They nevertheless disagree on how to interpret the role of religion and whether and how it can be disentangled from social and cultural aspects of life. Methodologically, religious studies is challenged by the fact that the starting point of studying a phenomenon ‘as something religious’ is always a performative positioning and articulation. Put differently, all we have are socially structured processes of communication which are taking place in mediated form or medial structures which we have to analyse.31 Non-propositional, tacit knowledge like religious experience or even religious conviction is approachable by religious scholarship only in the form of culturally formatted explications. But it would be wrong to conclude that this methodological challenge or problem of observing and analysing has to be a problem outside of religious studies. Theoretically, we have to admit that the relation of experience and articulation by a certain believer or group of believers can be totally different from what we can observe. Religious studies always deals with something and interprets something which has already been interpreted. The phenomena

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studied under the consideration that they are religious are already interpretations or constructions of the first order, in the words of Alfred Schütz. The task of religious studies scholars is to formulate constructions of second-order, or, as Eliade might term it, morphological structures, by resolving the tension between everyday interpretation and the estrangement of this interpretation. Comparative religious studies, therefore, is a hermeneutical enterprise, but not an enterprise that assumes a homogeneous lifeworld in the form of a shared horizon and subjective positioning of the interpreting subject in this context. Any hermeneutical approach has to begin with the assumption that all reality is already interpreted. The problem for religious studies is that when we observe and describe religions, religious rituals, articulations, texts and so on, we tend to attribute our outsider position and observing perspective as a competence concerning those whom we observe. Too often we fail to realize that the actors have neither to know nor to perform what we are observing as symbols or rituals. Recognizing and experiencing are two aspects of relating to reality. In this regard, Martin Heidegger distinguished between Zuhandensein and Vorhandensein. The recitation of a mantra and the linguistic analysis of a mantra are obviously two activities which have to be differentiated. The difference is not a difference in content or in the words that are articulated in the ritual, or in a transcendent area to which these words might be related; the difference is the perspective towards the object. For religious scholars who work in the field of cultural studies and intentionally abstain from any attempt to make the insider perspective a topic of their research, this statement is trivial. A distanced engagement with the object of investigation is seen as a necessary requirement for religious studies, and especially comparative religious studies, since any comparison rests on the assumption of being able to take distance from immediacy. This has at least two implications. The first is that a systematizing of religion, religious acts, phenomena and structures is always a secondary product, or, as Jonathan Z. Smith argues, we work with second-order, generic concepts.32 The second implication – and this has often been blanked out in approaches to religious studies that understand themselves as part of cultural studies  – is that cultural knowledge is always characterized by three factors: a practical dimension that structures action, an implicit or tacit knowledge, and an explicit dimension that is articulated by those who belong to a religious, linguistic, cultural or political community and which is the result of a praxis of communication and affirmation.33 Reflecting on the relationship between implicit and explicit knowledge as elaborated by Michael Polanyi34 in his critique of objectifying methodology, Eliade’s obviously religious approach to religious studies presents a challenge for the study of religion. The comparison of outsider and insider perspectives in the study of religion has been challenged by Jeffrey Kripal, who argues in regard to the study of mysticism ‘not only that professional scholarship and personal religious experience can be mutually enlightening, but more radically, that our modernity and now post-modernity demand an honest and unflinching uniting of the two’.35 As I see it, Eliade’s approach to religion involves not only a method but also a personal commitment to the reality of homo religiosus and a particular understanding of it. Kripal’s suggestion, as Jeremy Biles has argued,36 coincides on some level with a dimension of Eliade’s thought. Eliade has repeatedly insisted that his wide-ranging and

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trans-generic writings should be considered as one opus. Although Eliade’s work can be categorized into distinct genres (apart from his scholarly writing, he has published newspaper articles, novels, stories, letters and a lengthy autobiography), his work can be seen as different approaches to overlapping phenomena and questions. What Eliade aims at, as has already been argued, are general patterns of meaning, spiritual realities that are to be discerned in historical and ethnological documents through the shaping imagination of the inquiring interpreter. Knowledge here is not a matter of photographic representation or logical analysis, but of poiesis, of a making and a shaping that in certain ways is analogous to that of a writer or an artist. Eliade’s constructions of the ‘myth of the eternal return’ or of the ‘cosmic tree’, to mention only two that are prominent in his writings, cannot be verified simply by returning to an appraisal of the documentary materials, no matter how much he insists that they arise directly from these. He also insists repeatedly that they are hidden, camouflaged and unrecognizable to common, everyday vision. It requires a constructive imagination to see (or hear) them. In drawing a strict distinction between ‘poetry’ and ‘truth’, religious studies confirms, as Catherine Belsey has convincingly argued, centuries of Western tradition of thought and action: sanity, rationality, responsibility, the characteristics of the citizen entitled to play a part in society, and to be accountable before the law, are synonymous with the ability to tell the difference between reality and delusion.37

This has resulted in a differentiation of modern, post-enlightened rationality and premodern, religious and irrational experiences. Taking these seriously is considered as psychopathic or as a form of politics of nostalgia, to use a term of Russell McCutcheon; it is considered outdated at best and neo-colonial at worst. I would still like to ask why Eliade is so interested in the religions, expressions, myths and symbols of what he calls ‘archaic’ societies. We know he had a humanistic impulse to bring religion back to modern man in order to save him from the terror of history. As I mentioned above, I consider this intention highly problematic, but this does not tackle the real problem of Eliade’s approach to comparative religion, which is: What language can we use to articulate what is religion and what is religious? Today it is cinema that divides the world of fiction from reality, marking a common-sense distinction between fact and fiction. Fiction is not real. But the postmodern condition has called the commonly handed-down perspective on reality into question. What is real and what is illusion? Does it depend on the perspective? Is there a difference between the two that can be pointed at objectively? Is reality an effect of cultural transmissions? Is it predominantly dependent on the subjective mind? Recent cultural theory has contested the conventional view that human behaviour is predominantly natural. ‘Cultural criticism has successfully challenged the common-sense assumption that our social arrangements and values constitute the expression of a universal, foundational humanity. Indeed, we have also relativized common sense itself.’38 However, the cultural turn has been so influential that it has become almost common sense to see human beings as entirely culturally constructed. In large sections of religious studies today, and in those which consider themselves part of cultural studies and are concerned

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with postmodern theory in particular, a thoroughgoing constructivism or culturalism is predominant. Historicism prevails in religious studies. From this point of view, while what we can know is entirely culturally relative, what exists becomes reducible, either explicitly or implicitly, to what can be said to exist. In other words, epistemology subsumes or occludes ontology.39

Other aspects of post-structuralism, and especially those reflected in linguistics, can shed light on Eliade’s comparative method, as I would like to develop in the following paragraphs. Early twentieth-century linguistics has emphasized that words do not have exact equivalents from one language to another and, furthermore, that the relationship between signifier and signified is arbitrary. Meanings, therefore, do not exist outside language; post-structuralist theory consequently affirms the relativity of what is possible for us to know as subjects. How, then, does a scientific language capable of expressing religious experience and its explication have to be constituted? Possibly the most serious problem of the phenomenological question is the problem of language. What is the role of language in representation? Two aspects are at the forefront of academic debates in religious studies and its critique of phenomenology: the problem of the difference between being and meaning, and the problem of whether and how far meaning is inherent in a language that represents being. In other words, is language the representation or imitation of a given reality or truth, or is language constituting reality by articulating representations of representations and thereby never able to get direct access to something beyond experience? Brian Rennie has argued that the critics of Eliade have not seen that one of Eliade’s chief but largely ignored insights was that reality is always an interpretation rather than a matter of empirical perception or direct and unmediated experience. … He is not best seen as proponent of the ‘sui generis discourse on religion’ but an early forebearer of ‘attribution theory’.40

The change in the object This leads me to the second aspect I want to highlight in order to reread Eliade: a change in perspective implies a change in the object. Brian Rennie’s emphasis on interpretation suggests that Eliade’s approach of comparing the religious perspective with the profane implies that a change in the observational position provides a new line of sight towards an object. In a recent publication, Slavoj Žižek has called this change a parallax view. He has convincingly argued that the apparent displacement of an object by the change of perspective is not simply subjective, just because an object is seen from a different angle, or because a different point of view is adopted, but ‘that an “epistemological” shift in the subject’s point of view always reflects an “ontological” shift in the object itself ’.41 Eliade’s ambivalent conceptualization of hierophanies as subjective phenomena of consciousness and at the same time as objects of perception resembles Hegel’s dialectic of an inherently given interconnection of object and subject. An epistemological deferment of the point of view of the observing subject implies

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an ontological deferral in the object (e.g. a stone becomes the place of manifestation of the sacred). Eliade opens his Patterns of Comparative Religion with a quotation of a principle which, according to him, has been discredited by the confusion of the nineteenth century: ‘It is the scale that makes the phenomenon.’42 Žižek now tries to grasp this interdependence of subject and object in Lacanian terms: The subject’s gaze is always-already inscribed into the perceived object itself, in the guise of its ‘blind spot,’ that which is ‘in the object more than the object itself,’ the point from which the object itself returns the gaze.43

Lacan has called this object Objet petit a, the object cause of desire, which Žižek interprets as an object that, relative to the perspective, becomes or is transubstantiated into an object of desire for someone (in Eliade’s terminology, a sacred object), while for someone else it remains an ordinary profane object. When comparing these two points of view, the parallax view for Eliade is the deferral from a modern profane view to that of the homo religiosus of archaic cultures: We need only compare their existential situations with that of a man of the modern societies, living in a desacralized cosmos, and we shall immediately be aware of all that separates him from them. At the same time we realize the validity of comparisons between religious facts pertaining to different cultures; all these facts arise from a single type of behaviour, that of homo religiosus.44

Eliade’s epistemology for dealing with the questions of whether and how religion can be an object of study cannot be grasped sufficiently by simply drawing a distinction between religion as an objective substance and religion as a phenomenon of subjective consciousness; scholars have till now predominantly argued that Eliade tends to one or the other of these views. One has to look at the orientations in which the relationship between the substantial object and the conscious subject are formed.45 Eliade’s hierophanies resemble Lacan’s Objet petit a, and both can be defined as parallax objects. It is not only that the contours change with the shift of the subject. Hierophanies exist, but their presence can only be discerned when the landscape is viewed from a certain perspective. Many scholars have addressed the importance of the role played by the theory of the ‘camouflage of the sacred’ in Mircea Eliade’s oeuvre. Yet few have tried to draw a connection between Eliade’s concept of camouflage of the sacred and recent debates in cultural studies on the sublime, the uncanny and, last but not least, Lacan’s concept of the real. In religious studies, influenced to a large extent by one line of post-structuralist linguistics, there is a tendency to emphasize language and texts as predominant aspects of culture; we can observe in many publications a hesitation to incorporate what exists into what we think or know to exist. This has resulted in the omission of including a terrain of unmapped alterity, which Jacques Lacan calls ‘the real’, into the discourse. In contrast to the approach of the culturalists, but at the same time not reverting to the foundationalism that definitely is one aspect of Eliade’s works, a post-structuralist approach opens the possibility of retaining a structural uncertainty in religious studies

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which could be seen as a kind of anxiety for the ‘real’. ‘The “real” ’, Lacan writes, ‘is what does not depend on my idea of it.’ The ‘real’ in Lacanian thought is that which cannot be symbolized. Eliade’s emphasis on the camouflage of the sacred can be read as an attempt to keep open the differential gaps between hierophanies, symbolizations and the ‘real’. Truth in Eliade is always an enigma. Here, I see parallels to Lacan’s ‘real’, which is not to be confused with reality, that is what we do know because culture defines it for us. The ‘real’ is what is there but undefined and unaccountable, perhaps, within the frameworks of our knowledge. It is there as such, but not there-for-a-subject. Because it cannot normally be brought within the symbolic order of language and culture (in Eliade’s words, within the profane), the ‘real’ is there, but precisely not there-for-asubject, not accessible to human beings who are subject to the intervention of language: The sacred always manifests itself as a reality of a wholly different order from ‘natural’ realities.46

Religion is the realization of the ‘real’, as Eliade would want to see it for homo religiosus; for him, the sacred exists in the difference by which it differentiates itself. Hierophanies are nothing but traces of the realization of the sacred. Religion and Eliade’s ‘sacred’ are not the fullness of an essence for Eliade, but always something more, which cannot be fully symbolized. What is at stake, branching off from Eliade’s comparative approach, is a concept of religion that is capable not of suppressing, but of realizing, the terms and conditions of the possibility of the ‘religious’, which at the same time would include the terms and conditions of the impossibility of its essential purity. Keiji Nishitani has thoughtfully highlighted the twofold denotation of the verb ‘to realize’ as to ‘actualize’ or ‘to put into practice’, on the one hand, and to ‘understand’ or ‘to make aware’, on the other.47 On both levels, which likewise include the insider and the outsider perspective, a difference has to be considered: the difference between the imaginarysymbolic mouldings of religion and the ‘real’, that is that which cannot be symbolized completely, the camouflaged Sacred. In Lacan’s account, the meanings that give us our sense of reality are always acquired from outside. We learn what something means from other people, from a language that exists before we are born into it, or, in Lacan’s terms, from the irreducible otherness of the symbolic order. By subjection to the symbolic order, we not only gain access to social reality, but also become subjects. The symbolic order, nevertheless, misses the ‘real’, the gap is unsurmountable, and language is always between us and any direct contact with the ‘real’. For Eliade, this gap is predominantly expressed in myths. Only in the end shall we rejoin the ‘real’ in death, which we can name, but not know. Death separates us decisively from the experience of subjectivity, including the experience of reality.

Conclusion Whether this approach to reading Eliade (comparing religious and secular perspectives) is profitable or even possible remains to be seen. As a scholar who is interested in comparative religion as a hermeneutical enterprise, what I want to emphasize is

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that taking Eliade’s exhortation seriously does not necessarily mean reading him exclusively, or even primarily, as a scholar of religion. I would suggest that he be read as a religious thinker whose foremost aim was not academic in orientation; rather than the production and organization of knowledge, Eliade’s main purpose was to awaken a sense of the sacred in his readers, to assist in the generation of a new humanity, the resurrection of the ‘total man’ under the sign of homo religiosus. I conclude with a quotation from Jeremy Biles, which in a way summarizes what I have argued in this contribution to comparative religion: Eliade was known to characterize his academic life as a ‘camouflage’ hiding the secret, sacred aims of his work. And as he was never tired of reminding his readers, the sacred is at once announced and concealed in camouflaged forms. … Eliade’s real purposes lay in what proper academic discourse cannot tolerate. Eliade undertook the risky business of writing across genres of scholarship, fiction, and autobiography (including personal religious experience), allowing each to inform the other, with the aim of extending their mutually enhancing ‘sacred’ effects to his readers.48

Taking risks with Eliade means putting his ideas to unexpected use in interpretive analysis, but also critically altering those ideas along the way, in light of postmodern reflection on the real, the uncanny, camouflage and even repetition.

Notes 1 ‘This is roughly what Pascal said: the whole misery is rooted in the belief that we constantly have to compare ourselves with the infinite. And another misery – this is not Pascal – arises from the belief that one has to compare at all.’ Handke 1970: 314, trans. A. N. 2 cf. Sharpe 1986: 37ff. 3 Müller 1873: 34. 4 Smith 1982: 19–35. 5 cf. Patton and Ray 2000; but also the debate in Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, 16 January 2004: for example, Jensen 2004: 45–60. 6 Otto 1926, 1930. 7 Müller 1892: 1. 8 cf. Renn 2005: 196. 9 Smith 1982: 21. 10 Patton and Ray 2000: 1. 11 cf. the vast literature on Eliade, as, for example, listed in Rennie 2006: 424–38. 12 Eliade 1967: 233. 13 See the discussion in Allen 1978. 14 McCutcheon 2003: 191. 15 Ibid.: 209. 16 Eliade 1959: 10. 17 Ibid.: 11. 18 Eliade 1969: 9. 19 Ibid.

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20 Eliade 1959: 10. 21 Eliade 1969: 9. 22 Eliade 1967: 231. 23 Ibid.: 232. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid. 26 Eliade 1959: 14–15. 27 Eliade 1969: i. 28 Eliade 1958: 2. 29 Laitila 2007: 100. 30 Eliade 1958: XVII. 31 Brück 2007: 74. 32 Smith 1998: 281. 33 Loenhoff 2003: 107. 34 Polanyi 1966. 35 Kripal 2001: 14. 36 Biles 2011: 97. 37 Belsey 2005: 3. I owe the following ideas to Belsey and paraphrase her argument by applying it to the field of religious studies. 38 Belsey 2005: 3. 39 Ibid.: 4. 40 Rennie 2011: 51. 41 Žižek 2009: 17. 42 Eliade 1958: XVII. 43 Žižek 2009: 17. 44 Eliade 1959: 17. 45 Chung Chin-Hong 2007: 190. 46 Eliade 1959: 10. 47 Nichitani 1982: 44f. 48 Biles 2011: 98.

References Allen, Douglas (1978), Structure and Creativity in Religion. Hermeneutics in Mircea Eliade’s Phenomenology and New Directions, The Hague, Paris and New York: Mouton. Belsey, Catherine (2005), Culture and the Real, London and New York: Routledge. Biles, Jeremy (2011), Gambling with Eliade: Las Vegas and the Disaster of the Sacred, Archaeus, XV (1–2): 93–117. Brück, Michael von (2007), ‘Religionswissenschaft als Kulturwissenschaft’, in Anne Koch (ed.), Watchtower Religionswissenschaft, 73–93, Marburg: Diagonal. Chung Chin-Hong (2007), ‘Mircea Eliade’s Dialectic of Sacred and Profane and Creative Humanism’, in Brian Rennie (ed.), The International Eliade, 187–208, Albany: University of New York Press. Eliade, Mircea (1958), Patterns in Comparative Religion, New York: Sheed & Ward. Eliade, Mircea (1959), The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, New York: Harcourt. Eliade, Mircea (1967), Myths, Dreams, and Mysteries. The Encounter between Contemporary Faiths and Archaic Realities, New York: Harper & Row.

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Eliade, Mircea (1969), The Quest: History and Meaning in Religion, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Handke, Peter (1970), ‘Theater und Film: Das Elend des Vergleichens’, in Peter Handke (ed.), Prosa Gedichte Theaterstücke Hörspiel Aufsätze, 314–26, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Jensen, Jeppe Sinding (2004), ‘Why Magic? It’s Just Comparison’, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, 16 (1): 45–60. Kripal, Jeffrey J. (2001), Roads of Excess, Palaces of Wisdom. Eroticism and Reflexivity in the Study of Mysticism, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Laitila, Teuvo (2007), From Reality to Subject: A Sympathetic, Yet Critical Reading of Eliade, Temenos, 43 (1): 99–114. Loenhoff, Jens (2003), ‘Kulturvergleich und interkulturelle Kommunikation’, in Germanistisches Jahrbuch GUS ‘Das Wort’, Moskau - Bonn: Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst 105–14. McCutcheon, Russell T. (2003), The Discipline of Religion: Structure, Meaning, Rhetoric, New York: Routledge Chapman & Hall. Müller, Max (1873), Introduction to the Science of Religion, London: Longmans, Green, and Co. Müller, Max (1892), Anthropological Religion, London: Longmans. Nichitani, Keiji (1982), Was ist Religion? Frankfurt am Main: Insel. Otto, Rudolf (1926), West-Östliche Mystik. Vergleich und Unterscheidung zur Wesensdeutung, Gotha: Leopold Klotz Verlag. Otto, Rudolf (1930), Indiens Gnadenreligion und das Christentum, Gotha: Leopold Klotz Verlag. Patton, Kimberley C. and Benjamin C. Ray, eds (2000), A Magic Still Dwells. Comparative Religion in the Postmodern Age, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press. Polanyi, Michael (1966), The Tacit Dimension, New York: Peter Smith Publications. Renn, Joachim (2005), ‘Die gemeinsame menschliche Handlungsweise. Das doppelte Übersetzungsproblem des sozialwissenschaftlichen Kulturvergleichs’, in Ilja Srubar, Joachim Renn and Ulrich Wenzel (eds), Kulturen vergleichen: Sozial- und kulturwissenschaftliche Grundlagen und Kontroversen, 195–227, Wiesbaden: VS Verlag. Rennie, Bryan, ed. (2006), Mircea Eliade. A Critical Reader, London: Equinox. Rennie, Bryan (2011), ‘Fact and Interpretation: Sui Generis Religion, Experience, Ascription, and Art’, Archaeus, XV: 51–74. Sharpe, Eric (1986), Comparative Religion. A History, Chicago and LaSalle: Open Court. Smith, Jonathan Z. (1982), ‘In Comparison a Magic Dwells”, in J. Z. Smith (ed.), Imagining Religion. From Babylon to Jonestown, 19–35, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Smith, Jonathan Z. (1998), ‘Religion, Religions, Religious’, in Mark C. Taylor (ed.), Critical Terms for Religious Studies, 269–84, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Žižek, Slavoj (2009), The Parallax View, Cambridge and London: The Chicago University Press.

6

The Singular and the Shared: Making Amends to Eliade after the Dismissal of the Sacred Kenneth Rose

Making amends to Eliade It is time1 to make amends to the most famous founder of the discipline of religious studies, Mircea Eliade, whose ideas have spread far beyond the academy,2 where today, a mere three decades after his death, he has little honour, at least among Anglophone religious studies academics.3 The founding parricide that lies at the origin of the contemporary study of religion claimed other victims besides Eliade, for with the same sweeping gesture of dismissal that recent religious studies scholars pushed Eliade aside, they also rejected comparative work of other great comparativists of the last century such as, Joachim Wach, Gerardus van der Leeuw and Rudolf Otto. This recent cohort of scholars also threw aside the founders’ common quest for the specifically religious aspect of religion, an aspect that, were it to be isolated and described, would provide religious studies with its own intentional object4 of study and a sturdy foundation and justification for its activities. Eliade’s foundational insight into the autonomy of the religious realm5 is a missing dimension today in contemporary religious studies, which has declined in the last generation from a once culturally significant discipline focused on inquiring into the character of the sacred realities (whether or not such a sacred reality exists) into a marginalized guild of hyperspecialized scholars producing an endless succession of disconnected studies that nervously mimic the methodologies of other literary and social scientific disciplines (and now natural scientific disciplines). Sadly, it goes almost without saying that these studies have virtually no relevance either inside or outside the academy. Also missing from the field today is Eliade’s method, shared with other early leading figures in the academic study of religion, of ranging widely over the global phenomena of religion in order to abstract recurring religious ideas, or what I call ‘religious universals’. Ironically, even as religious studies has turned resolutely away from a generalizing approach to the study of religion, this approach has re-emerged in new disciplines such as the cognitive science of religion6 and the neurobiology of religion.7 While these approaches have not, at least until recently, been seen as part of traditional academic religious studies, the time has come to engage fully these new sciences of

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religion from the side of religious studies. Not only will this provide religious studies with a vast amount of new data about religion and suggestive methodological models; it will also allow these new sciences, born in the research centres and laboratories of modern science, to overcome a mostly unexamined and innocent bias towards Western religious conceptions.8 Reinvigorated by a scientifically informed return to the generic religious aspects of religion as religion, religious studies, drawing upon both its traditional competencies and its newfound scientific resources, could take up once again its long-neglected roles of producing spiritually and religiously sensitive academic knowledge about humanity’s varied religious response to life, of providing its public audiences with insights about how humanity’s many religions have dealt with life’s deepest and most baffling mysteries, and of working in its many forums to ameliorate religious conflicts through a critically purified and pluralistic understanding of the full spectrum of human religiosity. Against the charge, certain to be raised by many religious studies scholars, that a return to an interest in the generic religious features of religion as religion will undercut the scholarly focus on particular religious traditions, I would suggest that the preference of many scholars for the singular in religion no more invalidates the search for the shared in religion than the preference for one’s own cat over a neighbour’s cat invalidates the use of the concept ‘cat’. It is the argument of this chapter that discerning the shared and portraying the singular in human religious experience and practice are complementary intellectual activities, and the one atrophies when the other is for too long neglected, as has happened in contemporary religious studies. Concern that a renewed focus on the shared will negate the current focus on the singular is, in my view, overblown in any case, since there will always be scholars of religion whose primary focus is the study of the infinite array of particulars that religions display. Undoubtedly, highly focused idiographic studies of individual aspects of individual traditions will remain as a central area of research in the field, even while, as this chapter will contend, room must be made for nomothetic quests for the generic aspects of religious traditions.

Religious studies loses its way For at least thirty years, religious studies has mostly focused only on this religion or that religion at the expense of the general feature or features that constitute the religious aspect of religions as religions and not as other human institutions such as the military, commerce, sport, entertainment, education, medicine and so on (all of which can have religious dimensions). This historicist, constructivist and empiricist/ culturalist approach now massively determines practice in academic religious studies, which usually and as a matter of principle refrains from attempts to make sense of individual traditions in light of a general theory of religion that is itself religiously meaningful, although it inevitably does so from the perspective of other non-religious or anti-religious ideologies or critical stances. Taking its cues from Wilfrid Cantwell Smith,9 Clifford Geertz10 and Jonathan Z. Smith,11 contemporary academic religious studies set out boldly over a generation ago to overturn and render obsolete and passé

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the typological imagination12 of the old Chicago School and its projects of tracing the morphology and typology of religion, of which Wach and Eliade were masters. Despite the almost complete victory of the particularistic, constructivist and historicistic approach to the study of religions, a nostalgic but chastened fascination with the role of comparison in religious studies has lingered on among some would-be comparative religionists,13 as expressed, for example, in the title of a volume edited by Kimberley C. Patton and Benjamin C. Ray, A Magic Still Dwells.14 With a certain hesitation and perhaps a degree of dissent from the dominant anti-comparativist ethos, they suggest that a certain ‘magic’ still dwells in the comparative approach, which, in their view, is ‘an intellectually creative enterprise’ that is more of an art than a science, ‘a scholarly procedure’ that is ‘indeterminate’ and ‘creative’ even as it is an ‘imaginative and critical act of mediation and redescription in the service of knowledge’.15 As these hesitations and humble demurrals suggest, the ideal of a comparative religious studies that produces knowledge remained for these scholars almost as an eschatological hope at what was then the bright midday of constructivist and particularizing approaches to the study of religions. This nostalgia and wistful longing for the comparative approach among a minority of religious studies scholars is an ironic situation that results from a religious studies establishment that lost its way to the extent that it turned away from its own intentional object, which Eliade called ‘the sacred character’ of religious phenomena (caractère sacré),16 or, more simply, ‘the sacred’ (le sacré), and then searched in vain for its own raison d’être – like the Vedāntic parable of the ten men who searched for the missing tenth man after crossing a river until it was pointed out that he was always one of them. Such a stunted religious studies discipline not only shuns the use of one of its hands, but it also ceases being about religion in any meaningful sense, as is evidenced by the long and fruitless search for a theory of religious studies after the dismissal of the sacred.17 Eliade, on the contrary, held that the academic study of religion (or what he calls ‘the history of religion’), understood as a comparative and morphological study of hierophanies, or manifestations of the sacred, is ‘from the scientific aspect, largely the history of the devaluations and revaluations which make up the process of the expression of the sacred’.18 So viewed, the quest for a typology or morphology of religious universals is more than merely a creative act of conceptual mediation and scholarly redescription, as suggested by Patton and Ray. It is also the foundation for a future science of religion – or what Eliade called ‘the general science of religions’.19 Such a science of religion, in tandem with contemporary neuroscience, evolutionary biology and cognitive sciences,20 will relate the morphology of religiosity and spirituality expressed in disciplined contemplative experience with corresponding changes in the neural substrate and in brain chemistry as well as positive changes in the gene expression of contemplatives.21 To put such a view of religious studies at the centre of academic religious studies would end the pointless agonizing over the methodology appropriate to religious studies. It would also put the field back on a productive path, which would allow it to build bridges on its own terms to contemporary science, other humanistic fields, and the wider audiences of people in search of non-sectarian but essentially religious explanations of human religiosity.

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A religious studies scholar may, of course, as a matter of conviction, deny that life has a sacred dimension, and remain solidly in the ranks of academic religious studies, which, after all, is not a theological discipline (using that term in the broadest sense). But a rejection of the sacred as a matter of personal conviction must not lead to the imperative, systematically and institutionally expressed, that the study of religion must negate the clear evidences that religion is – even as a materially, biologically, historically and culturally embedded reality – about the sacred insofar as it is religious. Whether or not we are personally religious or spiritual, we must once again learn how to craft a religious studies discipline that can make sense of what, for example, Eliade saw as ‘the religious significance of the sky’, through which for most non-modern people ‘the transcendental quality of “height,” or the supra-terrestrial, the infinite, is revealed to man [sic] all at once, to his intellect as to his soul as a whole’.22

Recovering the element of the sacred It was along such lines that Eliade developed his familiar – at least to an older generation of religious studies scholars – morphological methodology of interpreting religious phenomena as exemplifications of primordial formal structures23 thought to underlie and to inform all of human experience. With virtually unparalleled breadth of perspective, he compared countless heterogeneous expressions of religiosity in order to distil the essence of religion. Against historicist and constructivist doubts that such an essence is discoverable, Eliade phenomenologically conceived this essence as a ‘coherent system’ of meanings that is revealed through the ‘dialectic of the sacred’ with cosmic, biological, mythical, symbolical, ideal and historical phenomena.24 In Eliade’s view, this dialectic mediates the numinous, mysterious power of the sacred, which is thought to be wholly different from, or opposite to, natural or human realities25 (and whether the sacred is an actual dimension of reality, or Wirklichkeit, need not be answered to engage in religious studies of this sort). Thus, as Eliade conceived it, comparative religion should proceed by searching for the primal and essential meanings preserved in myths, symbols and customs.26 This stance is an expression of his conviction that all religious expressions share a fundamental unity through their common participation in the archetypal structure of meanings – including religious meanings – that cognitively predetermine human experience. As startling as this proposition may sound to the established religious scholars of this and the preceding generation, it is just this sort of approach that bears the most promise of finding helpful partners in the nomothetic research initiatives of the emerging sciences that study the biological and neurological bases of consciousness, which, necessarily, includes religion.27

The return to typology and morphology Contemporary religious studies might understandably ask, after so long an absence from its own proper subject matter, what is the sacred?28 To answer this question,

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religious studies needs once again to turn its attention to religious universals, or the general features of religious experience that mark religious experience as religious and not as aesthetic, ethical, philosophical, political, biological, cultural or psychological. This shift towards religious universals represents a return to the concerns of the older comparative religion of figures such as Joachim Wach, Mircea Eliade and Joseph Kitagawa, who were the founding figures of what is sometimes called ‘the Chicago School’29 of the history of religions (even if ‘latter-day Chicagoans’ such as Christian K. Wedemeyer30 find this ‘moniker’ to be a ‘fiction’31). The old Chicago School sought religious universals in particulars and, in this way, differed methodologically from the currently dominant ethnographic and historical approaches, which focus on the rich array of details that can be observed in particular cultural settings, but which leave us, as Gregory D. Alles writes, ‘awash in a sea of description’.32 It is from submersion in this sea of ever ramifying but rarely connecting details that a return to the morphological approach of the old Chicago School can save us. This may take a bit of humility on the part of many current scholars of religion after so long a period of dishonouring or ignoring these pioneers. Yet, there are hopeful indications of renewed interest in this approach and its leading figures. For example, in a recent re-evaluation of the work of Wach, the pioneer of the distinctive methodology of the old Chicago School, Steven Wasserstrom acknowledges that Wach’s ‘greatest strength and most admirable contribution to our work’ was his ‘typological imagination’ (even if he considers Wach’s typologies ‘hopelessly outmoded’).33 Through what Wasserstrom calls Wach’s ‘rage for order’ and ‘drive for understanding the types of religion’, Wach not only opened the door to ‘the Eliadean revolution’34 but also stressed the religious or spiritual aspect of religiosity as against its historical character.35 That is, the typological – or morphological – approach, which must necessarily concern itself with features of religion that mark some human enterprise as a religion, will undoubtedly uncover the perennial features of religion, which are missed or explained away by overly rigorous constructivists, historicists and empiricists. An immediate problem, however, that a typological approach such as Wach’s must face is that, as Gregory Alles observes, it is unable to ‘derive’ types such as the founder, the reformer, the seer and so on from religious experience, which for Wach was the ‘core, origin, or essence of religion’.36 The problem here is not so much the general failure of the typological method, but a mismatch between religious experience and the religious types or forms that are derivable from it. If we take religious experience as our starting point – which is, of course, debatable, although I see it as axiomatic – then it may be hard to distinguish religious reformers and founders from secular reformers and founders, since the activities in both cases are quite similar regardless of the religious content – or lack of it – in the experience of either type of activity. (This similarity can account for the common misuse of religious as a synonym for ‘ultimate’, ‘intense’, ‘messianic’ and so forth, which can be expressed by saying, for example, that Apple co-founder Steve Jobs had a religious zeal for developing and promoting Apple’s iconic products.) Rather than rejecting the typological approach because of the inadequacies of Wach’s types, however, Alles turns to Rudolf Otto’s comparative project, which he

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thinks was more ‘up to the task’, since Otto’s contrast between mystical and devotional piety, although rudimentary and ‘not very informative’, is ‘at least … rooted in two very different encounters with the numinous’.37 Although Otto could get no further than these rudimentary categories, and Wach not even this far, because of what Alles sees as their ‘vague analysis of religious experience’,38 the implication is that typologies may be derivable from an analysis of religious experience that is sufficiently thematized through a chastened and renewed approach to comparative study; provided, that is, that comparative religion, thanks to the lessons of constructivism, historicism and empiricism, has learned without danger of regression that every typology must be seen as provisional and subject to revision as new information becomes available and ingrained biases come to light.39 Thus, one might go beyond simple but not unhelpful types derived from religious experience, such as Otto’s ‘soul-mysticism’ and ‘God-mysticism’40 and Friedrich Heiler’s familiar types of mystical and prophetic religion, to mysticisms grounded in concentrative practices and mysticisms grounded in insight practices, as has been done by Stuart Sarbacker, who has developed a subtle typology of the ‘cessative’ and the ‘numinous’ that is both phenomenologically astute and what he calls ‘incomplete[ly] constructivist’.41 My own attempt to develop a typology of religious universals grounded in contemplative and yogic experience in the forthcoming Yoga, Meditation, and Mysticism: Religious Universals and Contemplative Landmarks42 will hopefully avoid ambiguity and arbitrariness. One can conclude from these examples that the search for typologies, or religious universals, like the recently initiated search for the evolutionary, neurological and cognitive bases of religiosity, is a quest for order in the midst of the sprawling diversity, which currently has marooned religious studies in Alles’ sea of particulars. As sciences, these latter approaches seek the general in particulars, and so differ methodologically from ethnographic and historical approaches, which focus on the rich array of details that can be observed in particular cultural settings. And it is precisely this focus on the shared in religion rather than just the singular that points the way forward for the discipline or religious studies from what Wendy Doniger calls ‘the radical particularizing’ that ‘seems to deny any shared base to members of the same culture, much less to humanity as a whole’.43

Recovering the sacred as the intentional object of religious studies My claim earlier in this chapter that religious studies has lost its way to the extent that it has turned away from the intentional object of the sacred will be a controversial claim to a religious studies establishment that is allergic to the sacred. Yet, recovering the sacred in religious studies does not signal a return to theology or religious advocacy, for, as Bryan Rennie points out, ‘Eliade considers the sacred as the intentional object of worship’,44 which must be distinguished carefully from a real object and also from claims that this intentional object actually exists. Helpful in this connection is the distinction,

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familiar from Scholastic philosophy, that Husserl draws between an ‘intentional object’ (gegenständliche Objekt), or the meaning implicit within mental objects such as ideas or concepts, and a supposed ‘real object’ (wirkliche Objekt).45 Husserl’s view here is related to Frege’s distinction between the sense (Sinn) and the denotation (Bedeutung) of terms46 and Quine’s distinction between meaning and reference,47 all of which indicate that the subtle distinction between what we mean when we use language and what actually exists is one that, skilfully employed, might help humanity – especially modern and postmodern secular humanity – recover the rich inner worlds of human meaning revealed in traditional religious worldviews from crude forms of spiritually insensitive reductionism. With the help of this distinction, Eliade’s morphological approach can, once again, be seen as providing a reliable basis for a religious understanding of religion, whether for a religiously interested or for a purely non-religious and academic interpreter. If we accept the notion of the sacred as the proper intentional object of religious studies, then, as Rennie claims, other elements of Eliade’s classificatory structure could also be valuably retained: hierophany, the dialectic of the sacred and profane, illud tempus, and so on. These provide a reliable initial foundation on which to build a more nuanced and detailed understanding of the human behaviour we refer to as ‘religious’ – as long as we maintain a critical consciousness of the creative nature of interpretation.48

If we act upon this suggestion and learn to look at the world through Eliade’s eyes, we may begin to sense (the German ahnen would work better here in place of a dozen synonyms for the English to sense) that nature, the cosmos, conscious experience and action are irradiated with legible signals, or perennial messages, teaching a sacred wisdom that shows people how to live fully and well. And this remains the case even if one does not think the message itself is meaningful or true. From this perspective – one that is virtually taboo in the present-day academy – Eliade’s writings, like the Upaniṣads, become a key to life and its fundamental mysteries, and it is the unlocking of these mysteries that is religion’s highest task, one it does not share with geology or biology or linguistics. If it is religion as religion that we, above all else, intend to study in religious studies, and if it is not our intention to set up some other aspect of reality at the centre of our field, then a morphological and typological approach to the study of the sacred (whether it exists or not) should serve as the intentional object of a new and newly self-confident religious studies.

A return to theology? To the inevitable charge that this approach is nothing more than a return to theology and to the notion of religion as grounded upon an essential element that is sui generis, I will immediately say that the surrender of the sacred (or what I call ‘beatitude’ or ‘deathlessness’49) as the intentional object of religious studies can be characterized as itself a theological move. Since the sacred can empirically be shown to have been a pervasive aspect of human existence and its religiosity since the beginning of human awareness, to refuse to study it or to dissolve it away into other factors can be seen

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as an extreme instance of negative theology or as an expression of a dogmatic, materialistic atheism. These are not religiously neutral stances by any means, and they can be seen as instances of quasi-authoritative academic and scientific discourses that follow from the revolt against the exclusivistic religious tyrannies that for too long served as the official worldviews of late ancient, medieval and early modern European societies. But in our globally fused, post-secular world, such stances seem as parochial and theological as the exclusivistic religious views that they vanquished. In any case, it is not necessary to affirm the real existence of the sacred in religious studies; it is enough merely to study what presents itself in the documents of human religious experience and practice as being about the sacred. Thus, the key to a religiously neutral religious studies, one that can thrive in academic as well as religious settings that are not parochial, exclusivist or sectarian, is not the rejection of the sacred outright, but the preservation of the distinction between the sacred as a meaning, or intentional object, and the sacred as an actually existent reality, or real object. (And, of course, questions about the latter must remain open in pluralistic academic settings.50) As long as the distinction between meaning and reference is maintained, sufficient space for an autonomous, neutral and religiously independent religious studies methodology seems assured, at least in principle (constitutions and cultural mores respecting religious freedom are, of course, subject to change). Equipped with a morphological approach to religion and newly confident that our discipline has a workable methodology, we can now begin systematically to integrate the various approaches of the sciences, soft and hard, and the whole array of talents belonging to the humanities into the study of human religiosity in all of its diversity and particularity, which has been painstakingly uncovered by religious studies scholars in recent decades. For unless we return the concern of religious studies once again to the sacred, we will have mistaken the pillars and stones and towers for the temple.

Exposing the pre-emptive silencing of Eliade Before providing an example of how Eliade’s morphological method illumines religious phenomena as religious (and not merely as cultural, social and biological phenomena), a few comments are in order about what appear to be widespread attempts to preemptively silence Eliade in the academy before his voice can be heard by a new generation of scholars. For example, Patton and Ray, despite their nods (noted earlier) towards comparative methodologies, distance themselves from Eliade by claiming that ‘the work of Mircea Eliade, the late doyen of the history of religions, is held to be unredeemable, based as it is on the vision of a universal, transcendent “sacred” refracted in the ritual and mythic behaviour of a cross-cultural human archetype called Homo Religiosus’.51 It seems unduly harsh to me to view as ‘unredeemable’52 the quest of Eliade for a secure methodology that can discern meaningful patterns in the sea of data that washes over us from what Alles sees as the countless ‘loosely connected or disconnected microstudies’53 that have become a commodity in religious studies scholarship. Undoubtedly, much in Eliade’s programme is contestable, and his politics are controversial, but not nearly so much as Heidegger’s, who remains, despite attempts to drum him out of the

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philosophical pantheon,54 a major figure. Yet, the academic criticism of Eliade often seems excessively emotional, even political, rather than merely critical. Karl Kerényi, for example, dismisses ‘the work of the trivial Eliade’55 and Wendy Doniger speculates that ‘Eliade was fighting against history, even when he thought he was preserving it. More precisely, he was fighting against time and its inevitable destructiveness, fighting for immortality.’56 Similarly, Russell McCutcheon suggests that Eliade was trying both ‘to entrench’ himself and his readers ‘deeper in the historical present’ while also using his writings to find ‘salvation against the ravages of historical flux’.57 Alongside these attempts to pathologize Eliade’s ambitious comparative project is Anne T. Mocko’s half-hearted58 attempt to exonerate Eliade from charges that he was a Fascist enthusiast or even a Nazi with a needlessly politicized dismissal of his project as an instance of ultra-right nostalgia. She writes that ‘Eliade’s ideas and his orientation to the world … seem to place him clearly on the far right of the political spectrum, given his romanticism and his desire to save the world through archaic utopias.’59 Mocko also notes that Eliade’s ‘deeply conservative perspective is both unfashionable in the traditionally left-leaning academy and distasteful to my own views.’60 In defence of Eliade, I will affirm that I also am, like Mocko, a left-leaning intellectual who abhors the murderous totalitarian police states of the twentieth century and will make absolutely no defence of them. Yet, I think that the project of tracing the regular effects in multiple traditions of a reputed sacred dimension of life is beyond characterization in terms of rightist or leftist political ideologies.61 I thus find Mocko’s critical evaluation of Eliade’s oeuvre to be nothing than more than a skilful ad hominem argument that seems designed to silence Eliade before a new generation of religion scholars can give him a fair hearing (as indeed, she points out, was her own experience with Eliade as a younger scholar in the field62). In response to this line of criticism, I would argue that if, in fact, religion as religion signifies (without necessarily denoting) an irreducibly spiritual dimension of life and its manifestations in nature, ritual, society and inner experience, then the study of these central facts of human life is a basic human concern, which cannot glibly be written off as merely a concern of rightist traditionalists. (Perhaps one of the sources of the current malaise and crisis of relevance in religious studies is its insistence on reducing all issues to political and cultural conditions.63) In any case, the often highly negative and emotional academic criticisms of Eliade will likely seem beside the point of Eliade’s project to those outside the carefully monitored boundaries of the strictly stratified environs of academia, given that these mostly ad hominem arguments and charges are in the main rooted in cultural, political and scientistic discourses that have little to do with explicating the spiritual nerve of human religiosity, which seems to have been the main and enduring concern in the many and varied settings in which Eliade lived and wrote.

Eliade’s morphological interpretation of religious experience Besides undoing the damage that excessive ad hominem disparagement has done to his reputation, any rehabilitation of Eliade’s morphological approach must overcome the

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situation that it is now seen as passé and even as misguided to many in the academic field of religious studies, of which, ironically, he is a founding figure. Although Jonathan Z. Smith allows that the morphology of religion is the only comparative method that has ‘produced major comparisons that have stood the test of time’,64 he nevertheless sees Eliade’s morphological approach as insufficiently historical and, consequently, attractive to ‘few students of religion’.65 In dissent from this view, which overvalues the historical, or historicizing, approach to religious traditions at the expense of philosophical, or universalizing, and natural scientific, or nomothetic, approaches, I see Eliade’s morphological method as a disciplined attempt at tracing out from the limitless materials of humanity’s many religious traditions the general categories, types or forms of a perennial cataphatic spirituality, one that can break down the walls of particularism and exclusivism that potentially divide religious traditions and people from each other into walled-off and sometimes hostile camps. (This is the second essential element in what I see as the three methods native to religious studies. The first is the now dominant cataphatic description of individual religious traditions, while the third is the apophatic but empathic critique of religious traditions. I discuss this at greater length in Pluralism: The Future of Religion.66) In an attempt to recall the explanatory force of Eliade’s morphological approach, I want to follow him in a small but representative selection of his vast oeuvre as he goes about the work of systematically discerning the interrelated meanings that press in upon the awareness of those sensitive to the whisperings of the sacred in the panorama of beings and events that form the world of experience. For an older generation of religious studies scholars – many of whom are no longer active as teachers and researchers – this survey may appear to cover all too familiar ground. Yet for me, and I suspect for many religious studies scholars younger than I am, even this brief encounter with Eliade and his once universally acclaimed morphological approach to the sacred and its manifestations will be as suggestive and illuminating as travelling for the first time to a distant land where the colours are more vibrant and the language more ecstatic than at home. It is my hope that this survey will stimulate at least some younger scholars of religious studies to take up, in appropriately purified forms, the morphological approach of Eliade and to link it in their own studies with the nomothetic and universalizing approaches to religion that are building bridges between religion and the natural sciences.

The Hierophanic Spirituality of  homo religiosus In Eliade’s morphological approach to what he saw as the archetypal and archaic religion and ontology of homo religiosus, or what we might call ‘spiritual humanity’, all cosmic and existential phenomena are potentially occasions of hierophanies, or manifestations of the sacred, which Eliade saw as the ‘most elementary modalities of the sacred’.67 His morphological analysis of the globe’s religious traditions yields a number of systematically interrelated hierophanies, such as those associated with the sky, the sea, the sun, the moon, water, stones, earth, vegetation and agriculture. These hierophanies are not arbitrary projections of human superstition and ignorance,

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in Eliade’s approach, but constitute the transparent, natural and spiritual meaning of religiously significant phenomena. Quite radically, and in complete contradiction of a constructivist and historicistic approach, he asserts that such religious ‘symbolism is an immediate notion of the whole consciousness, of the man [sic], that is, who realizes himself as a man, who recognizes his place in the universe’.68 For homo religiosus, the sky is a hierophany that symbolizes, through its inaccessibility, changelessness and infinity, the infinity, transcendence and mystery of the sacred.69 Similarly, the phases of the moon are a hierophany that suggests the divine answer to the riddle of human mortality: a ceaseless, rhythmic transformation of death into life and of life into death. From the phases of the moon, homo religiosus derives the conviction that death, like the dark phase of the moon, is not final but is succeeded by renewed life.70 Other hierophanies are suggested by other natural phenomena. The characteristics of water symbolize the absolute, formless reality, which gives rise to and dissolves all forms.71 Stone is a hierophany of an absolute mode of being, which transcends the precariousness and the transitoriness of human life.72 The earth, through its own inexhaustible fecundity, suggests the sacred as the inexhaustible fount of all expressions of existence.73 The unifying principle of all of these hierophanies is the quest of homo religiosus to live in the ambience of the real, of the sacred.74 Since the sacred manifests in various phenomena, homo religiosus seeks to participate in the divine by participating in ritual activities that recall the hierophanic quality of those phenomena. These ritual activities involve a sacralization of space and time, for through ritual, archetypal humanity ‘reproduces the work of the gods’75 as it occurred ab origine, in illo tempore.76 In this way, through ritual, the otherwise profane world is brought into communion with the realms of divine beings and the originary sources of life and the cosmos. Because homo religiosus is always aware of a need to live in intimate contact with the sacred reality that informs the cosmos,77 it cannot live happily in a profane space marked by homogeneous extension and irreversible duration.78 Thus, the yearning of homo religiosus to live in proximity to the sacred manifests itself as a need to live near the centre of the world (axis mundi) and to live contemporaneously with the primordial act that established the world.79 Two phenomena, the sacred pole and New Year festivals, illustrate this essential trait of the experience of homo religiosus. The sacred pole, which stands at a site where contact has been established with the sacred, designates the centre of the world, or the privileged point in relation to which otherwise random and homogeneous space acquires structure. The pole, the symbol of the axis mundi, is thus the place where communication with divine beings is possible, and it is also the pillar of the universe that supports all things.80 At New Year festivals, the time of origin is recollected, thus transforming ordinary time into that originary time when the world ‘came from the creator's hand, fresh, pure, and strong’.81 This reinvigoration is a result of the reversion to archetypal experiences and events, which is a symbolic capacity at the centre of the experience of homo religiosus. Thus, festivals, which involve ritual invocation of sacred space and time, enable homo religiosus periodically ‘to live in the presence of the gods’ by making

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time ‘coincide with the time of origin’82 and by making certain locations correspond with the ‘Gate of Heaven’.83 And so, through subtle symbolic activity expressed in ecstatic storytelling and orienting rituals, homo religiosus charts compelling pathways to overcoming transiency, death and meaninglessness. To this short summary of Eliade’s morphological approach, countless details can doubtlessly be added. Short as it is, I hope that it suggests the extraordinary explanatory power of Eliade’s ‘science of religions’.84 No doubt this model is imperfect, and inadequacies can be found on all sides. Yet, there resides within Eliade’s approach, and that of the old Chicago School as a whole, an authentic determination to trace the source of humanity’s inveterate tendency to worship and to aspire to life in the uncanny realm of the sacred, which sets itself off from profane life, even as it sustains its endlessly varied expressivity, by its own infinity, deathlessness and beatitude. Whether or not one accepts such a marvellous realm, it cannot be denied that religion, beyond all other departments of human life, traffics with it. No science of religion that neglects this stubbornly resistant fact about religion can rightly claim either to be a science or to be about religion.

Conclusion Whether one holds that the sacred is a causal reality in human experience or that all such talk represents an outmoded, religious and non-scientific view of life, Eliade’s morphological approach cannot be faulted for failing to capture something essential in the religious experience of human beings, something that is almost completely missing from strictly idiographic approaches to specific religions. The chief value of Eliade’s global cataphatic and morphological spirituality is not that it provides us with a scientific description of the physical world and social worlds – for that we have, and need, the whole array of modern sciences. It does, however, provide us with a plausible, but not fixed and final, phenomenology of the inner life of humanity as it faces the world of natural phenomena. No matter how great the assault of a materialistic psychology upon the mental life of human beings, and no matter how competent the explanations of the influence of the brain upon consciousness become in neurobiology, the intuitive phenomenology of the firstperson experience of the world will not disappear unless we ourselves, as conscious human beings, completely disappear. For, even if there were but one human being left, the rich inner life of humanity in its wide symbolic reach would remain as a central and compelling feature of that one person’s experience. Whether one reads accounts of Lakota cosmology, Pentecostal spiritual warfare, or the Upaniṣads, one sees that the inner life of humanity is caught up in a symbolism involving values, forces and levels of being that have no physical counterparts – and no talking them away seems to be effective in finally eliminating them. How else can we account for the return of religion in the United States, a country where advanced science, biblical literalism, creationist museums, the ancient philosophies and religions of Asia, mindfulness, yoga, meditation and spiritually accented movements affecting every dimension of life

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find fertile soil alongside countless mainstream and sectarian religious movements? Non-introspective, third-person accounts of these phenomena are of little interpretative and explanatory value to those religiously sensitive people who experience these symbolic landscapes with more force than the supposed more real world of external objects and measurable forces. To fully appreciate the inner, spiritual life of humanity, we will need the resources of comparative literature, comparative theology, comparative religion, comparative mysticism and comparative philosophy, alongside all of the natural and social sciences, as well as the rest of the humanities. From all of these disciplines, and not through the exclusion of any, will a new science of religion emerge, one that is not in thrall to a limited, materialist, anti-introspective view of science. It is clear that numerous biases and outdated language mar the massive oeuvres of Eliade and the other masters of morphological phenomenology of religion, yet we might self-critically ask what biases and hurtful language, hidden from us now, will be all too painfully evident in our own work to the scholars of 2115, should humanity manage to get that far. Yet these founding figures successfully charted a clear and serviceable path for academic studies in an environment, far more secular than our own age, that was either hostile to or indifferent to religion, which was, in that fading epoch, thought to be on its way to oblivion, along with other relics of the supposed intellectual adolescence of humanity. Although these foundational masters of religious studies have been relegated to the sidelines in recent decades, it may be time for the discipline of religious studies once again to examine itself, to see whether its ultimate vocation is not in merely mimicking the methodologies of the sciences and the other humanities but, rather, in taking up once again the search for the universal elements of human religiosity and spirituality while avoiding a crudely reductionistic and dehumanizing worldview, on the one hand, and religious particularism, extremism and fundamentalism, on the other.

Notes 1 Two short portions of Rose 1994: 15–31, which summarize Eliade’s method, have been incorporated in modified form into this chapter. Permission to republish this essay in full or in modified form was granted by the journal’s editor. 2 Although Eliade has become a marginalized figure in academic religious studies, he remains a helpful guide to the character of religion outside of the academy, as even Wendy Doniger notes in citing a tribute to Eliade given by Nobel Prize laureate Seamus Heaney (Doniger 2010: xxxiv). 3 Bryan Rennie reflects on the irony of the situation in which the high international opinion of Eliade is little reflected ‘in the Anglophone West’, which ‘rarely takes international opinion into account, or considers Eliade’s career and oeuvre as a whole’ (Rennie 2007: 1). 4 Husserl 2002: §90, 262–5. 5 Eliade 1959b: 10, 11, 202. 6 As surveyed by Anttonen 2007: 67–8, where he summarizes the pioneering theories of Stewart Guthrie and Pascal Boyer. 7 Patrick McNamara holds that ‘the fact that a particular circuit of brain regions is consistently associated with religious experience may tell us something about the nature and functions of religion’ (McNamara 2009: xi).

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8 A weakness noted by McNamara 2009: x. 9 Wilfred Cantwell Smith, one of the most influential historians of religion in the latter part of the twentieth century, developed a methodology in the study of religion that clearly shied away from the comparative quest. He influentially argued that ‘there is no a priori reason for holding that the unique may not be more significant, more true, than the common’ (Smith 1978: 3). 10 A towering figure in religious studies since the 1970s is the anthropologist Clifford Geertz, who, like W. C. Smith, helped shift the ground in religious studies from nomothetic to idiographic approaches in a foundational essay ‘Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture’ (Geertz 1973). Ironically, Jung Lee tries to salvage the reputation of Geertz from recent charges that his own work is ‘universalist’, ‘transhistorical’ and ‘theologically driven’ (Lee 2012: 500). 11 Undercutting the comparative project at its roots, and even rendering it ludicrous, is the massively influential view of Jonathan Z. Smith that the notion of religion is ‘solely the creation of the scholar’s study’ (Smith 1982a: xi). In a later essay, Jonathan Z. Smith held that one of the new ‘standards’ that has been forged since the 1960s in the study of religion is ‘an ethic of particularity which suggested that any attempt at generalization violated the personhood of those studied’ (Smith 1995, quoted in Patton and Ray 2000b: 3). See also Smith 1982b in Patton and Ray 2000a: 24, where Smith complains that in comparative scholarship ‘the issue of difference has been all but forgotten’. 12 What Steven M. Wasserstrom calls the ‘typological sublime’ (Wasserstrom 2010: 49). 13 Wendy Doniger writes that ‘she is unwilling to close the comparativist shop just because it is being picketed by people whose views I happen, by and large, to share’ (Doniger 2000: 63). 14 As noted by Patton and Ray 2000b: 3. This expression, taken from J. Z. Smith, was used by Smith to undercut the comparative project by likening it to J. G. Frazer’s notion of homeopathic magic, which is based on ‘the recollection of similarity’ (Smith 1982b: 3). 15 Patton and Ray 2000b: 3–4. Luther Martin offers a cogent response to this diffuse definition of comparative religion in light of the testable theories of the contemporary natural sciences of religion (Martin 2004: 36–7). 16 Eliade 1949: 17. Eliade translates this phrase as ‘the element of the sacred’ (Eliade 1958: xi). 17 As evidenced in a series of now canonical, methodological essays that, with a tendentious intensity, set about to dismantle the notion of religion and to set the remaining academic discipline called ‘religion’ on an apparently more secure and legitimate non-religious foundation. See, for example, Smith 1988; Gill 1994; Wiebe 1988, all reprinted in Olson 2003: 20–5, 25–9 and 36–41, respectively. 18 Eliade 1958: 25, 465. 19 Eliade 1959a: 89. 20 As attempted in the non-reductionistic and religiously sensitive research and theorizing of neuroscientist Patrick McNamara (2009: ix–xiii). 21 One example of a rapidly growing body of evidence for this claim comes in a study published in Psychoneuroendocrinology 40 (February 2014): 96–107 (and as summarized in the medical press): after eight hours of mindfulness meditation, researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Institute of Biomedical Research of Barcelona discovered that ‘meditators showed a range of genetic and molecular differences, including reduced levels of pro-inflammatory genes. This correlates with faster physical recovery from a stressful situation.’ Noted

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neuroscientist Richard Davis comments that ‘Our genes are quite dynamic in their expression and these results suggest that the calmness of our mind can actually have a potential influence on their expression’ (Weber 2013). 22 Eliade 1958: 39. 23 Eliade 1959a: 98. 24 Eliade 1958: xvi, 26. 25 Eliade 1959b: 10, 1958: 1, 459. 26 Eliade 1958: 10. 27 William Paden sees Eliade’s morphological approach as ‘a formative taxonomic staging in religious studies’ that ‘may link the work of comparative religion and cognitive sciences’, as long, that is, as Eliade’s ‘staticism and noncontextualism’ are filtered out (Paden 2000: 183–4). 28 The sacred – or, better, the ideas and concept that this word connotes – has been surveyed by Veikko Anttonen, who offers a semantic analysis of the term in light of sociology and cognitive science (Anttonen 2000: 195–206). Although Anttonen refers extensively to Eliade’s notion of the sacred, he develops, in another essay, his own ‘non-Eliadean’ view of the sacred in light of sociology, one that dismisses Eliadean a priori cognition of the sacred as unempirical and unscientific in favour of his own ‘category-theoretical approach’ to religion, which analyses ‘specific concepts’ of the sacred and their referents in their ‘specific power- and value-laden sociocultural contexts’ (Anttonen 2007: 68, 66–70). 29 Wedemeyer 2010: xvii, xxv; Wasserstrom 2010: 22. 30 Wedemeyer 2010: xvii. 31 Ibid.: xix–xxi. 32 Alles 2010: 70. 33 Wasserstrom 2010: 61. 34 Ibid.: 49. 35 Ibid.: 50, agrees on this point with and quotes Kurt Rudolph, who claims that Wach, along with Heiler, Otto, van der Leeuw and others ‘all essentially sacrificed the historical, scientific character of the history of religions to theology’, Historical Fundamentals and the Study of Religion: Haskell Lectures Delivered at the University of Chicago (New York: Macmillan, 1985), 38. This use of theology is distinctive in contemporary religious studies, and it seems to be a metonym not for Christian theology as such but for any kind of theorizing about religion that attends – believingly or not – to spiritual values as being significant in their own right and does not attempt to reduce them to the terms of some other discipline, such as sociology or cognitive science. 36 Alles 2010: 63. Alles offers a comprehensive reassessment of Wach’s typological project (Alles 2010: 51–78). 37 Alles 2010: 63. 38 Ibid. 39 Although harshly critical of Eliade and his ‘modernism’, David Gordon White calls upon comparativists after the demise of postmodernism ‘to make sense of other people’s religions, even if we do so in the certain knowledge that everything that we say and write is provisional and condemned to revision if not ridicule by future generations’ (White 2000: 47, 49). 40 Otto 1932: 143. 41 Sarbacker 2005: 1, 9, 30–5, 104–8, 136. 42 Forthcoming from Bloomsbury Academic, 2015.

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43 Doniger 2000: 65. 44 Rennie 2010: 209. 45 Husserl 2002: §90, 262–5. Husserl would only have accepted the legitimacy of this distinction at the level of a merely psychological-phenomenological idealism, but not from the standpoint of his transcendental-phenomenological idealism; ‘Author’s Preface to the English Edition’, 2002: 12–15. 46 Beaney 1996: 49n6, 55n13; Zalta 2014. 47 Quine 1980: 22, 62; Reimer 2014. The technical scholarship on each of these sets of distinctions is enormous and subtle, but none of it can be entered into here. 48 Rennie 2010: 211. 49 In choosing this expression as the most generic meaning of the intentional object of religion, I indicate the long-standing influence on my own religious thought of the Buddhist notion of amata (amrta in Sanskrit) or the ‘deathless’, which, as Buddhist scholar and comparative theologian Perry Schmidt-Leukel points out on the basis of Khuddaka Pātha 6:7 in the Pāli Canon, ‘is a standard Buddhist epithet for Nirvāṇa’ (Schmidt-Leukel 2009: 128). 50 How one answers this question distinguishes between whether one is practising comparative religion, in which case one must remain silent about the actual existence of the sacred, or whether one is engaged in a religiously committed yet thoroughly pluralistic comparative theology as envisioned by Perry Schmidt-Leukel, who follows a path blazed in this direction by Wilfrid Cantwell Smith and Paul Tillich (Schmidt-Leukel 2009: 91, 100, 102; see also Schmidt-Leukel 2011: 5–6). 51 Patton and Ray 2000b: 3. Cho and Squier also detected the ambiguity of this introductory essay and of the volume as a whole, which seems to rehabilitate comparative religion while also voicing ‘the opposition of postmodern and postcolonial critiques’ (Cho and Squier 2013: 358n2). 52 Patton and Ray 2000b: 1. 53 Alles 2010: 72. 54 Faye 2011. 55 Quoted in Ginzburg 2010: 323. 56 Doniger 2010: xxxiv. 57 McCutcheon 1997: 79. 58 Anne T. Mocko carefully points out that the biographies of Heidegger and Dumézil should be ‘taken as cautions to their work, while the work continues to be used’, an approach that could help to rehabilitate at least some aspects of Eliade’s work (Mocko 2010: 286). 59 Mocko 2010: 306. 60 Ibid. 61 A position with which Doniger might agree (Doniger 2000: 71). 62 Mocko 2010: 285–6. 63 For an example, see McCutcheon 1997: 78–9. 64 ‘The only option [i.e. the morphological approach] appears to be no option at all’ (Smith 1982b, in Patton and Ray 2000: 28, 29, 30). 65 Smith 1982b, in Patton and Ray 2000: 29. 66 See Rose 2013: 157–62. 67 Eliade 1958: 11, 23. 68 Ibid.: 39. 69 Ibid.: 39–40. 70 Eliade 1959b: 156, 1958: 126, 157–63, 186.

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References Alles, Gregory (2010), ‘After the Naming Explosion’, in Christian K. Wedemeyer and Wendy Doniger (eds), Hermeneutics, Politics, and the History of Religions: The Contested Legacies of Joachim Wach and Mircea Eliade, 51–78, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Anttonen, Veikko (2000), ‘What Is It That We Call “Religion”? Analyzing the Epistemological Status of the Sacred as a Scholarly Category in Comparative Religion,’ Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, 12 (1–2): 195–206. ATLA Religion Database with ATLA Serials, EBSCOhost (accessed 24 October 2014). Anttonen, Veikko (2007), ‘Does the Eliadean Notion of the Sacred Make a Difference?’ Council of Societies for the Study of Religion Bulletin, 36 (3): 66–70. ATLA Religion Database with ATLA Serials, EBSCOhost (accessed 24 October 2014). Beaney, Michael (1996), The Frege Reader, Oxford: Blackwell. Cho, Francesca and Richard Squier (2013), ‘Religion as a Complex and Dynamic System’, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 18 (2): 357–98. Doniger, Wendy (2000), ‘Post-Modern and -Colonial -Structural Comparisons’, in Kimberley C. Patton and Benjamin C. Ray (eds), A Magic Still Dwells: Comparative Religion in the Postmodern Age, 63–74, Berkeley and London: University of California Press. Doniger, Wendy (2010), ‘Introduction II’, in Christian K. Wedemeyer and Wendy Doniger (eds), Hermeneutics, Politics, and the History of Religions: The Contested Legacies of Joachim Wach and Mircea Eliade, 51–78, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Eliade, Mircea (1949), Traité d’histoire des religions, Paris: Éditions Payot. Eliade, Mircea (1958), Patterns in Comparative Religion, trans. Rosemary Sheed, London and New York: Sheed and Ward. (Originally published as Traité d’histoire des religions, Paris: Éditions Payot, 1949.) Eliade, Mircea (1959a), ‘Methodological Remarks on the Study of Religious Symbolism’, in Mircea Eliade and Joseph Kitagawa (eds), The History of Religions: Essays in Methodology, 86–107, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Eliade, Mircea (1959b), The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, trans. Willard P. Trask, New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World.

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Faye, Emmanuel (2011), Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy in Light of the Unpublished Seminars of 1933-1935, trans. Michael B. Smith, New Haven: Yale University Press. Geertz, Clifford (1973), ‘Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture’, in Clifford Geertz (ed.), The Interpretation of Cultures, 3–30, New York: Basic Books. Gill, Sam (1994), ‘The Academic Study of Religion’, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 62 (4): 965–75, in Carl Olson, ed. (2003), Theory and Method in the Study of Religion: A Selection of Critical Readings, 20–5, Belmont, CA: Thomson/Wadsworth. Ginzburg, Carlo (2010), ‘Mircea Eliade’s Ambivalent Legacy’, in Christian K. Wedemeyer and Wendy Doniger (eds), Hermeneutics, Politics, and the History of Religions: The Contested Legacies of Joachim Wach and Mircea Eliade, 307–23, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Husserl, Edmund (2002), Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, trans. W. R. Boyce Gibson, Routledge (originally published 1931, Macmillan, New York). Lee, Jung (2012), ‘Ethos and Worldview Reconsidered: Geertz, Normativity, and the Comparative Study of Religions’, Religion Compass, 6 (12): 500–10. McCutcheon, Russell T. (1997), Manufacturing Religion: The Discourse on Sui Generis Religion and the Politics of Nostalgia, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. McNamara, Patrick (2009), The Neuroscience of Religious Experience, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Martin, Luther H. (2004), ‘ “Disenchanting” the Comparative Study of Religion’, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, 16 (1): 36–44. ATLA Religion Database with ATLA Serials, EBSCOhost (accessed 24 October 2014). Mocko, Anne T. (2010), ‘Tracing the Red Thread: Anti-Communist Themes in the Work of Mircea Eliade’, in Christian K. Wedemeyer and Wendy Doniger (eds), Hermeneutics, Politics, and the History of Religions: The Contested Legacies of Joachim Wach and Mircea Eliade, 285–306, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Olson, Carl, ed. (2003), Theory and Method in the Study of Religion: A Selection of Critical Readings, Belmont, CA: Thomson/Wadsworth. Otto, Rudolf (1932), Mysticism East and West: A Comparative Analysis of the Nature of Mysticism, trans. Bertha L. Bracey and Richenda C. Payne, New York: Macmillan (originally published as Westöstliche Mystik: Vergleich und Unterscheidung zur Wesensdeutung, Gotha: L. Klotz, 1926). Paden, William E. (2000), ‘Elements of a New Comparativism,’ in Kimberley C. Patton and Benjamin C. Ray (eds), A Magic Still Dwells: Comparative Religion in the Postmodern Age, 182–92, Berkeley and London: University of California Press. Patton, Kimberley C. and Benjamin C. Ray, eds (2000a), A Magic Still Dwells: Comparative Religion in the Postmodern Age, Berkeley and London: University of California Press. Patton, Kimberley C. and Benjamin C. Ray (2000b), ‘Introduction’, in Kimberley C. Patton and Benjamin C. Ray (eds), A Magic Still Dwells: Comparative Religion in the Postmodern Age, 1–19, Berkeley and London: University of California Press. Quine, Willard van Orman (1980), From a Logical Point of View: Nine Logico-Philosophical Essays, revised 2nd edn, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Reimer, Marga (2014), ‘Reference’, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Available online: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/reference/#RefRea (accessed 18 October 2014). Rennie, Bryan (2007), ‘Introduction: Themes in the International Eliade’, in Bryan Rennie (ed.), The International Eliade, 1–11, Albany: SUNY Press. Rennie, Bryan (2010), ‘The Influence of Eastern Orthodox Christian Theology on Mircea Eliade’s Understanding of Religion,’ in Christian K. Wedemeyer and

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Wendy Doniger (eds), Hermeneutics, Politics, and the History of Religions: The Contested Legacies of Joachim Wach and Mircea Eliade, 197–213, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rose, Kenneth (Fall 1994), ‘Faith or Hermeneutics in the Methodology of Mircea Eliade’, Journal of Theta Alpha Kappa, 18: 15–31. Rose, Kenneth (2013), Pluralism: The Future of Religion, New York, London, New Delhi and Sydney: Bloomsbury Academic. Rose, Kenneth (2015), Yoga, Meditation, and Mysticism: Religious Universals and Contemplative Landmarks, 2016, New York, London, New Delhi and Sydney: Bloomsbury Academic. Sarbacker, Stuart (2005), Samādhi: The Numinous and the Cessative in Indo-Tibetan Yoga, Albany: The State University of New York Press. Schmidt-Leukel, Perry (2009), Transformation by Integration: How Inter-faith Encounter Changes Christianity, London: SCM Press. Schmidt-Leukel, Perry (2011), ‘Interkulturelle Theologie als interreligiöse Theologie’, Evangelische Theologie, 71 (1): 4–16. Smith, Jonathan Z. (1982a), Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Smith, Jonathan Z. (1982b), ‘In Comparison A Magic Still Dwells,’ in Kimberley C. Patton and Benjamin C. Ray (eds), A Magic Still Dwells: Comparative Religion in the Postmodern Age, 23–44, Berkeley and London: University of California Press (originally published in Smith, Jonathan Z. (1982), Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown, Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Smith, Jonathan Z. (1988), ‘Religions and Religious Studies: No Difference at All’, Soundings, 71 (2–3): 231–44, in Carl Olson. ed. (2003), Theory and Method in the Study of Religion: A Selection of Critical Readings, 25–9, Belmont, CA: Thomson/Wadsworth. Smith, Jonathan Z. (1995), ‘Afterword: Religious Studies: Whither (Wither) and Why?’ Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, 7 (4): 407–14, quoted in Kimberley C. Patton and Benjamin C. Ray (eds), A Magic Still Dwells: Comparative Religion in the Postmodern Age, 3, Berkeley and London: University of California Press. Smith, Wilfred Cantwell (1978), The Meaning and End of Religion, 1st paperback edn, San Francisco: Harper & Row. Wasserstrom, Steven M. (2010), ‘The Master Interpreter: The German Career of Joachim Wach (1922–1935)’, in Christian K. Wedemeyer and Wendy Doniger (eds), Hermeneutics, Politics, and the History of Religions: The Contested Legacies of Joachim Wach and Mircea Eliade, 21–50, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Weber, Belinda (2013), ‘Meditation changes gene expression, study shows’, Medical News Today, 12 December. Available online: http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/ articles/269910.php (accessed 19 October 2014). Wedemeyer, Christian K. (2010), ‘Introduction I’, in Christian K. Wedemeyer and Wendy Doniger (eds), Hermeneutics, Politics, and the History of Religions: The Contested Legacies of Joachim Wach and Mircea Eliade, xv–xxxiv, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wedemeyer, Christian K. and Wendy Doniger, eds (2010), Hermeneutics, Politics, and the History of Religions: The Contested Legacies of Joachim Wach and Mircea Eliade, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. White, David Gordon (2000), ‘The Scholar as Mythographer’, in Kimberley C. Patton and Benjamin C. Ray (eds), A Magic Still Dwells: Comparative Religion in the Postmodern Age, 47–54, Berkeley and London: University of California Press.

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Wiebe, Donald (1988), ‘Why the Academic Study of Religion? Motive and Method in the Study of Religion’, Religious Studies, 24: 403–13, in Carl Olson, ed. (2003), Theory and Method in the Study of Religion: A Selection of Critical Readings, 36–41, Belmont, CA: Thomson/Wadsworth. Zalta, Edward N. (2014), ‘Gottlob Frege,’ in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Available online: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/frege/#FreTheSenDen (accessed 18 October 2014).

7

Religious Practice and the Nature of the Human Gavin Flood

The importance of understanding and explaining religion is as relevant today as it has ever been, and debates about the nature of religion are rehearsed and theories reposition themselves in relation to each other. The category ‘comparative religion’ has come under criticism in the last thirty years or more on the grounds that it assumes a questionable human universalism, that it privileges Christianity against other traditions, and that the very category ‘religion’ needs to be brought into question. Through interrogating ‘religion’, one argument goes, we find an implicit or hegemonic politics of representation in the service of neo-colonial power.1 Religion can be shown to be a local category with a specific history that, upon analysis, dissolves as being universal. These have been serious challenges to the very nature of the category at the heart of comparative religion, and in a sense we cannot return to the first naiveté of pure objectivity; these challenges have taught us how language and history constrain, if not determine, our views of the world, and how the privileging of text has been at the cost of studying the materiality of cultural practices. Along with the scepticism towards religion, we have a scepticism towards Max Muller’s aspiration to a ‘science of religion’, which has been generally abandoned except by some who see hope for a true science in the cognitive study of religion.2 For some time now, it has been generally recognized in the academy that purely textual accounts of religion are inadequate, and the materiality of religions – that they are enacted, that they are spatially located, and that they are concerned with objects as well as ideas – has taken centre stage. The post-structuralist emphasis on text and the hermeneutical enterprise of deconstruction has, in the end, proved inadequate to the task of understanding or explaining religion, with some exceptions that have explored the interface between apophatic theology and deconstruction.3 Reductionist accounts such as new forms of cognitivism, while potentially productive, have not proved fruitful, because higher levels of complexity (such as theological systems) cannot be adequately, that is causally, explained by lower-level processes (such as neurons firing). There is, therefore, a challenging but exciting task of developing accounts of religion that are both adequate to the complexity of what reveals itself and adequate to new explanatory paradigms developing in the harder sciences, particularly from cognitive science.

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But comparison is at the heart of religious studies, and has not been abandoned even in the face of these challenges. For example, Ray and Patton’s volume argues for the renewal of comparison,4 Arvind Sharma has argued for the reciprocal illumination between religions and between religions and methods,5 and the continuing relevance of comparison is shown in John Bowker’s important work.6 We also have a new field of comparative theology that sees comparison as a theological enterprise in which ‘the understanding’ in theology, understood as ‘faith seeking understanding’ comes from another tradition.7 In partial response to these developments, in the present chapter, I wish to sketch an argument that a comparative religion needs to develop theoretical models for the explanation of religion, which stem from the claim that to understand or explain religion, we need to begin with the nature of the human and to see comparative religion as a fundamentally humanistic enterprise. There are three stages to the argument I wish to present: first, that we need to highlight religious practices as the focus of inquiry and second, that hermeneutical phenomenology opens up the broader humanistic dimension of comparative religion, which, third, provides a philosophical basis for the explanation of religion in terms of the harder science of social cognition.

The centrality of religious practices The world religions we know today have come down to us from the pre-modern and often the ancient past. What we call Buddhism, Islam, Christianity and so on have their own unique histories, their own sets of practice and belief, institutions and texts. Arguably, there is little point in seeking shared doctrines in order to support a particular theory of universalism, as the unfolding of intellectual histories is unique to traditions: the doctrine of the Trinity has a particular history of its own, developed through various councils, and there is little point in comparing this with, say, the ‘Hindu trinity’ of three gods that only has credence within one particular form of Hinduism. Although a sophisticated attempt to resolve the problem of the particularity of religions while seeking a common element, John Hick’s view is left with the problem that his meta-argument (although he does not use that term) has, at least so far, been accepted by few theologians within various religious traditions.8 The doctrinal diversity within religions is so great as to resist any attempt at finding a common doctrine (as comparative theology recognizes). But comparative religion entails some idea of religion as something shared by human communities. What has more interesting potential for comparison is religious practices, as these are rooted in more general human practices. Arguably, it is in practices, rather than in doctrines, that we find a deeper commonality to religions, but even here there are difficulties, for in comparing practices we need to take into account their specific meaning in a context. Clifford Geertz’s advocation of ‘thick description’ derives from his reflections on Ryle’s example of the way in which the movement of an eyelid can have different cultural meanings dependent upon the intentions of the actors and the codes of the social context.9 We can, on this view, have only localized conclusions, which militate against comparison.

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But while it is undoubtedly true that cultural practices have meaning in their specific contexts, it does not follow that we cannot identify more general patterns of practice. Cultural practices are rooted in biological behaviours that are arguably cross-cultural, and while winking, in Ryle’s example, has culture- and context-specific value, we can identify broader patterns that have presumably developed through our evolutionary history: rituals that promote social bonding and cooperation, for example. There will be analogues to winking across cultures. Reflecting on practices raises interesting questions about what is shared and not shared by human communities. Martin Riesebrodt offers a compelling definition and understanding of religion based on practices rather than ideas. He argues for the universality of religion as a set of social practices, and he defines religion as practices ‘of establishing contact with superhuman powers’.10 Religions are primarily sets of ‘liturgies’ that are ‘institutionalized rules and guidelines for humans’ interactions with superhuman powers’.11 What is unique to religions as human social institutions is that they hold out the promise of salvation and the averting of misfortune. It is this promise of salvation that remains constant, even when the function of religions changes according to particular historical circumstances, and this goal is arrived at through practice, although Riesebrodt has been taken to task for not adequately addressing the relation between promise and practice.12 But, arguably, there is such a relation in the sense that religious practices – standard examples of prayer, sacrifice, the ritual recitation of texts – are performed within a ‘sacred canopy’ or orientation towards a goal. This cannot be developed here, but cultural practices might be defined as religious if they are orientated towards what Reisebrodt calls the promise of salvation. The term ‘salvation’ needs to be interpreted generously, as being tradition specific and yet sharing some idea of human flourishing, satisfaction or transformation to a condition outside of suffering and death.13 But it is the practices, rather than the promises, that we need to focus on as the shared inheritance of religions. Religions persist even in the failure of their promises and even in the face of the massive forces of secularism. It is not so much what people think but, rather, what they do that defines their identity within a particular group, and, as Riesebrodt identifies, an important part of social action is the averting of misfortune and the affirmation of a better or transformed life in this world or elsewhere. Riesebrodt is surely correct in emphasizing practice. In this emphasis, he can be placed in a tradition of scholarship that regards social action as being more defining of the human than thought.14 If we try to find uniting features in terms of doctrines, we find many problems, but if we understand religions as ways of being in the world, as systems of practice that mark boundaries and identities, then we find cultural forms that are shared. But although we might be able to identify shared practices or patterns of practice across human communities – practices of fasting, pilgrimage, sacrifice, prayer and so on – we have to conduct a deeper inquiry concerning the ground of these cultural forms. This cannot be belief as a general category – beliefs are so varied – but human actions must be rooted in the kinds of creatures that we are, and this inquiry is the presupposition of any comparative religion. The enterprise of comparative religion entails some view of what a human being is; it entails some shared understanding that appreciates the historical particularity of who we are while at the same time recognizing shared practices that define us. In order to examine this ground

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presupposed in the comparative enterprise, we need to turn to two resources that give us leverage on this idea: hermeneutical phenomenology, on the one hand, and social cognition, on the other.

Hermeneutical phenomenology One argument for the justification of comparative religion comes from hermeneutical phenomenology. Taking this from Ricoeur in critique of Husserl’s phenomenology, we might say that ‘hermeneutic phenomenology’ (la phénoménologie herméneutique)15 is the enterprise of explaining and understanding what shows itself as always mediated through signs, texts and histories.16 While phenomenology reveals the ways in which the structures of religion show themselves through text and, in particular, through practices, hermeneutics highlights the meaning of those texts and practices for those who stand within them. It is crucial for a comparative religion to expose religion as a set of cultural practices for a community or practitioner. This is not to seek some essence of religion; rather, it marks a shift to a philosophical reflection about practice, and as such is open to social science, history and hard science as explanations of the human. This initial inquiry is to ask about the meanings of religious practice and to pay attention to what shows itself. In a series of early lectures on the phenomenology of the religious life, Heidegger raises the question about the meaning of the being of religion. To inquire into religion is, in fact, to inquire into ‘the historical’ (das Historische) as the core phenomenon (Kernphänomen) of the phenomenology of religion.17 This is because the origins of religions are in the past, and the texts and practices have come down to us from an often pre-modern source. Heidegger sets out stages in a phenomenology of religious life. The first is historical inquiry, a pre-phenomenological stage of gaining a picture of ‘the phenomenal complex’ from which we can present a ‘study of origin’.18 Heidegger illustrates this with a study of the letters of Paul, in which the reader must understand Paul in his ‘object-historical’ complex but then needs to understand him through ‘the enactment-historical’ situation, in which the scholar raises the question: How is ‘the communal world’ given to him ‘in the situation of writing the letter’?19 To understand Paul, we need to shift from the purely historical – first-century Palestine – to the phenomenological that understands the meaning of what Paul is saying. In his analysis of how this happens, Heidegger introduces the idea of the formal indication (die formale Anzeige), crucial, for him, to the phenomenological project. The formal indication is a general orientation towards what Heidegger understood as the essential features of what is being inquired into; an indication or pointing to some primordial sense of being that entails both the historical formation of the ‘object’ – here Paul’s letters – and the historical situation of the inquirer. Deixis in language – the indexicals such as ‘I’ and ‘here’ – point to our own historical location as the presupposition of phenomenological investigation, an idea later developed by Gadamer. This is the structure of transformational understanding, in that language is formally indicative of the historical nature of the kind of being that we are. For Heidegger, the formal indication is something that points to a primordial sense of being.

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All phenomenological inquiries are formal indications of the historical, but a historical appearance that contains the structures of Dasein, namely, care and temporality, along with ‘mineness’. This is not a method – as bracketing might be a method – but, rather, an orientation towards appearances, claiming that recognition of human historical life is only possible because it can point to my life. That is, recognition of the other as historically distant – such as Paul’s letters – entails a recognition enabled by the formal indication. My understanding of the other is only possible because of my own humanity, and the formal indication highlights this. We cannot put ourselves in Paul’s place, but a shift in orientation from ‘object-history’ to ‘enactment situation’ entails a phenomenological understanding of the self in its temporal reality. This is made possible through the formal indication, and entails some understanding of ‘being like an I’ (Ichlichkeit), which is unique to each historical situation.20 In a sense this seems obvious, yet we should not underestimate the necessity and force of the recognition of the humanity of the other in philosophical or social scientific inquiry. The enterprise of comparative religion entails the recognition of the human by the hermeneutical phenomenologist, who is still the outsider, where such recognition is enabling and is, in fact, the precondition for any understanding and explanation. There are different levels of understanding here. The formal indication allows me to understand the cultural practices of others as well as my own, because all human beings perform cultural practices. The non-identical repetition of the ritual act or the unrepeatable moral act prescribed by a religion are understood because they are only formally indicative of human practices more generally. If the universality of the human is philosophically justified through the formal indication, the recognition of my humanity in the other while recognizing my inescapable historicity as a precondition for any comparative religion, then a further justification comes through the social and harder sciences. Here we find promising empirical work on the self–other relationship implied by the formal indication, and these promising new developments are significant for a theory-driven comparative religion. Specifically, social cognition and second-person neuroscience open new possibilities for understanding and explaining religious practices.

Social cognition Social cognition is a broad field within psychology, but for our purposes I wish to focus on a narrower development within this broad field, known as second-person neuroscience. This new development begins with the dynamics of the human faceto-face encounter. Recent studies in this field show the high degree of subliminal cognitive activity that goes on prior to or below conscious awareness in human interaction. Consciousness is only part of inter-human communication, which contains sophisticated subliminal assessments or judgements about particular social situations. There is, as it were, a spectrum from subliminal brain activity to conscious self-awareness of the deliberating, conscious, language-using subject. Social cognition thus involves a range of responses, from subliminal brain activity, expressed in eye movements and other bodily gestures, to forms of negotiation through the medium

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of language, which includes tone, selection of vocabulary and so on. Second-person neuroscience, a development concerned with ‘second-person’ human interaction, as developed by Schilbach and his colleagues, has revealed fundamental features of social interaction, particularly imitative interactivity, in which humans imitate each other through gesture, posture, facial expression and eye movements below conscious awareness.21 These finely tuned processes of interaction facilitate group bonding and contribute to our judgements about each other, whether we can trust the judgements of a particular person, and so on. A complex process of negotiation and imitation takes place in the face-to-face interaction, a process that involves empathy with the other and emotional identification through a process of ‘neural coupling’ by which we reconstruct others’ worlds to ourselves.22 This sociobiological inheritance is common to human beings. We cannot but react in particular patterns of engagement with the other, and this face-to-face encounter of imitation and empathy has enabled human beings to create and maintain strong social bonds absolutely central to our survival as a species. In exposing our own neurobiological complexity to the complexity of the other, we build community and kinds of solidarity in which human communities collaborate towards a common goal, especially the protection and maintenance of a community. This structure of human social cognition, exposed in second-person neuroscience, is recapitulated at the level of religion.23 That is, religions use the power of human encounter and project this biologically rooted solidarity beyond the face-to-face. Language is important here, as it has the ability to engage and enhance the human sense of belonging, identity through time, in the present face-to-face engagement, while also being able to open up horizons of perspective through narrative and a temporal perspective that enables a distantiation from the present moment of encounter. This double aspect of language, to reflect the here and now while at the same time narrating wider, longer-term perspectives, is crucial to ritual, in that it positions us in the present moment through the liturgical acts of repetition as well as projecting beyond the here and now in ways that involve the community and in ways that reflexively affect the present encounter. That is, language in ritual, often the repetition of ritual formulae from sacred texts, functions as interactive in a social transaction at the face-to-face level, yet also goes beyond that level, linking the here and now to a larger narrative structure that, in turn, controls socially cognitive interactions. The face-to-face encounter is augmented in religious ritual with unseen cosmic forces encoded within the language of the texts and enacted. The immediacy of social cognition in the present moment is transposed to the cosmic field, and the ritual arena becomes a greatly extended sociality that looks to past and future through language. The micro-level, face-to-face encounter is recapitulated at the macro level through ritual. The category ‘ritual’ is very broad and can be used to indicate patterns of imitative interactivity across species, from animal behaviour to complex social and political human interaction. Rappaport defines ritual as ‘the performance of more or less invariant sequences of formal acts and utterances not entirely encoded by the performers’.24 These sequences of formal acts are learned through imitation and apply broadly, from animal territorial defence displays to complex human interactions. In religious ritual, the encoded performance entails the sociality within the group but

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also entails an interaction with culturally posited non-human or superhuman agents, such as deities and powers that influence human life, as Riesebrodt has identified. These are encoded in language and text, and we might say that to identify ritual as religious is to identify the range of sociality envisaged and the kind of ‘salvation’ promised. In religious ritual, generally a text from the past is brought to life in the present performative context for a community of reception. The voice in the text from the past is brought into present meaning.25 Mantras from ancient texts are repeated in Hindu ritual, the Bible is used performatively in Christian liturgy and the Qur’an is recited in Muslim prayer. Ritual imitation of gesture and act, a key component in face-to-face social cognition, occurs through the body and through language linked to bodily movement. Ritual performs the text, and liturgical language is breathed out into the collective space shared by participants. The language of ritual that repeats texts set aside as sacred is not the language of the everyday, but is often archaic and relates to the community of reception in complex ways. The language of the texts, liturgically enacted, bonds the community to a cosmos, thereby extending the sense of community beyond the present into a wider temporality. But the meaning of ritual acts cannot be reduced to the language used; rather, it arises through enactment that situates a community within a cosmology in which meaning is understood as being located. The understanding or knowledge given to us in our biological natures is transformed into meaning at the ritual level as the transformation of the face-to-face encounter. For complex historical reasons, some forms of religion have rejected ornate liturgical patterns in favour of more simplified structures. Protestantism protests against the earlier cosmological, imitative interactivity, replacing it with a different kind of imperative to act. With the simplification of ritual pattern and the emphasis on the word of scripture, we have reorientation away from participation towards conscience and subjectivity. The subjective disposition of faith comes to be privileged over liturgical and thereby cosmological participation, and a moral imperative to behave in particular ways takes precedence over the mimetic, ritual imperative. But this, too, is a transformation of the face-to-face encounter in a different way. In the face-to-face encounter, we have the possibility of choosing the option to affirm the other, to place the other’s needs before our own. This free choice or election is transformed beyond the biological encounter in moral acts. The face-to-face that is our biological inheritance contains within it an implicitly moral imperative to act for the sake of the other. Tomasello’s experiments with apes and young, pre-language children offer strong evidence for an inbuilt altruistic imperative in our species.26 For humans as rational beings, this pre-linguistic orientation, fundamental to the face-to-face encounter, is controlled and transformed through cultural judgements about whether or not to follow that orientation in particular circumstances. The universality of the face-to-face and its implicit altruism can be, and has been, questioned at the cultural level, where humans make judgements about who is included and who is excluded within a particular sphere of interactivity. But the biological response in the face-toface situation is not moral in itself, or, rather, it is proto-moral, because it is automatic, rooted in our cognitive capacity. Morality arises at the higher cultural level through language and the choice of whether or not to act upon the biological imperative to

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affirm the other. In this way, the moral act is predicated upon a religion’s decision about who is and who is not included within it. Religions, especially as articulated through law, can be seen as transformations of social cognition yet which reflexively attempt to control social cognition, constraining human interaction in terms of varying degrees of legislation. Religions generally make claims upon who we can and cannot marry, who we can and cannot eat with, and what we can and cannot eat. There is, thus, a restriction through religions of the universality of the face-to-face encounter. The faceto-face encounter is a human universal at the micro level, with biological imperatives of compassion and empathy, and religions understand this and attempt to restrict such encounters in conformity with a religion’s understanding of its borders. The specieswide or universal imperative of the face-to-face encounter is limited and constrained by religions that are not universal. Indeed, they restrict the notion of universality and need to manage this force to maintain their boundaries: all seek to control human interaction and thereby to manage complexity. Using the power of the face-to-face, religions seek to reflexively control it through defining the boundaries of group identity and controlling social interaction. This is both restrictive – it limits the kinds of interaction permitted – and enabling – it facilitates the successful passage of people through life and helps communities manage the complexity of the real. The control of the face-to-face in religions has primarily occurred through religious law or injunction and prohibition. While religions are narratives that articulate a story about a particular group of people, they express a narrative identity; they are also imperatives to act in certain ways and prohibitions against acting in others. The cohesion or group bonding enacted through social cognition is limited by religions to a particular – even if large – community and controlled through religious law and obligation. Indeed, this is where we see conflict between religious and secular law. For example, in the secularized West, the internationalization of human rights has taken place through law that enacts the inclusivity of the face-to-face. This, however, is not easy to sustain, as it may conflict with the different universalism of religious communities. The ideal community of secular, universal legislation has a weaker claim on people than the claims of a moral tradition that appeals to a living community bound by its rules. The maintaining of family bonds and friendship within the bounds of tradition generally has greater claim on people than any abstract secular universalism. In contrast to a secular ideal of universal legislation and a discourse of rights, the concrete, lived universalism of religions affirms the bonds of the group. Let us summarize the claim so far. Rather than abstract notions of belief, what can be identified as shared markers of religious affiliation – even when these are complex and a person participates in several religions, as is common in China, for example – are forms of practice orientated towards the completion of a religious fulfilment or goal. While the category ‘religion’ is problematic in its universal applicability, the point is that we can identify forms of human practice that might be identified as ritual and moral act, that communities perform, as Riesebrodt has highlighted, in order to enact a promise of salvation. These are recognizable for the discipline of comparative religion through a hermeneutical phenomenology that enables the identification of practices as religious by the simultaneous understanding of our historical location along with a universalization of the human capacity to act. This ability to recognize the other, as

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we find in Heidegger’s formal indication, is grounded in the biological universality of the human face-to-face encounter revealed through the science of social cognition, in particular the second-person neuroscience of Schilbach and his colleagues. Religious practices of ritual and moral imperative articulated through religious law might be seen as transformations at the cultural level of the face-to-face encounter. In particular, these transformations are restrictions of the biological universality of empathy and compassion to particular communities through the control of behaviour, especially the control of sexuality through marriage, and dietary practices. Religious law serves to enact and control social cognition. If this is a credible argument, then, lastly, we need to ask what its implications are for comparative religion more broadly.

Comparative religion as a discipline The academic study of religions is arguably moving away from both a problematic universalism and a problematic relativism that understood all of human reality as being formed through language and culture. While, clearly, language is central to the formation of culture and therefore of religion, we must recognize a shared biological inheritance of the human, as seen in the formation of our brains and the social cognition that this entails. Any comparative religion, therefore, implies certain assumptions about human universality while at the same time recognizing the particularity of the cultures and histories, the webs of meaning and significance that we are born into. Of course, there can be no substitute for the careful, philological and text historical scholarship that establishes the history of religions, or for careful recording of fieldwork in anthropology and sociology of religion, but comparative religion can also engage in explanation as well as description, and such explanation needs to be rooted in contemporary knowledge of the human. This is not an attempt to return to a nineteenth-century view of science as a totalizing claim to knowledge, as we have gone through a reflexive sociology of science that understands its historical location. But it is to claim that comparative religion needs to engage with new evidence-based theory about the nature of the human, particularly social cognition. New knowledge from social cognition, primatology and brain science more broadly about the human species is relevant to explaining the place of religion in human life and history. Through the harder sciences, such as social cognition, we can begin to understand the power of religion to form community, to form human identity and to form solutions to contemporary environmental and political problems. The view presented here is certainly a kind of materialism, but a materialism that is non-reductive because of the insistence upon a hermeneutical with neuro-cognition. In this non-reductionist sense, the view presented here is in consonance with some recent developments in religious studies that have emphasized spatiality27 and material culture.28 But comparative religion needs to see that what we know through science about social cognition, particularly the primacy of the face-to-face encounter and its structure, first gives coherence to the category ‘religion’ and second, indicates the importance of religion in human life. If by ‘religion’ we mean forms of social cognition that universalize within a particular group the biological inheritance of the face-to-face

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encounter, then this establishes religion as central to human community formation, identity and politics. Whatever those cultural forms are that use the energy of the faceto-face, and in turn reflexively control the face-to-face, is the object of the discipline of comparative religion. Religions are forms of life that provide meaning for human communities and ways of living and dying.29 They constrain people’s choices in moral acts and the non-identical repetition of the ritual act. That the churches are emptying in northern Europe and parts of North America does not indicate the demise of religion as such, for the function of religion will be taken over by analogous cultural forms that lay claim to social cognition. But it would seem that only religions have the historical depth and semantic density that, so far in human history, have successfully negotiated and developed the primacy of the human encounter. If religions are important to human communities, as we see that they are, then comparative religion as a critical discipline is important in understanding these cultural forms as stemming from brain processes that accompany religious practices and in recognizing the inevitable sociality of human cognition.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

15 16 17

Fitzgerald 2007. Wiebe 1999. Derrida and Vattimo 1998. Patton and Ray 2000. Sharma 2005. Bowker 2005. Clooney 2010. Hick 1989; see responses in D’Costa 1990. Geertz 1993. Riesebrodt 2010: 13. This is a translation of Cultus und Heilsversprechen. Ein Theorie der Religionen (München: C. H. Beck, 2007). Riesebrodt 2010: xiii. Stausberg 2007: 264–82. Indeed, there may be a case for ‘liberation’, taken from Indian religions, rather than ‘salvation’ to be a more appropriate category for cross-religious comparison. Max Weber, of course, drew our attention to the importance of religious action and religion as interest in salvation expressed through social action, namely religious practices, particularly asceticism (see Weber [1948] 1991). Other scholars have also emphasized practice, such as Frits Staal (1988), who argues for ritual as a common feature incorporated within the category ‘religion’. Bowker (1987) speaks of ‘somatic exploration’ as key to religions. Flood (2012) has argued for religious action as mediating the human encounter with mystery. Ricoeur 1986: 61. For an account of the hermeneutic turn in phenomenology, see Wiercinski 2005. See Flood 2014: 10–11. Heidegger 2004: 22. (Phänomenologie des Religiösen Lebens. Gesamtausgabe vol. 60, 31, Frankfurt: V. Klostermann, 1995).

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18 Heidegger 2004: 58. 19 Ibid.: 61. 20 Ibid.: 64: ‘being like an I belongs to each situation’ (Zu jeder Situation gehört Ichliches). See Flood 2014: 15–18 for further discussion. 21 Schilbach et al. 2013; Chatel-Goldman et al. 2013. 22 Stephens et al. 2010; Clark 1996. 23 This section on social cognition summarizes some research I have done with a colleague, Oliver Davies, at Kings College London. We have written an unpublished paper on this: ‘Beyond the Face-to-Face: Religion as Social Cognition’ (Flood and Davies 2014). 24 Rappaport 1979: 24. 25 Davies 2013; Flood 2012. 26 Tomasello 2009, 2014. 27 Tweed 2006; Knott 2005. 28 Vasquez 2011: 59–84. 29 Flood 2012.

References Bowker, John (1987), Licensed Insanities: Religions and Belief in God in the Contemporary World, London: Meakin and Associates. Bowker, John (2005), The Sacred Neuron: Extraordinary New Discoveries Linking Science and Religion, London: I. B. Tauris. Chatel-Goldman, Jonas, Jean-Luc Schwartz, Christian Jutten and Marco Congedo (2013), ‘Non-Local Mind from the Perspective of Social Cognition’, Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 7 (107): 1–7. Clark, Herbert H. (1996), Using Language, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Clooney, Francis (2010), Comparative Theology: Deep Learning across Religious Borders, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Davies, Oliver (2013), Theology of Transformation. Faith, Freedom and the Christian Act, Oxford: Oxford University Press. D’Costa, Gavin, ed. (1990), Christian Uniqueness Reconsidered: The Myth of a Pluralist Theology of Religions, Maryknoll: Orbis. Derrida, Jacques and Gianni Vattimo (1998), Religion, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Fitzgerald, Timothy (2007), Discourse on Civility and Barbarity: A Critical History of Religion and Related Categories, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Flood, Gavin (2012), The Importance of Religion: Meaning and Action in Our Strange World, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Flood, Gavin (2014), The Truth Within: A History of Inwardness in Christianity, Hinduism and Buddhism, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Flood, Gavin and Oliver Davies (2014), ‘Beyond the Face-to-Face: Religion as Social Cognition’, unpublished. Geertz, Clifford (1993), The Interpretation of Cultures, London: Fontana Press. Heidegger, Martin (2004), The Phenomenology of Religious Life, trans. Matthias Fritsch and Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferecei, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press (translation of Phänomenologie des Religiösen Lebens. Gesamtausgabe vol. 60, Frankfurt: V. Klostermann, 1995).

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Hick, John (1989), An Interpretation of Religion: Human Responses to the Transcendent, London: Macmillan. Knott, Kim (2005), The Location of Religion: A Spatial Analysis, London and Oakville: Equinox. Patton, Kimberley C. and Benjamin C. Ray, eds (2000), A Magic Still Dwells: Comparative Religion in a Postmodern Age, Berkeley: California University Press. Rappaport, Roy A. (1979), Ecology, Meaning and Religion, Berkeley: North Atlantic Books. Ricoeur, Paul (1986), Du texte à l’action: Essais d’herméneutique II, Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Riesebrodt, Martin (2010), The Promise of Salvation: A Theory of Religion, Chicago: University of Chicago Press (translation of Cultus und Heilsversprechen. Ein Theorie der Religionen, München: C. H. Beck, 2007). Schilbach, Leonard, Bert Timmermans, Vasudevi Reddy, Alan Costall, Gary Bente, Tobias Schlicht and Kai Vogeley (2013), ‘Towards a Second Person Neuroscience’, Behavioural and Brain Sciences, 36 (4): 393–414. Sharma, Arvind (2005), Religious Studies and Comparative Methodology: The Case for Reciprocal Illumination, Albany: SUNY Press. Staal, Frits (1988), Rules without Meaning, New York: Peter Lang. Stausberg, Michael (2007), ‘Interventionist Practices and the Promises of Religion: On Martin Riesebrodt, Cultus Und Heilsversprechen’, in Michael Stausberg (ed.), Contemporary Theories of Religion: A Critical Companion, 264–82, London and New York: Routledge. Stephens, Greg J., Lauren J. Silbert and Uri Hasson (2010), ‘Speaker-Listener Neural Coupling Underlies Successful Communication,’ Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 107 (32): 14425–30. Tomasello, Michael (2009), Why We Cooperate, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Tomasello, Michael (2014), A Natural History of Human Thinking, Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. Tweed, Thomas A. (2006), Crossing and Dwelling: A Theory of Religion, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Vasquez, M. A. (2011), More than Belief: A Materialist Theory of Religion, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Weber, Max ([1948] 1991), From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, London: Routledge. Wiebe, Donald (1999), The Politics of Religious Studies, New York: St Martin’s Press. Wiercinski, Andrzej, ed. (2005), Between Description and Interpretation: The Hermeneutic Turn in Phenomenology, Toronto: The Hermeneutic Press.

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On All-Embracing Mental Structures: Towards a Transcendental Hermeneutics of Religion Fabian Völker

The significance of that ‘absolute’ commandment, Know thyself – whether we look at it in itself or under the historical circumstances of its first utterance – is not to promote mere self-knowledge in respect of the particular capacities, character, propensities, and foibles of the single self. The knowledge it commands means that of man’s genuine reality – of what is essentially and ultimately true and real – of mind as the true and essential being.1 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) The intellectual history of the hermeneutics of religion has been largely informed by contrasting dichotomies such as empiricism versus rationalism, descriptivism versus normativism, constructivism versus essentialism, explanation versus interpretation, and concrete alterity versus universal identity. The rejection of universalizing claims or the reverse, the repudiation of reductionist approaches, has often led to an overemphasis on one of these terms to the exclusion of the others. In its most extreme forms, this not infrequently resulted in a bewildering variety of relativisms or in a corresponding aberration of absolutizing historically or culturally contingent aspects. To advance a comprehensive and adequate methodology, these supposedly opposing and antagonistic phenomena need to be reconciled into a reciprocal unity. From this reconciled perspective, the formalist a priori standpoint of a decontextualized, normative and rational philosophy and the material a posteriori standpoint of a radically contextualized and purely descriptive empiricism are not taken to be mutually exclusive but, rather, complementary positions in which the two perspectives are not conflated uncritically. As Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) determined, the human being is an existential unity that is simultaneously a psychophysical entity embodied in the world and a transcendental subject that constitutes the world.2 The empirical dimension of human life is always given in historical concretion and necessarily embedded in culturally and socio-economically limited and relational contexts. The transcendental

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dimension, on the other hand, consists essentially of the universally valid and invariant structure of consciousness as the constitutive condition of possibility of all experience and knowledge. The vocation of man, then, is to be inextricably intertwined in this specific condition. I suggest that questions central to the comparative study of religions cannot be treated adequately within a hermeneutics dominated by empiricism. However, by providing a comprehensive hermeneutical framework that fosters the integral relationship between our empirical and transcendental aspects, a hermeneutics based on transcendental philosophy can contribute to the comparative study of religions in two important ways: 1. It accounts for a strictly scientific methodological basis without limiting itself to empiricist criteria of meaning. The comparative study of religions can thus become truly interdisciplinary, no longer excluding theology and the philosophy of religion. 2. It accounts for the heuristic assumption of universal reason as irreducible human nature and tertium comparationis that enables intercultural comparability and intelligibility.

Interculturality, or, transcendental humanism within the phenomenology of religion It is by no means new to base the methodology of comparative religion on the universality of reason as essential to man and common to human nature. This methodology typically conceives of consciousness as an overarching and epistemologically privileged foundation. Since the very inception of the phenomenology of religion, seminal scholars such as Rudolf Otto (1869–1937), Gerardus van der Leeuw (1890– 1950), Joachim Wach (1898–1955) and Mircea Eliade (1907–86) have all advanced an anthropological basis for understanding, and one that is predicated on the undisputed fact that all cultures and religions are at all times necessarily tied back to human carriers. These phenomenological scholars combined their anthropological approach with a principal ‘religious a priori’ assumption as an irreducible datum of human experience and religion as a distinctive sui generis category that is not dependent on a particular society, culture or time. Without going into the merits and shortcomings of each approach, I will delineate the basic arguments proposed for the transcendental-anthropological approach to the phenomenology of religion. Drawing especially on Immanuel Kant’s (1724–1804) transcendental philosophy and Wilhelm Dilthey’s (1833–1911) philosophy of life, Rudolf Otto argued that the ‘holy’ as the essence of religion is not a culturally or contextually contingent construct, which would place limitations on analysing it outside its cultural contexts. He further said that it is not a disguised form of the collective conscience, nor is it a mere by-product of evolutionary, psychological or social history. For Otto, the holy is ‘in the fullest sense of the word’ a ‘purely a priori category’. With this term, ‘we are referred away from all sense-experience back to an original and underivable capacity of the mind implanted in … “pure reason” independently of all perception’. Ultimately, Otto  asserted,

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‘we are referred back to something still deeper than … “pure reason”, at least as this [pure reason, F. V.] is usually understood, namely, to that which Mysticism has rightly named the “fundus animae”, the “bottom” or “ground of the soul” (Seelengrund)’.3 Without the existence of a priori factors universally and necessarily latent in the human spirit, there would be no possibility of recognizing the religious signification of religious figures of the past, as, for example, the contemporary experience of holiness in the person of Christ; as Otto claimed, ‘If without this no understanding and no impression of Christ was possible even to the first disciples, of what avail should any tradition be that requires the mediation of generations of Christian men?’ The fact that the experience of Christ is possible even today was taken by Otto as proof of the innate capacity and universal predisposition of humans to recognize the holy and to respond to it. This transcendental-anthropological constant, as Otto understood it, must be utterly unfettered by cultural and historical constraints and independent of human imagination to account for the overall manifestation, communication and experience of the holy throughout history: ‘For the Spirit knows and recognizes what is of the Spirit.’4 Much like Otto, Gerardus van der Leeuw was exceedingly apprehensive of the constitutional challenge of ‘historical scepticism’ that threateningly intruded on the investigations of the historian of religion, thereby rendering ‘all comprehension of remote times and regions impossible to us’.5 According to van der Leeuw, this essentially epistemological and methodological question of the possibility of understanding lies at the very heart of virtually all hermeneutical endeavours. It concerns not only the possibility of understanding ‘the Egyptian of the first dynasty’, but also the possibility of understanding ‘my nearest neighbour’: ‘Certainly the monuments of the first dynasty are intelligible only with great difficulty, but as an expression, as a human statement, they are no harder than my colleague’s letters.’6 As van der Leeuw asserted, the ability to sympathize keenly and closely with the experience of others is only possible by assuming an essential sameness among human beings: ‘homo sum, humani nil a me alienum puto [I am a human and deem nothing human alien to me, F. V.]: this is no key to the deepest comprehension of the remotest experience, but is nevertheless the triumphant assertion that the essentially human always remains the essentially human, and is, as such, comprehensible’.7 Quoting Karl Jaspers (1883–1969), van der Leeuw claimed that understanding the experiences of different people in past times is generally possible despite their infinite remoteness, because, as a specifically human expression, ‘there is something that is intelligible in accord with our own experience’8 (erlebnismäßig Verstehbares). Since all differences are ultimately founded on the perennial essence of humanity as the common ground of understanding, such differences are not incommensurable and are therefore phenomenologically bridgeable. According to Joachim Wach, the possibility of genuine understanding was also key to hermeneutics and significant for the whole of the humanities, especially for the comparative study of religions. Undoubtedly, it is possible ‘to “know the facts” in the sense of gathering and organizing all the available information’, but this is only enough for the ‘positivistically minded scholar’,9 as Wach states. However, an interpretation of religion that goes beyond the empirically given facts is possible for Wach by analysing the expressions of religious life as ‘a bridge to its understanding’. But  this

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bridge would be altogether impassable ‘if there were no certainty that somehow one soul can understand another’.10 It is, therefore, impossible to conceive of genuine understanding apart from an inner relationship between the hermeneut and the believer (as the object of the hermeneut’s investigation). But what exactly is this inner relationship that makes understanding possible, according to Wach? Quoting Dorothy M. Emmet (1904–2000), Wach holds that we come back ‘to the Platonic principle that if any rational understanding is to be possible, the logos in us must be akin to a logos in things’.11 And this hermeneutical principle, he adds, ‘proves to be valid for the understanding of religion, too’.12 Still, not everything can, in principle, be understood, but ‘only that in whose nature (Wesen) I can somehow “take part”’. Thus, it is possible to say, as Wach stresses, that ‘you comprehend only what is like yourself, no more’.13 He indicates these subjective conditions, which are ‘the presuppositions for the understanding of the not entirely foreign and the not perfectly familiar’,14 by quoting the words of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832): ‘In jedem Menschen liegen alle Formen des Menschlichen (In every man all forms of human character are potentially present)’.15 Thus, everything spiritual and cultural, ‘the entire world of “expression,” the simplest sentence, the smallest utterance, the apparently insignificant fact’ is to be seen as the expression ‘of a certain inner attitude (Haltung) or spirit (Geist)’.16 The basis for hermeneutical understanding, then, is the anthropological fact that the scholar of religion and the investigated believer share a common human nature that is held to be universal and, ultimately, homogeneous. It serves as the common denominator or tertium comparationis, that is, ‘the tertium (the “third”) that unites’17 two seemingly unrelated phenomena and bridges all differences found in religious expressions. As Wach argues, it is necessary to ‘“understand” this spirit, to relate to it even those expressions that are most objective and appear to be most independent, and to interpret those expressions from the “spirit”’.18 Thus, Wach’s hermeneutics of religion is predicated on a distinct philosophy of spirit, ‘according to which the idea of participation … based on an essential commonality (Wesensgemeinsamkeit) is the presupposition of all understanding’.19 As Catherine Cornille pointed out, both van der Leeuw and Wach adopted Eduard Spranger’s (1882–1963) notion of ‘all-embracing mental structures’ (übergreifende Geistesstrukturen), that is essential structures of consciousness that are latent in us all.20 In Types of Men, Spranger unequivocally states that the mental content of acts must be timeless, since it can be understood regardless of intervening space and time. Accordingly, all mental acts must contain ‘a law or validity which is independent of their actualization in the world, or their realization in individual experience’. These laws and norms whereby meaning is created must be timeless to account for the general possibility of understanding the significance of mental acts. Even though the manifoldness of their phenomena is always culturally and historically determined and never to be wholly understood a priori, ‘their mental content, their lawful structure is eternal’,21 as Spranger apodictically adds, and as such, reconstructable. It is thoughtprovoking how seemingly easily Spranger complements the transcendental notion of a consciousness guided by identical and objective laws of structure embedded within the empirical self, with its accidental, contextual and individual objects of knowledge. Spranger thereby provides an exemplary approach for understanding both the a priori

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standpoint of rationalism and the a posteriori standpoint of empiricism, as well as their respective fields of application within the comparative study of religions as theoretically and practically complementary positions: And just as an ordered whole can be built up in our minds by means of cognitive laws (in whose interlacing structure the outline of objective nature is assumed a priori) in the same way our knowledge of and participation in the intellectual world must be based on laws of mental behavior. These laws are embodied in the individual as ideal directive constants which control the acts of its productive imagination as well as the acts of its mental activity. By means of this living systematic structure within the individual we can understand intellectual creations even if they have been developed under different historical conditions and in historically divergent souls. We must constantly keep in mind however that this a priori data only gives us the basis of mental structure. It is just as hard for the comprehending subject to evolve manifold historical differentiations and developmental phases as it is to disclose special natural laws. But if these differentiations were wholly chaotic and arbitrary noone could understand them.22

Only by means of these formative a priori principles and the transcendental structures that are part of our subjectivity can one possibly understand the manifoldness of empirical phenomena. If every human being were but ‘a chaos of changing tendencies’, there would be no possibility at all of interpreting the culturally, socially and historically conditioned and changing world of particularity and difference. It necessarily follows, as Spranger argues, that the ‘mental nucleus of man always has the same structure’.23 A similar transcendental-anthropological approach was also adopted by Mircea Eliade. Like many of his predecessors, Eliade located the sui generis nature of the sacred/holy as ‘an element in the structure of consciousness’ and not as ‘a stage in the history of consciousness’,24 as such being an integral part of the essence of man. Due to the claimed homogeneity of human nature, Eliade could identify and decipher all empirically and historically given manifestations of the sacred as expressions of their a priori category, which again was philosophically grounded in the notion of a universal and transcendental self free from all cultural determinants and independent of historical and socio-economic context: The historian of religion recognizes a spiritual unity subjacent to the history of humanity; in other terms, in studying the Australians, Vedic Indians, or whatever other ethnic group or cultural system, the historian of religions does not have a sense of moving in a world radically ‘foreign’ to him. Certainly, the unity of the human species is accepted de facto in other disciplines, for example linguistics, anthropology, sociology. But the historian of religions has the privilege of grasping this unity at the highest level – or the deepest and such an experience is susceptible of enriching and changing him. Today history is becoming truly universal for the first time, and so culture is in the process of becoming ‘planetary.’25

However, as Eliade explained, this transcendental disposition as part of the conditio humana does not mean that a religious phenomenon itself can be understood outside of its particular historical and cultural context. On the other hand, conceding the

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radical contextuality and historicity of all religious phenomena does not imply that religious data are reducible entirely to non-religious forms of behaviour or a nonreligious history like economic, social or political history.26 Like Spranger, Eliade was acutely aware of the transcendental necessity of a grounding principle to account for the possibility of understanding and comparison without denying the necessity of developing manifold cultural, sociological and historical differentiations. But, to avoid sinking back into ‘an obsolete “reductionism,”’ as Eliade maintained, ‘the history of religious meanings must always be regarded as forming part of the history of the human spirit’.27 Otto, van der Leeuw, Wach, Spranger and Eliade were rightfully convinced that any form of comparison would be precluded if the differences between cultures and religions were entirely fundamental. If two things are absolutely different, they cannot even be known to be different. They must be ultimately based on some common ground in order to allow comparison at all. In fact, the assumption of a historically, culturally and linguistically invariant principle of understanding is not the ‘unwarranted assumption that there is universality and necessity in the fundamental modes of human experience’28 but an a priori requirement of reason, if understanding is assumed to be possible at all. In his second private lecture on the science of knowledge (Wissenschaftslehre), given in Berlin in 1804, Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814) claimed that ‘to the extent that general agreement is possible among actually living individuals in regard to any manifold, to that extent the oneness of principle is in truth and in fact one. For divergent principles become divergent results, and consequently yield thoroughly divergent and mutually incoherent worlds, so that no sort of agreement about anything is possible.’29 A transcendental hermeneutics of religion, then, elaborates on this transcendentally undeveloped claim originally inaugurated by these phenomenologists of religion, and establishes the irrevocable horizon of the transcendental a priori of consciousness as a first principle for all knowledge and as the ultimate foundation of all hermeneutic endeavours. This transcendental position, as it was widely endorsed by the phenomenological school of the history of religions to facilitate intercultural and interreligious understanding, has been critiqued by some postmodern and postcolonial sceptics, who question whether there is any unity to be discovered, given the internal and external diversity of religious traditions and cultures. Typical examples of the widespread distrust of universalizing claims and the fear of colonializing agendas lurking behind the comparative study of religions are, from the field of philosophy, Robert C. Solomon (1942–2007), from religious studies, Tim Murphy (1956–2013), and from literature and anthropology, Marie Louise Pratt. Before elaborating on the notion of a transcendental consciousness and the corresponding claim of universal laws of reason, I will review some of their objections levelled against the transcendental position.

The ‘Transcendental Pretence’? According to Solomon, the basic belief in the universality of human nature, the inborn faculty of reason and the essential sameness of the transcendental structure

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of consciousness already entail the transcendental pretence. This technical term of Solomon’s own coinage encompasses not only the unjustified claim of universally valid structures of human experience by postulating ‘an indefinitely large and largely unknown class, humanity’,30 but also ‘the arrogant assumption that one’s own virtues’ define ‘the nature of that species itself ’,31 that is ‘that we – the white middle classes of European descent – were the representatives of all humanity’.32 Fully developed, Solomon further asserts that the transcendental pretence consists of two corresponding components: first, ‘the remarkable inner richness and expanse of the self, ultimately encompassing everything’ and second, ‘the consequent right to project from the subjective structures of one’s own mind, and ascertain the nature of humanity as such’.33 Apparently, the self so questioned is not the empirical self or individual personality, but, rather, a transcendental and ‘presumptuously cosmic’ self, that is ‘the self – timeless, universal, and in each one of us around the globe and throughout history’.34 By reflecting itself, the absolute self consequently does not only know itself, but ‘all selves, and the structure of any and every possible self ’.35 As in the exemplary case of Kant, Solomon argues that the combination of this seemingly innocent and ‘superficially attractive humanism’36 with substantial beliefs and principles as a matter of human nature gave rise to the unjustified absolutization of culturally and historically contingent principles that Kant, ‘as a bourgeois Protestant, had happened to be taught in provincial Germany’.37 The transcendental pretence, then, is ‘no innocent philosophical thesis’,38 according to Solomon, but a potent political weapon in the ‘battle for power and status’39 with its roots ‘firmly planted in the Christian concept of man’.40 It is a ‘bourgeois ideology’ employed as a ‘totally fraudulent excuse for not taking other people seriously’.41 Furthermore, it embodies ‘a profound arrogance’ that promotes ‘self-righteousness’, prohibits ‘mutual understanding’ and belies ‘human diversity’42 by self-servingly projecting one’s individual idiosyncrasies onto humanity as a whole, thereby dismissing anyone holding views different from one’s own. Above all, the transcendental pretence justifies ‘unrestricted tolerance for paternalism’,43 as it is the aggressive effort in the realms of morality, politics and religion to prove that there are no valid possible alternatives, but only one ‘legitimate set of morals (the middleclass morals of Europe), one legitimate form of government (the form of parliamentary monarchy that ruled most of Western Europe), and one true religion, to be defended not just by faith and with force of arms, but by rational argument, by “reason alone”’.44 Following Solomon, Murphy contends that a hermeneutics of religion that would base itself upon the non-temporal, ahistorical, decontextualized, universal and immutable structure of consciousness is an ethnocentric essentialization and universalization of a culturally specific concept of consciousness. For Murphy, this concept is a mere Western logocentric construct inevitably tied to the claim that Christianity is the highest fulfilment of this innate a priori structure of consciousness, thereby ranking non-European and non-Christian religions as lower manifestations. Moreover, according to Murphy, it is a racist, Eurocentric ‘white mythology’ which reassembles and reflects the culture of the West, perfidiously invented to legitimate power structures and establish colonial hierarchies. As such, Murphy argues that the transcendental standpoint is nothing more than a totalitarian ideology that tries to establish identity by violently suppressing historical disparity, silencing cultural alterity and devaluing social differences.45 As Marie Louise Pratt similarly argued,

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a ‘basic element constructing modern Eurocentrism’ is the concept of a ‘planetary consciousness’ and ‘global subject’.46 According to Pratt, however, the subject is not transcendental, universal or inherent in the entirely gender-biased ‘man’, but irrefutably historical, as the concept of a universal a priori structure of consciousness underlying all diversity is nothing but an epistemological fraud. So, is it really the case, as Mark Taylor claimed, that transcendental philosophy, though ‘acutely sensitive to the problem of the other’, is ultimately ‘unable to provide an account of alterity that does not reduce difference to same[ness]’?47

Transcendental anthropology Against the aforementioned critics, I suggest that the notion of transcendental structures of intelligibility is decidedly not a logocentric, Eurocentric, Christiancentric, ethnocentric and racist invention of Europe that is ‘only projected onto “the rest of the world”’.48 As Ramakrishna Puligandla rightly remarks, every problem that occupied the attention of European philosophers also engaged Indian philosophers: monism and pluralism, change and permanence, appearance and reality, materialism, atomism, idealism, realism, pragmatism, the nature of self and consciousness, perception, language and reality, theories of meaning and names, the problem of universals and particulars, nominalism, conceptualism, criteria of valid knowledge, laws of logic, theories of inference, freedom and determinism, the individual and society, the good life – these are but a few issues common to both Indian and European philosophies.49

How do we account for this common phenomenon, if not by assuming a universal transcendental grid that determines our thinking irrespective of place, time, history and culture? Despite some postmodern, postcolonial and post-humanist claims to the contrary, transcendental humanism effectively attempts to counter prejudices and instead base comparative religion, intercultural philosophy and interreligious theology on the most unbiased, universalistic and inclusive ground possible by proposing a transcendental anthropology that is socially, historically and culturally disengaged. As a matter of principle, transcendental humanism has as its corollary a radically egalitarian view of religions and cultures. Without denying the definite referential context and complex historical and cultural entanglement as a general feature of human existence and of the researching scholar in particular, the philosophical tradition of transcendental humanism nevertheless abstracts, as Luc Ferry remarked, ‘the humanity of human beings … from any particular roots’50 and posits ‘“extra-worldly” values and meanings’, whether they are designated as ‘“innate ideas,” “eternal truths,” “a priori categories,” or “existentials”’. ‘In each of these cases it is a matter of unveiling a radical transcendence in relation to the “ontic” sphere of ordinary nature.’51 What, then, is the humanity of human beings, according to transcendental philosophy? According to Fichte’s Lectures concerning the Scholar’s Vocation (1794), that which exclusively pertains to man and distinguishes him ‘from all those beings with which we are acquainted but which we do not designate as human’52 is pure reason, that is the fundamentally coherent and universally valid system of norms in which,

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according to Husserl, ‘reason displays itself, as the “logic” for all true knowledge of the objective world’.53 Without reason, man would become an ‘irrational beast’, as Fichte claims: ‘There would be a new animal species, but there would no longer be any men.’54 Insofar as man is considered merely a rational being, he is absolutely equal. But it is not simply that man is pure reason; he also is something: ‘He does not say merely “I am”; he adds, “I am this or that.” He is a rational being insofar as he exists at all.’55 To ‘the extent that man is something [definite] he is a sensuous being’. But according to Fichte, ‘man is a rational being at the same time, and his reason should not be canceled by his sensibility. Reason and sensibility are supposed to coexist alongside each other.’56 The concrete individual subject, then, is a dynamic unity of pure reason and world-related sensibility, a pure I that cannot contradict itself, since it contains no diversity but is instead always one and the same, and an empirical I that can contradict itself, since it is determined and determinable by external things.57 While the transcendental subject is non-temporal, ahistorical, decontextualized, universal, immutable and the same in all humanity, the empirical subject is temporal, historical, contextualized, relative, mutable and individually unique. From this perspective, Solomon, Murphy and Pratt commit a grave and far-reaching category mistake by uncritically confusing the transcendental and empirical standpoints. Solomon wrongly claims that the assumption of a universal and objective reason that is immutable and valid for all people at all times and under all conditions becomes in its application ‘the a priori assertion that the structures of one’s own mind, culture, and personality are in some sense necessary and universal for all humankind, perhaps even “for all rational creatures”’.58 While attempting to heighten our awareness of human diversity, reveal blind spots, grant clarity in order to gain a critical distance for our relative perspectives, provide an account of alterity that rejects naive foundationalism and pernicious essentialism, and expose totalizing logocentrism that betrays the inescapable finitude of human knowledge, these patterns of postmodern and postcolonial thinking have eventually become an inhibiting and fragmenting force that works to conceal and suppress the presence of universal laws discernible through constitutive reason. As Ashok K. Gangadean aptly illustrates, instead of igniting the global mind through dialogical awakening, whereby we are able to stand back from our ‘particular cultural orientation and localized historical situation’ to ‘rise to a higher global perspective between worlds’59 and witness the ‘emergence of Global First Philosophy’,60 these forces in cultural evolution ‘have kept humanity in localized languages, partial and fragmented vision, artificially bounded experience, and forms of discourse that block access to the global truth of logos and hence of the realization of our true human essence’.61 Most postmodernist ‘philosophy’ simply exchanged ideologies of unity for ideologies of difference and failed to realize the transcendental turn, which acknowledges the true oneness that is the principle simultaneously of apparent oneness and of disjunction.62

Transcendental philosophy and anthropology To avoid a complete reversal of the transcendental standpoint, it is crucial to distinguish clearly between the general standpoint of anthropology and the universal

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standpoint of transcendental philosophy without conflating them. In his lecture on Phenomenology and Anthropology delivered to meetings of the Kant Society in 1931, Husserl apodictically denied ‘any science of human being, whatever its form, a share in laying the foundations for philosophy’63 and opposed all related attempts ‘at foundation-laying as being anthropologism or psychologism’.64 According to Husserl, transcendental philosophy provides the basis on which all sciences, including anthropology, are ‘for the first time to receive their philosophical grounding’.65 As Husserl states, prior to knowledge of the factual world, including the human being as a psychophysical entity, ‘there is universal knowledge of those essential possibilities without which no world whatever, and this includes the factical world as well, can be thought of as existing’.66 Only by way of a relentless inquiry into the ultimate sources of validity and a transcendental reduction that inhibits all presuppositions that are not irrevocably evident can we arrive at a sufficient principle for radically grounding science. According to Kant, ‘the highest point to which one must affix all use of the understanding, even the whole of logic’67 and transcendental philosophy is the transcendental unity of apperception. As Husserl argues, only this transcendental consciousness, the apodictic I ‘along with the “I am” of which I am conscious’,68 can be immediately and apodictically ascertained. But this transcendentally reduced consciousness is evidently not the empirical self of an individual human being with its psychical and worldly sphere. According to Husserl, those who think that this transcendental consciousness can be anything other than just a mere abstract ‘stratum of this concrete human being, its purely mental [geistiges] being, abstracted from the body’ have already ‘fallen back into the naïve natural attitude. Their thinking is grounded in the pregiven world rather than moving within the sphere of the epoché. For, to take oneself as a human being already presupposes an acceptance of validity of the world.’69 Evidently, by reflecting the transcendental antecedents of the phenomenal world and the conditions of the very possibility of all empirical sciences, transcendental philosophy is prior to and therefore different from anthropology. The purely a priori science of transcendental philosophy thus recognizes and elaborates on the fact that transcendental consciousness is the basic phenomenon which is absolutely irreducible. It must be most clearly and unambiguously expressed, though, that transcendental consciousness is neither the immaterial, immortal, incorruptible and personal soul of rational psychology nor ‘some sort of thing (round or square?) which exists as a thing in itself, independently of its being represented’,70 as Fichte caricatured the falsely reified and hypostatized consciousness that results from the fallacy of metaphysical subreption (apperceptionis substantiatae).71 As Husserl similarly argued, it must by no means be accepted that with transcendental consciousness we have ‘rescued a little tag-end of the world’72 that resembles a substance as a bearer of properties. The ultimate principle of this non-objectifiable and hence categorically indeterminable consciousness is based upon the ineluctable fact that being is being only as determined by consciousness, and that we can never legitimately abstract anything from the medium of consciousness. There is no point of view from which one can possibly examine statements of transcendental philosophy independently of consciousness itself. Any such attempt ignores the fact that it necessarily occurs within the act of consciousness itself and is transcendentally self-oblivious. Conceiving of

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the world apart from the knowing subject and separating reality from transcendental consciousness result from a naive-realistic epistemology that does not work using the justificatory standard set by Kant, Fichte and Husserl. Consequently, it is simply impossible to undermine the universality of consciousness or to limit the applicability of the transcendental standpoint to a Western context, thereby denying its legitimacy for cross-cultural analysis. Transcendental consciousness is apodictically certain, since it cannot be disclaimed without committing a performative self-contradiction, as both Fichte and Śaṅkara (ca. 650–750 ce) argue. If someone were to claim that ‘human knowledge be totally without any foundation’ and ‘that all human knowledge should instead be only conditional, that no proposition should be valid in itself, but rather that every proposition should be so only on the condition that the proposition from which it follows is valid’, and thus ultimately ending in an infinite regress, that person, as Fichte points out, could ‘always ask himself what he would know if his I were not an I, that is, if he did not exist, and if he could not distinguish something not-I from his I’.73 The same retorsive argument is applied by Śaṅkara against the alleged nihilism of the Mādhyamikas in order to proof the self-evident (svatahsiddha) and undeniable (abādhita) witness-consciousness (sāksi-caitanya) or ātman. In his Praśnopanisadbhāsya, he communicates the evidence of consciousness by challenging a Mādhyamika to explain ‘how he would argue away the presence of that knowledge by which he imagines the non-existence of that knowledge; for the nonexistence of the knowledge being itself a knowable object, it cannot be cognized unless there is knowledge of it’. It follows that the non-existence of knowledge is reduced to a meaningless term that cannot be postulated without performative self-contradiction, ‘because the non-existence of knowledge becomes essentially a knowledge [sic!]’.74 We can transcend the general perspective of anthropology, then, by logically abstracting from all empirical experience in the manner of transcendental philosophy in order to consciously and deliberately reflect upon knowledge itself and ascertain the necessary a priori structure of knowing that is presupposed by our ordinary consciousness of the sensory world. As Gangadean argues, this would bring us significantly closer to ‘the code for the rational structure of discourse and reality’75 by discerning ‘the ultimate grounds of Knowledge’ and ‘the fundamental grammar of thought’.76 Correspondingly, transcendental philosophy attempts to reflect the formaldiscursive totality of all conditions of knowledge in their entirety through the explicit self-examination of knowing. Through this self-reflexive act of thinking about thinking, the entire a priori structure of consciousness systematically unfolds in resolute selfdisclosure. Accordingly, transcendental philosophy aims at a reflexive reconstruction of a universally valid and abstract system that contains the contingent and concrete totality of phenomenal reality.77 While a logically abstracted transcendental structure cannot appear separately and exist independently of its concrete manifestations, phenomenal concretions are axiomatically restricted to the boundaries of a transcendental structure as their constitutive framework. Thus, it is not only incorrect that transcendental philosophy, though ‘acutely sensitive to the problem of the other’, is ultimately ‘unable to provide an account of alterity that does not reduce difference to same[ness]’,78 as Mark Taylor claimed. It also appears that transcendental philosophy is an ideal framework to provide an account of both identity and alterity that neither reduces identity to alterity

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nor difference to sameness; thus, it can significantly contribute to a universally shared philosophical horizon.

Transcendental hermeneutics of religion The key notion of transcendental hermeneutics of religion is the integral standpoint of universal reason and, correspondingly, that invariant structures of knowing enable intercultural comparability and intelligibility. As a historically, culturally and linguistically invariant principle of understanding, pure reason, or the fundamentally coherent and universally valid a priori structure of consciousness in which reason displays itself, provides the ultimate ground of understanding that is necessary, if understanding is assumed to be possible at all. A hermeneutics based on transcendental philosophy thus unequivocally rejects all positivist, naive realist and relativist accounts of interpreting religion by establishing the irrevocable horizon of the transcendental a priori of consciousness as a first principle for all knowledge and for the ultimate foundation of all hermeneutic endeavours. Moreover, transcendental philosophy accounts for a strictly scientific methodological basis that is not limited to an empiricist criterion of meaning. It can be generally said that a rigorously empirically based hermeneutics of religion not only precludes the intelligibility and legitimacy of any theological explanation of religion within a scientific frame of reference, but also renders an adequate treatment of philosophical problems impossible. Among the source material of religions, there are countless statements about philosophical problems which an empirically limited hermeneutics would have to re-construe as cultural anthropological, sociological, or psychological problems and interpret as expressions of an individual or ecological crisis and/or social changes. However, philosophical questions cannot be reduced to natural anthropology or assimilated to other disciplines within the humanities, even though they might be affected by these issues to a certain degree. While non-religious perspectives such as those of history, sociology, ethnology, psychology and economics are indispensable for a comprehensive analysis and treatment of religion, genuine philosophical topics central to all religious traditions can in no way be reduced to the empirical sciences. By denying the recognition of the a priori conditions of experience and the ontological principles that underlie their own position, the positive sciences thus unjustifiably eliminate important philosophemes, together with their existential and religious implications, from the field of verifiable truth. Evidently, the transcendental antecedents of empiricism – like Kant’s transcendental unity of apperception, Fichte’s absolute I or Śaṅkara’s non-objectifiable witness-consciousness (sāksi-caitanya) – cannot be verified or falsified by natural scientific observations. Even while they are a condition for the very possibility of all empirical sciences, they can never become facts of phenomenal consciousness and objects of empirical experience. To quote Husserl, the ‘ultimate presuppositions of the possibility and actuality of objective knowledge cannot be objectively knowable’.79 As Kant rightly states, ‘although all our cognition commences with experience, yet it does not on that account all arise from experience’.80 It follows that the limits of empiricism are decidedly not the limits

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of scientific knowledge. According to a transcendental hermeneutical framework, empirical, philosophical and theological studies of religion can be equally conducted within a scientific frame of reference. The comparative study of religion can thus become truly interdisciplinary, no longer excluding theology and the philosophy of religion. However, this does not mean that the benefits of the transcendental standpoint within the comparative study of religions are confined to the domain of purely methodological reflection. A hermeneutics based on transcendental philosophy may contribute to the comparative study of religions in two further ways: 1. While constituting the tertium comparationis that enables intercultural comparability and intelligibility, the transcendental grid that determines our thinking irrespective of place, time, history and culture can itself become the object of cross-cultural analysis and comparison. If the same transcendental structures of intelligibility are necessarily at work in all religious traditions, we can explore this hypothesis more broadly in relation to selected Buddhist, Christian, Confucian, Hindu, Islamic, Jewish or Daoist texts. As I have shown elsewhere, Nāgārjuna and Śaṅkara gained transcendental insights ante litteram that made them representatives to the universality claim of transcendental philosophy outside of Europe.81 This also means that the specific problem of the self-understanding of philosophy can no longer be discussed without granting non-European thinkers like Nāgārjuna and Śaṅkara a significant place therein. In fact, a transcendental hermeneutics of religion not only attempts to foster the emergence of global first philosophy, but actively tries ‘to lay bare the fundamental philosophical structure of the world-view’82 that Toshihiko Izutsu (1914–93) already demanded in order to arrive at a ‘suitable locus in which the “mutual understanding” here in question could be actualized in the form of a meta-historical dialogue’. These meta-historical dialogues, conducted methodically, as Izutsu believed, will ‘eventually be crystallised into a philosophia perennis in the fullest sense of the term. For the philosophical drive of the human Mind is, regardless of ages, places and nations, ultimately and fundamentally one.’83 By accounting for universal thought-patterns that are operative in all religious traditions, a transcendental hermeneutics of religion can explain why classical philosophical issues such as the one and the many, being and becoming, appearance and reality, the nature of self and consciousness, laws of logic, etc. challenge all religious traditions, and may thus produce a significant contribution to our understanding of them. 2. A transcendental hermeneutics of religion might also shed new light on an understanding of the ‘religious a priori’ that was claimed to be an irreducible datum of human experience and an element in the structure of consciousness by Otto, Eliade and other seminal figures in the phenomenology of religion. Again, if the same transcendental structures of intelligibility are necessarily at work in all religious traditions, we can explore this hypothesis more broadly in relation to selected texts from different religious traditions. What, then, is this element in the structure of consciousness according to transcendental philosophy? There is evidence in all religious traditions that the philosopheme of a transcendental and non-objectifiable ground of consciousness was theoretically taken and/or practically intuited to be the

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essence of man and the innermost centre of human existence that essentially links man to transcendent reality. I highlight thinkers such as Bhāratītīrtha/Vidyāraṇya (ca.  fourteenth  century ce), Patañjali (first  century  bce or fourth  century  ce), Paramārtha (ca. 499–569 ce), Mullā Ṣadrā (ca. 1571–1640), Moses de León (ca. 1250– 1305) and Jan van Ruysbroeck (ca. 1293–1381). Their works and philosophies testify to what appears to be, historically as well as structurally, the Hindu-advaitic, Hinduyogic, Buddhist, Islamic, Jewish and Christian equivalent of this very transcendental notion: The eye is the seer, and form (and colour) the seen. That (eye) is the seen and the mind is (its) seer (rūpam˙ drśyam˙ locanam˙ drk taddrśyam˙ drktu mānasam). The witness alone is the Seer of thoughts in the mind and never seen (drśyā dhīvrttayassāksī drgeva na tu drśyate).84 Yoga is inhibition of the mental processes (yogaś citta-vrtti-nirodhah). Then the seer is established in his own nature (tadā drast uh svarūpe’ vasthānam).85 The true purport [of ‘consciousness only’] is that one does away with the object because one wants to render mind empty, and for this reason, the principle [of ‘consciousness only’] is only truly realized when both object and consciousness disappear at once. This simultaneous disappearance of both object and consciousness is precisely the perfected nature (parinispannasvabhāva); and the perfected nature is precisely the amalavijñāna.86 When a human turns to himself (raja῾a ilā dhātihi) and makes his itness present (ahdara huwīyatahu), he may neglect all universal meanings, even the meaning of his being a substance, an individual, or a governor for the body. Thus, in examining myself (῾inda mutāla ῾ati dhātī) I only see an existence which apprehends itself as a particular (wujūdan yudriku nafsahu ῾alā wajhi al-juz’īya), and whatever is other than the individual itness to which I refer by ‘I’ is external to myself (dhātī), even the concept ‘I’, the concept of existence, the concept of what apprehends itself (al-mudruki nafsahu), and the concept of governor of the body, or soul, and so forth; for they all are universal cognitions, to which all I refer by ‘it’, whereas I refer to myself (dhātī) by ‘I’.87 Anything sealed and concealed, totally unknown to anyone, is called ayin, meaning that no one knows anything about it. Similarly … no one knows anything at all about the human soul; she stands in the status of nothingness, as it is said [Eccles. 3.19]: ‘The advantage of the human over the beast is ayin’! By means of this soul, the human being obtains an advantage over all other creatures and the glory of that which is called ayin.88 ‘The God-seeing man … can always enter, naked and unencumbered with images, into the inmost part of his spirit. There he finds revealed an Eternal Light. … It [his spirit] is undifferentiated and without distinction, and therefore it feels nothing but the unity.’89

From this transcendental viewpoint, theological and philosophical reflections within religious traditions might ‘be woven into a common hermeneutical texture’ through which one might ‘go beyond the dogmatic statements into the human reality which is prior to them and is the condition of their possibility’, as Francis X. D’Sa aptly describes

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the merits of Gerhard Oberhammer’s transcendental hermeneutics of religious traditions. With this, D’Sa continues, hermeneutics would move towards a fundamental phenomenon that is common to all religious traditions, namely the religion of the Human as the realization of his spirit. From there the faith-statements of these traditions could be understood as concrete answers to the Human’s basic quest for absolute meaning. The diverse religious traditions could then be viewed as living witnesses and interpretations of the experience of human transcendence.90

Notes 1 Hegel 1894: 377. 2 cf. Husserl 1997. 3 Otto 1950: 116. 4 Ibid. 5 Leeuw 1986: 676. 6 Ibid.: 677. 7 Ibid.: 675. 8 Ibid.: 677. 9 Wach 1958: 10. 10 Wach 1988b: 29. 11 Wach 1958: 18; Quoting Emmet 1932: 53. 12 Wach 1958: 18. 13 Wach 1988b: 114. 14 Wach 1988a: 178. 15 Ibid.: 179. 16 Wach 1988b: 114. 17 Ibid.: 116. 18 Ibid.: 114. 19 Ibid.: 155. 20 cf. Cornille 2005: 6. 21 Spranger [1921] 1928: 25. 22 Ibid.: 6. 23 Ibid.: 30. 24 Eliade 1978: xiii. 25 Eliade 1969: 69. 26 cf. Ibid.: 7. 27 Ibid.: 9. 28 Solomon 1988: 7. 29 Fichte 2005: 24. 30 Solomon [1979] 1993: 13. 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid.: xiv. 33 Solomon 1988: 1f. 34 Ibid.: 4. 35 Ibid.: 6. 36 Solomon [1979] 1993: 8.

On All-Embracing Mental Structures 37 Ibid.: 11. 38 Solomon 1988: 6. 39 Solomon [1979] 1993: 13. 40 Ibid.: 343. 41 Ibid.: 359. 42 Solomon 1988: 1. 43 Ibid.: 6. 44 Ibid.: 7. 45 cf. Murphy 2010: 275–316. 46 Pratt 1992: 15. 47 Taylor 1985: 280. 48 Murphy 2010: 301. 49 Puligandla [1975] 2008: 4. 50 Ferry [1996] 2002: 139. 51 Ibid.: 138. 52 Fichte 1993b: 148. 53 Husserl 1970: 93. 54 Fichte 1993b: 181. 55 Ibid.: 148. 56 Ibid. 57 cf. Ibid.: 149. 58 Solomon 1988: 7. 59 Gangadean 2008: xiv. 60 Ibid.: 1. 61 Ibid.: xiii–xiv. 62 cf. Fichte 2005: 56. 63 Husserl 1997: 485. 64 Ibid.: 486. 65 Ibid. 66 Ibid.: 487. 67 Kant 1998: B134: 247. 68 Husserl 1997: 491. 69 Ibid.: 493. 70 Fichte 1993a: 67. 71 cf. Kant 1998: A402: 442. 72 Husserl 1982: 24. 73 Fichte 1993c: 119. 74 Praśnopaniṣadśaṅkarabhāṣya 5, 2. In Gambhīrānanda 1992: 484. 75 Gangadean 2008: 21. 76 Ibid.: 20. 77 cf. Schneider 1966: 54. 78 Taylor 1985: 280. 79 Husserl 1970: 95. 80 Kant 1998: B1: 136. 81 cf. Völker 2015a, 2015b. 82 Izutsu 1983: 469. 83 Ibid. 84 Bhāratītīrtha/Vidyāraṇya: Dṛg-Dṛśya-Viveka 1, in Tejomāyānanda 2006: 1. 85 Patañjali: Yogasūtra 1: 12, in Leggett 2006: 60, 64. 86 Paramārtha: Zhuanshi lun (skt. pravṛttivijñāna śāstra), in Radich 2008: 82f.

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87 Mullā Ṣadrā: Asfār, in Kaukua 2015: 190. 88 Moses de León: Sheqel ha Qodesh, in Matt 1990: 130. 89 Jan van Ruysbroeck, The Adornment of the Spiritual Marriage, in Stace 1961: 94. 90 D’Sa 1994: xxvi. cf. Oberhammer 1987, 1989, 2003.

References Cornille, Catherine (2005), ‘Conditions for the Possibility of Interreligious Dialogue on God’, in Werner G. Jeanrond and Assulv Lande (eds), The Concept of God in Global Dialogue, 3-18, Maryknoll: Orbis Books. D’Sa, Francis X. (1994), ‘The Re-Membering of Text and Tradition. Some Reflections on Gerhard Oberhammer’s Hermeneutics of Encounter’, in Francis X. D’Sa and Roque Mesquita (eds), Hermeneutics of Encounter. Essays in Honour of Gerhard Oberhammer on the Occasion of his 65th Birthday, ix–1, Vienna: Institute for Indology. Eliade, Mircea (1969), The Quest. History and Meaning in Religion, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Eliade, Mircea (1978), A History of Religious Ideas. Volume 1. From the Stone Age to the Eleusinian Mysteries, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Emmet, Dorothy M. (1932), Whitehead’s Philosophy of Organism, London: Macmillan. Ferry, Luc ([1996] 2002), Man Made God. The Meaning of Life, trans. David Pellauer, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Fichte, Johann Gottlieb (1993a), ‘Review of Aenesidemus’, in Daniel Breazeale (ed.), Fichte. Early Philosophical Writings, 53–77, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Fichte, Johann Gottlieb (1993b), ‘Some Lectures Concerning the Scholar’s Vocation’, in Daniel Breazeale (ed.), Fichte. Early Philosophical Writings, 137–84, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Fichte, Johann Gottlieb (1993c), ‘Concerning the Concept of the Wissenschaftslehre’, in Daniel Breazeale (ed.), Fichte. Early Philosophical Writings, 87–135, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Fichte, Johann Gottlieb (2005), The Science of Knowing. J. G. Fichte’s 1804 Lectures on the Wissenschaftslehre, trans. Walter E. Wright, Albany: SUNY. Gambhīrānanda, Swāmī (1992), Eight Upaniṣads. Volume Two (Aitareya, Muṇḍaka, Māṇḍūkya & Kārikā, Praśna). With the Commentary of Śaṅkarācārya, Calcutta: Advaita Ashrama. Gangadean, Ashok K. (2008), Meditations of Global First Philosophy. Quest for the Missing Grammar of Logos, New York: State University of New York Press. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1894), Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind. Translated from the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences with five Introductory Essays by William Wallace, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Husserl, Edmund (1970), The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. David Carr, Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Husserl, Edmund (1982), Cartesian Meditations. An Introduction to Phenomenology, trans. Dorian Cairns, The Hague, Boston and London: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. Husserl, Edmund (1997), ‘Phenomenology and Anthropology (June, 1931)’, trans. Thomas Sheehan and Richard E. Palmer, in Thomas Sheehan and Richard E. Palmer (eds), Edmund Husserl. Psychological and Transcendental Phenomenology and the Confrontation with Heidegger (1927–1931). The Encyclopaedia Britannica Article, the

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Amsterdam Lectures, ‘Phenomenology and Anthropology’ and Husserl’s Marginal Notes in Being and Time and Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, 485–500, Dordrecht, Boston and London: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Izutsu, Toshihiko (1983), Sufism and Taoism. A Comparative Study of Key Philosophical Concepts, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press. Kant, Immanuel (1998), Critique of Pure Reason, trans. and ed. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood, Cambridge, New York and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. Kaukua, Jari (2015), Self-Awareness in Islamic Philosophy. Avicenna and Beyond, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Leeuw, Gerardus van der (1986), Religion in Essence and Manifestation, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Leggett, Trevor (2006), Śan˙kara on the Yoga Sūtra-s. A Full Translation of the Newly Discovered Text. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass. Matt, Daniel C. (1990), ‘Ayin: The Concept of Nothingness in Jewish Mysticism’, in Robert K. C. Forman (ed.), The Problem of Pure Consciousness. Mysticism and Philosophy, 121–59, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Murphy, Tim (2010), The Politics of Spirit. Phenomenology, Genealogy, Religion. Albany: SUNY. Oberhammer, Gerhard (1987), Versuch einer transzendentalen Hermeneutik religiöser Traditionen, Vienna: Institute for Indology. Oberhammer, Gerhard (1989), ‘Begegnung’ als Kategorie der Religionshermeneutik, Vienna: Institute for Indology. Oberhammer, Gerhard (2003), Transzendenzerfahrung als absolute Begegnung, Vienna: Department of South Asian, Tibetan and Buddhist Studies. Otto, Rudolf (1950), The Idea of the Holy. An Inquiry into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and its Relation to the Rational, trans. John W. Harvey, London: Oxford University Press. Pratt, Mary Louise (1992), Imperial Eyes. Travel Writing and Transculturation, New York and Abingdon: Routledge. Puligandla, Ramakrishna ([1975] 2008), Fundamentals of Indian Philosophy, New Delhi: D. K. Printworld. Radich, Michael (2008), ‘The Doctrine of Amalavijñāna in Paramārtha (499–569), and Later Authors to Approximately 800 C.E.’, Zinbun, 41: 45–174. Schneider, Peter K. (1966), Die Begründung der Wissenschaften durch Philosophie und Kybernetik. Idee, Umriß und Grundprinzip einer axiomatischen Strukturtheorie, Stuttgart, Berlin, Köln and Mainz: Kohlhammer. Solomon, Robert C. ([1979] 1993), The Bully Culture. Enlightenment, Romanticism, and the Transcendental Pretense, 1750–1850, Lanham: Littlefield Adams Quality Paperbacks. Solomon, Robert C. (1988), Continental Philosophy since 1750. The Rise and Fall of the Self, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Spranger, Eduard ([1921] 1928), Types of Men. The Psychology and Ethics of Personality, Halle (Saale): Niemeyer. Stace, William T. (1961), Mysticism and Philosophy, London: Macmillan. Taylor, Mark C. (1985), ‘The Stranglehold of Transcendentalism’, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 53 (2): 277–84. Tejomāyānanda, Swāmī (2006), Dṛg-Dṛśya-Viveka by Ādi Śaṅkarācārya, commentary by Swami Tejomayananda, Mumbai: Central Chinmaya Mission Trust.

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Völker, Fabian (2016a, forthcoming), ‘Der präreflexive Grund des Bewusstseins. Eine transzendentalphilosophische Interpretation Nāgārjunas’, in Helmut Girndt (ed.), Das Nichts und das Sein. Buddhistische Wissenstheorie und Transzendentalphilosophie. Völker, Fabian (2016b, forthcoming), ‘Der Advaita-Vedānta als Proto-Transzendentallehre. Prolegomenon zu einer transkulturellen Transzendentalphilosophie’, in Kai U. Gregor (ed.), Zukunft der Philosophie – Philosophie der Zukunft. Wach, Joachim (1958), The Comparative Study of Religions, New York: Columbia University Press. Wach, Joachim (1988a), Essays in the History of Religions, New York and London: Macmillan. Wach, Joachim (1988b), Introduction to the History of Religions, New York and London: Macmillan.

Part Three

Reciprocal Illumination and Comparative Theology

9

Comparative Theology and Comparative Religion Klaus von Stosch

The development of Comparative Theology Comparative Theology1 is, at least within German-speaking countries, a relatively new branch of research. Its outlines are only beginning to take shape. At the same time, however, a rich tradition of comparative theologies and of other disciplines that compare religions already exists. Therefore, it is important to examine the history, purpose and development of Comparative Theology and to discuss the precursors of this new research approach. We can establish that theologies which constructively grapple with other religious traditions have a long tradition in the history of Christianity. John Renard, for example, emphasizes that Christian theology has always operated in a comparative framework,2 and Robert C. Neville points out that comparative theology is not new but, rather, the foundation of all successful, large-scale theological conceptions that address interreligious questions – such as Thomas Aquinas’ inclusion of neo-Platonic, Aristotelian and Islamic thought.3 Perhaps an even more convincing example of comparative theological efforts is the theological thought developed by Christians living in the Near East during the eighth and ninth centuries. They were at home in the world of Islam and began to articulate their Christian convictions in the idiom of the predominantly Islamic culture.4 Even the very beginning of theology and its appropriation of Hellenistic thought could be described as comparative theology in the broad sense of the term. Such conceptions are, however, always apologetic in their orientation. They employ the theology of the other religion or non-Christian worldview solely in order to better articulate Christian faith through the creative transformation of the other. In this context, a critical engagement with what is foreign is not an end in itself. NonChristian religions are not considered to be capable of helping the Christian reflection of faith to deepen its own understanding of truth. The term comparative theology was not used in the context of this apologetic-type theology. An explicit engagement with comparative theology only began in the modern era,5 and gained increasing influence over the course of the nineteenth century. Numerous

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works on comparative theology were published during that time, especially in the English-speaking world, and efforts were made to establish the emerging research field as an academic discipline.6 Sometimes, the terms comparative theology and comparative religion competed, with comparative theology being understood in this context as an external, non-denominational, purely academic reflection upon religions. Thus, it should have been referred to not as theology but as religious studies.7 Sometimes the term comparative theology was used to indicate more than merely religious studies during the nineteenth century. Comparative theology was also a very common term for an entire branch of literature which is little known today and which exhibited very diverse expressions.8 A shared feature of these fields was their heavily apologetic orientation.9 For Frederick Denison Maurice, for instance, the comparison of religion was intended to identify Christianity as the one true religion.10 James Freeman Clarke further pointed to the fundamental ‘difference between the intrinsically universal religion (Christianity) and the intrinsically limited, race-specific religions (all the rest)’.11 Consequently, comparative theology has certainly not always been an area of research that has supported the appreciation of the faiths of other people. Still, the comparative theology of F. Max Müller, the founder of comparative religious studies, explicitly signifies ‘a decisive break with the tradition of exclusivist Christian apologetics that liberal Christians increasingly found distastefully intolerant, parochial, and reactionary’.12 Yet this apparent epochal break had no sweeping effect either in comparative religious studies or in comparative theology. Both disciplines demonstrated time and again that Christianity was the one world religion, so that their ostensibly objective approach led to a strong link between liberalism and imperialism.13 Even the different religious studies approaches of the twentieth century have – as current discussions in postcolonial studies demonstrate – implicitly grounded their thinking in the hegemony of Western culture and thus perpetuated it. A good example of this is the invention of ‘the Orient’ through Orientalism, which Edward Said criticized extensively in his influential study. Said assumed that it was through Orientalism that the view of a distinctive Orient, absolutely different from the West, was developed.14 Through this process, Orientalism created an ideal other and made the Orient the representative of this other in Western culture. Eventually, all of these ostensibly objective scholarly efforts, whether based on arguments from within Christianity or cultural studies, led to a denigration or stigmatization of the other. The situation began to change with the development of postcolonial cultural studies as well as modern theology. Theology has now begun to view the other in a new and positive light. In German-language theology, it is especially the reception of Emmanuel Levinas and other Jewish philosophers of religion that has changed the Christian relationship to their religious other. But it is not only in this specific school of thought within systematic theology that modern theology holds a positive view of the religious other. The same phenomenon is visible in the various theological disciplines, each with different motivations. Keith Ward is absolutely right when he emphasizes that important parts of current Christian theology quite naturally work through comparison without denigrating the religious and cultural other, and reminds his readers of how patristics engaged in Hellenistic thought and Christology discovered the Jewishness of Jesus.15

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Yet, despite these efforts, the term comparative theology has never been used in German-speaking countries. Moreover, theological analyses tend to refer to existing interactions between religions, while the newer Comparative Theology examines how religions can enrich each other reciprocally, independently of their historical influences on each other.16 Comparative Theology is the first approach to attempt to be programmatic about constructively including the religious features of non-Christians in its own thinking. Thus, without denying that in the broad sense of the term there has almost always been something like comparative theology, or that comparative theology can draw on many phenomena of current theological research, hereafter this chapter will only consider the new Comparative Theology which explicitly gives itself this name. Theologically-interested religious studies scholars, such as Rudolf Otto and Annemarie Schimmel,17 as well as Asianists, in particular Aloysius Pieris and his Buddhist and Hindu studies colleagues,18 provided the first inspiration for the new Comparative Theology. But Comparative Theology has only become a formative school of thought in the English-language world in the last twenty years. Accordingly, when I differentiate Comparative Theology and religious studies, I am basing my understanding of Comparative Theology on how it has developed during this time.19 Considered against older forms of comparative theology, three attributes of the new Comparative Theology stand out.20 First, the newer form attempts to avoid generalizing judgements. Comparative Theology is sensitive to the inner heterogeneity of religious traditions and seeks to cultivate an awareness of the richness of religions that results from this complexity. Second, Comparative Theology connects theological deliberation with the practice of interreligious dialogue. It does not want only to think and talk about the other, but also to enter into conversation with other religions and to make room for different faiths’ self-understanding in its own thinking. Third, Comparative Theology develops an awareness of its own normative hermeneutical presuppositions within such conversations, and cultivates a willingness to critically question its own assumptions. When considering these three features, one might get the impression that the new Comparative Theology and religious studies can barely be distinguished from each other. Therefore, it will be important to define the relationship between these two distinct disciplines in the following section.

The question of truth as a criterion to distinguish between Comparative Theology and comparative religion In my view, the crucial difference between Comparative Theology and comparative religion is that Comparative Theology asks the question of truth and validity with regard to religious convictions. By doing this, it claims to provide people who seek religious orientation with rational standards for the evaluation of religions. While comparative religion refrains from truth claims and attempts to remain neutral with regard to different religions, Comparative Theology seeks to offer tools that can help

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to decide the question of truth and explores religion through active involvement in religiosis. As a common ground, Comparative Religion and Comparative Theology both tend to proceed by focusing on individual cases, that is on specific ways a religion is practised or interpreted. Thus, both are interested in comparing different religious traditions without attempting to essentialize religions. In order to undertake the task of comparison, it is important that scholars are at least initially willing to practise a form of epoché, that is suspension of judgement.21 Even though a radical form of epoché is considered to be psychologically and hermeneutically impossible,22 religious studies scholars still seek to work purely hermeneutically. The final aim of Comparative Theology, on the other hand, is to work with questions of truth. Both disciplines share the fundamental intuition that one can understand religion better and more deeply when one is familiar with more than just one tradition.23 When, for instance, Udo Tworuschka refers to ‘people of all times, spaces, and religions, who speak in pictures, dances, sounds, architecture, smells and colors, in rituals and conversations, and, of course, in texts about the transcendent objects that they consider truly important’ as the subject of religious studies, then it is also possible to consider these coherencies to be the subject of Comparative Theology, even if one might reject the talk about ‘transcendent objects’ as inappropriate.24 Comparative Theology will sometimes employ phenomenological and empirical methods, and can learn a great deal from comparative religion. Still, one crucial difference remains: ‘Religious studies scholars … have to practice not to allow their specific religious convictions to influence their scholarly work.’25 These scholars always attempt to remain neutral with regard to the question of the validity of religion, and address the entire academic public in like manner.26 By contrast, Comparative Theology does not strive for religious neutrality, and, despite the fact that as a public theology it speaks to the entire academic public, this includes addressing believers concerning its considerations.27 Ultimately, then, Comparative Theology deals with the question of truth and examines how truth can be testified to in different religious contexts and what can be believed as truth in these contexts. Unlike comparative religion, it is less concerned with the psychological, sociological or historical elements of religious convictions, but asks, instead, about their meaning and rationality, and on this basis inquires after the question of truth.28 Comparative religion, on the other hand, refrains from discussing truth altogether, but stays, of course, obliged to its own position, which remains Eurogenic and partially Eurocentric. … In academics itself, as a cultural and sociopolitical endeavor, a latent dimension of seeking truth and orientation is naturally also always at work. … Comparative religion is not suspended from its claim to truth within the academically realizable discourse about the truth, but it is freed from making a decision about the truth: it practices abstinence from truth.29

This abstinence from truth in comparative religion contrasts with the search for truth in theology, and constitutes the main difference between the two disciplines. Closely connected to the question of truth is the question of the assessment of relativism. Like every theology, Comparative Theology is a normative discipline, and

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thus must avoid any form of relativism. The accusation of being a relativist approach is one of the most effective denunciations of its convictions. Comparative religion, by contrast, is not afraid of relativism, according to Mohn, because relativism in terms of religion is unavoidable from a religious studies perspective. Rather, it is a prerequisite point of departure which defines the structures of the subject area ‘religion,’ because it is connected to the large number of religions. It cannot be ‘subsumed’ through the construction of a meta language or a meta religion (neither in the Hegelian sense).30

Comparative Theology certainly does not want to introduce a meta level for evaluating religious convictions. However, it does wrestle with its own capacity to test the rationality of these convictions by going back and forth between selected individual cases. Through these efforts, Comparative Theology desires to explicitly help those who seek truth and orientation in the human search for the right attitude towards the truth claims of religions. Comparative Theology, then, remains obliged to the truth, whereas for empirical religious studies, religious truth always exists ‘only in its historical contingency and thus contextually within a system of religion, and thus it is “relative” in a certain sense, which is why it is impossible for [religious studies] to provide help with the making of religious decisions.’31 Hence, Comparative Theology is concerned not only with the description but also with the evaluation of religion, or, rather, of certain religious convictions within specific contexts. This branch of theology monitors standards of rationality, and asks not merely about the meaning and potential of religious convictions but also about their truth. It thus places itself in conversation with philosophical discourse, while also attempting to take into adequate account the insider perspective of religious believers. Precisely because religious beliefs shape the lives of religious believers to the extent that they can only be understood with reference to the different forms of practice within religious traditions, Comparative Theology cannot offer instruments for decision making on a religio-philosophical meta level, but has to make various insider perspectives transparent to each other and compare them with each other by referring to an externally founded criteriology.

Observer perspective versus participant perspective? Frequently, scholars, especially those from religious studies, have tried to encapsulate the difference between the two disciplines by assigning the observer perspective to religious studies and the participant perspective to theology.32 A popular analogy for this is the different relationship that a botanist and a gardener have to plants.33 Reinhold Bernhardt recounts this comparison as follows, without, however, himself agreeing with the juxtaposition (as I detail in a few pages): The botanist studies the plants and describes them, but does not pass judgment on them. The differentiation between herb and weed, useful and harmful, beautiful and ugly, precious and worthless is not part of the botanist’s analytic instruments

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of description. The gardener’s relationship to plants, by contrast, is one of caring. Out of this involved perspective, the gardener makes evaluating differentiations.34

From a theological point of view, this type of analogy is, of course, problematic, because the task of the gardener can hardly be appreciated as a science. It also underestimates theology’s role as critic of religion. Still today, when reflecting on their own discipline, many religious studies scholars commonly refuse to include the religious insider perspective in their understanding of religion. Fritz Stolz, for example, classically assigns the insider perspective on religion to theology and the outsider perspective to comparative religion. He assumes as a matter of course that members of a given religion will not agree with the religious studies description of their faith.35 Klaus Hock also distinguishes between the ‘thinking through a religion “from the inside” – in theology, missiology, theology of dialogue, and theology of religions – and a thinking through religion “from the outside” – in comparative religion’.36 However, many colleagues in religious studies currently want to break with this conception. They realize that if they methodologically exclude any inner participation of the researcher from the epistemological process, then, from the perspective of the philosophy of science, they are cementing ‘the European subject-object division as the basis for all legitimate scholarship and science’.37 These scholars are becoming increasingly sensitive to the fact that participation reveals to us important aspects of the examined object of study, ‘namely, the manifold contingencies of the subject, without which “objective” research in the humanities cannot even take place. … A neutral access to the “object” does not exist.’38 From this, one can conclude that religious studies also need to recognize the value of individual ‘explorations of the insider perspective of a religion’.39 At the very least, one should take one’s own insider perspective of religion more seriously – as some religious studies scholars have already done40 – and, for instance, appreciate when believers of the respective religion recognize their own faith in the work of comparative religion.41 This new point of departure in comparative religion is, of course, of great interest to Comparative Theology, because, as a theology, it has always been aware that religion cannot be understood from a purely outsider perspective.42 If comparative theologists want to approach religions other than their own through understanding, then they face the same problems as ethnographers and religious studies scholars. Consequently, Comparative Theology can use the latter groups’ empirical methods or cooperate with them in research associations, insofar as religious studies scholars take seriously the particular insider perspectives of religions. Comparative Theology can, however, give an additional critical impulse to the study of religions, because it does not only empirically describe the perspective of those it researches but also obtains that perspective through normative theological interpretations. This task requires concurrent empirical research, because the correlation between the way religion is practised and understood in daily life and the way it is intellectually reframed in theological interpretations is sometimes very different. Here, empirical research can elucidate new possibilities of correlations between the way religion is practised and the way it is interpreted.

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Another shared concern between the new points of departure in comparative religion and Comparative Theology is that comparative religion is increasingly interested in ‘integrating ideology and religio-critical procedures in a humanizing intent’.43 When the field of religious studies is understood in this way, it takes on a normative perspective at a crucial point, because the wish to humanize religion is a normative enterprise. This closely links comparative religion to the project of Comparative Theology and forces both fields to search together for norms that are independent of religion and for a criteria of rationality for religions. Furthermore, comparative religion here identifies an interest that I also see anchored at a prominent place in Comparative Theology.44 If religious studies scholars include the participant perspective, both disciplines can move closer together in their work. Recall that theology does not simply and as a matter of course take the participant perspective and assume it to be true. Rather, it attempts to mediate the participant and observer perspectives. Theology, including Comparative Theology, seeks to include the critical outsider perspective of religion in the reflection of its own validity and to process that perspective productively. Reinhold Bernhardt, for example, argues that when theology reflects its own belief-informed insider perspective, it is forced to step out of the immediacy of this perspective ‘in order to submit it to a perception that is an approximate outsider perspective’.45 ‘Within the metaphor of the above chosen comparison: [Comparative Theology] is not simply identical with the gardener rather than the botanist, but it mediates between both epistemological positions.’46 Theology’s task, then, is to mediate between the insider perspective and the outsider perspective. It should not frame the participant perspective without considering the outsider perspective. It is not possible, therefore, to distinguish theology from religious studies by assigning the insider perspective to theology and the outsider perspective to comparative religion. This distinction does not do justice to either field in its respective broadness. However, it is true that the respective participant perspective has much higher significance for theology than it does for comparative religion. While comparative religion only attempts to understand the participant perspective, for theology, this perspective forms part of its normative frame of reference.47 While comparative religion seeks to understand the perspective of religions without attempting to evaluate their capacity to discern truth, Comparative Theology wants to use the researched religious perspectives to search for theological possibilities of mediation between them in a way that remains committed to the search for truth. Theology takes the insider perspective into much greater account than comparative religion. In contrast to an empiricist model of scholarship, such an orientation to the hermeneutical aspects of research within a neo-pragmatic model appears to be no less rational, because, in the perspective of thinkers like Jürgen Habermas, who now carry a certain weight in theology as well, academic standards and rationality are not dependent on the renunciation of the insider perspective or reliant on the empiricist ideal of data. Instead, an orientation ‘towards the ideal discourse situation’ is crucial: ‘All relevant arguments pro et contra should be submitted without regard for conditions outside the discourse and should be acknowledged relative to their weight.’48 In other words, ‘The academic discipline of discursive verification … does

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not hinge on giving up a subjective participation in favor of a completely impartial, programmatically un-involved position of observation. Rather, it rests on opening oneself to the perspective of the other.’49 For this reason, I have prominently grounded an openness for other perspectives as inherent to the methodology of Comparative Theology. The inclusion of other theologies and religious perspectives can be a stronger rationalizing force than an ostensibly completely neutral perspective, which might also be biased in its suspension of the question of truth and the normative dimension of religious convictions.50 Consequently, theology demonstrates its rationality by critically examining the insider perspective upon which it draws. This inquiry takes an outsider perspective on religions, but also takes the respective views of other religions completely seriously.51 In the same way, religious studies scholars should take seriously the particular insider perspectives of religions. In this way, both disciplines could enhance each other’s work much more than is currently the case. To do so, it will be important to recognize that academics and rationality are not simply above conflict. Rationality is not a neutral mediator. Rather, it is fought with arguments.52 Rationality has to prove itself and make itself understood time and again. As difficult as it appears to be to assign different perspectives to Comparative Theology and religious studies, they are markedly distinct with regard to the question of truth. In order to be able to work on the question of truth adequately, Comparative Theology needs exchanges with religious studies scholars just as much as with representatives of other theologies. Accordingly, Comparative Theology needs new institutional cooperation with those disciplines that study religion.

Development of a concrete methodology If Comparative Theology is to succeed, it cannot be designated a distinct discipline within theology, but needs to be a cross-sectional task of all theological disciplines, developed through close exchange with other academic disciplines. John Renard, for instance, points out how important it is for the project of Comparative Theology that the systematic and historic disciplines within theology work in conversation with each other. He lists seven models of Comparative Theology, of which four have a more historical and three a more systematic layout, while reciprocally referencing each other.53 Accordingly, Renard comes to the conclusion that historic and systematic theology have to work together closely for the establishment of Comparative Theology.54 Likewise, the micrological method that focuses on individual cases points the denominationally differentiated theology of one’s own religion towards a dialogue with theologies of other religions, as well as with religious and cultural studies. Therefore, Protestant and Catholic theology in Germany should establish chairs not only for religious studies but also for theologies of other religions within their own differentiated divinity schools or in close cooperation with them. Only if broadly positioned Christian theologists are in equal conversation with members of other religions can theology assume a dialogic form, the prerequisite for fruitful wrestling with the question of truth. Of course, it is not possible to establish chairs of several different non-Christian

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religions in all divinity schools. But it is important for Christian theology to make a point of promoting other theologies and entering into conversation with them. In Germany, a number of Centres for Islamic Theology are currently established at public universities. At these universities, all disciplines of Christian theology should enter into dialogue with them. And Christian theologies should make every effort to promote the development of non-Christian theologies at these centres and in other places. If theology departments were not able to enter into academic conversation with most other important religions and to open spaces for them in German universities, it would be not only a demonstration of the inadequacy of German academia, but also a serious problem for the future academic viability of Christian theology. Additionally, Christian divinity schools will need their own experts in the theologies of other religions, so that they can help to build bridges between different theologies. These experts can work in departments of fundamental theology in accordance with the classic distribution of tasks in Catholic theology. Since Comparative Theology is a cross-sectional task for all theological disciplines, it will be imperative to educate people from different disciplines in the art of conversing between theologies, enabling them to have learning experiences in Comparative Theology. Only if divinity schools ensure the quality of work across the spectrum of relevant fields for Comparative Theology can the interdisciplinary conversation between the theologies of different religions be fruitful. Obviously, close cooperation with comparative religion is especially desirable for this end. A medium-term realistic goal for all divinity schools might be to generate at least one chair for one non-Christian theology and to concentrate competencies for Comparative Theology in at least one theological chair for one of the classical disciplines. Then, starting from this classical chair and the support of comparative religion, a dialogue with non-Christian theology could be made possible within the context of divinity schools.55 Comparative religion would not only help to enable the conversation of different theologies across religious boundaries, but, together with notions from cultural studies, could support the search for criterial standards. Because it cannot suffice in late modernity to use only the rational criteria that were developed in an academic monologue for testing the results of comparative theological efforts, a third party will be necessary to enhance and critically counsel the dialogue of confessional theologies. Here, religious studies can play a fruitful role in the dialogue between different theologies. At any rate, the third party cannot be just abstract philosophy or criteriology; it must be a concrete third party which is able to examine the dialogue between the other two as a supervisory authority. Religious studies can help to introduce such an entity into the conversation. Depending on the status of the conversation, it may suffice to consult a member of a third religious tradition, if this person’s basic idea of the issue at hand is clearly different and if he or she can argue this position from a trained perspective of religious criticism. The quality of dialogue may already improve, for instance, if a Muslim–Christian discussion is alert to the Jewish perspective and includes it in the conversation. Here, Comparative Theology has an important point of contact with Abrahamic dialogue, especially as developed by Karl-Joseph Kuschel.56 The Jewish perspective, in particular,

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can be tremendously enriching for the Muslim–Christian conversation, as I have tried to demonstrate more extensively elsewhere with regard to the understanding of revelation.57 In any case, it is important that research institutions for Comparative Theology are careful to institutionally inject the external perspectives not only of other religions, but also of different cultural and religious studies. The third party should not be in a privileged position as an overseer of the processes of Comparative Theology, such as, for example, a philosopher of religious criticism, even though such philosophers can be important authorities. Instead, it is vital that Comparative Theology relates to academic processes external to the dialogue, which will need to test every new determination of Comparative Theology critically. Translation services may also be important in this context to make sure that different theologies do not talk past each other. For this more propaedeutic task especially, comparative religion’s expertise can add great value to the efforts of Comparative Theology. However, it will be important for the third party not only to help to initiate the dialogue but also to critically analyse its results. With regard to this task especially, the weight of comparative religion cannot be overestimated. Robert C. Neville appropriately refers to a ‘critical cloud of witnesses’, which can only be comprised of very diverse approaches, and which can guarantee critical attention to comparative theological processes only as a unit.58 In the end, it will never be possible to satisfy all members of the ‘cloud of witnesses’.59 Comparative Theologians, however, must be continuously willing to submit their results to newly arising academic questioning from other disciplines and religions, and should in no way try to immunize themselves against objections. Hence, we need the third party or the ‘cloud of witnesses’, who can not only be sought outside one’s own religion, but can also be a representative of some diversity within one’s own religion. As fruitful as this diversity is, I always understand Comparative Theology as a component of denominational theology. In my view of Comparative Theology, each effort at communication is developed from clearly recognizable denominational positions. It is only when outsiders can see that someone’s theology draws on his or her own practice of faith and on a faith-informed manner of living that the existential dimension of each religious conviction can be understood. Only when Comparative Theology draws on the respective practices of faith can it utilize functional equivalencies beyond semantic differences to the benefit of interreligious communication.60 In order to do this, Comparative Theology will continuously need to refer back to the practices of different religious traditions and to their advances in the interreligious dialogue. Without denominational grounding in a diverse faith community, Comparative Theology could run the risk of being misunderstood as the development of a new global and interreligious theology, which eventually would lose its roots in its own religious community. Then Comparative Theology would forfeit the strength necessary for carrying its own faith community along in the processes of renewal and communication to which it is committed. Its effort to value religious heterogeneity would then remain the endeavour of a small elite, without lasting effect for the coexistence of religions. In contrast, rootedness in respective religious communities and their practices of faith provides the best safeguard for developing Comparative Theology as a hermeneutical endeavour that aims to renew theology and contribute to a more positive coexistence among different religions and cultures.

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Notes 1 I use the capitalized spelling of ‘Comparative Theology’ when I refer to the newer Comparative Theology, which I will further characterize below. I will use the lower case spelling when I refer to comparative theology as general comparative theology. In those instances, the focus is not on the specific contours of the new Comparative Theology at which my approach is aimed. 2 cf. Renard 1998: 3. 3 cf. Neville 1991: 4. 4 cf. Hintersteiner 2007: 471 with reference to Griffith 2007. The Basel-based religious studies scholar Jürgen Mohn emphasizes that comparative theology is not a novelty in the history of religion, but a procedure that in the past was applied in situations of confrontation between religions (Mohn 2009). 5 The oldest book about comparative theology I have found in my research, and which is quoted frequently, is Garden 1699, English translation 1752. 6 cf. Hintersteiner 2007: 465–8. With regard to the history of Comparative Theology, cf. also Clooney 2010: 30–40. In German-speaking countries there are a few examples of the use of the term komparative Theologie, but they are not as widespread as in the English-speaking world, for example A. Berlage calls the comparative history of religion ‘comparative Theologie’ in Berlage 1839: 221ff. (cf. Hintersteiner 2009: 100). From that time until the present, there have been sporadic attempts at comparative theology (cf. Ibid.: 102f for the reference to other approaches of comparative theology: Exeler 1978), but this branch has not formed its own school of thought. Cf. Exeler’s comparative theology also with Hock 2011: 20. 7 Nicholson 2010: 49. 8 cf. Masuzawa 2005: 72. 9 cf., for example, the conceptions of Maurice 1842, Clarke 1881 or MacCulloch 1902. 10 cf. Masuzawa 2005: 77. 11 cf. Ibid. Accordingly, for Clarke, Christianity is ‘the providential religion sent by God to man, its truth is God’s truth, its way the way to God and to heaven’ (Clarke 1881: 14). 12 Nicholson 2010: 50. 13 cf. Nicholson 2010: 51. 14 Said 1978: 96f. 15 cf. Ward 2009: 60f. 16 cf. Ibid.: 61. 17 cf. Nicholson 2010: 52, fn. 36. In one of my advanced seminars about Comparative Theology, Annemarie Schimmel personally assured me of how much she relates to the project of Comparative Theology. 18 cf. Valkenberg 2006: 204. 19 In this chapter, I do not want to discuss the roots that new Comparative Theology has in the humanities. If I did, I could draw attention to the influences of new comparativism: cf. Paden 1996: 5–14, 2000: 182–92. Paden has been strongly inspired by Jonathan Z. Smith. Post-Liberal Theology has also influenced Comparative Theology. 20 cf. Nicholson 2010: 58f. 21 cf. Schmidt-Leukel 2005: 55f. 22 cf. for the time being Ibid.: 56, with reference to Cahill 1982: 106ff., 148ff. 23 cf. Friedrich Max Müller’s dictum: ‘Whoever knows one religion, knows no religion’ (translated from Müller 1876: 14). Adolf von Harnack programmatically refuted

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this in his rectorate speech: ‘Whoever does not know this religion [i.e. Christianity], does not know any, and whoever knows it along with its history, knows them all’ (translated from von Harnack 1906: 168). This statement illustrates liberal theology’s successful defence against comparative religion – which is probably one of the reasons why chairs for religious studies were formed only very late at German universities (cf. for the development of religious studies as academic discipline, Hock 2002: 169–74). 24 Translated from Tworuschka 2001: 126. 25 Ibid.:131. 26 cf. also Clooney 2010: 9. 27 cf. Fredericks 2010: xiii. 28 cf. Ward 1994: 40: ‘Comparative theology differs from what is often called “religious studies,” in being primarily concerned with the meaning, truth, and rationality of religious beliefs, rather than with the psychological, sociological, or historical elements of religious life and institutions.’ 29 Translated from Mohn 2009: 273. 30 Ibid.: 275. 31 Translated from Flasche 1998: 20. 32 cf., for example, references to this at Werbick 2011: 120, with reference to Greschat 1988: 137. 33 cf. Deming 2005: 125f. 34 Bernhardt 2005: 139. 35 cf. Tworuschka 2001: 132. 36 Translated from Hock 2002: 169. 37 Translated from Stephenson 2009: 21. The theologian Jürgen Werbick recently pointed out that behind the assignment of the mere participant perspective to theology and the mere observer perspective to comparative religion stands an empiricist-positivistic understanding of academic scholarship: ‘The research process and its results gain objectivity when they no longer reveal any subjective contingency. Everything subjective falsifies the results of the research process’ (translated from Werbick 2011: 122). 38 Translated from Stephenson 2009: 21. 39 Translated from Ibid.: 22. 40 cf. Smith 1959, who was the first to demand this kind of shift in religious studies. 41 Tworuschka 2001: 132. 42 cf. translation from Gellner 2008: 24: Over and against a neutral outside perspective in comparative religion, we can add the words of the Zurich based Old Testament scholar Conrad von Orelli (1846–1912): ‘Whoever does not have one, does not know any.’ One has to know religion from the inside in order to be able to understand religions and to compare them. The focus is thus on a reciprocal learning ‘from faith to faith,’ which changes all participants by leading them more deeply into the truth of their own traditions, into a more encompassing understanding of the larger reality of God. 43 44 45 46 47

cf. translation from Tworuschka 2001: 135. cf. von Stosch 2012: 193–215. Translated from Bernhardt 2005: 153. Translated from Ibid.: 154. The following applies to religious studies: ‘The insider perspective of the researched religion is part of the object of research, without forming its normative point of reference’ (translated from Bernhard 2005: 146).

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As summarized by Jürgen Werbick (Werbick 2011: 124). Ibid.: 128. cf. the corresponding suspicion; Ibid.: 129. cf. translated from Bernhardt 2005: 157: ‘It is not the acceptance of the truthfulness of the researched subject that puts academic standards into question but only the refusal to critically check this truth.’ Werbick 2011.: 130. cf. Renard 1998: 7–14. cf. Ibid.: 15: ‘There is a mutually supportive, even symbiotic, relationship between Historical and Systematic Theology.’ For the according assignment of comparative religion, cf. Reiss 2012: 5–21. cf. for now Kuschel 1994, 2007. From a Comparative Theology perspective, cf. Valkenberg 2005. cf. von Stosch 2010: 96–122. Neville 2009: 42. cf. Ibid.: 43. cf. von Stosch 2012: 171–93.

References Berlage, Anton (1839), Einleitung in die christkatholische Dogmatik, Münster: Theissingsche Buchhandlung. Bernhardt, Reinhold (2005), Ende des Dialogs? Die Begegnung der Religionen und ihre theologische Reflexion (Beiträge zu einer Theologie der Religionen; 2), Zürich: Theologischer Verlag Zürich. Cahill, P. Joseph (1982), Mended Speech. Crisis of Religious Studies and Theology, New York: Crossroad. Clarke, James Freeman (1881), Ten Great Religions. An Essay in Comparative Theology, Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company. Clooney, Francis X. (2010), Comparative Theology. Deep Learning across Religious Borders, Malden, MA and Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Deming, Will (2005), Rethinking Religion. A Concise Introduction, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Exeler, Adolf (1978), ‘Vergleichende Theologie start Missionswissenschaft?’, in Hans Waldenfels (ed.), ‘Denn ich bin bei euch’ (Mt 28,20). Perspektiven im christl. Missionsbewusstsein heute. Festgabe für Josef Glazik u. Bernward Willeke zum 65. Geburtstag, 199–211, Zürich: Benzinger. Flasche, Rainer (1998), ‘Vom “Absolutheitsanspruch” der Religionen oder: Religiöse Wahrheit und Religionswissenschaft’, in Bärbel Köhler (ed.), Religion und Wahrheit. Religionsgeschichtliche Studien. FS für G. Wiesner, 13–20, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag. Fredericks, James L. (2010), ‘Introduction’, in Francis X. Clooney (ed.), The New Comparative Theology. Interreligious Insights from the Next Generation, ix–xix, London and New York: T & ​T Clark. Garden, James (1699), Discursus academica de theologia comparative; Engl.: 1752: Comparative Theology or the True and Solid Grounds of Pure and Peaceable Theology. A Subject Very Necessary, Tho' Hitherto Almost Wholly Neglected. First Laid Down in an University Discourse, and Now Translated from the Original Latin. London: Printed and sold by the Booksellers of London and Westminster.

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Gellner, Christoph (2008), Der Glaube der Anderen. Christsein inmitten der Weltreligionen, Düsseldorf: Patmos. Greschat, Hans-Jürgen (1988), Was ist Religionswissenschaft? Stuttgart, Berlin and Köln: Kohlhammer. Griffith, Sidney H. (2007), The Church in the Shadow of the Mosque. Christians and Muslims in the World of Islam, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Harnack, Adolf von (1906), Die Aufgabe der theologischen Fakultäten und die allgemeine Relgionsgeschichte, in Adolf von Harnack, Reden und Aufsätze, 2nd edn, 159–87, Giessen: Töppelmann. Hintersteiner, Norbert (2007), ‘Intercultural and Interreligious (Un)translatability and the Comparative Theology Project’, in Norbert Hintersteiner (ed.), Naming and Thinking God in Europe Today. Theology in Global Dialogue, 465–91, Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi Verlag. Hintersteiner, Norbert (2009), ‘Interkulturelle Ünterkultur in religiöser Mehrsprachigkeit. Reflexionen zu Ort und Ansatz der Komparativen Theologie’, in Reinhold Bernhardt and Klaus von Stosch (eds), Komparative Theologie. Interreligiöse Vergleiche als Weg der Religionstheologie (Beiträge zu einer Theologie der Religionen; 7, 99–120), Zürich: Theologischer Verlag Zürich. Hock, Klaus (2002), Einführung in die Religionswissenschaft, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Hock, Klaus (2011), Einführung in die Interkulturelle Theologie, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Kuschel, Karl-Josef (1994), Streit um Abraham. Was Juden, Christen und Muslime trennt – und was sie eint, München and Zürich: Piper Verlag. Kuschel, Karl-Josef (2007), Juden, Christen, Muslime. Herkunft und Zukunft, Düsseldorf: Patmos. MacCulloch, John Arnott (1902), Comparative Theology, London: Methuen. Masuzawa, Tomoko (2005), The Invention of World Religions. Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Maurice, Frederick Denison (1842), The Religions of the World and Their Relation to Christianity, Boston: Gould and Lincoln. Mohn, Jürgen (2009) ‘Komparatistik als Position und Gegenstand der Religionswissenschaft. Anmerkungen zum religionswissenschaftlichen Vergleich anhand der Problematik einer Komparatistik des Zeitverständnisses im Christentums (Augustinus) und im Buddhismus (Dōgen)’, in Reinhold Bernhardt and Klaus von Stosch (eds), Komparative Theologie. Interreligiöse Vergleiche als Weg der Religionstheologie (Beiträge zu einer Theologie der Religionen; 7, 225–76), Zürich: Theologischer Verlag Zürich. Müller, Friedrich Max (1876), Einleitung in die vergleichende Religionswissenschaft, Straßburg: K. J. Trübner. Neville, Robert C. (1991), Behind the Masks of God. An Essay toward Comparative Theology, Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Neville, Robert C. (2009), ‘Philosophische Grundlagen und Methoden der Komparativen Theologie’, in Reinhold Bernhardt and Klaus von Stosch (eds), Komparative Theologie. Interreligiöse Vergleiche als Weg der Religionstheologie (Beiträge zu einer Theologie der Religionen; 7, 35–54), Zürich: Theologischer Verlag Zürich. Nicholson, Hugh (2010), ‘The New Comparative Theology and the Problem of Theological Hegemonism’, in Francis X. Clooney (ed.), The New Comparative Theology.

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Interreligious Insights from the Next Generation, 43–62, London and New York: T & T Clark. Paden, William E. (1996), ‘Elements of a New Comparativism’, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, 8 (1): 5–14. Paden, William E. (2000), ‘Elements of a New Comparativism’, in Kimberley C. Patton and Benjamin C. Ray (eds), A Magic Still Dwells. Comparative Religion in the Postmodern Age, 182–92, Berkeley and London: University of California Press. Reiss, Wolfram (2012), ‘Anwendungsorientierte Religionswissenschaft – statt eines Vorwortes’, in Wolfram Reiss and Ulrike Bechmann (eds), Anwendungsorientierte Religionswissenschaft Vol. 1, 5–21, Marburg: Tectum Wissenschaftsverlag. Renard, John (1998), ‘Comparative Theology. Definition and Method’, Religious Studies and Theology, 17 (1): 3–18. Said, Edward (1978), Orientalism, New York: Pantheon. Schmidt-Leukel, Perry (2005), Gott ohne Grenzen. Eine christliche und pluralistische Theologie der Religionen, Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus. Smith, Wilfred Cantwell (1959), ‘Comparative Religion: Whither – and Why?’ in Mircea Eliade and Joseph Kitagawa (eds), The History of Religions. Essays in Methodology, 31–58, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Stephenson, Günter (2009), ‘Beteiligt, skeptisch oder distanziert’, Zeitschrift für Missionswissenschaft und Religionswissenschaft, 93: 16–24. Stosch, Klaus von (2010), Offenbarung (Grundwissen Theologie), Paderborn: UTB. Stosch, Klaus von (2012), Komparative Theologie als Wegweiser in der Welt der Religionen (Beiträge zur Komparativen Theologie; 6), Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh. Tworuschka, Udo (2001), ‘Selbstverständnis, Methoden und Aufgaben der Religionswissenschaft und ihr Verhältnis zur Theologie’, Theologische Literaturzeitung, 126: 123–38. Valkenberg, Pim (2005), ‘Hat das Konzept der “abrahamitischen Religionen” Zukunft?’ Concilium. Internationale Zeitschrift für Theologie, 41 (5): 553–61. Valkenberg, Pim (2006), Sharing Lights on the Way to God. Muslim-Christian Dialogue and Theology in the Context of Abrahamic Partnership, Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi Verlag. Ward, Keith (1994), Religion and Revelation. A Theology of Revelation in the World’s Religions, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ward, Keith (2009), ‘Programm, Perspektiven und Ziele Komparativer Theologie’, in Reinhold Bernhardt and Klaus von Stosch (eds), Komparative Theologie. Interreligiöse Vergleiche als Weg der Religionstheologie (Beiträge zu einer Theologie der Religionen; 7, 55–68), Zürich: Theologischer Verlag Zürich. Werbick, Jürgen (2011), Vergewisserungen im interreligiösen Feld, Münster: Lit (Religion – Geschichte – Gesellschaft; 49).

10

Reciprocal Illumination Arvind Sharma

I Comparison figured as an element in the field of religion long before it became a part of the academic study of religion since its inception in the 1860s.1 Herodotus (c. 484–25 bce) famously compared his own Greek gods to those of Egypt, even to the point of identifying them. He identified Greek gods and goddesses with what may be called their Egyptian ‘prototypes’, because he believed that Greek religion and culture were derived from Egypt. So he identified ‘Zeus with Amon, Apollo with Horus, Hephaistos with Ptah, and many more’.2 Eric Sharpe remarks that ‘in his desire to observe and describe the religion of a foreign culture with the help of data from his own culture, he anticipates one of the fundamental attitudes of comparative religion through the ages’.3 This kind of identification through comparison was ‘rather common in the ancient world’.4 As J. H. Mordtmann notes, Greek and Roman writers, even in strictly scholarly works, anxiously avoided using ‘barbaric’ words, preferring to replace them, wherever possible, with expressions from their own language. Above all, this applies to the names of the ‘barbaric’ deities. The final result of this tendency was a firmly established usage of terminology. Just as Athene was regularly translated as Minerva, Hera as Juno, and so forth, in the same manner the foreign deities were dealt with …5

Megasthenes (fourth century bce) similarly compared Indian gods to their Greek counterparts.6 As the ancient world was largely polytheistic, some scholars have associated this form of comparison with polytheism. Be that as it may, the rise of monotheism deeply affected the use of comparison as a method in an interreligious context. Whereas earlier comparison had been used as a method for identifying sameness, now the method came to be used for identifying difference, for the monotheistic religions, notwithstanding any similarities with the religions they came in contact with, wished to emphasize their uniqueness, which required that difference be highlighted. As the monotheistic religions edged out the polytheistic ones, the role of comparison, as it were, was reversed, from that of indicating sameness to one of indicating difference.7

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This continued to be the situation in the European world until European expansion over the rest of the world began in good earnest in the sixteenth century, culminating in European dominance over the world until the Second World War.

II However, while the rise of the West, in its earlier phase, only involved a comparison with other cultures and religions to their disadvantage, the rise of the academic or nonconfessional study of religion in the West, around the middle of the nineteenth century, witnessed a very different role being assigned to comparison. Comparison now became the fundamental principle of the academic method of studying religion. In fact, The method that resulted can be characterised as scientific, critical, historical and comparative: scientific because of its inductive pattern and its belief in universal laws of cause and effect, and because of its distrust of obvious a priori arguments; critical because of its fundamental attitude to evidence; historical because of the new sense of continuity between the past and the present to which it gave rise; comparative because it claimed comparison to be the basis of all knowledge. It compared the known with the unknown, it compared phenomena in apparent temporal sequence, it compared phenomena belonging to different areas but having features in common. In all this, in true scientific spirit, it set out to determine, with regard to religion, the genus ‘religion’ which underlay the species ‘the religions’.8

It is the centrality of comparison which gave the academic study of religion its more popular name, namely, the science of comparative religion, or just comparative religion, because comparison constituted the basis of classification on which the whole science was based. Thus, as Eric Sharpe notes, as in language, as in any science, the absolutely vital principle is that of comparison. To argue from one single religious tradition is to cut oneself off from the springs of the new knowledge. To be a devoted Christian, Jew, Muslim or Hindu is admirable; but it is not science. In the science of religion, in short, as Max Müller so often said, ‘He who knows one, knows none.’9

Thus, while theologically comparison was used to establish the superiority of Christianity, a trend which persists to this day,10 academically it was used to lay the foundation of what was hoped would become ‘the science of religion’.11 Such comparison was put to several uses within this science. In the anthropology of religion, it became a method for identifying the evolution of various forms of religion along Darwinian lines,12 just as in theology it had become a way of establishing the superiority of Christianity, as noted above. In the psychology of religion, it gave rise to the comparative study of mysticism,13 until this was replaced by the Freudian and Jungian approaches to the study of religion,14 all of which employed comparison but within the overarching architectonics of their own discipline. Comparison, as a method on its own, achieved maturity with the rise of the phenomenology of religion through the work of such scholars as W. B. Kristensen

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(1867–1953), Gerardus van der Leeuw (1890–1950) and Mircea Eliade (1907–86), who used comparison to identify broad patterns in human religiosity in general, as found manifested in the various religious traditions through their comparative studies, in a way strongly suggestive of hermeneutics.15 Some critics, however, thought that the attempts of the phenomenologists were too grand and their typology too broad. The critics, therefore, proposed to use comparison not to arrive at global generalizations but to make narrower granular comparisons, and preferred a bottom-up comparative approach to the top-down approach of the generalists. This latter approach is sometimes considered top-down in the sense that the material is approached through a pattern or category which has already been determined, whereas the anthropologist begins with the raw data itself. This approach may be spelled out in summary form as follows, as exemplified by the work of E. E. Evans-Pritchard: We must, for example, first investigate the religion of one Melanesian people, then compare the religion of that group with several other Melanesian societies that are nearest to it in their culture. After that would come a comparative study of all Melanesian groups, and only then could one say something about Melanesian religion in general. This laborious kind of research is the only hope for eventually achieving broader conclusions about religion.16

Other critics of the phenomenology of religion, strongly influenced by postmodernism, attacked the phenomenologists for essentializing and totalizing. These criticisms ultimately led to the rise of what has been called the ‘new comparativism,’ as the practitioners of the old comparative method took these criticisms on board. This ‘new comparativism’ should be carefully distinguished from the ‘new comparative religion’ associated with the anthropological approach to the study of religion, mentioned earlier.17 The assessment of the critiques of the phenomenological comparisons referred to earlier, and further reflection on it by scholars like Jonathan Z. Smith, Huston Smith, William E. Paden, Laurence E. Sullivan and a host of others, have led many to conclude that ‘postmodernism in its extreme form goes too far in rejecting all metanarratives and all essentializing and totalizing claims’.18 Against such postmodernist trends, they argue that scholars can risk positing a comparative framework not to reach closure in service of a particular theory, nor to achieve moral judgment or to gain intellectual control over the ‘other,’ but to empower mutual dialogue and the quest for understanding. Although no author presents a simple formula or definitive method – an inadvisable strategy – each offers the vision of a renewed comparative enterprise. It is a vision that attends as strongly to difference as to similarity, while recognizing that both depend upon the scholar’s choices and assumptions. This renewed and self-conscious comparativism is eclectic and circumscribed, dialogical in style and heuristic in nature; and it is self-confidently situated within interdisciplinary area studies programs and religion departments of the secular academy. Its ultimate purpose is not to create more generic patterns of the sacred in support of grand theories but to enlarge our understanding of religion in all its variety and, in the process, to gain renewed insight into ourselves and others.19

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It is while the role of comparison in religious studies stands at this crossroads between the ‘new comparativism’ and the ‘new comparative method’ that I dare to offer my own ideas about the role it might play in our field by introducing the concept of reciprocal illumination.20 It is obvious from the preceding discussion that comparison can be, and has been, employed in a number of ways in the study of religion. The concept of reciprocal illumination represents one specific way of employing it. Comparison is often employed to draw general conclusions based on material drawn from different religious traditions, and the conclusions drawn could well transcend the self-understanding of the believers themselves. The concept of reciprocal illumination possesses a more limited focus and embodies the idea that something in another religious tradition (or other traditions) may help us understand something in our own religious tradition more profoundly and clearly, and vice versa. Thus, a knowledge item, or datum, in tradition A may help us better understand something in tradition B, within the framework of tradition B itself. The same could happen in relation to the various methods employed in the study of religion, and more than one religious tradition or method may also be involved in this process, as will become obvious when we explore the topic further with the help of actual comparisons. This mode of comparison differs from other modes of comparison in its greater focus on one-to-one comparisons and its endeavour to remain within the bounds of the self-understanding of the religion or the method of study involved.

III I would like to plunge straight into the topic by presenting three concrete examples of what I consider to be cases of reciprocal illumination, as the proof of the pudding lies in the eating.

First example The person reading this chapter is doubtless familiar with the word yoga, of which several examples are found in Hinduism. One classification, however, which has become quite popular in presentations of Hinduism, consists of the triad of jñānayoga or the path of knowledge, bhakti-yoga or the path of devotion, and karma-yoga or the path of action, for realizing the ultimate reality. My first example has to do with the path of devotion to God, or bhakti-yoga as it is called. This yoga sets great store by divine providence, and the following story is sometimes narrated to make this point. There was a group of male ascetics who used to practice their austerities in a remote part of the forest, but would occasionally visit villages or towns to collect alms, particularly food, to support themselves. On one such trip they found a boy who had been orphaned, with nobody to care for him. So they took this boy along with them out of compassion, to raise him in their own male fraternity. Soon the boy came of age, and when this happened they said to him: ‘Young man, you must also now go out like us to beg alms. Go and stand in front of a house and take the name of God to announce your presence. Soon someone will come from the house and fill your begging bowl with something to eat.’

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The boy did as he was told. When he took the name of God standing outside a house, the daughter of the house heard the call and came out to give him some food. Upon seeing her, he looked at her curiously and asked her: ‘What is wrong with you? Do you have boils on your chest around which you have wrapped a bandage?’ Having lived and grown up in an exclusively male fraternity, the young man had never seen a woman before, hence his puzzlement. Upon hearing his comment, the young woman did what any other woman would do in her situation – she called out to her mother for help. The mother came out, and being an Indian mother, sized up the situation in one glance. She then sat the young mendicant down and told him about the birds and the bees. The young man listened to her account with undivided attention, and after she was finished, he put to her the following question: ‘Are you saying that arrangement for providing milk has already been made for a child who has not yet even been conceived?’ When the mother confirmed that such was, indeed, the case, the young man discarded his begging bowl, throwing it up in the air and exclaiming: ‘If such is the providence of God then it is an insult to God to beg for food.’ He then went on to become one of the paradigmatic devotees of God – to be called a true bhakta or devotee in Hindu devotional circles. It is my experience that when I narrate this story in my class, it is followed by stunned pin-drop silence. In any case, having narrated the story, I soon went on to cover not only the rest of Hinduism, but Buddhism and Confucianism as well, as the rapid survey of world religions continued, and found myself preparing for the lecture on Daoism. In the course of this preparation, my eyes fell on the following lines of Zhuangzi/ChuangTzu, the famous Daoist thinker of the fourth century bce, second in significance only to Laozi himself. This is what he said: For the one who supplied me with what I needed in life Will also give me what I need in death.21

The story of the orphaned boy was still fresh in my mind, and as I read these lines, I experienced a moment of what I call reciprocal illumination. The story of the orphaned boy covered the workings of divine providence in the course of one’s life; Zhuangzi/ Chuang-Tzu had, at one stroke, extended it beyond life to include death as well. It had extended the message of the original story beyond its limits, while remaining entirely faithful to the spirit of the story. What added to the intellectual intrigue generated by this connection was the fact that Daoism is not even a theistic tradition in the way Hinduism is; yet a shaft of light from such an unexpected source had illuminated the path of devotion to God in Hinduism with such clarity. Another moment of reciprocal illumination was provided by Egyptian religion, in which such elaborate arrangements for the dead were made,22 in contrast to the no-needfor-such-arrangements attitude of Zhuangzi/Chuang-Tzu. The reciprocal illumination consists of the fact that while one tradition, such as Daoism, here represented by Zhuangzi/Chuang-Tzu, may regard ritual recognition of death as of little moment, in another tradition, such as the Egyptian, it may become the focus of elaborate ritual procedures. Both possess the illuminating property of the extreme case, and reciprocally illuminate the range of possible reactions to which the phenomenon of death gives rise.

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Second example As professors at universities, we are usually engaged in teaching and research. This research often involves the writing of papers, and where appropriate, books. It will be useful, in coming to grips with the second example, to keep this dual dimension of our work in mind. At the time I am going to talk about, I was teaching a course on world religions and was also engaged in writing a book on Mahatma Gandhi. By now I had advanced to the teaching of Judaism, the presentation of which I had oriented in keeping with the textbook of the course. The prescribed textbook was Huston Smith’s well-known work, which originally bore the title The Religions of Man; its revised and enlarged version is called The World’s Religions. Huston Smith organizes his chapter on Judaism around the theme of its ‘passion for meaning’,23 which he discusses under various headings, such as: (1) meaning in God, (2) meaning in creation, (3) meaning in human existence, (4) meaning in history, (5) meaning in morality, (6) meaning in justice, (7) meaning in suffering, and (8) meaning in Messianism. The discussion of the Judaic quest for meaning in justice naturally involved the discussion of the prophetic tradition. And one naturally drew attention to the fact that the prophets, whether they were pre-writing prophets like Elijah and Nathan, or writing prophets like Amos and Isaiah, were speaking ‘truth to power’. The expression is used often these days, so it was important to point out that when the prophets spoke truth to king, it was to an authority which had the power of life and death over them. When describing how Elijah took King Ahab to task for the foul means which he had acquired Naboth’s vineyard, Huston Smith remarks: ‘One will search the annals of history in vain for its parallel. Elijah was not a priest. He had no formal authority for the terrible judgment he delivered. The normal pattern of the day would have called for him to be struck down by the bodyguards on the spot.’24 And yet Elijah did not desist from speaking out for justice. So on the one hand, I was telling the class all this, and on the other, I was reading about Gandhi doing something similar in the face of the might of the British Empire. There is no ‘prophetic tradition’ in Hinduism as such, but Gandhi was acting as if it had one. Could it be that here we had an example of Gandhi being influenced by the prophetic tradition of Judaism and Christianity, religions with which he was quite familiar? The prophets spoke for God; Gandhi also occasionally claimed to hear the voice of God, and on one occasion arguably heard it literally.25 He also wrote as follows in his journal, the Harijan, in 1933: ‘His voice has been increasingly audible as the years have rolled by.’26 The question I found asking myself was: Where was Gandhi’s inspiration coming from? And in what way were the people treating him as inspired? Even as I was debating this question, I was also struggling with another aspect of Gandhi’s life: the tendency of the people to divinize him. In the year 1921, writes his well-known and multi-volume biographer D. G. Tendulkar, remarkable scenes were witnessed. In a Bihar village when Gandhi and his colleagues were stranded on the way, an old woman came seeking out Gandhi. ‘Sire, I am now one hundred and four,’ she said, ‘and my sight has grown dim. I have visited the various holy places. In my own home I have dedicated two

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temples. Just as we had Rama and Krishna as avatars, so also Mahatma Gandhi has appeared as an avatara, I hear. Until I have seen him, death would not appear.’ This simple faith moved India’s millions who greeted him everywhere with the cry: ‘Mahatma-Gandhi-ki-jai’ [Victory to Mahatma Gandhi].27

Some of the divinization of Gandhi is, of course, sheer hagiography and mere euhemerism, but even when parts of it could thus be accounted for rhetorically, I still felt analytically unsatisfied. I did not feel I had really grasped the significance of this phenomenon. While I was involved in this churning, it struck me that in Judaism, or the Abrahamic tradition in general as a whole, God does not fight injustice himself directly by appearing on the scene – although there may be some instances of this; typically, he sends his prophets to speak for him, whereas in Hinduism, God himself appears in such situations. Judaism and Islam both reject the idea of God’s incarnation, and although Christianity accepts it, it is limited to one, and the focus of that incarnation seems to be not so much on fighting injustice as on atoning for the sins of humanity, although I am open to correction on this point. It could well be that Jesus, in the prophetic selfunderstanding of his mission, was fighting against a kind of justice which is devoid of mercy, and hence fighting for a nobler concept of justice, whereas in the subsequent understanding of his role, as developed by the church, he came to be understood as one who redeemed the sins of humanity. In Hinduism, however, God regularly incarnates himself to fight injustice. Thus, Viṣṇu’s incarnation as Rāma was meant to put an end to the depredations of the demon Rāvaṇa, just as Kṛṣṇa appeared to do away with the wicked king Kaṃsa. In other words, for me, the prophetic tradition in Judaism and Christianity and the incarnational theology of Hinduism had become reciprocally illuminating when I viewed them through the prism of Gandhi’s life. It was now not difficult to see how a human being who fights passionately and spectacularly for justice may come to be seen by his Hindu admirers as the emanation of that divinity itself which assumes human shape to do the same from time to time. The example also clarifies the point that the concept of reciprocal illumination does not necessarily imply that two items must reciprocally illuminate each other, but, rather, that two or more traditions may reciprocally illuminate each other at different points.

Third example The first example dealt with the category of divine providence and basically stuck to that theme, although it juxtaposed Hinduism and Daoism. The second example was a little more complex, not only involving a comparison of categories but also taking virtually three traditions within its ambit. The third example I have in mind is progressively more complex, and tries to demonstrate how variations of one basic issue reciprocally illuminate at least five points of interest in our field. The basic issue I have in mind is this. The universe hangs before us like a gigantic question mark, and although we may offer many explanations of it, whether theistic or materialistic, certainty in the matter eludes the neutral observer, as the various parties press their claim. I am now going to argue that the aporiatic nature of the cosmic

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question, as it were, enables us to see diverse developments linked to each other through the mirror of this root issue. The first development is provided by an answer given by Huston Smith to the following question posed to him: Kenaston: Are some people asking, ‘What do I belong to?’ In other words, many people are so unsure of how life fits together, or what their role is in the world, that they aren’t even sure where to apply for membership. People are just drifting.28

Huston Smith’s response to this runs as follows: Smith: I hear that as a different wording of the same question. My wording was, ‘Do we belong or do we not?’ The nineteenth century zoologist Ernest Haeckel said that if he could have one question answered it would be, ‘Is the universe friendly?’ If we don’t belong, that is another way of saying that it is not friendly. Now, the universe is ambiguous; it comes to us in both moods. So therefore, there is no objective stance from which you can decide this question: Is it friendly or do we belong? From that point it comes down to William James – the choice of the most creative hypothesis. Now, if I defend religion, it’s a close call between the kicks and the milk it gives! [This is an allusion to the nineteenth-century Hindu mystic Ramakrishna’s statement that ‘Religion is like a cow. It kicks, but it gives milk too.’] Kenaston: Sometimes the kick is the milk, isn’t it? Smith: Well, that’s true. When we come down on the side of religion, we have faith that ultimately it makes sense. So when it comes right down to it, I’m not finally a pragmatist – although you can go a long way, almost to the end, pragmatically. Okay, if it’s ambiguous and it’s not going to tell us unambiguously whether it’s friendly or not, then it’s up to us which is the most creative hypothesis. It seems we shouldn’t throw in the towel too soon but press the more creative hypothesis. This I think the traditions do, and I think that is why religion has persisted over two and a quarter million years, or however long human beings have been around.29

Huston Smith clearly invokes the ambiguity of the universe in providing the answer. And his suggestion seems to be that if it is not possible to find a truthful answer to the question, let us go with the most useful answer. The second development pertains to the role this issue seems to play in an eschatological context. If one brings an eschatological rather than a pragmatic approach to bear on the ambiguous nature of the universe, the issue becomes suggestive of a somewhat different resolution. In this context, John Hick develops the parable of two travellers, who are travelling on the same road: ‘One of them believes that it leads to the Celestial City, the other that it leads to nowhere, but since this is the only road there is, both must travel it.’30 We encounter the ambiguity of the universe as we did earlier, here in the form of ultimate destination. Thus, during the course of the journey, the issue between them is not an experimental one. That is to say, they do not entertain different expectations about the coming

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details of the road, only about its ultimate destination. Yet when they turn the last corner, it will be apparent that one of them has been right all the time and the other wrong. Thus, although the issue between them has not been experimental, it has nevertheless been a real issue.31

Thus, the invocation of the ambiguity of the universe yields a slightly different outcome here compared with its invocation by Huston Smith. For, according to John Hick, it illustrates that it is ‘possible for a proposition to be in principle verifiable if it is true but not in principle falsifiable if it is false’,32 and that eschatological issues represent propositions of this kind. The ambiguous nature of the universe manifests itself in yet another way. Our daily life discloses two features of it with which we are in constant contact, and which are also in constant contact with each other. The first of these features consists of the fact that the world possesses a material dimension – it consists of numerous material objects. The second feature consists of the fact that it also possesses an immaterial dimension, such as thoughts and feelings, and above all consciousness. If we approach these facts of life philosophically, then three major tendencies can be identified. According to one of them, the immaterial dimension can be reduced to the material, a claim made by modern scientific materialism, and, in its own way, by Marxism. Another tendency has been to claim that the material can be reduced to the immaterial, a philosophical position generally referred to as idealism, ranging from the schools of idealism found in Hinduism and Buddhism to that of Bishop George Berkeley (1685–1753). There is also a third tendency, although not as popular as the first two, which refuses to reduce one to the other and accepts the dual reality of matter and spirit. The Hindu philosophical school of Sāṅkhya, and Jainism, posit such a fundamental dualism. This distinction is surprisingly illuminating when applied to the life of Gandhi, but in order to see the relevance of the distinction between materialism and idealism to the life of Gandhi, we have to take it into account religiously rather than philosophically. Of course, in a sense, Gandhi flirted with philosophy all his life, but religion was a matter of life and death for him – or even more important than that. The way this distinction plays out in religion is that it is possible to offer a credible natural or material account of this world, especially in the light of the scientific advances over the past few centuries. It is, however, also possible to continue to offer a credible spiritual or theistic account of it, which was the major mode of explanation in earlier times. Now, if one is not committed in advance to either of these two positions, then it would perhaps not be unfair to say that we now possess two credible and competing accounts. Gandhi becomes interesting at this point because he opted for what we might call the spiritual or theistic account, but in full awareness of the existence of the natural account, as a way of handling this ambiguity in his life. Gandhi’s account of his ten-year-old son Manilal’s illness provides a good illustration of this. Manilal once came down with typhoid while Gandhi was in Bombay, and the Parsi doctor recommended chicken broth, a recommendation which ran counter to Gandhi’s belief in vegetarianism. So Gandhi relied instead on hydropathy and called to God for help. The whole incident is narrated in an emotion-filled chapter in his autobiography, wherein he describes how he gave a wet sheet pack to his son and went for a walk on the popular Chaupati beach in Bombay. Plunged in deep thought, he

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repeated to himself: ‘My honour is in Thy keeping oh Lord in this hour of trial’ and Rāmanāma, or the name of Rāma, was on his lips. He then writes: ‘After a short time I returned, my heart beating within my breast’, to discover that the son’s fever had broken. The crisis was over. He concludes the chapter in a rather prosaic manner, but the conclusion stands out in the light of the theme under discussion. He writes: Today Manilal is the healthiest of my boys. Who can say whether his recovery was due to God’s grace, or to hydropathy, or to careful dietary and nursing? Let everyone decide according to his own faith. For my part I was sure that God had saved my honour, and that belief remains unaltered to this day.33

Thus, for Gandhi, just as both a credible natural account and a credible theistic account of the universe are possible, similar rival accounts of what goes on in the universe are also possible. He alludes to both and favours the theistic one for himself. This ambiguity regarding the explanation of the universe, on which we have had pragmatic, eschatological and Gandhian takes so far, is capable of yielding reciprocally illuminating insights even further. Consider, for instance, the fact that the competition between the two points of view alluded to above – namely, between the naturalistic, materialistic explanation and the theistic, spiritual explanation – is perhaps as old as recorded history. Seeds of it can be found in the ṚgVeda on the one hand, and in early Greek philosophy on the other, even as the debate rages in our own times. An interesting point to ask at this stage would be: Is this debate capable of resolution in principle? Perhaps some stunning scientific advance might resolve it, but a healthy scepticism in the matter might be in order, in the light of what has been discussed so far. The reason for such scepticism may be illustrated with the help of two metaphors. The first metaphor is that of light; it is not original with me – I think I owe it to C. E. M. Joad. Let us take a candle which produces a circle of light, and compare it with a lamp, which produces a larger circle of light. One would then be tempted to assume that the more light we have, the less ignorant we will be about the world, so that the growth of knowledge may one day resolve the issue. But Joad pointed out that while it is true that the lamp produces a larger circle of light compared with the candle, the points of contact with the darkness of the larger circle are also greater than in the case of the smaller circle produced by the candle. The more we know, the more there may be to know as well, so that further knowledge may only intensify, rather than remove, the mystery. The second metaphor, that of an island, is also not original with me; I can say with certainty that I owe it to Huston Smith, who writes: ‘The larger the island of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of wonder. It is like the quantum world, where the more we understand its formalism, the stranger the world becomes.’34 Huston Smith uses the word ‘wonder’, which in a way contains shades of epistemological optimism. If one uses the word ‘ignorance’ – that is to say, the larger the island of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of ignorance – then the outlook becomes epistemologically more challenging, if not stark. We have considered four responses to the ambiguous nature of the universe: a pragmatic one, an eschatological one, a Gandhian one and a philosophical one. I would like to conclude with a theological one, with which some readers may already be familiar.

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If God wants a human being’s uncoerced response as an act of faith, then would he or she not create precisely such a universe as the present one, of which competing explanations are possible, which remain perennially inconclusive? For if there were sufficient evidence either way, then we would have proof, and it would no longer be a matter of faith. So if God truly wishes us to love him or her or accept him or her as an act of faith, would he or she not create precisely the kind of ambiguous universe we have?

IV I hope these examples suffice to illustrate the wide range over which reciprocal illumination can occur. It can occur directly between two items, as when we compare the person of Jesus with the scripture called the Qur’ān. In Christianity, the vehicle of revelation is the person of Jesus Christ, and the doctrines of virgin birth and immaculate conception preserve this vehicle from contamination. In Islam, the vehicle of revelation is the word of God itself (not the Word becoming flesh, as in Christianity); hence the doctrine that the Prophet could not read or write, which ensured that he conveyed God’s words exactly as he received them, not being subject to an educated person’s temptation to editorialize. In this respect, it is telling that while the nativity of Jesus is celebrated with such enthusiasm in Christianity, the date of the birth of the Prophet is not known with certainty. But the day on which the first revelation was received by the Prophet is celebrated with the same enthusiasm in Islam as the ‘nativity’ of Jesus. Reciprocal illumination can also occur when two traditions illuminate not just the two points, but different points in each other, as illustrated by some of the examples shared earlier. It can also occur in the way in which two traditions promote deeper understanding of central issues in the study of religion and philosophy by promoting mutual understanding of these issues, as illustrated particularly by the last example. Common to all of them is the basic principle of reciprocal illumination: that in carrying out these comparisons, the self-understanding of believers is neither transgressed nor transcended, but, rather, enriched.

Notes 1 Sharpe 1975: 27. 2 Ibid.: 4. 3 Ibid. 4 Halbfass 1988: 14. 5 Cited, Ibid. 6 Ibid. 7 On this dialectic of sameness and difference in relation to comparison, see Kripal 2014: 4 and passim. 8 Sharpe 1975: 31–2, emphasis added. 9 Ibid.: 31. 10 Ibid.: chapter VII. 11 Ibid.: 45.

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Ibid.: chapters III and IV. Ibid.: chapter V. Ibid.: chapter IX. Ibid.: chapter X. Lessa and Vogt 1958: 5. See Ibid.: 3–4: Earlier studies of religion purported to be comparative – and indeed they often were – but these earlier studies used comparison as a sort of apologetics for the dominant Judaic-Christian religions. During the latter stages of the nineteenth century several factors were combining to emancipate the comparative study of religion from this earlier goal of providing data for the validation of the origins and authority of Judaism or Christianity. One such factor was the accreting store of knowledge about primitive religions that was being collected by travelers, soldiers, missionaries, and administrators. Another was the Darwinian theory of biological evolution, which led to studies of other forms of evolution – among them that of religion. Several scholarly disciplines began to contribute stimuli to objective comparative studies; sociology, anthropology, philology, mythology, folk psychology, and history all began to eschew apologetics for science. The new comparative religion as represented by the anthropological approach makes no effort to evaluate, and it encompasses all the religions of the world, past and present, about which there is any information. By going beyond the complex cults of the great contemporary civilizations it is possible to gain not only a wider range of variation but also a greater degree of detachment.

For a contemporary approach of this type, see Taves 2009. 18 Patton and Ray 2000: 17. 19 Ibid.: 17–18. The word ‘author’ in this quotation refers to the contributors of A Magic Still Dwells. 20 Sharma 2005. 21 Cited by Smith [1958] 1991: 216. 22 See Frankfort [1948] 1961: passim. 23 Smith 1991: 272. 24 Ibid.: 290. 25 See Gandhi [1950] 1958: 93. 26 See Payne 1969: 449. 27 Tendulkar 1951: 58. 28 Cousineau 2003: 66. 29 Ibid.: 66–7. 30 Hick 1990: 104. 31 Ibid.: 105. 32 Ibid.: 104. 33 Gandhi 1993: 248. 34 Smith 1991: 389.

References Cousineau, Phil, ed. (2003), The Way Things Are: Conversations with Huston Smith on the Spiritual Life, Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Frankfort, Henri. ([1948] 1961), Ancient Egyptian Religions: An Interpretation, New York: Harper and Row. Gandhi, M. K. ([1950] 1958), Hindu Dharma, ed. Bharatan Kumarappa, Ahmedabad: Navajivan Press. Gandhi, M. K. (1993), An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth, Boston: Beacon Press. Halbfass, Wilhelm (1988), India and Europe: An Essay in Understanding, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Hick, John H. (1990), Philosophy of Religion, 4th edn, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Kripal, Jeffrey J. (2014), Comparing Religions, Chichester, West Sussex, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Lessa, William A. and Evan G. Vogt (1958), Reader in Comparative Religion: An Anthropological Approach, Evanston, IL, Elmsford, and New York: Row, Peterson and Company. Patton, Kimberley C. and Benjamin C. Ray, eds (2000), A Magic Still Dwells: Comparative Religion in the Postmodern Age, Berkeley: University of California Press. Payne, Robert (1969), The Life and Death of Mahatma Gandhi, New York: E.P. Dutton and Co. Inc. Sharma, Arvind (2005), Religious Studies and Comparative Methodology: The Case for Reciprocal Illumination, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Sharpe, Eric J. (1975), Comparative Religion: A History, London: Gerald Duckworth & Company, Ltd. Smith, Huston ([1958] 1991), The World’s Religions, San Francisco: Harper Collins. Taves, Ann (2009), Religious Experience Reconsidered: A Building Block Approach to the Study of Religion and Other Special Things, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Tendulkar, D. G. (1951), Mahatma: Life of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, vol. 2, New Delhi: The Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India.

11

On Creativity, Participation and Normativity: Comparative Theology in Discussion with Arvind Sharma’s Reciprocal Illumination Ulrich Winkler

With his book Religious Studies and Comparative Methodology. A Case for Reciprocal Illumination,1 published in 2005, Arvind Sharma introduces a new methodological approach to religious studies which, to my understanding, is also highly relevant to comparative theology. To me, it was intriguing to reflect on the significance of his approach of ‘reciprocal illumination’ for comparative theology. I was astonished that comparative theologians had hardly paid any attention to it, though Sharma is well known to most of them. On the other hand, I was also amazed that Sharma, in turn, largely neglected the efforts of comparative theology, with the notable exception of Robert Neville’s Comparative Religious Ideas project.2 The observation of a mutual lack of attention may raise some further questions about the perception (or non-perception) of other academic disciplines, in particular if they are dealing with very similar questions.3 I suggest that something like reciprocal illumination may not only happen in our comparison of religious data but also in the comparison of our respective disciplines. Comparative religion and comparative theology may very well be in need of learning from each other. In this chapter, I will look at the possibility of ‘reciprocal illumination’ between both disciplines, primarily from the perspective of comparative theology. I will follow just one direction of these two directional processes, hoping that scholars from religious studies may also find some illumination in comparative theology, thus making the process truly reciprocal. In the first part of my chapter, I will introduce what I consider to be key presuppositions of comparative theology. In the second part, I will show how comparative theology can be better understood in light of Sharma’s approach, taking into account similarities and differences. A comparison of the comparative approaches of two different disciplines needs to include the anticipated perception of the other that is woven into the fabric of each discipline’s structure. The mutual perception of the other discipline in both theology and religious studies is often shaped by some pre-established exclusive difference: the former is viewed as partial and apologetic, as being concerned with questions of its own religious identity truth claims, and the latter, in contrast, as marked by claims to

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objectivity and neutrality. My assessment of Sharma’s approach and its significance for comparative theology cannot be discussed without taking into account this widely established, yet potentially biased, perception of each discipline. I suspect that Sharma’s neglect of comparative theology might also be influenced by this established perception. Bringing comparative theology and the new comparative religion into a situation of potentially reciprocal illumination will thus involve a critical revision of established perceptions of both disciplines’ identity constructions and constructions of otherness, and of how these impact the structure of encounters. In a word, a postcolonial deconstruction of the methodology is required. The three keywords in the title of this chapter – creativity, participation and normativity – refer to three crucial aspects of comparative theology. As such, they can easily be mistaken as being indicative of comparative theology’s essential contrast and even conflict with comparative religion and its claims to objectivity, impartiality and neutrality (remaining descriptive rather than normative or creative). Yet, as I will show, both the development of comparative theology and an approach like Sharma’s ‘reciprocal illumination’ may blur such stereotypes to a considerable extent.

Cornerstones of comparative theology The dawn of comparative theology: From apologetics to appreciation Polemics and apologetics were not simply a biased form of theology in former times. In the Roman Catholic Church, the system of theology developed through the subdiscipline of so-called ‘apologetics’. This was the defensive alliance of Catholic theology against various questions and claims from outside.4 Apologetics became constitutive of Catholic theology and developed an impressive systematics up until the time of neo-scholasticism. The tract of demonstratio religiosa was developed against atheistic worldviews, the demonstratio christiana against other religions, and the demonstratio catholica or ecclesiae against other churches and denominations. The presumption of this biased comparison (of the church’s own views against those of atheism, other religions and other forms of Christianity) was based on the standpoint of what was felt to be one’s own superior position and was therefore informed by strategic interest. Theologians made decisions about the truth and relevance of an outsider’s position prior to any experience. Whatever else one encountered was inferior to one’s own faith. There was no chance for other religions to be represented fairly. The degradation of other religions through a hermeneutics of suspicion was an intrinsic factor of theology, and in this case not only of Roman Catholic theology. The most prominent academic reaction to this biased theological tradition was the decision to leave theology behind and establish a new, non-theological discipline that could pursue the unbiased study of religions. This was the origin of the ‘science of religion’ (Religionswissenschaft), the phenomenology of religion (usually identified with comparative religion), religious studies, etc. Whatever the label, the aim was to study and present religions objectively and descriptively, avoiding judgement on

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any religion’s truth and value. The relation between theology and religious studies or comparative religion – especially, but by no means only, in the German context – has been affected by this historical competition up until the present. But the establishment of the ‘science of religion’ was not the only answer to neoscholastic theology and its biased hermeneutics of suspicion. Within the Roman Catholic Church, theology itself changed its attitude towards the faith of outsiders, in particular to other churches, to Judaism and to other religions. With the Second Vatican Council, the attitude of Catholic theology changed to a large extent from suspicion to appreciation, from apologetics to learning. Most significant in this respect is the development of the ‘theology of religions’ within Christian theology in general, including Roman Catholic theology. Since the Second Vatican Council, Catholic theology assumes the presence of truth, holiness and the gifts of the Holy Spirit in other religions.5 The earlier assumption of polemical apologetics, that there was no truth in others, was thus completely inverted: ‘There is truth.’ Although the theology of religions is richer than a discussion on the three major models of exclusivism, inclusivism and pluralism, we can still say that a pluralistic approach is required if one conceives of comparative theology as a process of interreligious learning.6 For how could one assume to learn from other religions if they are not seen as equally truthful or even, in some respects, as superior, or at least potentially so? I suggest that the assumption of the potential equality or superiority of other beliefs is the precondition for any willingness to learn. If one is convinced that outside of one’s own religion only immature forms of religions exist and that one’s  own religion is a priori higher and superior, there is no reason to learn from others or to confess one’s own shortcomings or even guilt. The developments in the theology of religions, therefore, account for many Christians’ positive stance towards other religions, and thus for a spiritually relevant attitude of trust instead of suspicion.

Comparative theology as confessional theology While the theology of religions is concerned with working out a theory of Christianity’s attitude to other religions in general, comparative theology focuses on the particular. Both are theological enterprises. Because theology is a reflection of participants’ faith, theology is bound to a faith community; it is confessional and church-related. Comparative theology pursues several aims: the enrichment of one’s own faith, a better understanding of other religious traditions, and the deepening of one’s understanding of religious truths across religious borders. Using an impressive metaphor, Francis Clooney speaks of comparative theology as ‘a journey in faith’: If it is theology, deep learning across religious borders, it will always be a journey in faith. It will be from, for, and about God, whose grace keeps making room for all of us as we find our way faithfully in a world of religious diversity. That for me the work of comparative theology finally discloses a still deeper encounter with Jesus Christ only intensifies the commitment to learn from the religious diversity God has given us. In Christ there need not be any fear of what we might learn; there is only the Truth that sets us free.7

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Clooney defines comparative theology as ‘a practical response to religious diversity read with our eyes open, interpreting the world in light of our faith and with a willingness to see newly the truths of our own religion in light of another’.8 While this rich definition would be worth a far more expansive treatment, I will restrict myself to highlighting just three points: 1. Comparative theology is not done just to satisfy one’s own curiosity, but is a response to questions and problems as encountered in the world. As such, comparative theology is closely related to the Second Vatican Council’s call for doing theology in a way that corresponds to the signs of the times. 2. Therefore, comparative theology is more a practice than a theory. 3. In this respect, comparative theology involves ‘a willingness’ to relate to the truth of the other. This ‘willingness’ is decisive: it changes the relation to other religions. In my understanding, the theology of religions is the theological theory of this ‘willingness’ as presupposed in comparative theology.

Comparative theology and spirituality As they are usually understood, theology and the science of religion differ with respect to the participant and observer perspectives. Comparative theology is done from the participant perspective, that is by the religious practitioners themselves, while the science of religion does not presuppose such faith commitment, or even sometimes excludes it in terms of its methodology. However, if we consider the theological assumptions on which comparative theology is based, it requires not only being rooted in one’s own faith tradition but also some kind of faith commitment to other religious traditions. Particular forms of such commitments are discussed, for example, under the notion of ‘multiple belonging’, but beyond this there is a broad variety of ways to approach the other’s participant perspective (shared practices, etc.). Acknowledging the existence of religiously relevant truths in other religions is an expression of faith. Comparative theology, therefore, implies a spirituality that goes beyond the borders of one’s own faith community. In acknowledging that other religions could or do contain truth, holiness and spiritual gifts, one not only expresses the faith of one’s own tradition but also shares, to some extent, the faith of a different religion. In both ways, such a faith commitment entails more than the intellectual epistemology of any science. Comparative theology is, thus, expressive of a particular spirituality; it is itself a practical act of faith. Put more simply, rational theological and epistemological presumptions rely on existential involvement.

Comparative theology in the light of new comparative religion’s ‘Reciprocal Illumination’ Up to this point, I have argued that the understanding of theology, especially in relation to the religions of others, has significantly changed from its understanding at the time when the ‘science of religion’ (Religionswissenschaft) came into existence. This itself, to

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a significant extent, occurred in response to the state of theology at the time. But what about the ‘science of religion’? Is comparative religion the same as it was presented in the introductory literature and textbooks of the past decades, which largely reflected the theology-critical features of the discipline’s formative period? Does the unbridgeable gap between theology and religious studies still exist, the first being biased and unfair, the latter objective, descriptive, distant and observing? Or do we have to be alert to the fact that our reciprocal notions of theology and religious studies are more a matter of the representation of the other? To what extent is the opposition between theology and religious studies a legacy of the past and of its stereotypical constructs? To what extent is this opposition still a vital and current issue? There have been major moves and transformations on both sides. With respect to the treatment of religions in theology, the transformation is evident if one looks at the theology of religions and comparative theology. With respect to religious studies, Sharma’s book Religious Studies and Comparative Methodology indicates a similarly remarkable change, particularly in relation to his method of ‘reciprocal illumination’. Reading comparative theology and Sharma’s ‘reciprocal illumination’ side by side, comparative religion may shed new light on comparative theology and, hopefully, comparative theology may enhance the discipline of comparative religion. This ‘reciprocal illumination’ of methods requires, as I will show, a kind of postcolonial deconstruction of the representation of the other discipline within one’s own field.

‘Reciprocal Illumination’ of methods As long as theology represents religious studies as nothing more than neutral and descriptive methods, comparative theology will appear unique in reconciling a fair treatment of religions with the participants’ faith perspectives. Sharma, however, introduces ‘reciprocal illumination’ not only as a method by which ‘one religious tradition helps in understanding another’9 but also as a means for the mutual enrichment of methods. His methodological suggestions indicate a new direction of religious studies … by recognizing the phenomenon that can be called ‘reciprocal illumination’ … as a method in a study of religion; and … this method may help overcome the current impasse in the study of religion in which one is either encouraged to contemplate a religious tradition only in its phenomenological virginity, or invited to molest it by subjecting it to an array of reductionistic methodologies abhorrent to its followers.10

With the method of ‘reciprocal illumination’, Sharma intends to overcome the dichotomy between phenomenology and reductionism in the study of religion. This expresses a significant change in comparative religion, a refusal to comply with its usual representation according to theology. According to Sharma, ‘The concept of reciprocal illumination … is not confined to merely stimulating [mutual clarifications of two different doctrines] … I defined it in terms of our encounter with another tradition deepening our understanding of our own tradition.’11 This shows that Sharma does not confine comparative religion to the neutral comparison of contents and doctrines; rather, he takes his own position as scholar into account. The scholar differentiates

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between another’s tradition and his own, and, furthermore, is engaged in enhancing the understanding of his own tradition. This accords with the observation Clooney made in his initial statement12 at the American Academy of Religion conference in Washington, DC, in 2006 when establishing the comparative theology group. The self-conception of religious scholars is changing. Without moving into theology, an increasing number of scholars are focusing on an academic investigation of religious traditions to which they themselves belong. In the wake of some early suggestions like those of Wilfred Cantwell Smith,13 there is a new sensitivity to the relevance of the participant perspective. I want to avoid misreading or overinterpreting Sharma by pushing him towards theology. He clearly distinguishes between theological, methodological, epistemological and ontological reductionism, on the one hand, which have in common the tendency ‘to judge one item in terms of another’,14 and on the other hand, his method of ‘reciprocal illumination’, which ‘compares things … in order … to see how our understanding of the items themselves is enhanced in the process’.15 This seems to be very close to the traditional notion of the phenomenology of religion, with its major interests in categories, classification and so-called items, rather than in religious traditions themselves. As I will show, this is not entirely clear. The above quotations reflect a tension in Sharma’s book. On the one hand, he is sensitive to the scholar’s perspective as that of a participant; on the other hand, he tends to downplay this awareness by returning to the old assumption of distanced observation. From my perspective, this problematic oscillation remains unresolved. However, in my readings of Sharma, I see a preferential option for traditions rather than categories. He distances himself from phenomenology when stating that the earliest phenomenological writings … brought similar phenomena closer together. … [t]hey had their eye on the category to which they belonged, but reciprocal illumination seeks to see how one datum may shed light on another, or two data on each other, rather than on a common or transcendent category, and further seeks to show that apparently different phenomena may also unexpectedly shed similar light.16

So Sharma highlights his interest in items and data over classification and categories. What is remarkable in this citation, however, is his interest in differences and his methodological awareness of surprise. I will return to the role of both below. Rather than focusing on category formation, Sharma indicates his appreciation for items in order to understand the specific and particular nature of traditions: ‘It was precisely in the interest of retaining this focus on the items, items that may enhance our understanding of one tradition and/or of another through reciprocal illumination. … [This enhanced understanding] … insists on local knowledge.’17 A few lines further, Sharma argues against the use of comparative material to serve some end other than itself – that of understanding a tradition. … This book has tried to develop a new approach to comparable data in which comparison is not meant to serve some other end, but is used to clarify the items under comparison themselves. Because these data are not used in this method to illuminate anything other than the data themselves.18

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Comparative religion shaped by reciprocal illumination focuses more on the comparison of data and less on looking for classifications and categories. It takes into account the role of one’s own tradition and reflects or the role of the participant perspective, yet dismisses any goals external to the comparison itself. But what is the exact relation between the data, their enhanced understanding through ‘reciprocal illumination’, the data’s tradition in terms of their religious context, and the tradition that shapes the perspective of the scholar? Sharma’s book is particularly rich in giving examples of how his method works. My general impression is that the way in which he practises comparison as ‘reciprocal illumination’ is not that different from how comparison is practised in comparative theology. It recalls my experience at the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School during 2012–13. Most guest speakers and conference panellists were scholars from different religious traditions, more or less interested in comparative theology. But nobody had any doubt about the relevance of their own studies for comparative theology. Again, with respect to my reading of studies in comparative theology and comparative religion, there are very few examples I would be able to blindly assign exclusively either to authors in comparative theology or to those in comparative religion. If one looks at the practice of comparison, not only as found in Sharma’s book, it appears that there is much less of a difference between comparative religion and comparative theology than the usual descriptions of their different methodologies would suggest. If creativity, participation and normativity, the three keywords used in this chapter’s title, indicate specific features of comparative theology, we may note that, after considering Sharma’s understanding of comparative religion, ‘creativity’ and ‘participation’ are no longer exclusively characteristic of theology. ‘Creativity’ and ‘participation’ are relevant for reciprocal illumination as well. Like comparative theology, comparative religion draws on inspiration and creativity to find points of comparison, forgoing the traditional paths of classifications, categories and homophonous similarities. Creativity is opposed to all set forms of knowledge and discourses. At the very least, with Wilfred Cantwell Smith, the importance of participants is relevant for comparative religion, even if the impact of participation and community relation is different. So, there are still differences, but hardly enough to mark the sharp distinction between theology and comparative religion suggested by traditional stereotypes. Comparisons made in comparative theology and comparisons made along the lines of ‘reciprocal illumination’ have become largely indistinguishable. Yet, what about normativity? It appears that normativity still indicates a major difference between the two disciplines’ approaches to comparison.

Comparative theology and the understanding of normativity Within the context of theology and in relation to comparisons undertaken from a theological perspective, ‘normativity’ can have a variety of meanings. Not all of them, however, apply to the understanding of normativity in the context of comparative theology. 1. One possible understanding could be the tendency that Sharma aims to avoid, namely, using comparisons for external purposes rather than enhancing the

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understanding of the data themselves. In the polemical apologetic tradition, for example, comparisons were made only to demonstrate the superiority and unquestionable normativity of one’s own religious tradition. It is obvious that this is not the aim of comparative theology. 2. The most appropriate understanding of ‘normativity’ is related to the invention of heresy in the ancient church. To a significant extent, systematic theology can be seen as the hermeneutical attempt to keep new theological ideas, subjects and expressions within the boundaries of perceived or prescribed orthodoxy, thereby taking responsibility for the continuity of the tradition and its truth. Therefore, one would probably expect that normative judgements and evaluations of true and false statements (in the sense of ‘orthodox’ or ‘heretical’) would mark the crucial difference between comparative theology and comparative religion. But, as a matter of empirical observation, somewhat surprisingly, this is not the case! As Reinhold Bernhardt19 observed, there is a lack of these kinds of judgements in comparative theology. Most studies in comparative theology are confined to carving out inspiring insights. But what does this observation tell us about the concept of comparative theology? Are the theological critics of comparative theology right when they accuse comparative theology of betraying theology and the church? Is comparative theology working towards the dispersal of theology itself, silently surrendering its theological nature to the non-theological business of comparative religion? I think this suspicion is unfounded because of the third notion of normativity, which is more complex but also more relevant to the practice and understanding of comparative theology. 3. Beyond the binary construction of identity, there are considerations with respect to participation and authority. Within a theological context, normativity is usually related to a church authority. In the Roman Catholic Church, authority is often seen as represented by the magisterium, that is the bishops and the pope, as extrinsic and in contrast to the believers and participants. But beliefs rely on faith and on the responsibility of the faith decisions of the believers within the church. Both religious leaders and theologians function within the broader framework of participatory authority. For a better understanding of normativity, it is helpful to draw on insights from postcolonial theory that help us describe the negotiation of identities. As previously, normativity was closely related to the guarding and preservation of identity. If identity is understood as the unaltered repetition of the same, an extrinsic authority may be seen as sufficient to guarantee its preservation. On an alternative and less static understanding, identity can be taken as part of a process and the result of negotiations. In order to describe the negotiating character of identity, one may locate it in a ‘postcolonial space’, a term which combines the deconstruction of postcolonial studies with the concept of the ‘third space’ of discourses.20 The dominant concept of identity is based on several factors: first, the construction, exclusion and humiliation of the other and second, ideas of the essence of the self that have been repeated throughout history and developed on higher and higher levels over time. Third, the knowledge of one’s self and the other is shaped by the power to set up discourses and representations. Historically, the leading actor has predominantly

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been the self-determined subject. Since the advent of theories of deconstruction and postcolonial studies, we have become conscious of the role of power and its impact on our representation of others. The mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion are involved with a binary normativity of truth. Differences are qualified with truth claims. Since the Second Vatican Council, the demarcation lines of difference have shifted. They are no longer identical with the demarcation of true and false and right and wrong. Truth and sin can be found both within and outside the faith and the church. In particular, the theology of religions has deconstructed the apologetic and binary tradition, according to which the boundaries between religious truth and falsity are coextensive with those of the Christian or Catholic Church. Furthermore, there is growing theological insight into the extent to which our Christian identity is related to the religious and cultural other. Since the cultural turn, we are becoming aware of the inclusions and hidden exclusions within our identity constructions. Even supposedly pure identities are permeated by hidden discourses on the other: the other can be seen as an invention of one’s own discourse, designed for and geared towards another’s humiliation, alienation and exclusion. In addition – and even more problematically – the more that the exclusion of the other is invisible, hidden, veiled and faded from one’s own consciousness, the more one’s own identity is compromised by these exclusions and alienations. The production of knowledge is always mingled with interests and power. As a consequence of postcolonial insights, the construction of identity as based on the binary structure of self and other was replaced by the more differentiated complexity of postmodern and postcolonial epistemology, developed by thinkers like Homi Bhabha21 and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.22 The spatial turn in cultural studies locates identities beyond binaries in the ‘third space’ of discourses, differences, ambiguity, imagination, negotiation and overlapping, and shifts attention from the centre to the margins and edges. Identities are a matter of negotiation. There is not one single authority sitting in a chair and deciding on the identity of a faith community simply by repeating the traditional creeds and dogmas. Identities are negotiated by several parties. Since these parties are participants in the community and its discourse, they are authorities at the negotiation table of identity. Another, perhaps more appropriate, metaphor would be that of a journey: the Second Vatican Council’s document Gaudium et Spes speaks of the ‘People of God [as on their] … earthly pilgrimage’ (GS 45). And the ‘People of God’ is, according to the Second Vatican Council’s understanding, not limited to Catholics but intentionally include the whole of humankind. If we draw on a concept of normativity along those lines of participatory authority and identity negotiation, we can more appropriately locate three points of difference between comparative theology and comparative religion: 1. The findings of comparative religion are valid in that they may improve the understanding of particular items. Comparative theology shares this interest in an enhanced understanding of the data and employs more or less the same comparative procedures as comparative religion. However, in addition, comparative theology claims authority within theology and within the faith community, so that its reflections and findings have an impact on the community’s identity negotiation. Christian comparative theology claims to have an impact

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on the understanding and formulation of the Christian faith, its identity and the church. Because the Second Vatican Council acknowledged the existence of truth, holiness and spiritual gifts in other religious traditions, these other tradition gained authority within theology and the church. 2. In addition, comparative theology strives for interreligious competence, which has its own authority in addressing common predicaments and developing possible solutions. The highly elaborate philosophical theology of Robert Neville23 is the latest and one of the best examples. This is where W. C. Smith’s concept of a ‘world theology’ may still have a role.24 3. A third aspect of normativity and authority emerges if we ask how comparative theology assesses religious differences. Comparison seems to tend towards the discovery of similarities and commonalities. But what about differences? How can differences be interpreted from the theological perspective of comparative theology? Is comparative theology confined to finding meanings only from transreligious commonalities? Comparative religion may just take note of religious differences and leave it at that. But from a Christian theological perspective, there is nothing in the world that is not related to the all-embracing reality of God. As a result, nothing is, in principle, exempt from theological reflection.25 Is the vast number of differences, oppositions and contradictions between religions a major objection against writing comparative theology? Klaus von Stosch26 is optimistic that gaps between religions and differences between their doctrines can be bridged by looking at the pragmatic and grammatical level of religious teachings. But what if this optimism will not work in every respect and may not have the desired impact on encounters between religions? Differences and speechlessness remain. I suggest that we urgently need to develop a new theological theory of religious differences. Comparative theology may interpret unbridgeable differences and the lack of insight into similarities as the ‘grammar of God-talk’. These differences and lack of insight are the open space of speechlessness and silence as forms of Godtalk, since they stand for and represent the transcendence of the unspeakable, incomprehensible and ineffable.

Concluding remark Within the larger field of Christian theology, comparative theology has not yet found the kind of intensive reception that it deserves in relation to the systematic reflection on the Christian faith and Christian doctrines. Nor have comparative theology and its numerous comparative studies been noticed within the academic discourse of comparative religion. Although postcolonial and cultural studies exert their influence on religious studies, they are scarcely reflected in Sharma’s methodology. Yet, as I have tried to show, it can be particularly beneficial when we reflect on normativity and identity as markers of the borders between comparative theology and religious studies as academic disciplines. For both, after the cultural turn, the focus on data must move beyond ideas and texts, because religious utterances are also accessible, performative and materialized in signs, bodies, rituals, memories and narratives.

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Notes 1 Sharma 2005. 2 Ibid.: 248–50. 3 Although meeting someone from another discipline as a discussion partner could arise from the intrinsic logic of comparison, this chapter was inspired by meeting Arvind Sharma at a small symposium which provided the opportunity to discuss the relation between his concept of ‘reciprocal illumination’ in religious studies and comparative theology. It was, thus, external circumstances (the infrastructure of a conference), what Michel Foucault calls the ‘dispositive’, that brought us together. It was less the logic of our knowledge than the power of discourse. This observation is significant for our theme: 1. What is the logic of the form of our knowledge, especially when we encounter other knowledge? 2. What dimensions of encounters are required so that ‘reciprocal illumination’ can occur? 3. What is the perception of the other discipline? What about the representation of the other in my own discipline? 4 Cf. Winkler 2011. 5 Second Vatican Council: Nostra Aetate: Declaration on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions. 6 Among comparative theologians, this issue is highly controversial. On the one side, see, for example, Stosch 2007; on the other side, Kiblinger 2010 and Winkler 2016b. 7 Clooney 2010: 165. 8 Ibid.: 69. 9 Sharma 2005: 21. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid.: 17. 12 Clooney, Francis X. (2006), Statement for the Comparative Theology Group for the AAR. Presented 18 November 2006 at the AAR, Washington, DC. 13 Smith 1959, 1963. 14 Sharma 2005: 247. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid.: 254. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid. 19 Bernhardt 2012. 20 Cf. Winkler 2016a. 21 Cf. Bhabha 1990, 2009, 2010; Babka and Malle 2012; Sieber 2012. 22 Cf. Spivak 1999; Landry and Maclean 1996; Spivak 2010. 23 Cf. the major work in three volumes: Neville 2013, 2014, 2015. 24 Cf. Smith 1989; Nehring 2005; Bernhardt and Schmidt-Leukel 2013. 25 Cf. Winkler 2014. 26 Cf. Stosch 2012a, b.

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References Babka, Anna and Julia Malle, eds (2012), Dritte Räume. Homi K. Bhabhas Kulturtheorie. Kritik, Anwendung, Reflexion, Vienna and Berlin: Turia + Kant. Bernhardt, Reinhold (2012), ‘Comparative Theology: Between Theology and Religious Studies’, Religions, 3: 964–72. Bernhardt, Reinhold and Perry Schmidt-Leukel, eds (2013), Interreligiöse Theologie. Chancen und Probleme (Beiträge zu einer Theologie der Religionen 11), Zürich: TVZ. Bhabha, Homi K. (1990), ‘The Third Space. Interview with Homi Bhabha’, in Jonathan Rutherford (ed.), Identity, Community, Culture, Difference, 207–21, London: Lawrence & Wishart. Bhabha, Homi K. (2009), ‘In the Cave of Making. Thoughts on Third Space’, in Karin Ikas and Gerhard Wagner (ed.), Communicating in the Third Space, IX–XIV (Routledge Research in Cultural and Media), New York: Routledge. Bhabha, Homi K. ([1994] 2010), The Location of Culture, London and New York: Routledge. Clooney, Francis X. (2010), Comparative Theology. Deep Learning across Religious Borders, Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Kiblinger, Kristin Beise (2010), ‘Relating Theology of Religions and Comparative Theology’, in Francis X. Clooney (ed.), The New Comparative Theology: Interreligious Insights from the Next Generation, 21–42, New York: T&T Clark. Landry, Donna and Gerald Maclean, eds (1996), The Spivak Reader. Selected Works of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, New York: Routledge. Nehring, Andreas (2005), ‘Welttheologie oder Religionswissenschaft? Zur Bedeutung von W.C. Smith in der postkolonialen Kulturdebatte’, Zeitschrift für Religionswissenschaft, 13: 45–59. Neville, Robert Cummings (2013), Ultimates (Philosophical Theology 1), Albany: SUNY. Neville, Robert Cummings (2014), Existence (Philosophical Theology 2), Albany: SUNY. Neville, Robert Cummings (2015), Religion (Philosophical Theology 3), Albany: SUNY. Sharma, Arvind (2005), Religious Studies and Comparative Methodology. A Case for Reciprocal Illumination, Albany: State University of New York Press. Sieber, Cornelia (2012), ‘Der “dritte Raum des Aussprechens”, Hybridität, Minderheitendifferenz. Homi K. Bhabha: ‘The location of culture’, in Julia Reuter and Alexandra Karentzos (eds), Schlüsselwerke der Postcolonial Studies, 97–108, Wiesbaden: Springer VS. Smith, Wilfred Cantwell (1959), ‘Comparative Religion: Whither – and Why?’, in Mircea Eliade and Joseph M. Kitagawa (eds), The History of Religions. Essays in Methodology, 31–58, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Smith, Wilfred Cantwell (1963), The Meaning and End of Religion. A New Approach to the Religious Traditions of Mankind, New York: Macmillan. Smith, Wilfred Cantwell (1989), Towards a World Theology. Faith and the Comparative History of Religion, Maryknoll: Orbis. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (1999), A Critique of Postcolonial Reason. Toward a History of the Vanishing Present, 2nd edn, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (2010), ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ revised edn, from the ‘History’ chapter of the Critique of Postcolonial Reason, in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Rosalind C. Morris (eds), Can the Subaltern Speak? Reflections on the History of an Idea, 21–80, New York: Columbia University Press.

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Stosch, Klaus von (2007), ‘Comparative Theology as an Alternative to the Theology of Religions’, in Norbert Hintersteiner (ed.), Naming and Thinking God in Europe Today (Currents of Encounter – Studies on the Contact between Christianity and Other Religions, Beliefs and Cultures 32), 507–12, Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. Stosch, Klaus von (2012a), Komparative Theologie als Wegweiser in die Welt der Religionen (Beiträge zur Komparativen Theologie 6), Paderborn, München, Wien, Zürich: Schöningh. Stosch, Klaus von (2012b), ‘Comparative Theology as Liberal and Confessional Theology’, Religions, 3: 983–92. Winkler, Ulrich (2011), ‘What Is Comparative Theology?’ in David Cheetham, Ulrich Winkler, Oddbjørn Leirvik and Judith Gruber (eds), Interreligious Hermeneutics in Pluralistic Europe Between Texts and People (Currents of Encounter – Studies on the Contact between Christianity and other Religions, Beliefs, and Cultures 40), 231–64, Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. Winkler, Ulrich (2014), ‘To Dare Subtle Learning: A Response to Francis Clooney’s Plea for Comparative Theology’s Catholicity’, Studies in Interreligious Dialogue, 24: 27–36. Winkler, Ulrich (2016a, forthcoming), ‘Religious Identities in Third Space – The Location of Comparative Theology’, in Oddbjørn Leirvik, Lidia Rodriguez and Ulrich Winkler (eds), Contested Spaces, Common Ground? The Spatial Turn in Intercultural Theology and Interreligious Studies (Currents of Encounter), Leiden: Brill/Rodopi. Winkler, Ulrich (2016b, forthcoming), ‘Passion and Fog. The Impact of the Discussion about the Theology of Religions Typology on the Epistemology of Comparative Theology’, in Elizabeth Harris, Paul Hedges and Shanthi Hettiarachchi (eds), TwentyFirst Century Theologies of Religions: Retrospection and New Frontiers (Currents of Encounter), Leiden: Brill/Rodopi.

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Christ as Bodhisattva: A Case of Reciprocal Illumination Perry Schmidt-Leukel

Is there a fundamental case for comparison, one that is really hard to undermine? I think there is, inasmuch as comparison is an essential part of human understanding. In understanding something unknown, we need to relate it to something known. This relating will inevitably involve an act of comparison, in the sense of identifying some kind of similarity or commonality among dissimilarities and strangeness. If something were literally and totally ‘beyond compare’, it would be beyond any understanding. If understanding, and hence comparison, are indeed possible, my fundamental case for comparison as part of human understanding presupposes that there do exist genuine similarities or commonalities: things that we do, in fact, share. This presupposition rests on two – and if we include religion, three – intuitions about human beings. First is the intuition that we share a common human nature with some common features. Second is the intuition that we share a world or reality which we jointly inhabit, regardless of how much our perception of this world might be shaped and constructed by human particularities. This second intuition is already implied by the first one, for without assuming some basic form of realism there would be neither any human beings nor any joint nature to be shared between them.1 Third is the (metaphysical) intuition that we also exist in relation to an ultimate reality which, on the one hand, infinitely exceeds finite reality but is, on the other hand, not repressed or displaced by finite reality, so that it is also of utmost immediacy or immanence, ‘closer to us than our jugular vein’, as the Qur’an (50:16) graphically claims. Among those who agree with this third intuition, some will see it as already implied by the first intuition, inasmuch as it is a capacity of our common human nature to be potentially aware of our relation to the ultimate. The significance of these three intuitions for the possibility of comparative religion is, I suppose, obvious. For about four decades, the phenomenology of religions used to be the major approach within the systematic branch of religious studies. Given that its principal method is the comparison of religious phenomena, the crisis of phenomenology also became a crisis of comparative methodology. In part, this crisis was fostered by the progressive influence of postmodernist ideas on cultural studies and social anthropology and, via these, on religious studies, which increasingly turned away from

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phenomenology to social and cultural analysis privileging limited area studies over large-scale comparative investigations. Simply put, a critical observer might be inclined to see this development as somewhat similar to the spread of a contagious disease. Postmodernism, suffering from a strong allergy to all universals, commonalities and ‘grand narratives’ – apart, of course, from its own ones2 – and at the same time suffering from a compulsive obsession with purportedly incommensurable singularities and solipsistic anti-realism, infected cultural and anthropological studies, which then transferred the virus to religious studies. In religious studies, the two most prominent victims of this allergy and obsession became the concept of ‘religion’ itself, being its ‘grandest narrative’, its most universal category, and religious comparison as its main corresponding activity. Perhaps it is not just pessimists who might fear that in the case of religious studies, the infection could be fatal. Fortunately, there are various signs that religious studies possesses an immune defence which, in part, is still working. This present collection includes a number of efforts to re-establish the legitimacy and, in fact, the indispensability of comparison in religious studies. In my view, one of the most notable attempts to explore new ways and concepts of comparison is Arvind Sharma’s case for Reciprocal Illumination, published in 2005.3 While I fundamentally agree with Sharma’s intention to rehabilitate and reinforce the comparative method, and particularly commend his idea of reciprocal illumination, I nevertheless intend to push his suggestions beyond some limits which Sharma himself left un-transgressed. These limits concern the subject and the object of ‘reciprocal illumination’. After clarifying my criticism, intended to be constructive, this will be exemplified by one possible case of reciprocal illumination: the comparison between Christ and Bodhisattva, or, better, the question of whether Christ can be seen as Bodhisattva.

Who and what is illuminated? The subject of ‘Reciprocal Illumination’ In his 2005 monograph, Sharma introduces the idea of ‘reciprocal illumination’ in two significantly different ways: Version I: In chapter one, Sharma argues ‘that a knowledge of tradition A helps us understand tradition B better’.4 This does not sound terribly new, but more like a soft version of Max Müller’s famous dictum ‘he who knows one, knows none’, which Sharma also quotes.5 Version II: In chapter two, Sharma introduces ‘reciprocal illumination’ in a different way. Here he says that reciprocal illumination occurs ‘when our knowledge of another tradition enables us to gain a better understanding of some aspect of our own tradition and vice versa’.6 The difference between the two versions is in the location of the word ‘us’. When Sharma says in version I that knowing A helps ‘us’ in understanding B, the identity of ‘us’ remains unclear. ‘Us’ might refer to an outside observer, someone studying A and B

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without any commitment to or involvement with A or B, or at least no involvement relevant to his studies. This interpretation would be in line with the emic–etic distinction that has become so popular in religious studies; or, to use its rough German equivalent, the distinction between the insider’s perspective (Innenperspektive) and the outsider’s perspective (Außenperspektive). The emic perspective, or Innenperspektive, is said to characterize the work of the ‘theologian’ (the religious expert on religion), while the ‘objective’ scholar of religion works from an etic perspective, or Außenperspektive. If this is how we need to understand version I, it differs sharply from version II, where Sharma clearly locates the ‘us’ within one of the two compared traditions. Here, the commitment or involvement with one tradition – ‘our own tradition’, as he explicitly says – is instrumental in the whole process of understanding. Studying another tradition is expected to improve the understanding of one’s own tradition, and, if we take note of Sharma’s ‘vice versa’, one’s own tradition is apparently claimed to be helpful in getting a better understanding of the other tradition. In both versions, Sharma’s claims are far from being uncontroversial. Let me focus on some of the difficulties. Consider version I. What kind of perspective is it, if we speak from an etic or ‘external’ perspective in relation to religion? I suggest that there are no more than two possibilities. The first is the perspective from outside a specific religion. That is, a member of religion A has an external or outsider perspective when he or she looks at religion B. The second is the perspective from outside all religions. That is, religion A, B, C or D is examined from a non-religious perspective, that is, from an atheist, or better, naturalist point of view. (Here, a naturalist is understood as someone who does not believe in any form of transcendent reality, regardless of whether it would take a theist or a non-theist form.) There is no alternative other than a religious or a non-religious view. Therefore, the ‘external perspective’ can be specified as being either the perspective from a different religious tradition or the perspective from a non-religious worldview. At this point in my argument, a number of colleagues from religious studies will contradict me by claiming that the external perspective which they have in mind is neither from a different religious tradition nor from a non-religious worldview, but is characterized by an agnosticism which abstains from both of the aforementioned perspectives. Contrary to this widespread stance, I suggest that agnosticism (or ‘methodological agnosticism’) is unable to constitute a third option. ‘Agnosticism’ may merely refer to something like epistemic caution. In this sense, agnosticism would express the position: ‘We cannot infallibly know whether a particular view is right; it may be wrong.’ Alternatively, ‘agnosticism’ may mean to refrain from any position whatsoever, which is, of course, not a view in itself. On the first reading, agnosticism would imply admitting different interpretations of religious phenomena as they arise from different religious or non-religious perspectives, but it would reject the claim of infallible knowledge for any of these interpretations. On the second reading, it is hard to see what kind of understanding of religious phenomena agnosticism could suggest. If consistent, it would imply refraining from any interpretation. Yet, as a matter of fact, the so-called agnostic perspective usually presents a reductionist interpretation, that is a non-religious or naturalist understanding of religious phenomena.7 In none of these ways does agnosticism present an alternative option to a religious or non-religious perspective.

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Therefore, there is no good reason to assume that the ‘external’ or etic perspective is in any way a privileged one when it comes to understanding religions, or even that it should be the default perspective of a scholarly, ‘objective’ approach. On the contrary, one of the main arguments of religious studies pioneers (Friedrich Max Müller and others) was that the writings of Christian theologians about non-Christian faiths suffered massively from their apologetic bias, which was a specific feature of their looking at other faiths from an external perspective, that is from an Außenperspektive. In this regard, an atheist or naturalist ‘external’ perspective is not in any fundamentally better position. It is biased in favour of its non-religious understanding. As a result, two generations of phenomenologists have suggested studying religions as much as possible from the inside. That is, by means of epoché (bracketing one’s own beliefs) and méthexis (empathetically looking at the other’s beliefs as if one would share them), they attempted a ‘passing over’ into the inner world of the religion under scrutiny. However, it turned out that bracketing one’s own background, one’s own horizon of understanding, cannot be done that easily or, in fact, at all.8 A neutral perspective does not seem to be available. It would have to be a perspectiveless perspective, which no human being can justly claim to be equipped with. Postmodernism, indeed, has an important lesson to teach in emphasizing the inevitable particularity of the observer of religious phenomena who is as much shaped by specific contextual conditions as are the objects of his or her studies. Wilfred Cantwell Smith, without any postmodern influence and free from its problematic philosophical claims, already articulated this insight in the late 1950s. Smith stated that the investigator of religion ‘is coming to be seen as a person like another: not a god, not a superior impersonal intellect, monarch of all it surveys, but a man with a particular point of view’.9 Given these considerations, my sympathy is clearly with Sharma’s concept of reciprocal illumination as presented in version II. Here, we find the clear awareness that comparison is always done from a specific perspective. This is not necessarily the perspective of one of the two religions under comparison. It would also be possible for a member of tradition C to look comparatively at traditions A and B. However, in doing so, the background views of the comparativist, originating from her own tradition C, would inevitably have some impact on how she understands and compares A and B. In that case, A and B are not only compared with each other but also in some, perhaps hidden, ways with C. Hence, it is desirable not to conceal but to reveal this aspect of the comparative work, so that its influence will become transparent and thereby controllable. In this case, reciprocal illumination is of two orders. It will not only occur between A and B, but also between A and B, on the one hand, and C, on the other hand. Moreover, the comparison of religions A, B, C, etc. must not be confined to perspectives from different religious backgrounds. That is, in understanding views different from one’s own, non-religious scholars are neither better nor worse disposed than any religious comparativists. Yet, they should be clear about the formative influence that their own non-religious background has on their perception of the religious phenomena which they are studying. To summarize my point, there is a tension between version I and version II of ‘reciprocal illumination’, and this tension remains unresolved throughout Sharma’s book. My suggestion is to resolve it in favour of version II. When Sharma writes,

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in commenting on W. C. Smith, that reciprocal illumination encompasses two possibilities: (a) ‘the illumination an insider receives about his or her own tradition through comparison with another’ and (b) ‘the illumination the empathetic outsider, the historian-phenomenologist, receives from the empathized religion’,10 I suggest that (b) is not really different from (a). The purported ‘empathetic outsider’ is, in fact, an insider too. Or, to quote Rita Gross, ‘there is no neutral place from which one can objectively study religion … and those who claim they are outsiders to religion are insiders to and advocates of some other belief about religion’.11

The object of ‘Reciprocal Illumination’ Apart from the issue of locating the comparativist, my second criticism relates to the question of how comparison can contribute to a better understanding of religions. Sharma touches upon this issue when he ‘questions the wisdom of comparing apples and oranges’.12 Yet, contrary to this commonsensical insight, apples and oranges can be compared quite well and under a number of meaningful aspects, for example how healthy both are, what kind of specific vitamins they contain, how well they can be preserved, under what conditions they might be cultivated, etc. Even if one were to refine one’s points of comparison so that these apply only to the comparison of apples with other (kinds of) apples or to oranges with other oranges instead of apples and oranges, the latter comparison does not appear to be altogether meaningless. Nevertheless, as a matter of principle, someone sceptical about comparison in general may still raise the question of whether we really do understand a particular apple better by comparing it with oranges, bananas, pineapples, or even other sorts of apples. Of course we do. We would expect an expert in apples to know more than just one sort of apple. And we expect an expert in nutrition to be well informed about various kinds of fruits. In that respect, Müller’s dictum of ‘he who knows one, knows none’ is self-evident. Yet what if we, say, compare apples with stones or apples with airplanes? This could still be done, and we could still learn something meaningful, for example if we compare them as physical objects with different properties, for example their ballistic nature. So the issue is really a question of the kind of category or respect under which we compare certain things. What is the category or theoretical interest under which to compare religious phenomena? This, I suggest, is where the location of the comparativist comes in, which is significant in relation to the understanding of the objects under comparison. Let me explain. Phenomenologists of religion have designed a range of typological categories structuring their comparisons. Indeed, why should we not be able to compare creed with creed, symbol with symbol, ritual practice with ritual practice, sacred scripture with sacred scripture, and so on? If we take it seriously that the comparativist is never merely an outsider but always an insider to some position as well, one issue is that these categories are far from neutral. If we consider the perspectival nature of any comparison, the comparative question turns into something like: Is what others do or believe indeed comparable with what one does or believes oneself? Does it truly belong to the same category, or would this create a superficial, misleading perspective? Can, for example, the atheist understand the beliefs of a religious theist as belonging

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to the same category of ‘beliefs’ as his own conviction that there is no God? Or will he hold that the religious person is given to illusions (called ‘believing’) while he himself is just facing the truth (i.e. ‘knowing’)? Or, to give another example, will someone belonging to religion A acknowledge that a ritual practice of religion B is genuinely within the same category as a practice from his own religion, for example the consumption of the karah prasad of the Sikhs and the consumption of the holy host during Eucharist? The question of whether two different convictions are both genuine forms of belief, or whether two practices are both genuine forms of worship, is a question of whether they can legitimately be seen as belonging to the same category. And if the category expresses a specific interest or perspective under which they are compared, the possibility of arriving at something like ‘reciprocal illumination’ ultimately hinges on specific metaphysical presuppositions held by the comparativist. It is obvious that Sharma wants to keep the issue of comparative categories out of his concept of reciprocal illumination. The method that he recommends ‘involves a one-to-one comparison without any necessary temporal or categorical mediation’.13 He wishes to abstain from ‘category formation’ because he wants to stay as close as possible to the compared data themselves: ‘These data are not used in this method to illuminate anything other than the data themselves.’14 On the other hand, ‘illumination’ is a hermeneutical concept. It signifies some form of understanding or improved understanding which is not independent of the one who is trying to understand. The question of correct comparative categories is, thus, of a double nature. It is a question about the data themselves, about what they truly are. It is also about the comparativist, about his or her views of what these data truly are, which largely find expression in the category or point of interest under which he or she compares the data. To sum up my second critique, now concerning the object of ‘reciprocal illumination’: the nature of the data under comparison can ultimately not be established independently of significant metaphysical presuppositions. Sharma criticizes W. C. Smith as being too theological in his approach to comparative religion,15 and quotes, apparently with approval, Patrick Olivelle’s view that as part of its ‘very foundation … scholarly inquiry … presupposes the human origin of the objects of that inquiry’.16 This, however, is not a neutral, objective and exclusively scholarly perspective, but a reductionist perspective which settles the nature of the data before any inquiry begins. Olivelle, in the paragraph quoted by Sharma, sharply distinguishes ‘theological assertion’ from what he calls ‘the conclusion of scholarship’ by asking ‘what historical or other evidence is there to support either the existence of a “transcendent” or of the openness of the human spirit to it?’17 Yet, why does he not ask the converse question: ‘What historical or other evidence is there to exclude the existence of a “transcendent” or of the openness of the human spirit to it?’ In my mind, there is nothing wrong with Olivelle’s naturalist bias. What is wrong is that he presents it as the one and only option of serious scholarship. Olivelle’s understanding of the nature of religious phenomena is just one possible option.18 There is no justification for excluding a religious understanding of these phenomena as beyond serious scholarly inquiry, as Olivelle does with regard to W. C. Smith. If reciprocal illumination is meant to illuminate the data under comparison, we need to be clear about whether we expect an illumination which only concerns their interpretation as purely human phenomena or whether we

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would also expect an illumination of their nature as possible products of an interaction between human beings and the transcendent. Sharma’s concept of ‘reciprocal illumination’ appears highly attractive to me, in as much as this illumination entails the promise of both, illuminating the comparativist and illuminating the data or phenomena under comparison. Yet, unfortunately, Sharma himself refrained from pushing his inquiry more resolutely in both directions. For the remainder of this chapter, I will exemplify my remarks by turning to the example of comparing Christ and the Bodhisattva, asking to what extent both religious concepts19 might be reciprocally illuminating.

Christ as Bodhisattva According to Sharma, reciprocal illumination can take the form of ‘memory, recognition, or potentiality’.20 Recognition consists in seeing, with the help of another tradition, something in one’s own tradition that was always there but either went unnoticed or, at least, had not been perceived, so far, in this particular way. ‘Such recognition’, he continues, ‘is apparent for the Christian in the case of Jesus Christ as suffering savior and the bodhisattva of Mahāyāna Buddhism.’21 Unfortunately, Sharma does not expound any further on what exactly he has in mind, apart from stating that the correspondence between Christ and Bodhisattva is ‘so close’ that it led some scholars to consider the possibility of direct borrowing. This has, indeed, been the case not just with Arthur Llewellyn Basham, whom Sharma cites, but also with Har Dayal, the author of the long-time authoritative study The Bodhisattva Doctrine in Buddhist Sanskrit Literature. Although Har Dayal excludes any Christian influence on the origin of the Bodhisattva ideal, he takes it as feasible that Christianity may have had some impact on later developments, in particular as found in Śāntideva’s Bodhicaryāvatāra.22 I do not see any central element23 in the doctrinal evolution of the Bodhisattva ideal that could not be sufficiently explained by inner-Buddhist dynamics within this development or by Hindu influences. Hence, I see no need to postulate borrowing from Christianity, although we may not be able to definitively exclude this either. In fact, what motivates such speculations about Christian influence does not seem to be any otherwise unexplainable leaps or gaps in inner-Buddhist developments, but, rather, the striking similarity between some features of the Bodhisattva ideal and Christian beliefs. These similarities, however, might call for a different kind of explanation than borrowing, perhaps a theological one, which sees the same spirit at work in both traditions – if we do not want to give ourselves to the harsh kind of reductionist dogmatism à la Olivelle, banning such explanations from serious scholarship before giving them any serious scholarly consideration. When we inquire about the similarities (or dissimilarities) of the two concepts of ‘Christ’ and ‘Bodhisattva’, Sharma pushes us in the right direction in assigning this particular case to the category of ‘recognition’, in as much as recognition unambiguously implies the localization of the comparativist. It is a Buddhist or a Christian who may or may not recognize some aspect of the concept of ‘Christ’ or ‘Bodhisattva’ that was always there in his or her own corresponding concept but went unnoticed, or was, at

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least, not perceived in this particular way. We can thus specify one possible point of interest in the comparison of Christ and Bodhisattva by asking whether Christians can gain some fresh insight into the concept of Christ by understanding Christ as Bodhisattva (and hence Jesus as a Bodhisattva) and Buddhists by understanding the concept of a Bodhisattva in the light of the Christ, so that this would constitute for both of them a case of reciprocal illumination. Steven Rockefeller clearly expressed the question during a symposium on ‘The Christ and the Bodhisattva’ held in 1984 at Middlebury College in the United States, when he localized the comparison of Christ and Bodhisattva by asking: ‘Can a Bodhisattva be called a Christ from a Christian point of view, and then from a Buddhist point of view, could Christ have been a Bodhisattva without being a Buddhist?’24 Seeing Jesus as a Bodhisattva has been suggested by both Buddhists25 and Christians. When Buddhists speak of Jesus as a Bodhisattva, this certainly expresses a high degree of appreciation, something which cannot be taken for granted. On the contrary, some Buddhists speak about Jesus in rather derogatory terms, such as, for example, Anagarika Dharmapala (1864-1933), who stated about Jesus: ‘Neither he nor his god could be called merciful.’26 Seeing Jesus as a Bodhisattva clearly expresses a very different kind of assessment. However, on strictly doctrinal terms, a Bodhisattva is a ‘Buddha-to-be’, someone on the way to full enlightenment, but not yet really there. So Helmuth von Glasenapp was right when he emphasized that a Buddhist interpretation of Jesus as a Bodhisattva is not entirely appreciative, but also entails the view that Jesus had not yet attained the full liberation from all passions.27 The fourteenth Dalai Lama famously stated that for him, ‘Jesus Christ … was either a fully enlightened being or a bodhisattva of a very high spiritual realization.’28 Again, this remark reflects the doctrinal position that a Bodhisattva represents a lesser stage of spiritual development than ‘a fully enlightened being’, that is, a Buddha, and the Dalai Lama leaves it open where exactly to position Jesus. One difficulty of seeing Jesus, from a Buddhist perspective, as a Buddha29 instead of ‘merely’ as a Bodhisattva is that Jesus’ teachings about faith in a merciful God differ significantly from the teachings of the or a Buddha.30 Traditionally, every Buddha is expected to expound more or less the same kind of doctrine. Jesus’ divergence from the Buddhist norm is easier to accept by Buddhists if he is seen as a Bodhisattva rather than a Buddha. It is a traditional topic in Mahāyāna Buddhism that Bodhisattvas, out of their compassion, at times use even heretical doctrines as skilful means to lead particular people nearer to enlightenment.31 The Dalai Lama, fully aware of this tradition, suggested that Jesus may even have been fully enlightened, but nevertheless employed his teachings about God as skilful means adapted to the epistemic and existential conditions of his specific audience. What counts, per the Dalai Lama, is the result, that is that Jesus helped and inspired the people by his teachings to be compassionate.32 In terms of compassion, there is no essential difference between a Buddha and a Bodhisattva, although perhaps there is a gradual one: while the Buddha’s compassion is perfect, the Bodhisattva’s compassion is on the way to perfection. However, in the case of highly developed Bodhisattvas, such as, for example, in the case of Avalokiteśvara, the doctrinal difference between the Bodhisattva and a fully enlightened Buddha is, in fact, often blurred. If, therefore, Mahāyāna Buddhists refer to Jesus as a Bodhisattva,

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this may not necessarily express his subordination under a Buddha. It may simply be a way of emphasizing the nature of Jesus as a highly compassionate being. For, from a Mahāyāna Buddhist perspective, a Bodhisattva is not only someone on his way to Buddhahood but someone who puts all of his spiritual striving in the service of others. He strives for enlightenment not out of any selfish reasons but for the sake of others. This is precisely the reason why he strives to become a Buddha instead of an Arhat (an ‘ordinary’ enlightened being); for, as a Buddha, he is of utmost service to all other beings.33 This is also the reason why he vows not to leave sam  sāra before all beings are saved, and thus – even as a Buddha – he remains salvifically present. This selfless spirit of ‘Great Compassion’ (mahākarunā) involves the readiness and practice of self-sacrifice for the sake of others. As we read in Śāntideva’s highly influential Bodhicaryāvatāra (a classic introduction to the spirituality of a Bodhisattva), ‘If the suffering of one ends the suffering of many, then one who has compassion for others and himself must cause that suffering to arise.’34 Buddhist narratives are replete with stories illustrating particularly this aspect.35 From a Buddhist perspective, therefore, a Bodhisattva is indeed, as Sharma holds, a ‘suffering savior’.36 Hence, if Buddhists identify Jesus as a Bodhisattva, they thereby ascribe at least some degree of salvific value to him. While, according to Rita Gross, ‘it is easy for a Buddhist to see Jesus as a bodhisattva’,37 this seems to be significantly more difficult for Christians. According to Paul Williams, calling Jesus Christ a Bodhisattva would be – in each possible variation – ‘radically unsatisfactory to Christian orthodoxy’.38 The reasons for this difficulty are various. First, in following some unwritten rule like Lindbeck’s ‘Christological maximalism’,39 Christians will certainly not designate Jesus as a Bodhisattva if such designation implies that he is of a lower degree of perfection than a Buddha.40 Second, another reason that makes Christians hesitate is their fear that Jesus’ designation as a Bodhisattva would repudiate his uniqueness. Third, there are those Christians who believe that non-Christian religions (including or apart from Judaism) are so much lacking in revelation that none of their religious categories would ever be suitable to express the divine nature of Christ. At the general assembly of the World Council of Churches in 1991, the Korean theologian Chung Hyun Kyung famously called the Bodhisattva Kwan In (the female form of Avalokiteśvara) a female image of Christ,41 and thereby caused a storm of protest among the more conservative delegates, in particular from the Eastern Orthodox churches.42 In a far more elaborate form, another Korean theologian, Hee-Sung Keel, suggested a few years later that seeing Christ as Bodhisattva is a legitimate and adequate development within the ongoing hermeneutical process of interpreting Christ. Understanding Christ by means of the Bodhisattva ideal could not only make Jesus more meaningful within an Asian context but also help Christians to discover new aspects about him.43 Keel addresses all three major Christian concerns mentioned above. He argues that the work of the divine Word or logos is not confined to a particular culture and that ‘the power of salvation itself is eternal and universal’. Hence, it will also be known in various ways to the religious and philosophical traditions of Asia.44 Yet this is not only a justification for the Christological employment of non-Christian concepts. Keel further holds

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that ‘the power behind bodhisattvas and Jesus is ultimately the same’, a power which can be called ‘Logos’ or ‘Emptiness’ or ‘cosmic love’. ‘Bodhisattvas’, says Keel, ‘are certainly manifestations or “incarnations” of the Logos.’45 However, despite this relinquishment of Christ’s uniqueness, he still retains a Christological maximalism by arguing that Jesus is ‘the “single highest” incarnation of the Logos’,46 or ‘the person who realized the ideal of the bodhisattva most clearly in history’.47 Keel’s article evoked a Buddhist response from Kun-Ki Kang, who welcomed Keel’s view that salvific power is not confined to only one person, but rejected his further suggestion of seeing ‘Jesus as a bodhisattva superior to all others’.48 In addition, Wang Shik Jang, a fellow Christian theologian from Korea, questioned the legitimacy of Keel’s position that ‘Emptiness and divine love … refer to the same reality in different ways.’49 Per Jang’s objection, Keel misunderstands emptiness as an ultimate reality in an objective, reified sense, that is, as a reality that would or could be similar to the Christian understanding of God. This, according to Jang, goes completely against the grain of the Buddhist understanding of emptiness, which is directed against all such reifications.50 Keel, however, had anticipated this objection. He felt that his linking of God and emptiness was justified because the non-reifying dynamic of emptiness has something to teach to Christians. Explicitly, he sympathized with ‘the Buddhist challenge to dehypostatize our concept of God’.51 The issue of reification or dehypostatization of the God concept is at the centre of Masao Abe’s famous Zen Buddhist interpretation of the so-called ‘kenotic Christology’. Abe suggested that the self-emptying (kenosis) of Christ should not be understood as a process in which Christ abandons his previous divine nature, but should be interpreted in the more paradoxical sense that Christ is divine because of manifesting the dynamic nature of self-emptying. For Abe, the kenosis of Christ is, in fact, the kenosis of God: God is ultimate reality only as the reality of self-emptying. The God whose real being is his complete self-abnegation is, according to Abe, ‘truly a God of love’, being totally identical with everything, including sinful humans.52 As related by James Fredericks, Abe held ‘that Christ is a kind of bodhisattva’ because he manifests this original truth of self-emptying.53 From a Christian perspective, the analogy between kenotic Christology and the ontological meaning of the Bodhisattva had already been drawn by the Sinhalese theologian Lynn de Silva in 1982.54 For de Silva, kenosis signifies the paradox that ‘the Unborn was born’, that is, the ‘Unconditioned’ took on the marks of conditioned existence: decay, suffering and non-self, without losing itself (note that both the ‘Unborn’ and the ‘Unconditioned’ [asam  skrta] are Buddhist predicates referring to nirvāna). Kenosis, according to de Silva, is the paradox of cross and resurrection, that is, of finding oneself through losing oneself. He underlines that Paul refers to the selfemptying of Christ (Phil. 2:5-11) as a model for all: ‘Have this mind that was in Christ.’ According to de Silva, ‘Self-negating and self-elevating love … is not an experience exclusive to Christians.’55 Rather, it is universal and ‘archetypal’,56 finding its expression, inter alia, in the Bodhisattva ideal. For Masao Abe, too, it is impossible to speak of ‘“the Son of God” apart from us’. According to Abe, the Son of God ‘must be realized right here, right now, at the depth of our present existence, as the self-emptying Son of God’.57

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Given these examples of Buddhist–Christian conversation, the comparison of Christ and Bodhisattva has evidently triggered some kind of reciprocal illumination. In some dialogues between Buddhists and Christians, the category of the ‘suffering saviour’ appears as the archetype of manifesting one’s true self or nature through self-sacrificing, self-negating love. This love is seen as salvific in as much as Buddhists and Christians are able to connect it with ultimate reality, that is, in as much as they understand the kenosis of Christ and the selfless compassion of the Bodhisattva as true expressions of the immanence of the transcendent, which is otherwise, in respect to its transcendence, beyond all human concepts. Selfless love is induced, encouraged and empowered as an experience of the ultimate, as the experience of supra-individual bodhicitta (the ‘spirit of enlightenment’ according to the Bodhisattva ideal), Buddha-Nature, or – in Christian terms – grace or Holy Spirit.58 The reciprocal understanding of the salvific nature of selfless love as represented in the Christ and in the Bodhisattva can, indeed, be summarized, as Sharma suggests, under the term ‘recognition’. It is, however, not so much the recognition of sameness but, rather, of a strong affinity combined, at the same time, with serious challenges: the challenge of non-uniqueness as felt by Christians,59 and for Buddhists, the challenge of Jesus Christ as a very special Bodhisattva being markedly different from the standard type of traditionally Buddhist Bodhisattvas. In the particular case of Christ and Bodhisattva, reciprocal illumination thus comes not only as reciprocal confirmation but also as reciprocal challenge. Can Christians, with the help of seeing the Christ in the light of the Bodhisattva ideal, accept the nonuniqueness of Christ, and can Buddhists, with the help of seeing the Bodhisattva ideal in the light of the Christ, accept that liberating truth may also appear in theistic forms? In any case, if understood according to the model of reciprocal illumination and with the due localization of the comparativist’s standpoint, religious comparison has the potential to be a creative and transformative activity. Religious beliefs – such as the belief in Bodhisattvas and the belief in Jesus as Christ – will not only display hidden or hitherto unnoticed features if seen in a reciprocally illuminating light; reciprocal illumination may also trigger creative developments. The comparison of Christ and Bodhisattva not only instantiates the category of ‘recognition’ but apparently also that of ‘potentiality’60 in that it opens up new ways of understanding the data. In reciprocally shedding their light upon each other, the data not only appear in a fresh light but also exhibit new features and thereby, in some sense, themselves experience some kind of transformation. Here, as elsewhere in scientific endeavours, observation implies alteration.

Notes 1 I call these first two tenets ‘intuitions’ because it is not possible to demonstrate their truth in a strictly irrefutable way, as the arguments of radical scepticism have shown. Nevertheless, this kind of radical scepticism or solipsism clearly contradicts our most basic intuitions. 2 See Osborne 1995: 157: ‘the narrative of the death of metanarrative is itself grander than most of the narratives it would consign to oblivion’. See also Eagleton 1997.

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3 4 5 6 7 8

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cf. Sharma 2005. Sharma 2005: 3. Ibid.: 23. Ibid.: 11. For a more detailed elaboration of this argument, see Schmidt-Leukel 2012. See Panikkar’s famous essay ‘Epoché in the Religious Encounter’ in Panikkar 1978: 39–52. 9 In his well-known essay from 1959: ‘Comparative Religion: Whither – and Why?’; see Smith 1976: 149. 10 Sharma 2005: 71. 11 Gross 2005: 150. 12 Sharma 2005: 24. 13 Ibid.: 64f: 86: 89. 14 Ibid.: 254. 15 Ibid.: 70. 16 Ibid.: 268. 17 Ibid. 18 For an alternative approach, see, for example, what Jorge N. Ferrer and Jacob H. Sherman call the ‘Participatory Turn’. They suggest ‘that religious worlds and phenomena … come into existence out of a process of participatory cocreation between human multidimensional cognition and the generative force of life and/or the spirit’ (Ferrer and Sherman 2008: 34f), while they wish to leave open ‘[w]hether such creative source is a transcendent spirit or immanent life …’ (Ibid.: 72, n. 155). 19 Here, ‘Christ’ and ‘Bodhisattva’ are both used as religious concepts. Thus, ‘the Christ’ is not used as another ‘name’ for Jesus, nor is ‘the Bodhisattva’ used in order to refer to Gautama Buddha in his previous lives. Both terms, rather, signify the concepts which Christians employ in their interpretation of Jesus and Buddhists in their interpretation of various figures on their way to Buddhahood. 20 Sharma 2005: 67. 21 Ibid.: 68. 22 Har Dayal 1932: 40ff. 23 Nevertheless, some details may display Christian influence. A possible candidate in the Bodhicaryāvatāra is perhaps the simile of the unity of the body (8: 91, 99, 114) which has a surprisingly close parallel in 1 Cor. 12:12–27, while I am not aware of any parallel in the earlier Buddhist tradition. 24 Lopez and Rockefeller 1987: 253. 25 For summary treatments of Buddhist views of Jesus, see Gross and Muck 2000; Schmidt-Leukel 2001; Barker 2005: 13–45; Barker and Gregg 2010: 215–81; Morgan 2011. 26 Anagarika Dharmapala 1965: 450. 27 von Glasenapp 1972: 379. Ernest Valea (2015: 4) regards the designation of Jesus by Buddhists as an expression of Buddhist inclusivism. 28 During the John Main Seminar in 1994; see Dalai Lama 2002: 83. 29 The other difficulty consists in the traditional view that within one particular world there cannot be more than one Buddha at a time, that is, there cannot exist simultaneously two salvific communities (saṅghas) founded by two different Buddhas (see Milindapañha 4:6: 4–10). Mahāyāna Buddhists, however, tend to be slightly less strict about this position, though – as far as I am aware – they never accepted the existence of two different saṅghas.

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30 Cf. Cabezón 2000: 26. Valea (2008: 181–6), himself a Christian, gives Buddhists the advice not to see Christ as a Bodhisattva because his teachings differ so much from Buddhist ones that these – from a Buddhist perspective – would only contribute to the further delusion of people. 31 See, for example, Vimalakīrtinirdeśa Sūtra, Chapter 8, or Pāramitāsamāsa, 5: 54–67. 32 See Grünschloß 2008: 258. 33 A widespread Western misunderstanding of the Bodhisattva ideal entails that the Bodhisattva would postpone his enlightenment. This misunderstanding emerges from an identification of enlightenment with nirvāṇa. Far from postponing or even forsaking enlightenment, the Bodhisattva puts all his efforts into the attainment of Buddhahood – and hence of the enlightenment of a Buddha (instead of that of an arhat or pratyekabuddha). He wants to become a Buddha in order to be able to assist other beings in those perfect ways in which only a fully enlightened Buddha can assist them, and thus he vows not to leave saṃsāra until all are saved, which means that even as a Buddha he will remain present. According to some later Mahāyāna traditions, the Bodhisattva attains, through Buddhahood, nirvāṇa in a such a way that it is compatible with his staying in saṃsāra, which was thus called apratiṣṭhita nirvāṇa, that is ‘non-static’ or ‘non-abiding nirvāṇa’ (see also Williams 2009: 58–62). 34 Bodhicaryāvatāra, 8: 105; Crosby and Skilton 1995: 97. 35 For a more recent study of this theme, see Ohnuma 2007. 36 Valea (2015: 206–11), however, in following Paul Williams (see endnote 40), rejects any equation of Christ and Bodhisattva, or of agapé and karuṇā, on the grounds of his submission that in contrast to Christ’s suffering, the Bodhisattva’s suffering would not be real. It is certainly correct to state that from a Madhyamaka perspective, ‘suffering’ is part of the illusory world, which is – as a whole – not ultimately real. Yet within this world, suffering is as real – deadly real – as it can be. Valea’s comparison of the Bodhisattva’s suffering to the only apparent suffering of an actor in a movie does not do justice to this aspect, and is thus misleading. Unlike a movie, the teaching of emptiness does not presuppose the real world of the spectators watching the movie or of the actors only pretending to suffer. Perhaps it would be more fitting to use the classical Buddhist analogy of a ‘dream’. For in a dream, for example a nightmare, horror and suffering are quite real, although still part of the dream. 37 Gross 2000: 47. 38 Williams 2011: 166. 39 Lindbeck 1984: 94. 40 Paul Williams combines the objection of subordinating Jesus below a Buddha with the accusation of docetism. While he was still a Buddhist, he wrote in his Mahāyāna Buddhism that Bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara may take every form ‘suitable for aiding, converting, and saving human beings. If a Buddha form is suitable, then he appears as a Buddha; if a Hearer form, as a Hearer; if a god, then as a god. We might add, if the form of a Jesus is suitable, then he appears in that form too’ (Williams 1989: 231). In the revised second edition, after his reconversion to Christianity, he dropped the last sentence (see Williams 2009: 221). In Williams 2006: 56–63 and 2011: 164–9, he argues that if Christ’s suffering for others was real, he would have been a very underdeveloped Bodhisattva. If, however, he was far advanced, he was not really suffering, but his whole appearance was a magical, docetic manifestation. 41 Chung 1991. 42 See Friedli 1995. 43 See Keel 1996: 172f.

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44 Keel 1996: 171. 45 Ibid.: 184. 46 Ibid. 47 Ibid.: 185. Somewhat similarly, Ross Thompson suggests seeing Christ as ‘the radical Bodhisattva’ who ‘has done something unique and necessary for the salvation of the whole universe’. Yet Thompson adds that possibly ‘other Bodhisattvas and the Buddha … have also carried out unique acts indispensable for the liberation of the universe’ (Thompson 2010: 154). 48 Kang 1996: 188. 49 Keel 1996: 181. 50 Jang 1996: 190. 51 Keel 1996: 185. 52 Abe 1990: 16. 53 Fredericks 2003: 227. On the role of the Bodhisattva ideal in Abe’s understanding of Christ and Christianity, see also Valea 2015: 160–8. 54 De Silva 1982: 56–60. 55 Ibid.: 58. 56 Ibid. 57 Abe 1990: 10. 58 See May 2010: 400f, 403. 59 During the abovementioned symposium on ‘The Christ and the Bodhisattva’ (1984), David Steindl-Rast rightly pointed out – in the face of this particular challenge – that the reality of Christ is not confined to Jesus, and that there is a parallel between the ‘Bodhisattva living out of the Buddha nature’ and the Christian living out of the Christ reality in him/her. See Lopez and Rockefeller (eds) 1987: 255f. 60 Sharma 2005: 67.

References Abe, Masao (1990), ‘Kenotic God and Dynamic Sunyata’, in John Cobb and Christopher Ives (eds), The Emptying God. A Buddhist-Jewish-Christian Conversation, 3–65, Orbis: Maryknoll. Anagarika Dharmapala (1965), Return to Righteousness, ed. Ananda Guruge, Colombo: The Government Press. Barker, Gregory A., ed. (2005), Jesus in the World’s Faiths. Leading Thinkers from Five Religions Reflect on His Meaning, Maryknoll: Orbis. Barker, Gregory A. and Stephen E. Gregg, eds (2010), Jesus beyond Christianity. The Classic Texts, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cabezón, José Ignacio (2000), ‘A God, but Not a Savior’, in Rita Gross and Terry Muck (eds), Buddhists Talk about Jesus – Christians Talk about the Buddha, 17–31, New York and London: Continuum. Chung, Hyun-Kyung (1991), ‘Welcome the Spirit; Hear Her Cries: The Holy Spirit, Creation, and the Culture of Life’, Christianity and Crisis, 51: 220–3. Crosby, Kate and Skilton, Andrew, trans. (1995), Śāntideva, The Bodhicaryāvatāra, Oxford: Oxford University Press. H.H. the Dalai Lama (2002), The Good Heart, ed. Robert Kiely, London, Sydney, Auckland, Johannesburg: Rider.

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De Silva, Lynn (1982), ‘Buddhism and Christianity Relativised’, Dialogue N.S., 9: 43–72. Eagleton, Terry (1997), The Illusions of Postmodernism, Oxford: Blackwell. Ferrer, Jorge N. and Jacob H. Sherman (2008), ‘The Participatory Turn in Spirituality, Mysticism, and Religious Studies’, in Jorge N. Ferrer and Jacob H. Sherman (eds), The Participatory Turn. Spirituality, Mysticism, Religious Studies, 1–78, Albany: SUNY. Fredericks, James (2003), ‘Masao Abe: A Spiritual Friendship’, Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality, 3: 219–30. Friedli, Richard (1995), ‘Synkretismus als Befreiungspraxis: Asiatische und afrikanische Modelle im Dialog’, Dialog der Religionen, 5: 42–66. Glasenapp, Helmuth von (1972), Die fünf Weltreligionen, 3rd edn, Düsseldorf and Köln: Eugen Diederichs. Gross, Rita (2000), ‘Meditating on Jesus’, in Rita Gross and Terry Muck (eds), Buddhists Talk about Jesus – Christians Talk about the Buddha, 32–51, New York and London: Continuum. Gross, Rita (2005), ‘Methodology – Tool or Trap? Comments from a Feminist Perspective’, in René Gothóni (ed.), How to do Comparative Religion? Three Ways, Many Goals, 149–66, Berlin and New York: De Gruyter. Gross, Rita and Terry Muck, eds (2000), Buddhists Talk about Jesus – Christians Talk about the Buddha, New York and London: Continuum. Grünschloß, Andreas (2008), ‘Buddhist–Christian Relations’, in Perry Schmidt-Leukel (ed.), Buddhist Attitudes to Other Religions, 237–68, St Ottilien: EOS Verlag. Har Dayal, Lala (1932), The Bodhisattva Doctrine in Buddhist Sanskrit Literature, London: Routledge & Kegan. Jang, Wang Shik (1996), ‘A Christian Response to “Jesus the Bodhisattva”’, Buddhist Christian Studies, 16: 188–90. Kang, Kun-Ki (1996), ‘A Buddhist Response to “Jesus the Bodhisattva”’, Buddhist Christian Studies, 16: 185–8. Keel, Hee-Sung (1996), ‘Jesus the Bodhisattva: Christology from a Buddhist Perspective’, Buddhist Christian Studies, 16: 169–85. Lindbeck, George (1984), The Nature of Doctrine. Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age, Philadelphia: Westminster Press. Lopez, Donald S. and Steven C. Rockefeller, eds (1987), The Christ and the Bodhisattva, Albany: SUNY. May, John D’Arcy (2011), ‘Sympathy and Empathy. The Compassionate Bodhisattva and the Love of Christ’, in Jerald D. Gort, Henry Jansen and Wessel Stoker (eds), Crossroad Discourses between Christianity and Culture (Currents of Encounter 38), 395–411, Amsterdam and New York. Morgan, Peggy (2011), ‘Buddhist Perspectives on Jesus’, in Delbert Burkett (ed.), The Blackwell Companion to Jesus, 267–82, Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Ohnuma, Reiko (2007), Head, Eyes, Flesh, and Blood. Giving Away the Body in Indian Buddhist Literature, New York: Columbia University Press. Osborne, Peter (1995), The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde, London: Verso. Panikkar, Raimundo (1978), The Intrareligious Dialogue, New York: Paulist Press. Schmidt-Leukel, Perry, ed. (2001), Buddhist Perceptions of Jesus, St Ottilien: EOS Verlag. Schmidt-Leukel, Perry (2012), ‘Der methodologische Agnostizismus und das Verhältnis der Religionswissenschaft zur wissenschaftlichen Theologie’, Berliner Theologische Zeitschrift, 29: 48–72. Sharma, Arvind (2005), Religious Studies and Comparative Methodology. The Case for Reciprocal Illumination, Albany: SUNY.

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Smith, Wilfred Cantwell (1976), ‘Comparative Religion: Whither – and Why?’, reprinted in Willard G. Oxtoby (ed.), Religious Diversity. Essays by Wilfred Cantwell Smith, 138–57, New York: Harper & Row. Thompson, Ross (2010), Buddhist Christianity. A Passionate Openness, Winchester and Washington: O-Books. Valea, Ernest (2008), The Buddha and the Christ. Reciprocal Views, (no location given): BookSurge Publishing. Valea, Ernest (2015), Buddhist–Christian Dialogue as Theological Exchange. An Orthodox Contribution to Comparative Theology, Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications. Williams, Paul (1989), Mahāyāna Buddhism. The Doctrinal Foundations, London and New York: Routledge. Williams, Paul (2006), Buddhism from a Catholic Perspective, London: Catholic Truth Society. Williams, Paul (2009), Mahāyāna Buddhism. The Doctrinal Foundations, 2nd edn, London and New York: Routledge. Williams, Paul (2011), ‘Catholicism and Buddhism’, in Gavin D’Costa (ed.), The Catholic Church and the World Religions. A Theological and Phenomenological Account, 141–77, London: T&T Clark.

Index

Note: page locators followed by ‘n’ indicate notes section. a posteriori standpoint  142, 146 a priori standpoint  142, 145–9, 151–3, 193 ab origine  120 Abe, Masao  213 Abrahamic religions  21 academic religious studies  111–22, 179 ´adam (man)  78 ‘Adde Parvum Parvo Magnus Acervus Erit’  54, 57–8, 66 n.21 aggadic text  82 agnis. t.oma sacrifice  80 agnosticism 206 Ahab, King  183 all-embracing mental structures  145 Alles, Gregory D.  114–15, 117 American Academy of Religion conference 196 `ammei ha-´ares. (people of the land/ ignorants) 79 analogical/homological comparison, of religion 74–5 anathema 35 anthropological approach  143 Anttonen, Veikko  124 n.28 Āpastamba Dharmasūtra  80 apologetic-type theology  163–4, 191–3 Apple 114 Aquinas, Thomas  163 archaic culture  97, 99, 101, 103, 105, 118–19, 136 archetypal patterns  19, 27–8, 55, 62–3, 113, 117, 119–20, 213–14 Ark of God  78 Asad, Talal  17 Asiatic Society of Calcutta  72 asymmetrical comparison, of religion  63, 67 n.44

Atharva Veda  83 atirātra sacrifice  81 atithi (guest)  80–2 axis mundi (centre of the world)  19, 120 Babylonian Talmud  78–9 baid.ālavratikān (cat vow)  81 bakavr.ttīn (herons)  81 Barlaam and Josaphat  21, 28–9 Barth, Karl  3 Basham, Arthur Llewellyn  210 Bayly, Christopher A.  46 Bedeutung (denotation)  116 belief systems  132, 208–9 Belsey, Catherine  103 Bergunder, Michael  6–7 Berkeley, George  186 Bernhardt, Reinhold  167, 169, 198 Bertrand, Romain  84 Bhabha, Homi  199 bhakta (devotee)  182 bhakti  24 bhakti-yoga (path of devotion)  181 Bhāratītīrtha/Vidyāraṇya 155 bhojayet (feed)  81 Biles, Jeremy  102, 107 biological taxonomy  64, 68 n.48 Bloch, Marc  67 n.43 Bodhicaryāvatāra (Śāntideva)  210, 212, 215 n.23 bodhicitta (spirit of enlightenment)  214 bodhisattva, Christ as  210–14, 215 n.19 The Bodhisattva Doctrine in Buddhist Sanskrit Literature (Dayal)  210 bottom-up comparative approach  180 bourgeois ideology  148 Bowker, John  131

222 Boyer, Pascal  122 n.6 brahmin/brahmanism  77, 80–1, 83 Bringing the Sacred down to Earth (Dempsey) 43 Brown, Peter  69 n.52 Buddha, Gautama  22, 154, 211–12, 215 n.19 camouflaged religious aspects  97 Campbell, Jonathan  19 Canon, Pāli  125 n.49 Carnap, Rudolf  1 Carter, Jeffrey  60–1 categorical/temporal mediation  209 category-theoretical approach  124 n.28 Center for the Study of World Religions 197 centrality of religious practices  131–3 Chakrabarty, Dipesh  38–43, 45 Ch’an monasteries  22 Chicago School  112, 114, 121 Chidester, David  42, 85 Christ, as bodhisattva  210–14, 215 n.19 Chuang-Tzu/Zhuangzi 182 Clarke, James Freeman  164 Clooney, Francis  5, 24, 193–4, 196, 201 n.12 cognitive science of religion  110, 130 Cohn, B. S.  68 n.47 Comparative Mythology (essay)  95 comparative religion  17–29, 95–107, 132–3, 138–9, 165–70, 191–200 Comparative Religion: A History (Sharpe)  17, 29 Comparative Religious Ideas project 191 comparative theology  23–5, 116–17, 163–72, 191–200 Conceptualizing Religion (Saler)  75 conditio humana  146 confessional theology, comparative theology as  193–4 contested category, of religion  21–3 contextless lists  54–5 contrast of contexts  67 n.42 Cornille, Catherine  145 cosmogonic myth  63 cosmos  100, 105, 116, 120, 136 Cox, James L.  5

Index creativity, and comparative theology 191–200 critical cloud of witnesses  172 cross-cultural dimension, and religion  36, 40, 43, 55, 117 cultural evolution  57, 59 ‘cultural island’ approach  21, 24 cultural practices, and religion  131–2 cultural transaction, religion as  23, 74 cultural way of interpretation  37 Dalai Lama  211 Daoism  182, 184 darkhe shalom (social peace)  80 Darwinian theory  189 n.17 Das Elend des Vergleichens (The Calamity of Comparison)  96 Dasein  134 Davies, Oliver  140 n.23 Dayal, Har  210 de-provincializing, of religion comparison 85–6 de Silva, Lynn  213 demonstratio catholica/ecclesiae  192 demonstratio christiana  192 demonstratio religiosa  192 Dempsey, Corinne  4, 35, 36, 43–5 denotation (Bedeutung)  116 Derekh Erets Rabbah  77 Derekh Eretz Zuta  77 Derrida, Jacques  34 descriptive comparison, of religion  60–1 dharma  77, 80, 82 Dharmapala, Anagarika  211 dharmaśāstra  77 dharmasūtra  77, 82 dialectical theology  3 difference mode of comparison  61–2 Dilthey, Wilhelm  143 Dilthey, William  27 Dionysiac 62 divergent principles  147 domesticization of ritual gestures  82–3 Doniger, Wendy  18, 27, 115, 118, 122 n.2, 123 n.13 D’Sa, Francis X.  155–6 Dumézil, Georges  73 Durkheim, Emile  98 dvādaśāha sacrifice  81

Index ECSR. see evolutionary cognitive science of religion (ECSR) eidetic step (seeing the essence)  20 Eliade, Mircea  3, 17–19, 22, 27–8, 31 n.45, 55–6, 59, 74, 76, 96–107, 110, 112–22, 143, 146–7, 180 Elias, Norbert  84 Eliezer, R.  78 Elijah 183 Emmet, Dorothy M.  145 empathic critique of religious  119 empathized religion  208 empathy  20, 24 encyclopaedic mode of comparison  54–5, 59 Enlightenment  20, 40 entangled histories, and postcolonialism 46–7 epistemological deferment, of observation 104 epoché (bracketing or suspension of judgement)  20, 166, 207 ethnographic mode of comparison  54, 59 Eucharist 209 Eurocentrism, and religion  36–40 Eurohegemonic perspective  4 European invention/European concept 42 Evans-Pritchard, E. E.  180 evolutionary cognitive science of religion (ECSR) 8 evolutionary mode of comparison  56–7 experience 40 explanatory comparison, of religion  60–1 explicandum  83 explicit knowledge  102 external perspective (Außenperspektive)  206–7 face-to-face interaction  135–8 fact and fiction  103–4 family resemblance method  75 Feil, Ernst  40–1 Fergusson, James  72–4 Ferry, Luc  149 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb  147, 149–52 Fitzgerald, Timothy  17, 42–4 Flood, Gavin  18, 22, 25–6, 28, 34 fortiori arguments (qal wa-h.omer)  78

223

Foucault, Michel  201 n.3 Frazer, James George  55, 58–9, 66 n.21, 123 n.14 Fredericks, James  213 Freidenreich, David  61–2 fundamental dualism  186 fundus animae  144 funerary rites  28 Gandhi, Mahatma  183–4, 186–7 Gangadean, Ashok K.  150 Gate of Heaven  121 Gaudium et Spes  199 Geertz, Clifford  3–4, 111, 123 n.10, 131 Geist (spirit)  145 genealogical comparison, of religion  73–4 general science of religions  112 genus–species relationship mode of comparison 62 Glasenapp, Helmuth von  211 Global First Philosophy  150 global religious history  45–7 god-mysticism 115 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von  55–6, 59, 73, 145 Goffman, Erving  84 The Golden Bough  55, 66 n.21 Great Compassion (mahākarunā) 212 gr.hastha (householder)  80–1, 83 Gross, Rita  208, 212 Guthrie, Stewart  122 n.6 Habermas, Jürgen  169 haitukān (sophists)  81 halakhic text  82 Haltung (attitude)  145 Handke, Peter  96 Ḥanina, R.  79 Harijan (journal)  183 Harnack, Adolf von  173 n.23 h. aver (companion)  79 Heaney, Seamus  122 n.2 Hebrew Bible  27, 73 Heidegger, Martin  102, 117, 133, 138 Heiler, Friedrich  3, 55, 96, 115 hermeneutical phenomenology, of religion  4, 9, 27, 82–3, 99, 102, 106, 130, 131, 133–4, 137–8, 165–6, 169, 172, 180, 192–3, 198, 209

224

Index

Herodotus  54, 178 Hick, John  131, 185–6 hierophany  8, 19, 25, 28, 55–6, 97–8, 100–1, 104–6, 112, 116, 119–20 Hindu trinity  131 historical skepticism  144 historicity, and religion  40–3, 104 Hock, Klaus  168 Holdrege, Barbara  27–8, 78 Holy Spirit  193, 214 homo religiosus  97, 99, 102, 105–7, 117, 119–21 homological/analogical comparison, of religion 74–5 hospitality, and religion  77–82 human diversity  148 human nature, and religious practices 130–9 human religiosity  8, 10, 111–12, 117–18, 122, 169, 180 Husserl, Edmund  20, 116, 125 n.45, 133, 142, 150–3 Icelandic spiritualism  45 ideology, and religio-critical procedures 169 ikebana 29 Iliad  74 illo tempore  120 illud tempus  116 illuminative mode of comparison  62–4 imaginative approach  62 imitative interactivity  135 imperialism 164 implicit/tacit knowledge  102 ‘In Comparison a Magic Dwells’  57–8, 67 n.30 inner perspective (Innenperspektive) 206 intellectual imperialism  35–6, 97 intentional object of sacred  115–16 inter-human communication  134–7 interaction rituals  84 intercourse 79–80 intercultural philosophy  149 interculturality 143 intermonastic dialogue  25 interreligious learning  193 interreligious theology  149

Introduction to the Science of Religion (Müller) 72 Inwardness  22, 28 Italian Franciscan Catholicism  28 Jacob, R. Eliezer b.  79 Jacolliot, Louis  72, 74 Jang, Wang Shik  213 Jaspers, Karl  144 Jerusalem Temple  82 jñāna-yoga (path of knowledge)  181 Joad, C. E. M.  187 Jobs, Steve  114 Josaphat and Barlaam  21, 28–9 Jose, R.  79 justitia 40 Kang, Kun-Ki  213 Kant, Immanuel  20, 143, 148, 151–3 Kant Society  151 karah prasad  209 karma-yoga (path of action)  181 Keel, Hee-Sung  212–313 kenotic Christology  213 Kerényi, Karl  118 King, Richard  42 Kippenberg, Hans-Georg  98 Kitagawa, Joseph  114 knowledge, and religion  102–3 Kocka, Jurgen  67 n.44 Kripal, Jeffrey  102 Kristensen, W. B.  179 Kun-Ki Kang  213 Kuschel, Karl-Joseph  171 Kwan In (female form of Avalokiteśvara) 212 Kyung, Chung Hyun  212 La Bible dans l’Inde, vie de Iezeus Christna  72 Lacan, Jacques  105–6 Lakota cosmology  121 language, and religion  135–6 Leach, Edmund  76 Lectures concerning the Scholar’s Vocation (Fichte)  147, 149 Lee, Jung  123 n.10 Leeuw, Gerardus van der  56, 74, 95, 110, 143–5, 147, 180

Index leftist political ideologies  118 León, Moses de  155 Levinas, Emmanuel  164 liberalism 164 life-cycle ritual  63 liturgy 136 logos  145, 213 Lucas, George  19 Lyotard, Jean-Francois  34 macro-causal analysis  67 n.42 Mādhyamikas  152 ‘magic’ analogy  58 A Magic Still Dwells (Patton and Ray)  26, 57, 61 mahākarunā (Great Compassion)  212 Mahāyāna Buddhism  210–11, 215 n.29, 216 n.40 manifestations 56 Manifestations and Essence of Religion (Heiler) 55–6 mantras  136 Map is Not Territory (Smith)  57 Martin, Luther  123 n.15 Marxism  21, 38, 186 material culture  138 Matthes, Joachim  35–6, 38, 40 Maurice, Frederick Denison  164 Mauss, Marcel  83–4 McCutcheon, Russell  17, 43–4, 97, 103, 118 McNamara, Patrick  122 n.7, 123 n.20 me´areah. (entertain)  79 Megasthenes 178 méthexis  207 Method and Theory in the Study of Religion  75 micro-logical method, and theology  170 Mintz, Sidney  74 Mishna  77, 79 mleccha/yavana  82 moccasin walking  20 Mocko, Anne T.  118, 125 n.58 modes of comparison, of religion  53–65 Mohn, Jürgen  173 n.4 monotheism/polytheism 40 Mordtmann, J. H.  178 morphological mode of comparison  55–6, 59, 113, 117–21

225

Müller, F. Max  23, 73, 95–6, 130, 164, 173 n.23, 205, 208 Murphy, Tim  147–8, 150 Muslim prayer  136 mysticism  40, 115, 144, 179 myth 40 Myths, Dreams, and Mysteries (Eliade) 99 Nāgārjuna. see Buddha, Gautama Naoki Sakai  37 nationalism 21 nekhasim  78 Neo-Saiva Siddhanta  44 neo-scholasticism 192–3 Neo-Vedanta 45 neurobiology of religion  110 Neville, Robert C.  163, 172, 191, 200 new comparativism  180 New Testament  73 New Year festival  120 Nicholson, Hugh  5 nirvāṇa  216 n.33 Nishitani, Keiji  106 normativity, and comparative theology 191–200 nr.-/manus. ya-yajña (humans)  81 Oberhammer, Gerhard  156 object of reciprocal illumination  208–10 objet petit a  105 observer perspective to theology  167–70 The Odyssey  74 Old Testament  174 n.42 Olivelle, Patrick  209–10 ontological deferral, in object  105 Orelli, Conrad von  174 n.42 the Orient  164 Orientalism  46–7, 96, 164 Othering 96 Otto, Rudolf  3, 95, 110, 114–15, 143–4, 147, 165 Paden, William  35, 75–6, 124 n.27, 180 pañca mahāyajña (great sacrifices)  81 parallax view, and religion  104–6 parallel demonstration of theory  67 n.42 participant perspective to theology  167–70

226

Index

participation, and comparative theology 191–200 pās.an.d.inah.(heretical sects)  81 Patagonians 57 Patanjali 155 Patterns in Comparative Religion (Eliade)  18–19, 55, 74, 99, 105 Patton, Kimberley  4, 25, 28, 34, 57, 112, 117, 131 Pentecostal spiritual warfare  121 Peoples Temple Christian Church  62 perennial features of religion  114, 116, 119, 144 Phänomenologie der Religion (Leeuw)  56 phenomenological methodology  3, 26, 99–100, 143–7, 180, 192, 196, 204 Phenomenology and Anthropology  151 philosophia perennis  154 Pieris, Aloysius  165 point of comparison, and religion  36–7, 39 Polanyi, Michael  28, 102 political implications  36 post Bar-Kokhba context  78 post-Enlightenment 20 post-facto evaluation  58 postcolonialism, and entangled histories 46–7 postmodern critique  34–47 postmodernism  21, 116, 180, 205, 207 practices, religious  130–9 Praśnopanisadbhāsya  152 Pratt, Marie Louise  147–50 Primitive Cultures (Tylor)  56 primitive religions  56–7, 98, 101, 189 n.17 principal critique  20 production of comparisons  54 profane  19, 23, 43, 97–106, 116, 120–1 prophetic tradition  183–4 Protestant Reformers  41 Protestantism 136 Psychoneuroendocrinology  123 n.21 Puligandla, Ramakrishna  149 purity concerns  79–80 Pyysiäinen, Ilkka  74 Quine, Willard van Orman  116 Qur’an  27, 188, 204

Rabbi Yehuda ha-Nasi  79 Rabbi Yonathan b.´ Amran  79 rabbinic Judaism  21, 77–8, 83 rabbinic movement  82 radical particularizing  115 radical skepticism  214 n.1 Rajneeshees 44 Rappaport, Roy  135 rationality, and theology  170 Ray, Benjamin  4, 57, 112, 117, 131 real object (wirkliche Objekt)  116 realization (Wirklichkeit), and religion  103–6, 113 reciprocal illumination  63, 178–88, 191–200, 205–10 Reciprocal Illumination (Sharma)  205 reductionism  116, 147, 195–6 reflexive level, of religion comparison 84–5 refocus mode of comparison  62 rejection of thought  68 n.47 Religion in Essence and Manifestation (Heiler) 56 The Religions of Man (Smith)  183 Religionsgeschichte  85 Religionswissenschaft (science of religion)  2–3, 67 n.32, 73, 192–5 religious elites, as textual communities 83 religious practices, and human nature 130–9 religious realm  110 Religious Studies and Comparative Methodology (Sharma)  191, 195 religious universals  8, 110, 112, 114–15 Renaissance humanists  41 Renard, John  163, 170 Rennie, Bryan  18, 104, 116, 122 n.3 ṚgVeda 187 Riesebrodt, Martin  132, 136–7 rightist political ideologies  118 rituals/ritualization  40, 79, 82–3, 132, 135–6 Roberts, Michelle Voss  24 Rockefeller, Steven  211 Roman Catholic Church  22, 192–3, 198–9 Rosenau, Pauline  35 Russell, Bertrand  60 Ruysbroeck, Jan van  155

Index sacred/holy  18–19, 23, 27, 43–5, 55–6, 74–6, 97–107, 110–21, 135–6, 146, 180, 208 sacrificial gestures, and hospitality  80–1 Ṣadrā, Mullā  155 Sages 78 Said, Edward  4, 46–7, 164 Saivism 44 sāksi-caitanya (witness-consciousness)  153 Saler, Benson  41–2, 75 salvation  132, 136  sāra  212, 216 n.33 sam Śaṅkara 152–4 Sāṅkhya 186 Śāntideva  210, 212 Sarbacker, Stuart  115 Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa 83 śat.hān (hypocrites)  81 skepticism  53, 130, 144, 187, 214 n.1 Schimmel, Annemarie  165, 173 n.17 Schmidt-Leukel, Perry  125 n.49, 125 n.50 Schutz, Alfred  102 second-person neuroscience  134–5 Second Temple Judaism  21 Second Vatican Council  193, 199–200, 201 n.5 sectarian stance  4, 19, 30 n.10 Segal, Robert  35 self-righteousness 148 sense (Sinn)  116 Sharma, Arvind  63, 131, 191–2, 195–7, 200, 201 n.3, 205–10, 212, 214 Sharpe, Eric  17, 29, 178–9 Shinshu Buddhism 28 shrine 63 similarity mode of comparison  61 Sinn (sense)  116 Smart, Ninian  17–18, 20, 28 Smith, Huston  180, 183, 185–7 Smith, Jonathan Z.  17, 26, 36, 54–9, 61–2, 64, 66 n.21, 67–8 n.46, 73, 76, 95–6, 102, 111, 119, 123 n.11, 180 Smith, Wilfred Cantwell  5, 41, 111, 123 n.9, 125 n.50, 196–7, 200, 207–9 social cognition, and religion  134–8 social Darwinism  57 socio-anthropological level, of religion comparison 83–4

227

socio-historical level, of religion comparison 82–3 solemn sacrifice  83 Solomon, Robert C.  147–8, 150 soul-mysticism 115 spiritual humanity. see homo religiosus spirituality, and comparative theology 194 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty  199 spontaneous-associative mode of comparison 59 Spranger, Eduard  145, 147 śrauta sacrifices  83 Srividya 44 śrotriya (vedic scholar)  80 Star Wars (movie series)  19 Stausberg, Michael  43 Steindl, David  217 n.59 Stolz, Fritz  168 Stosch, Klaus von  200 subject of reciprocal illumination  205–8 Subrahmanyam, Sanjay  74 śūdra  81 sui generis category  143, 146 Sullivan, Laurence E.  29, 180 systematizing of religion  102 taboo  55, 116 talmid h.akham (scholar)  78 Tamil Brahman  44 Tamil Saivism  44 tannaim  78 taxonomic mode of comparison  62–4 Taylor, Mark  149 temidin  79 temporal/categorical mediation  209 temporal evolution of culture  56 Tendulkar, D. G.  183 terminus post quem  77 tertium comparationis  74–7, 143, 145, 154 Thatamanil, John  24 Theravada  22, 25 Thompson, Ross  217 n.47 Tiele, Cornelis  74 Tillich, Paul  3, 125 n.50 Tomasello, Michael  136 Tomoko Masuzawa  4, 43 top-down approach  180

228

Index

Torah  78–80, 83 Toshihiko Izutsu  154 transcendence, and religion  23, 25–6 transcendental-anthropological approach 142–56 transcendental hermeneutics of religion 153–6 transcendental humanism  143–7, 149 transcendental philosophy  143, 150–3 transcendental pretence  147–9 traveler’s impressions  54 Tree and Serpent Worship (Fergusson)  72 Trinity  72, 131 Tripitaka 27 Tworuschka, Udo  166 Tylor, Edward B.  56, 73 Types of Men (Spranger)  145 typological imagination  112, 114–15 typological sublime  123 n.11 ukthya sacrifice  81 universal comparative category  75 universal religious element  75 Upaniṣads  116, 121 vaiśya  81 varn.a  81 Veda and Torah (Holdrege)  78 Vedāntic parable  112 Vedas  27, 80 vedic scholar (śrotriya)  80 Vedic schools  77 vidhi (duties)  81

vikalpa (rewards)  81 vikarmasthān (improper activities)  81 Vorhandensein  102 Wach, Joachim  3, 67 n.32, 110, 112, 114–15, 143–5, 147 Ward, Keith  164 Wasserstrom, Steven  114 Wasserstrom, Steven M.  123 n.11 Weber, Max  67 n.32, 67 n.44, 139 n.14 Werbick, Jürgen  174 n.37 Wesen (nature)  145 Western monotheisms  42 White, David Gordon  124 n.39 white mythology  148 Whitehouse, Harvey  74 Wiebe, Donald  76 Williams, Paul  216 n.36, 216 n.40 wirkliche Objekt (real object)  116 World Council of Churches  212 world religions  27, 46 The World’s Religions (Smith)  183 Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Lyotard)  34 yavana/mleccha  82 yoga  155, 181 Yoga (Eliade)  18 Yose, R.  78 Zhuangzi/Chuang-Tzu 182 Žižek, Slavoj  104–5 Zuhandensein  102