1 On Concepts and Contact
1.1 Key Concepts and the DHR Series
It is an established custom—or perhaps, I should say a ritual of rite de passage—in the study of religion as an academic discipline that research, when put onto paper and presented to an interested community of readers, must set forth a markedly defensive position. It must begin with a humble self-defense, often even an apology for tackling such a contested subject as ‘religion’ at all. This is an outcome of the “decades of theoretical angst we have experienced in religious studies over the usefulness of the category of ‘religion’.”1 Anyone desirous of inclusion in the ‘we’ addressed here must pay theoretical, or even intellectual, tribute to this lurking angst in religious studies.
Luckily, in my own academic training, I have the privilege of claiming incompetence in the field of the study of religion and I am, therefore, not subject to the self-imposed conventions and restrictions of the field. So, admittedly, the following considerations come from ‘outside’ the discipline of religious studies, at least concerning the academic affiliation of the author. Having not been socialized in the academic field of the study of religion I cannot but claim the status of an external observer. Due to a lack of linguistic skills in non-European languages, I expect to remain that way. However, as a member of the Käte Hamburger Kolleg (KHK) ‘Dynamics in the History of Religions between Asia and Europe’ project from its very beginnings in the year 2008, this observer is (definitely) personally and (hopefully) intellectually engaged enough to dare to intervene in the ongoing discussion of the field in the hope of offering some clarity.
In the words of its founding director, Volkhard Krech, the KHK project “aim[ed] to contribute to a theory of religious transfer and thus to the historiography of a general and tendentially global history of religion; at the same time we also expect the results to produce new ideas for theories of general cultural transfer and comprehension-oriented hermeneutics.”2 As a major output of the work of the KHK, the series ‘Dynamics in the History of Religions’ (DHR) focuses on the crucial role of mutual encounters in the formation, development, and internal differentiation of religious traditions, assuming that the interconnections between self-perception and perception by the other, and of adaptation and demarcation are indispensable factors in the historical dynamics active in the religious field.
So far, the DHR series has mainly concentrated on the analysis and comparison of various case studies. As an addition, a volume dedicated to conceptualization is necessary to realize the aims of the series as originally designed. Situations of religious contact provide a stimulus to the development of basic religious notions and concepts in object language; accordingly, they should trigger the development of suitable concepts of scholarly metalanguage. Examining the emergence and formation of religious traditions via diachronic and synchronic cultural contact and discerning the interactions essential to the process of institutionalization and spread of religions requires a suitable analytic vocabulary that allows us to bridge and mediate scientific meta- discourse on religion and the self-descriptions that emerge from within religious traditions. Here, general concepts, such as the concept of religion3 itself, but also the conceptualization of processes such as attraction, contrast, stabilization, tradition, transcendence/transcending, space/spatial ordering, secrecy, and perhaps even sleep, provide systematic points of reference which allow for the integration of diachronically and synchronically heterogeneous material in a general history of religions. Not least, the role of language and linguistic model forms in situations of contact has to be scrutinized. Thus, the basic relation of contact and dynamics can be conceptually grasped and transformed into a theoretical model for the history of religions.
The present volume offers the reader a set of concepts deemed suitable for the analytical examination of religious phenomena and situations of religious contact. These are, on the one hand, derived abductively from an engagement that sought to unite hypothetical conceptualizations and empirical studies and the interplay between object language and metalanguage on the other hand. On this basis, some frequently used basic terms in the study of religions like ‘attraction’, ‘dynamics’, ‘tradition’, ‘transcendence’, ‘senses’, ‘secrets’, and ‘identity’ should be re-evaluated and re-defined for the contact-based general approach. The volume also intends to summarize selected guiding themes from the KHK ‘Dynamics in the History of Religions between Asia and Europe’ project. In accordance with the other permanent members of the KHK, I believe that the redefined general terms will prove useful for further research, thus allowing a future continuation of the KHK’s basic approach in the forthcoming study of religion.
1.2 Concepts
This book is titled ‘Key Concepts in the Study of Religions in Contact’. Harmless as it seems, the title can, nevertheless, be taken as an indication of the disturbing and almost unspeakable fact that the author of the following pages believes that concepts indeed are no mere tools of cultural imperialism,4 but rather, indispensable and useful items of a proper and adequate study or analysis of the phenomenon of religion and the history of religions.5 “Concepts,” as Jeppe Sinding Jensen pointedly put it, “enable us to see things, to talk about them, to make theories about them, even if the ‘things’ do not really exist.”6
Admittedly, within scholarship on religion, concepts are in a crisis. This is, however, not a reason to abolish concepts and conceptual work, but rather, it is a sign that concepts, as fallible instruments, genuinely belong to scientific work. I think it is about time to finally release the study of religion from the judgment that would have us expel all concepts, imposed on it by the well-justified rejection of the claim of one of the founding fathers of the field, Rudolf Otto, that the presence of concepts is a marker of the eminence and superiority of religions, or rather, a particular religion.7 As it seems, the study of religion as an academic field was for many good reasons discontent with the impact of philosophy upon the field and the performance resulting; however, this discontent somehow became mutual as philosophy had in turn very good reasons to be discontent with certain developments in religious studies, mainly with regard to its increasingly ‘notioclastic’ tendencies.8 The mutual discontent, often resulting in a mutual refusal to communicate, is the unsatisfactory result of recent developments in both fields. After all, Alfred N. Whitehead’s claim remains valid for both scholarship and religion alike: “Progress in truth—truth of science and truth of religion—is mainly a progress in the framing of concepts, in discarding artificial abstractions or partial metaphors, and in evolving notions which strike more deeply into the root of reality.”9 To stress the point: the discarding of artificial abstraction goes hand in hand with the effort to develop more suitable notions that ‘strike more deeply into the root of reality.’ Deconstruction is always to be supplemented by construction. The point is not to stop halfway. The consonance in function, thus, might be something to be kept in mind when approaching religion with the intention of scholarly understanding. Simply abandoning concepts means that scholarship has taken the easy way out.
In his stimulating theory of religion, titled Crossing and Dwelling, Thomas A. Tweed quotes Michel Serres: “When everyone around you is demonstrating that no one can walk, it’s a good time to get up and start running.”10 Though I do not agree with every aspect of Tweed’s theory, he definitely has a crucial point here.11 I would add that stumbling, even falling flat on one’s face in an attempt to run, is preferable to sitting securely or advocating a complete standstill as the only possible way of acting. This is all the truer for the use of concepts. There are many concepts around, and there are even a fair few theories of concepts, not least in philosophy.12 In the following, however, I am interested solely in a certain type of concept that plays a decisive role in academic scholarship of a certain field. The following lines, therefore, are not concerned with the philosophical question of how religion as such works. In order to discern the type of these concepts more precisely, I have employed the metaphoric term ‘key concepts’. Key concepts are those concepts that unlock access to certain perspectives that allow the drawing of a better picture of what is going on in a particular field. In our case, that is the study of the history of religions. Key concepts are, therefore, instrumental for a certain usage: the scientific or scholarly representation of the subject of the prevailing research. Scholarly representation consists of description and analysis, which together constitute the decisive elements of explanation. Explanation, therefore, is the scholarly representation of what is going on.
The key concepts discussed here are meant as conceptual offerings to those working in the field of religious studies to be used as heuristic tools. Thus, my considerations of the concepts, as well as the overall validity of the concepts themselves, await corroboration or rejection by my fellow scholars. In fact, to my mind, this is the very thing that any responsible philosophy of religion can do: to provide conceptual offerings, ideally developed in close collaboration with those working on the material of religious studies, and theoretical models based on those same concepts, to describe and to analyze religious phenomena. The following pages are, thus, suggestions to supplement the colloquial language of the academic field used to describe and analyze the area in question, namely religion. Attempts that go further, such as any scrutiny of the essence of religion, the truth-conditions of religious assertions, or the judgment of religious phenomena, are philosophical questions of metaphysics, logic, and ethics. They are issues that may claim a life of their own but are to be distinguished from the subject matter of religion itself.
Furthermore, the key concepts examined here are not the usual suspects brought forth in the context of the study of religion. Popular, not to mention important notions such as ritual, cult, the sacred and the profane, holiness, the secular and secularization, sacrifice, myth, and magic, all of which have found both acclaim and criticism within the academic field, are clearly absent from this work. A number of concepts appear in this book that seem outdated—or which have even been abolished within religious studies—notably ‘tradition’ and ‘transcendence’, both of which have been subject to a wide array of deconstructivist, culturalist and postcolonial critiques. I should be clear that I do not take the validity of such kinds of criticism for granted and rather claim for a balanced evaluation of the possible capacities of the prevailing concepts for the process of responsible scholarly work.
As a matter of fact, I do not claim that the concepts of attraction, dynamics and stability, tradition, the transcendence/immanence distinction, senses, secret, and space are the only key concepts of the study of religion—there are, in fact, others, some of which also played a role in the work of the KHK such as purity, media, gender, and so on.13 I also do not claim that the choice of concepts in this volume covers all important concepts for the study of religion, or even the most important ones. I do, nevertheless, claim that these concepts, under the correct (i.e. contact-related) perspective are indeed key concepts that are helpful in providing a more adequate picture of what is going on in the history of religions. However, my stance towards concepts in the field of religious studies is not entirely conservative. One should not keep just anything. There are concepts that are admittedly treated as key concepts, but which in fact rather distort the possibility of an adequate description and analysis of the history of religions. In particular, in these pages I do also claim that a very popular concept in political and scholarly discourse, that of ‘identity’, is not a helpful key concept of the study of religion in this sense; rather, it is not a scholarly concept at all. Critique of this concept is not new, yet despite many well-founded attempts to show the issues with this particular concept it remains with us still.
There is a certain arbitrary logic that has dictated the selection of the key concepts discussed here. First, they were concepts the colleagues and fellows of the KHK in the twelve years of its existence repeatedly discussed and, to a certain degree, then applied to the material in an abductive manner. Most of the concepts even had a ‘focus group’ dedicated to their examination, or served as an ‘overarching topic’ that framed and structured discussion across an academic year. All these concepts were considered to be most promising for a fruitful discussion, but, of course, without an exclusive claim as there are many others that deserved the same scrutiny. Second, the key concepts presented here were the ones I personally was involved with most, and it is not by chance that many of them also play a dominant role as basic concepts of philosophy, including dynamics and stability, space and the senses (Wahrnehmung). If the transcendence/immanence distinction might be equated to the relationship of subject and object (ontology), secrecy can be likewise linked to the problem of insight (Erkenntnis), and tradition to the problem of time. There are even more possibilities here to seek connections to philosophy to render the choice of concepts in this work more explicable. However, in doing so, it can also be demonstrated that the concepts raise fundamental problems in both disciplines, and that they are interrelated, as are time and space, insight and experience, and even being and becoming (Sein und Werden).
The sequence in which the key concepts are presented seems rather arbitrary as well. In fact, it follows for the first part the chronological sequence in which these concepts were explored by the KHK, meaning that the first concept that was discussed here (‘Attraction’) in a focus group of its own, is presented first, followed by the more general theme of ‘Dynamism and Stability’ to which a subsequent Focus Group was devoted to. There is, however, a systematic context that justified the decision to start with the concept of attraction and then proceed through the sequence of concepts that follow as I shall explore later in this introduction. Though the sequence might be too weak to properly be termed systematic, it is (at least hopefully) not without consequence, and will hopefully be apparent to readers as they make their way through this book.
In the following, let me give a short overview of the chapters with regard to the work of the KHK:
Attraction
The first chapter on attraction aims to answer a very important question posed by all kinds of people involved in matters of religion: that is, why does religion suck? Given the fact that philosophy is often seen as a remedy for the hardships of religion, the follow-up question of ‘what philosophy can do about it?’ has some justification stemming from the material itself.
Attraction is perhaps the most unexpected term selected for inclusion in our key concepts of the study of religion, although it played a crucial role in the discussions of the KHK in its early years. It is perhaps the most original notion and concept examined here and in the following pages. The KHK devoted not only a Focus Group to the subject of attraction, which lasted from 2009 to 2011, but also organized two conferences on the subject: Modes and Models of Religious Attraction (November 15–18th, 2010) and a successor event in 2011 titled Modes and Models of Religious Attraction. Part II: Knowledge and Action (July 25–28th). Attraction here, most importantly, was not understood as a psychological category, but rather as an aspect of the dynamic processes in the history of religions itself, leading to the auratization of religious phenomena that, as such, may display an agency of their own. The focus group ‘Attraction’ intended to identify attractors and cultural operators (in the sense of Lévi-Strauss) accounted responsible for processes of condensing of religious traditions (such as, for example, the phenomenon of secrets). Here, the dynamic constellation of an attractor seemed suitable to describe the contact of emerging religious traditions distinguishing centripetal and centrifugal dynamics.
Dynamics and Stability
The immediate successor to the focus group on ‘Attraction’ was the focus group on ‘Dynamics and Stability’ that existed in the years 2011 to 2013. Dynamics and stability, thus, is the subject of the second chapter. As the notion of dynamics is part of the overall title of the KHK project, the concept was considered to be a necessary object of further examination. Above all, the interrelatedness of dynamics and stability in religious attractors made ‘Dynamics and Stability’ an attractive object of further scrutiny that is both on the material side and regarding scholarly metalanguage. The focus group was devoted to the elaboration of a general concept of dynamics with reference to the results of other focus groups. On the one hand, it examined possible kinds of dynamics that may be found in the history of religions such as, for example, expansion, transfer, decline or intensification processes. On the other hand, the notion of dynamics itself was scrutinized with regard to its presuppositions and heuristic value for the examination of phenomena in the history of religions. Dynamics in the history of religions, in any case, is a complex phenomenon of diverse interacting dynamic processes and not reduced to phenomena of change. Therefore, the focus group also addressed intensifying and facilitating dynamics, as well as the interplay of dynamics and stability.
The discussions on the subject were aimed at self-understanding as well as allowing experimental suggestions for explorative purposes. They were, however, not entirely lacking discussion outside the KHK proper. Late in 2013, for example, the KHK conducted a workshop on the ‘Dynamics of Signs’, organized by Volkhard Krech and myself that was intended to scrutinize the applicability of Peircean semiotics for the explication of processes in the history of religions.
Tradition
After the basic working structure of the KHK was changed after 2014 for the sake of providing a more concentrated thematic cohesion, ‘Tradition’ was the first in a series of overarching topics that guided the work of the KHK over an academic year. Being one of the few uncontested terms in the study of religion (at least, in its relevance for the analysis of religious phenomena), the concept served as a starting point for comparative and structural analysis. Hence, from 2014–2015, tradition and tradition-building processes were examined to throw light on the specific dynamics of the emergence and condensation (Verdichtung) of religious traditions as stable and sustained networks. Traditions, thus, were examined as temporally recursive processes resulting in an authoritative texture of mediations, i.e., within a context of scriptural, practical and oral elements. Key questions focused on the metaphors, the contesting forms, the authority, and the paradoxes of tradition as well as the specific question concerning the particular relations of religion and tradition.
There have been a number of workshops dedicated to the subject of tradition as well as on salient elements of traditions that were highlighted in the work of the KHK.14 Here, the authority of scriptures in processes of traditions and the relation of tradition and innovation extracted from the previous discussion served as important foci of scrutiny.15
Transcendence/Immanence Distinction
The notion of transcendence had been subject of closer scrutiny in a discussion group since 2011 that mainly dealt with concepts. It was introduced in a workshop conducted by sinologist Heiner Roetz on Transcultural Perspectives on Immanence and Transcendence on July 8th, 2011. After having been the focus of a discussion group meeting irregularly in the years before, in the academic year 2016/2017 the KHK examined critically the distinction of immanence and transcendence (transcendence/immanence distinction: TID) as the guiding distinction for identifying the religious, regarding the validity of the distinction for both comparative research and the emergence of the religious field. Assuming that religion can be described as communication, the distinction between immanence and transcendence provides what can be termed a communicative code for the identification of religious communication. In order to provide a matrix across which comparison is possible16 and to be able to describe the emergence of religious communication, a three-level model of the distinction was introduced that allows the examination of religioid material as a possible expression of the transcendence-immanence distinction. The presentations and discussions focused in particular on the turning points of the model, at which a more semantized level of transcending is reached.
Several conceptions of transcendence were discussed in KHK workshops, including the June, 2017 workshops on ‘The inner self and transcendence’ (organized by Christian Frevel). The concluding September conference of the academic year 2016/2017, titled ‘The Transcendence/Immanence Distinction in the Study of Religious Contacts between Asia and Europe’, was devoted to a critical discussion and more detailed elaboration of the model as well as to its possible connections to current guiding themes in the study of religion.
Senses
As embodied representations and concretizations of ideas, notions, and concepts dealing with the absent, the senses proved to be a central element in the emergence and formation of religious traditions. The academic year 2015/2016 in the KHK was devoted to this spatially and temporally omnipresent theme in the history of religions. Senses and sense perceptions, if communicated as religions, provide an important mediator of religious experience. Moreover, the evaluation of the senses in religious traditions serves as an interreligious means of demarcation. The process of authorization of the senses becomes noticeably visible if a sense-related practice is challenged—as most often occurs in situations of religious contact. In ritual, the dimension of sensate experience is made visible, although its formalized action tends to distract from everyday sensate experience. Additionally, the sense-relatedness of ritual might serve as an important attractor being at work among contesting religious traditions. In the discussion groups of the year, a particular emphasis was laid on the phenomenon of smell and the olfactory sense.
The KHK conducted a number of workshops on the subject, starting in 2014 with an internal explorative Workshop ‘Religion and the Senses’ in May, and culminating in the 2016 September conference with the same title.
Secrets/Secrecy
The focus group ‘Secret’ (organized by Peter Wick)17 emerged in 2008 from the specific work of KHK-members on ancient mystery cults and was intended to explore the meaning of secrets in the history of religions from a both synchronic and diachronic perspective regarding, not least, the interrelationships of ‘secret’ and ‘official’ religion. It examined the role of secrets and corresponding ‘secretizing’ practices as an attractor of processes of condensing of religious traditions. The focus group organized several workshops, devoted to, respectively, the subjects of the content of religious secrets in antiquity (January 2009), the traditions of secret, secrecy and secretism in South and East Asia (‘Secrecy in Asian Religions’, June 2009), the role of the secret and esotericism in early modern West-European religiosity (‘Geheimnis in der Neuzeit’, September 2009), esotericism in modern times (19th and 20th century), on religious secrets in contact (December 2010), and, finally, a concluding workshop titled ‘Space of Secrecy—Secrets in Contact. Perspectives from the East and the West’ was conducted on January, 26th and 27th, 2012.
The focus group predominantly discussed the phenomenology of the secret in diverse religious traditions and the semantic aspect of secret in religious object language that is, in particular, the ways in which secrets are linguistically addressed. The manifest and possible function of the secret for religious traditions themselves and in situations of contact was examined with regard to semantic and communicative strategies, above all concerning the role of the secret as a context-related blank space that might be an interface of religious contact. A collected volume with case-studies on the subject of secrets in contact, published within the DHR series and edited by Anna Akasoy, Licia Di Giacinto, Georgios Halkias, and myself, is now in preparation (2025).
Space
Examining ‘space’ as a key concept of religion one could easily arrive at the conclusion that religions stops at nothing, or, to use the more pertinent German equivalent of this saying: Religion geht über Leichen. The concept of space, though it was neither the overall focus of an academic year nor had a focus group of its own, nevertheless, gained some prominence among the subjects discussed at the KHK.18 There were in fact several KHK events that were devoted to the examination of space as a key concept in the history of religions. In 2011, the Focus Group ‘Expansion’ devoted a Fellow Year to the subject of ‘Space and Religion’, culminating in the conference ‘Locating Religion: Contacts, Diversity and Translocality’ on February 8th–10th, 2012; there was also a reading group ‘Space and Diversity—Religions in the Mediterranean’ in 2011/2012. ‘Ancient Central Asian Networks’ were examined as a significant religious space in June 2014. In November, 2014, the internal workshop on ‘Space—the Development of Religious Centres and Strategies of Accommodation’ examined the manipulation of symbols as legitimization strategies of religious traditions. The notion, accordingly, is one of the generic concepts that should frame and guide the case studies examined in the journal Entangled Religions.
That space may be contested between religious traditions seems to be a truism. The case of Augustine, however, shows how space is ‘placed’ to gain religious significance or meaning in a situation of contact, dynamically linking the elements of the transcendence/immanence distinction in a directional or vectoral process.
Sleep
Perhaps to the relief of the reader confronted with the dominantly theoretical considerations of the previous chapters, the last chapter of this work is intended to provide a short case study in which the key concepts previously analyzed are applied to the material. Though sleep emerged as an implicitly important topic during some meetings of the KHK, the concept of sleep has not been an object of institutionalized scrutiny within the research world, save a single workshop devoted to the topic.19 However, I hope to present here an object language discussion of how the phenomenon of sleep might be described and analyzed as a site of contact between religious traditions. Perhaps counter-intuitively, sleep can in fact be shown to facilitate contact between traditions. Rather than giving a summarizing conclusion I would like to show the concepts ‘in action’, using them to provide a better picture of what is going on in selected religious material.
The KHK was an interdisciplinary and transpersonal enterprise founded on some generally shared common assumptions, notably the central importance of the ideas of contact and its associated processes in the study of the history of religions. There was, however, no preconceived systematic framework to be applied to the phenomena of the prevailing religious traditions, as this framework was intended to be elaborated abductively in the interplay of theory and material in the course of the discussion. The discussion, thus, was moved by a dynamic of its own and led to certain crystallizations on particular subjects thanks to the research interests of both fellows and permanent members. The sequence of key concepts presented here mirrors this process to a certain extent. I am, however, of the opinion that a systematic connection independent of the historical development of the KHK emerges from this sequence of concepts. Below, I provide a brief tentative characterization of these systematic connections.
Dealing with the first concept to be explored by the KHK, the chapter on attraction establishes an idea of the particular dynamics involved in the history of religions; the chapter on dynamism and stability introduces the concept of a particular bipolarity as connected to this process. The tradition chapter elaborates this bipolarity as a form of self-reference, while the chapter on the transcendence/immanence distinction, which introduces a basic coding for religious communication and a model for its processing, elaborates on the specific forms of processing involved in the process of religions. The chapter on the senses exemplifies the findings of the previous chapters in its exploration of the bipolar interrelationships of physical and mental processing within sensate religious experience. The concept of the secret and the idea of secrecy shows the contact-promoting potential of certain concepts at the object language level. The chapter on space, then, provides a case study on the dynamics of space ascribed with religious meaning, namely the bipolar processuality and directedness of such realms.
The validity of the systematic context, however, is secondary to the primary aim of this study, which is to provide conceptual tools for the study of religions. Just as I myself have taken eclectically from the theoretical reflections of others, the reader should not swallow the book whole, but rather is encouraged to draw on those parts that best fit with their own particular work as appropriate.
It goes almost without saying that the treatment of the key concepts given here is by no means exhaustive. As a matter of fact, every single concept of the eight examined here (and, of course, many more, such as for example the KHK concepts of purity,20 mission, and media)21 deserve at least a monograph, if not whole libraries of their own. As such, the chapters are mere starting points for further elaboration. This said, they do make claim to discussion of important, if not so far neglected, aspects of the concepts in question. Furthermore, they claim to be documents that record an ongoing discussion. That is, they speak to those aspects that emerged in the discussions of the KHK, guided by its overall approach.
Although it be against all one-sided dualistic approaches to spirit and matter—either the assertion of religion as something exclusively spiritual, or the current ‘material turn’ in scholarship of religions—this book demands that religion be explicated as a bipolar, dynamic relationship between conceptualizations and the material. This is because the subject of study itself, namely the religious traditions in question, employs this bipolar set of dynamics. In the study of religion, the chasm that has been torn between the material and the mental aspect of religious phenomena must be overcome, and likewise, we must cross those that divide its derivates, the material and the doctrinal, the practical and the theoretical, the lived and the intellectual. What is needed, is a unified explanation of religious phenomena that prevents either simply explaining the phenomena away or overestimating them to a point where we merely repeat religious self-explanations.
Some bipolar dynamics are also present in the choice of reference, on the one hand regarding theory and, on the other hand, regarding ‘material’ that is above all, object language expression of religious traditions themselves. I hope that there is some potential in their interrelation thus dynamizing the study of religion.
1.3 Remarks on Theory and Case Studies
The study of religion cannot do without concepts or a theoretical angle that allows for a tentative and provisional ordering of the material in question. The theoretical models I would like to introduce, or rather, to stress in their terms of their potential for the analysis of religion, are not exactly new, but still underestimated and underrepresented in religious studies. This is clearly the case for the ideas of Karl Popper and Alfred North Whitehead, although Niklas Luhmann is perhaps slightly better known. If asked directly I would—with a pinch of salt—claim to follow a simplified Whiteheadian approach to the study of the dynamics of the history of religions, supplemented by ideas of Popper and Luhmann.22 Admittedly, I treat these and other authors eclectically for the sake of modelling and theory-building and, accordingly, do not aim to produce an exegesis, let alone an exhaustive interpretation of the authors quoted or mentioned.
Let me spend a few words on the abovementioned authors as major sources of reference in elaborating on a suitable framework intended to give an adequate picture of what is going on in the dynamics in the history of religions. As usual, on the applicability of these authors, scholars disagree. This is at least very true for the first author I shall tackle here: “An Luhmann—das ist offensichtlich—scheiden sich die Geister.”23 On Luhmann, opinions differ. It comes as a relief, then, that the applicability of Niklas Luhmann’s ‘highly abstract and complex’ thinking to the study of religion has already convincingly been demonstrated, on the one hand by concrete application, and, on the other hand, by balanced refutations of critiques of his applicability, such as the well-known piece authored by Christoph Kleine.24 What is more, religion gains a prominent status in Luhmann’s thinking as religion is concerned with the very problem of communication, such as in the relation of the definite and the indefinite.25 The most important point, however, that will be addressed in my introductory remarks, is a careful distinction between levels of metalanguage discourse. Such distinction may prove partially suitable for adaption of Luhmannian theorems; partially not.
As supposedly outdated in the theory of science and apparently irrelevant to the academic field that is in question here, Karl Popper seems to be the most unlikely and least fashionable candidate for theoretical benefit in the study of religion.26 At least, of the three persons mentioned, he is undoubtedly the most approachable in the clarity of his language. It should not be forgotten, however, that the ultimate aim of Popper’s thinking was a certain social and cultural theory that takes insights on the acquisition and growth of human knowledge explicitly into account. There are, as a consequence, certain aspects to his thought, in particular with regard to the concepts of dynamics, attraction, tradition, and senses that, at least in my opinion, deserve some more attention.
The ever-careful scholars of religion may gain some confidence in Alfred North Whitehead by the fact that he, as his leading biographer puts it, “was definitely a friend of religion.”27 Thus, as a mathematician who later became a philosopher, he was nevertheless someone who took the phenomenon of religion seriously in theory as well as in personal conduct. As he himself noted, it has something to do with transcending one’s limitations.28 To Whitehead, religious experience was an undeniable fact, and, consequently, he wrote the book Religion in the Making in order to deal philosophically with it.29
Whitehead is often alluded to as a possible theoretical reference for the study of religion, most often, with regard to the notion of ‘process’ as a suitable concept to be employed in religious studies. However, his thinking is rarely drawn on more broadly, perhaps due to the forbidding appearance of his explicitly ‘speculative cosmology’. Admittedly, it is, to my mind, not Religion in the Making which is relevant to the present topic, but rather his cosmology as developed in his book Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929), which presents his Gifford Lectures delivered in 1927–8. This lectures series in general provides a fertile ground for basic considerations about religion: another famous example of these Gifford Lectures is F. Max Müller’s Natural Religion (1888) and William James’ pathbreaking Varieties of Religious Experience from 1901–02. Here, Whitehead commits himself to a philosophical task that is well fitted to the scientific study of religion (Religions-Wissenschaft) and comes as a relief to any philosopher depressed by the lack of applicability of his field of expertise. In his magnum opus Whitehead states: “Philosophy frees itself from the taint of ineffectiveness by its close relation with religion and with science, natural and sociological. It attains its chief importance by fusing the two, namely, religion and science, into one rational scheme of thought.”
Additionally, there are occasional references to the ideas of Georg Simmel, Charles S. Peirce, Edmund Husserl, Walter Benjamin, Jürgen Frese and Saul Kripke, among others, which I found helpful in the elaboration of a theoretical framework. Ultimately, in introducing all these authors I hope for a cross-fertilizing effect, concerning both the study of religion and the vast field of philosophical theorizing, all of which may be supplemented with concrete relevance. Among the many authors I found myself turning to who are closer to the field of religion proper than the abovementioned sociologists and philosophers, I would like to mention explicitly Jan Assmann, Stephen C. Berkwitz, Robert Ford Campany, Edward Slingerland, Jonathan Z. Smith, Guy G. Stroumsa, and, of course, Volkhard Krech, all of whom combine theoretical expertise with practical experience.
In order to make this study more readable and in an attempt to render it more valid for religious studies, I have tried to give some material examples for the ideas developed here. As some scholars hold that theories become antiquated, but case studies do not (Theorien veralten, Lokalstudien nicht30 ), the presence of some concrete examples can be justified beyond this study’s ambition to provide a theoretical supplement to the study of religion. Though I hope that they are able to support my point, the material examples given here are, in any case, also subject to Pascal Boyer’s reflections on ethnographic examples: namely, that the “examples given in support of various hypothesis must be treated in the same way as examples in all anthropological theories, i.e. as suggestive illustrations rather than definitive proofs.”31 To provide such cases, I have had to rely in most instances on the expertise of the authors quoted and the expertise of those who recommended these authors and the prevailing texts to me.32 In fact, these authors and texts are mostly those that played a role in the presentations and readings of the meetings of the KHK. Nevertheless, my inability to complement the theoretical considerations with original philological studies of my own, and particularly, from the non-European traditions, is a major drawback. I would like, however, to interpret it also as a living testament example to the fact that the study of religions cannot be undertaken successfully by an isolated scholar alone in the tower, but should rather be a matter of intense collaboration between scholars of diverse disciplines and areas of interest. Not least, to this end, should there be collaboration between those interested in theoretical reflections and those working with lived examples. To embroider upon Kant: conceptual work without empirical and philological grounding is empty and free-floating, while empirical and philological work without a conceptual framework is blind and solipsistic. The first of these twin propositions is commonly agreed upon; the second, sadly, is still too often neglected.
1.4 Contact
The notion of ‘contact’ is the most fundamental instrument and paradigm in the work of the KHK. Though object language (that is, the language of religious speakers) of past and present times might insist that there is only one true religion, from a scholarly perspective, and from the perspective of the KHK in particular, religion always appears at least in pairs. There is no religion until there is a second—There is no religion lest there are, in fact, two religions. Even a tradition that ‘invented’ the notion of religion and the concept to match it has done so as a result of a contact situation in which the notion and, perhaps, the concept proved to be a suitable tool to handle the situation of a challenging other. The presence of another ‘religion’ may come as an unpleasant surprise or as a well-established fact; in any case, contact is the birthplace of religion.33 To be more precise: there is no religion until there is a second one to make the claim for the title ‘religion’ a religiously meaningful enterprise—that to lay claim to the title ‘religion’ makes religious sense.
This, however, does not mean that there is no religion before religion; rather, it is the reason why it makes sense to denote something as ‘religion’ before the notion was ‘invented’. Due to the later appropriations of traditions or elements of traditions of earlier times made by religious traditions, on the object language level religions retrospectively constitute these claimed traditions as belonging to their particular religious tradition.34
This basic assertion has consequences for the history of religions as well. Though there are some dynamics interior to religion that contribute to change, the history of religions is not a closed-shop enterprise. Religions interrelate to their prevailing environments. The basic idea underpinning the KHK ‘Dynamics in the History of Religions between Asia and Europe’ was that religious traditions emerge, consolidate, spread, condense and decline via situations in which they come into contact with other religious traditions. The challenge of the other tradition triggers a process of self-reference that leads to an intensification of expression, which may have effects both external and external. In his article Religious Contact in Past and Present Times: Aspects of a Research Programme, Volkhard Krech put this point into its paradigmatic form: “Our guiding assumption consists of the claim that the formation, establishment, spread and further development of the major religious traditions (as well as other religious traditions) have been affected by mutual influences, as well as that the formal unity of the history of religions mainly consists of religious contacts, i.e. of mutual perceptions of religious traditions as religious entities that constitute regional religious fields and, in the long run, lead to a global religious field.”35
The possible forms of contact are multifold and cannot be reduced to an ideal (and, in fact, rather artificial) type in the sense of one proponent of religion A meeting another proponent of religion B at a certain time in a certain place. Rather, they may well occur among the same tradition, or across traditions. They may also well involve a number of religious traditions at the same time, and, indeed, this seems to be most normal. As a consequence, a religious contact is more likely to involve multiple actors following diverse agendas. This holds true not only with regards to the prevailing religious traditions, but also with regard to the diverse proponents of one tradition alone. It can be carried out by members of the religious hierarchy, by religious experts or by laymen, by members of a religious majority, or a minority. Situations of contact may in almost every case be described as asymmetrical. Here, one religious tradition observes one or more other traditions, in some cases, however, mutual observation of parties is discernible. Moreover, religious contacts do not exclusively and not even necessarily involve human beings. Concepts, notions, texts, articulated experiences, and even artificial objects used for religious purpose that is, mobile and even immobile objects (buildings, statues, ritual items, etc.) may get into a discernable contact as well. Contacts are neither temporally nor spatially restricted. As it may become clear from this rather incomplete list, possible participants of a contact may meet in small-scale interpersonal contact situations on one end of the scale, or they may meet during large-scale cultural transfers on the collective level on the other end. Accordingly, the situation of contact may well stretch temporally over long periods of time and unfold spatially in multiple locations, in a particular place, but also within a certain widespread space, for example, trading routes.
Situations of contact typically include both synchronic and diachronic elements, participants may observe the other by referring to previous experiences or traditional ideas. Religious contact situations are no autonomous events but, rather, can be triggered by events or developments from within the religious field, or be induced by outside forces, such as politics, warfare or economics (trade), or, ultimately in a combination of both. Last, but not least, religious contact may occur in face-to-face communication, but, as historical events, are more likely to be made tangible for researchers in textual or other media sources. As a result, situations of religious contact can have very different effects that may retrospectively influence the perception of the original scene of contact. Effects may, thus, range on a typological scale from the emergence of a new, symbiotic religious form to the total destruction of one religion through another.
In order to examine and analyze the ‘religious field’, the notion of contact, here, seems to be more promising and adequate to the phenomena than the somewhat vague ideas of ‘cultural flow’, cultural translation or unspecified ‘transfer processes’. Not least, it draws the scholar’s attention to concrete cases of contact. “Instead of speaking of transfer processes and cultural flows, it would appear to make more sense to see contact as a constitutive process in which cultural units in general and religious formations in particular form.”36 The interconnected processes of adaption and demarcation, self-perception and perception by others are considered to be important factors in the historical dynamics of the religious field.37
The value of this notion of contact for research can be questioned by highlighting the fact that the idea of two (or more) ‘sides’ or participants in a situation of contact may be problematic, as it seems to suggest that distinct, unified entities are meeting. The dynamics that emerge from the contact of such entities might suggest the impact model that explains contacts of billiard balls.38 Thus, the notion of a ‘contact of religions’ may lead to an unsuitable reification of ‘religions’ in question. Of course, any contact is, at first, not a contact of entities such as ‘religions’ (that are, in any case, too internally diverse to justify the postulation of such an entity). Religious contact as a communicative event is not the result of two religious entities contacting. Rather, it is the other way around namely, that two or more religious ‘entities’ are the result of religious contact as a communicative event. Here, religious contact produces their prevailing unity and represents it.39 Rather than contact between ‘religions’, it is a contact between individual religious acteurs, themselves the products of manifold influences and, in most cases, not representative for any proposed entity like a religious tradition. Moreover, in some areas, it might even be assumed that religious traditions are and were in constant contact, thus rendering the occasion of a contact situation difficult to determine as a clearly discernable event.40
The claim to abolish the notion and the concept of contact is, however, premature. The theoretical difficulties with the idea of contact arise mainly on the level of scholarly explanation. If there is constant contact and nothing but flow, how do scholars get to their subjects to examine? However, on object language level, as humans are beings who make differences (Georg Simmel), the opposing other might be described in that way: as a representative and as a consistent entity. On object language level, such unified entities do indeed meet, at least in the pars pro toto form of a or several individuals being referred to as representatives of this entity; the form of the other being a particular strategy of handling the situation by employing difference that introduces both discernable parts of the contact. This is mirrored in object language reflection on the situation of contact. Medieval religious dialogues such as Gilbert Crispin’s two works titled Disputatio employ an Iudaeus, a Gentilis and, of course, a Christianus. It is within the prevailing contact situation, within the contact of concrete individualities, that one might talk about ‘religions’ meeting, even in the sense of clearly distinguishable, homogenous entities meeting, and this is because the participants themselves, blurred and heterogenous as they may be, conceptualize others and themselves that way. The study of religions, thus, may address, or talk about religions in the manner of talking about persons because the religious themselves in situations of contact have done so.41 Contact precedes metalanguage.42 In his article Der Buddha als Avatāra, Oliver Freiberger likewise comes to the conclusion that the study of religion has to leave the differentiation of religions to the religious themselves, or rather, may leave the distinguishing action to the material. It is right at the point when religious actors demarcate themselves from others that the study of religion can identify one religion as a distinct socio-cultural formation.43
Situations of contact in the vast majority of cases, either explicitly or implicitly, are characterized by asymmetry. Due to the fact of the sources the study of religion must rely on, cases in which all the ‘participants’ in a situation of contact are given a voice of their own are very scarce, if there are such cases at all. There are no neutral sources.44 Furthermore, the categorization and demarcation processes in situations of contact may be extremely dynamic, mediated by the situation-dependent interests of the participants. However, the very fact that a source from a religious tradition can deal with a situation of contact shows that the prevailing tradition is being influenced by a contact-related challenge and forced to act correspondingly. It is at these points that contact-based research on the history of religions as to their emergence, formation and condensation can start. It is by repeated contact that characteristics ascribed to others and oneself can solidify and serve as an object language tool for categorization. Vital means for the development and persistence of religious doctrine (i.e. manifest self-reflection) can be generically related to situations of contact. Intra- and intercultural conflict can be described as the major trigger of the emergence of the idea of the canon, as well as for its formation.45
It should be stressed that the notion of contact does by no means insinuate a clash or a conflict between religions. Of course, there are agonal forms of contact, and one could well make a case that, given the asymmetric nature of sources, there is always some violence involved in object language contemplating or emerging from situations of contact. However, these cases, such as occasions of translation do not necessarily have to be interpreted as clashes.46 After all, to modify Ann Taves’ metaphor, they are also ready bridges that permit scholarly trespassing where a perfect bridge is not or cannot be available.47 The fact that the idea of a contact-based approach to the history of religions is not exactly new and that some very dubious intellectual figures indeed such as Paul de Lagarde some 150 years ago already hinted at the salient importance of encounter and interrelation of religions for the analysis of religion and the history of religions alike (“In history, we only find the contact of religions, but never the religions themselves.”48 ) should not distract from the value of the contact approach itself.49
I would like to continue these introductory lines with some remarks on basic features of language and method that I found increasingly relevant in the course of the work of the KHK, and with regard to my proceeding acquaintance with the discussions within the academic field of the study of religion. It should be noted that in these considerations, I shall not hold back from my personal conviction that certain currents in the study of religion have proved to be counterproductive. I find them even guilty of the worst crime possible in scholarly and scientific ethos: that is, in the words of Charles Sanders Peirce, guilty of having blocked the way of inquiry.50 Admittedly, the following chapter perhaps seems to demonize certain aspects of current scholarship, but I hope it shall serve to clarify the point and sensitize the reader to the basic problem as I perceive it.
2 The Andy-Warhol-Syndrome (AWS) in Postcolonial Religious Studies
Ich glaube, und das ist tiefster Glaube, daß nur in einer fürchterlichen Übersteigerung der Fremdheit, erst wenn sie sozusagen in Unendliche geführt ist, sie in ihr Gegenteil, in die absolute Erkenntnis umschlagen und das erblühen kann, was als unerreichbares Ziel der Liebe vor ihr herschwebt und doch sie ausmacht: das Mysterium der Einheit.51
hermann broch, Die Schlafwandler
As the title of the source of the above quotation suggests, the attitude described here is that of a sleepwalker: the idea that enhancing the strangeness of a phenomenon would at some point suddenly produce an immediate insight guided by an insurmountable mystery, revealing a unity that, in turn, induces a sympathetic feeling, or rather, love. Furthermore, this process is considered to be inaugurated by an attitude of love towards the phenomenon in question that is, the longing to unite with the phenomenon in a mystical wedding wherein all is unified.
2.1 Reenacting Andy Warhol
Aiming at a mystical union via the enhancement of strangeness is, in a nutshell, what I call the Andy Warhol Syndrome (AWS). Contemporary study of religion, both as research and as teaching, is permeated and often distorted by the AWS. Explicit references to the AWS are made in almost any discussion of scholarly presentations on methodology or in the subject matter of material-based area studies in the Humanities. It puts any scholarly efforts designed to produce understanding of other cultures into a dubious light, questioning the basic motives of their work. Thus, the very possibility of scientific work in the diverse fields of the Humanities is questioned; instead critiques aim at an exposure of political motives—although the hapless scholar himself might not be aware of them. Though not known by that name, the AWS is yet another expression of the ‘fear of knowledge’ within the contemporary Humanities as lucidly analyzed by Paul Boghossian,52 —a fear that becomes a public outcry in the literal meaning. This outcry, demanded by many as the ultimate manifestation of academic nature, is a significant expression of the AWS.
To explain the AWS, I have to refer to a personal experience of mine. In the early nineties, I had the opportunity to hear Arthur C. Danto giving a guest lecture at the department for Philosophy at the University of Bielefeld in Germany. Danto, an eminent analytic philosopher and art critic, combined his two capacities in his lecture by contemplating the role of humor in philosophy and the possible contribution of Andy Warhol to it, exploring that famous American Icon, the Brillo Boxes, in some detail. The title of the talk was Andy Philosophicus. While elaborating on Warhol’s concepts Danto described how Warhol reacted to works of art by other artists in an aside. When confronted with a piece of art and asked what he thought about it, Warhol would, according to Danto, simply open his arms and say ‘Wow! ’. Such a reaction is both startling and unsatisfying (and, to a certain extent, funny)—though it might have been very much to the satisfaction of the artist in question.
To my understanding, Warhol’s exclamation, a meaningful outcry at once laconic and expressive, bears considerable methodological significance— precisely thanks to its lack of content and its oversaturation with emphasis. In his book on Andy Warhol, Danto states that the Brillo Boxes helped him to solve an old problem, namely how to define art and why it is a philosophical problem.53 In the same manner, the Andy Warhol Syndrome—that is, the disposition manifested in his acknowledgement of work through employment of an otherwise empty word: ‘Wow!’—helped me to define what the actual study of religion should not look like, and what philosophy should do to prevent it.
Though I admit that I might have remembered Danto’s talk incorrectly, the anecdote has since seemed to me a comparatively precise description of the scientifically and politically correct attitude of a ‘Western’ researcher if confronted with non-‘Western’ cultural material,—if one was to follow the verdicts and prescriptions of postcolonial, culturalist and deconstructivist theorists.54 Here, nothing is valid but to ‘wow’. Haunted by the ever-present threat of inflicting cultural imperialism on their helpless research subjects, researchers thus destroy every genuine ‘authentic’ approach to the material. Scholars, ever wrecked by their guilt have to refrain from using notions, concepts, theories, ideas, viewpoints, mentalities, methods and languages of ‘Western’ origin to identify or to describe, let alone to analyze their subjects of study.55 This idea, however, is not entirely deconstructive, as there is one positive element on which scholarship is supposedly to be re-founded and rebuilt.56 Namely, scholars should express their acknowledgement of the Eigenwürde, the recognition of the unique dignity of their prevailing subject.57 In order to achieve this, a therapeutic strategy must be employed to cure both the injuries of the subjects studied and the bad attitudes and associated guilt of the ‘Western’ scholar.58 The only possible thing left to do is then the simple indication of the material in question through careful paraphrase, or, even better, by emphatically pointing at it, followed by a non-prejudicing pure acknowledgement of the ‘non-Western’ material which recognizes its dignity. In a word: Wow!
2.2 Effects of the AWS
To some people, however, though they might appreciate the basic attitude of the speaker, this self-induced aphasia—that is, the loss of metalanguage in the sense of Roman Jakobson—may be a slightly disappointing result of the work of scholars who are, in many cases, paid from public resources. In his critical discussion of William James’ approach to religious experience, Charles Taylor raised the obvious objection to such a conclusion produced by scholarly study of religion: “Many people are not satisfied with a momentary sense of wow! They want to take it further and they are looking for ways of doing so.”59 This is not least true for individuals interested in any kind of insight, and the ways to achieve such insight best, questionable as the insight may be.
Studying the writings of the diverse culturalist, postcolonialist, deconstructivist and ‘critical religionist’ promotors of AWS one cannot refrain from the impression that ‘Western’ scholarship has undertaken a penance analogous to the punishment of the builders of the Tower of Babel. Mutual incomprehension is the punishment for those who for reasons of arrogance and hubris claimed God-likeness in the field of language and insight in their promotion of an universal approach. Now they cannot understand even the smallest religious community outside the ‘western’ sphere, and this ‘fact’ is constantly kept in public attention by means of unrestrained redundancy. How dare you think differently, then? Contemporary theorists of religion have put great effort into ‘unmasking’ the imperialist philosophical and theological claims that lurk beneath the surface of carelessly employed ‘Western’ notions and ideas on other cultures.60 As for the issue of unmasking, this is no one-way street.61 Playing devil’s advocate I note that this attitude of pure astonished receptiveness, of unprejudiced recognition, itself has strong roots in ‘Western’ theological tradition as well. For example in the consideration of God’s actions as descending vertically from above (senkrecht von oben) as in Barthian Dialectic Theology, or in being simply overwhelmed by the numinous as described by Rudolf Otto,62 or in the glory and incommensurability of the non-aliud (‘the not-even-other’) of the Cardinal Nicolas of Cusa—or on the focus on experiences of individual men in their solitude as explored by the previously mentioned William James in his The Varieties of Religious Experience. Thus, the eager application of AWS becomes a vicious cycle. By employing AWS, the careful student of non-Western material might, therefore, be introducing the very same situation his exclamation is intended to prevent. Indeed, as sinologist and scholar of religion Edward Slingerland has fittingly put it, the Humanities have herein been witness to a new kind of Orientalism proposed by some of their most influential scholars that “has certainly taken older forms of Orientalism to new levels of verbal absurdity.”63
What is more, the current “ethos of difference,” as Francisca Cha and Richard King Squier in a masterly article have pointed out, “imprisons cultures into impermeable skins,” rendering them incomparable and as such, monolithic and static.64 It further fragments reality into windowless, atomistic monads. Observations that hint toward anything contrary to this view are treated as a threat and are denounced as morally flawed. Consequently, science and scholarship are turned into ideology. It is well known that ideology trumps facts, preferably by the introduction of alternative facts (‘other facts’ as facts about the insurmountably radical ‘Other’). It is precisely this ideology that engaged scholars such as Edward Said took firm issue against: “Far from being unitary or monolithic or autonomous things, cultures actually assume more ‘foreign’ elements, alterities, differences, than they consciously exclude.”65 This is, however, a truism that has to be brought back into the discussion, as the exaggeration of the ‘otherness’66 of non-‘Western’ non-European cultures has given rise to a new and politically well-defended cultural essentialism that is blatantly juxtaposed with the idealistic aims of its academic protagonists forcing them into a performative self-contradiction that is pitiful to witness. As Slingerland put it: “One of the odd features of the modern Academy is the fact that while the negative side of such cultural essentialism has been singled out and rejected as pernicious Orientalism, its normatively positive manifestation has continued to flourish.”67 As Slingerland has also stressed the tendency to lay great emphasis on cultural plurality, diversity and differentiation within non-Western cultures that are then portrayed as greatly endangered by notions of ‘the West’ is similarly self-contradictory—thereby assuming that, somehow Western culture is monolithic and unified in patterns of thinking and conceptual matters.68 The definite Western notion or concept of X does not exist, not within a certain era, not within a certain school, and one might even go so far as to claim: not within a single individual. Anyone concerned with the history of philosophy will vouch for the truth of this. To use Slingerland’s example, the idea that the ‘Western’ attitude to the mind and body-problem is always Cartesian is an assumption that has itself led to a vast quantity of improper generalization.69 Scholars in religious studies who employ this idea are guilty of precisely the same hubris as philosophers, implicitly holding the self-same idea that it is basically the philosophical elite that determines the way people think or ought to think.
As is well known from the history of religions, hubris is the deadliest of all deadly sins. Accordingly, the contemporary study of religion has taken strong measures against this archenemy of scholarly conduct and insight. No other scientific discipline can contest with religious studies in its scrupulousness about its own subject, wherein its scholars are permanently questioning the field, its scholarly basis. For sure, religious studies is the most dangerous area for ‘religion’. In my first encounters with the discipline in an academic environment I was astonished to witness doctoral students of religious studies, while presenting their theses, habitually apologizing for what they were doing and denying that the title of the discipline, ‘religion’, could possibly be applied to their material—as they were examining mostly non-West-European religious traditions. Now, there is no doubt that a certain humbleness does suit everyone well, and above all the scholar. Humbleness, however, does not consist of making oneself invulnerable to critique by employing over-careful notions and ideas—rather, it consists of allowing oneself to be criticized. Admittedly, one could interpret the self-denial of the young scholars as a sign of the need for a strong self-reflection along the lines of that suggested by Kippenberg and von Stuckrad in their introduction to religious studies. Religious studies, thus, become both scientific discipline and scientific meta-discipline at the same time.70 Fair enough. But there is also sufficient justification to describe it as a symptom and as a sign that something is going wrong in the field. Here, the demagogical argumentum ad baculum returns with a vengeance: one should not use concepts as in doing so, scholarship is thus inherently Eurocentric and thus a severe threat to the study of religion.71 In many cases, meta-communication on the study of religion is taken for research while the possible subject of research gets lost in self-centered discussions of the academics.72 The hyper-criticism of religious studies, within and outside the discipline itself easily morphs into hypocritical attitudes and behavior.73
In its exaggerated form, even the most contemporary ‘turn’ (the increasingly fast waltz of ‘turns’ in academia does not only make the turners giddy) in scholarship away from the study of what is called doctrine, theology or, more general, text, may be considered as a significant form of Andy Warhol Syndrome in the study of religion. To examine material, objects, bodies, senses, or experiences without reference to categorizing criteria derived from some text-based ‘doctrine’ seems to me a completely misguided, and, what is worse, misleading enterprise. Apart from the fact that scholars have to textualize their findings, they also have to textualize their observations. Of course, the categories, ascriptions and criteria used here should ideally come from the religious tradition in question itself, and not from the scholarly desk alone. But simply trying to do without any is an overtaxing and an abuse of phenomenology. Moreover, as Karl-Heinz Kohl has fittingly pointed out, scholarship mirrors society: the scholarly overtaxing of material objects may well be described as a characteristic trait of modern Western culture. Here, as in no other cultural sphere, material objects play a paramount role.74
For many reasons, scholars of area studies might develop a strong sense of protectiveness of their often endangered field of study, not at last from economic considerations regarding what should be taught at universities and what should not. There are contemporary crypto-religions that could be gravely endangered by scholars who reveal details of their practices, ideas, main concepts and persons. Generalizing the results of scholarship could lead to the abuse of such scholarship for political ends (and the ends of hegemonic religious traditions connected to politics) to produce homogenous political and religious bodies and landscapes, outlawing the deviant and the dissenting. There are small traditions that are in danger of being subsumed into the greater ones, thus losing their characteristic features. And finally, there are the philosophers of religion who tend to overlook the important differences in pursuit of a general theory of religion.
Without any doubt, these are sufficient reasons for great care towards the objects of scholarly study. To protect them from misunderstandings, however, is definitely not among these reasons.75 To deny the validity of any preliminary understanding (i.e. knowledge and understanding that can be subsequently improved upon by trial and error) and to chase the ideal of arriving at the truth totally, exhaustively, and at once, is a serious misunderstanding of the way understanding works. Additionally, it is a misunderstanding of science and the process of research. On the other hand, those who are over-anxious about their material and seek to protect it from any confrontation with near-religious zeal, however, simply act as if they do not have any confidence in the material they seek to protect. Consequently, they act in a fashion that becomes even more paternalistic and imperialistic than that of their supposed opponents.76 Othering is an imperialistic device, whether it be in the form of establishing a ‘negative’ or ‘positive’ other of one’s own. It is even more this when it arrives in the form of trying to define another culture or religion as the incommensurable, absolute ‘other’: here othering even becomes a divinatory act.77 A reminder from February 19, 1870, is thus still important today when it comes to the study of religion: “But true reverence does not consist in declaring a subject, because it is dear to us, to be unfit for free and honest inquiry: far from it! True reverence is shown in treating every subject, however sacred, however dear to us, with perfect confidence […].”78
That ‘Western’ conceptualization may fail to grasp non-Western material might be true to a certain extent. This is, nevertheless, no sufficient reason why such concepts should not be applied to the material in the process of research. In any case, it is only the tension between ways of conceptualization that is to be stated. The conclusion that is often drawn from the fact of this tension, however, namely that any Western conceptualization must be abandoned—is clearly overdone and misleading, not least with regard to the aim of promoting understanding of a ‘non-Western’ tradition. To overdo the ‘culturalistic turn’ means to face aporiae that counteract its original aim.79 With regard to China and Confucianism in particular, however, Heiner Roetz has repeatedly shown that it is no less paternalizing, blinkered and prejudiced to deny that Eastern traditions have developed an universalist humanism and ethics80 as it is to supposedly imperialistically ‘impose’ a ‘Western’ ideology on them.81 To Roetz, the post-colonial ideology of ‘aggressive particularism of civilizations’, claiming for the incommensurability of cultural traditions against ‘Western’ ideas for the sake of a ‘culturalistic identity-management’82 is a political, intellectual, and scientific dead end.83 It does not enhance, but rather reduce the complexity of cultures, and especially the complexity and plentitude of the prevailing cultures in question. It is, above all, a voluntary and aggressively claimed institutionalization of a declaration of bankruptcy concerning the very possibility of understanding other cultures, and not least, of promoting mutual understanding between them.
Cho and Squier, in opposing the fragmentation of knowledge and the new kind of ethnocentrism, have lucidly described the still growing “ethos of particularism in which the increasing data of religions are treated like atomistic and self-sufficient units of knowledge.”84 The following solipsism, imposing an atomistic worldview in the guise of respect for others,85 corresponds to a scholarly particularism and free-floating specialization that cannot but undermine the foundations of interdisciplinary work which is, at the same time, precisely what scholars in contemporary academia are urged to do.86 But it is not only the generation of knowledge that is questioned in the ethos of particularism. Such studies tend to generate cultural ghettos that are, as Zhang Longxi put it “[…] closed and of little interest to outsiders in the academic environment.”87 And, to take this point even further: the self-sufficient knowledge derived from supposedly atomistic and self-sufficient entities provide for the self-sufficient scholar—and that not at last in terms of monetary maintenance. A self-proclaimed irrelevant scholarship is quite obviously not a good investment for the general public.88
Moreover, the assertion that we must interpret cultures solely on their own terms suffers from its rigidity, claiming that understanding, always and in any case, has to be full and complete understanding. This, however, is nothing but a chimera of scholarship that ultimately ends up serving as a regulative idea for research, but is not to be taken too seriously. The “conservative interest in totality,” as Jonathan Z. Smith pointed out, is yet another incidence of scholarly preoccupation with the paraphrase as a supposedly adequate approach to the material of religious studies. This, too, stands opposed to any attempt to translate it into metalanguage: “Whether of a conceptual or a natural language, whether intercultural or intracultural, translation can never be fully adequate, it can never be total. There is always a discrepancy. If there is not, then one is not translating but rather speaking the other language. One cannot escape the suspicion that it is precisely this latter possibility (speaking the other language) that defines the goal of many students of religion.”89 Scholars and human beings alike cannot but interpret radically90 (tentatively, provisionally), above all, to interpret things unknown to them in a radical manner that is, by presupposing some kind of rationality in the other’s actions.91 Of course, this has to be a rationality that conforms to the standards of one’s own tradition. Accordingly, it is more promising to examine the (scholarly) productivity of misunderstandings.92 Above all, such attempts that do not aim for totality give room for trial and error. What is more, they even deliberately corrigible: “This necessary incompleteness of translation means […] that it is corrigible.”93
The preservative stance towards the prevailing object of one’s study is conservative in the word’s worst meaning, in that it denies dynamics and progress for the sake of the defense of a monolithic unchangeable entity. This position may perhaps consider itself progressive, but in doing so, it neglects the fact of dynamic change and the facts of the interrelatedness of cultural phenomena. To counter these challenges, progressive scholars become the policemen of what is written on their subject, laying down doctrine and deciding with almost divinatory power where the acceptable limits of academic discourse lie—a process of ‘condensation’ that is familiar from the history of religions examined from a contact-related perspective. Dogma emerges in the face of challenge; self-immunizing strategies arise, become popular and are enthusiastically celebrated when traditions are confronted with critique, or rather, with the presence of another model or (model form) of hermeneutics and interpretation. In his book Apopathic Paths from Europe to China, William Franke describes this process of dogmatization with regard to current discussions in sinology as follows: “For Hall and Ames, Chinese culture can be understood only ‘on its own terms,’ and thus in a manner preserving its distinctiveness and integrity. Unfortunately, this position can become dogmatic. After all, what terms can ever be simply and purely ‘one’s own’? All have their remote as well as proximate provenances and are never purely autochthonous. Moreover, the qualities in question cannot be apprehended absolutely and in themselves but only through relation and interaction with other cultures. Cultures and their distinctive characteristics are revealed only through mutual contrast and resistance. The aim of respecting differences is laudable and necessary in order to make comparative philosophy viable, and yet it is also impossible strictly to achieve.”94
2.3 Beyond Andy Warhol Syndrome
It is better to construct rough and ready bridges than to wait for the construction of a perfect bridge that will stand for all time.
ann taves95
“Science wants no partisans.”96 Differences only make sense in a comparative context; they do not make sense in a context defined solely by pure acknowledgment and appreciation. The Andy Warhol Syndrome is an obvious manifestation of the fact that in these times of cultural relativism, postcolonialism and deconstructivism the “once curative has become the illness.”97 This illness, moreover, has been exceedingly institutionalized by the moral zeal of the current academic atmosphere. The study of religion, thus, has to leave its present disciplinary comfort zone and abstract itself from the political correctness provided by culturalism, postcolonialism and deconstructivism where the mere utterance of Wow! might suffice for a scholarly statement or even a scientific discovery.
Guy Stroumsa reminds us of a pragmatic truth that should be brought back to general attention: “The challenge is how to dissolve false categories without giving up on the grand ambition to find laws; that is, to retain the principle of unity beyond diversity—and what else is science, what else is scholarship?”98 Reaching unity via absolute alienation is, however, not the way to go but, in fact, scholarly sleepwalking.99
The most notorious concept in the study of religion is that of religion itself, but this concept could provide a way forward. Above all, one should remind Jonathan Z. Smith’s clarification of James Leuba’s often-quoted line concerning the definitions of ‘religion’. In his article Religion, Religions, Religious Smith writes: “It was once a tactic of students of religion to cite the appendix of James H. Leuba’s Psychological Study of Religion (1912), which lists more than fifty definitions of religion, to demonstrate that ‘the effort clearly to define religion in short compass is a hopeless task.’ Not at all! The moral of Leuba is not that religion cannot be defined, but that it can be defined, with greater or lesser success, in more than in fifty ways.”100 Hence, it is not about the question of what are the prevailing reasons to give a prevailing definition, and thus, to be stuck in metacommunicative musings Smith is concerned with.101 Rather, Smith’s intervention is merely a simple observation. Namely: the attempt to define has been clearly fertile, given so many results. To continue: ‘religion’ as a term provides more than fifty starting points for examination and evaluation concerning the ‘greater and lesser success’ of each notion, all adding up to a base of more or less scientifically defendable mutually contrasting assumptions about religion.
The possibilities of continuation multiply and restrict further research at the same time, if one adds the corresponding phenomena on object language level. It is true that the notion of religion was created by scholars for their intellectual purposes and, therefore, it is theirs to define. However, it is also true that it is created and defined on object language level by object language speakers trying to develop appropriate, and perhaps contact-induced metalanguage. Thus, the process of notion-building is a shared strategy on object language and metalanguage levels, and scholarly research could take these occasions as a point of departure. It is better to manufacture religion than to be industrious about abolishing the notion from scholarly discourse.
To prevent Andy Warhol Syndrome from further developing into an obstacle to scholarly research, there are certain measures that may be taken. Scholarly progress depends on the scholarly ability to provide more suitable and adequate concepts, i.e. to evolve notions that strike more deeply into the root of reality (A.N. Whitehead). Accordingly, the main issue is not about trying to make concepts more fluid, fuzzy and provisional, but rather the opposite, to sharpen and to enforce their ‘Westerness’, their distinctness, or: distinctive potential in order to start a truly productive dialogue with the material.102 The appropriate approach is not to blur distinctions, but rather to move from more abstract distinction to more concrete distinctions in which the abstract distinction is an element. By doing so, metalanguage becomes ever more refined and differentiated. Above all, it is these notions that religious traditions themselves use and apply in situations of contact which can be used as a starting point for scholarly metalanguage.103
Moreover, such a notion can claim for further epistemic advantages. It is often claimed that certain concepts, such as religion, have to be as fuzzy as possible in supposed accordance with Wittgenstein’s ‘concepts with blurred edges’ (Begriffe mit verschwommenen Rändern) in order to cover the whole panorama of possible meanings of certain generalizing notions.104 These ‘soft’ concepts would, then, manifest a careful approach to the phenomena. The real point of Wittgensteinian blurred edges, however, is not to cover all possible meanings of all possible cases, but rather to allow for concrete examples of the notion in question that, in turn, allow for distinct meaning.105 To have such an example inaugurates a process of inquiry leading to distinct knowledge.106 First of all, being able to give material-based discursive reasons for not applying certain well-defined concepts and models to one’s subject of study does in fact serve scholarship by directing the field toward a better understanding and a more adequate picture of what is going on. These reasons, in turn, can be used for the development of adapted concepts that might again be confirmed or reasonably refuted, and so on and so forth. Thomas Tweed put it this way: “The term religion has not failed us when we decide it obscures some features we want to highlight. It has directed our attention to practices that we might otherwise have missed. It has prompted further conversation, more contestation. It has done its work. We know something we did not know.”107
Thus, it becomes obvious that, furthermore, more reflection on the possible role of notions and concepts in scholarly research is sorely in need.108 In scholarship, the question “How to do things with words?” or rather, “How do words do things?” remains of surpassing moment. Not least to preempt further futile discussion on the adaptability and applicability of notions and concepts, a topology of notions may prove to be necessary and useful for further work.109
Moreover, as object language examples of contact situations show, one should not underestimate the potential of creative misunderstandings to ultimately engender intercultural understanding.110 What to a more sophisticated time may retrospectively appear to be a clumsy encounter or mistaken blunder might, in the long run, yet still provide the inevitable basis that future sophistication develops from with regard to the examination of religious traditions. Introducing their examination of Picart’s and Bernard’s voluminous work Céremonies et coutumes religieuses de tous les peoples de monde (1723–1737), Hunt, Jacob and Mijnhard note: “Religious Ceremonies of the World marked a major turning point in European attitudes towards religious belief and hence the sacred. It sowed the radical idea that religions could be compared on equal terms, and therefore that all religions were equally worthy of respect—and criticism.”111 Accordingly, in these early attempts that are the nemesis of the orientalist and postcolonial mind, there can still be dynamics present that trend towards a better understanding, which should not be obscured entirely by the focus solely on the problematic aspects of such encounters. As Stroumsa reminds us: “As Edward Said has shown in his book Orientalism, the birth of orientalism in France and England, for instance, is certainly related to imperialist designs and attitudes. But this is true only to a certain extent. What Said did not see, and what too many forget or fail to remark, is that for scholars to invest so much energy throughout their lives in the study of difficult languages, abstruse mythologies, and odd literatures, they must be inspired by intense intellectual curiosity. Such intellectual curiosity goes a long way toward transforming traditional perceptions and patterns of thought. Crossing all traditional boundaries—ethnic, cultural, religious, or ideological—intellectual curiosity provides a necessary condition for the blooming of ‘la science pour la science.’”112
Ultimately, it is vital to refrain from habits of political branding with regard to the introduction and usage of certain notions. For instance, it is clearly not enough to use the notion of dynamics in the study of religion as a mere surface indicator of ‘good’ science. That is, by emphatically referring to such, an author proves that he is on the politically correct side of theory-building, standing out against static, essentialist and, therefore, ‘orientalistic’ forms of theorizing ‘over the heads of the phenomena’. Concepts have to be used more carefully than merely claiming to belong to the light side of scholarship. The question of language is, therefore crucial for responsible research on the history of religions.
3 On Language
In the year 2011, Břetislav Horyna, professor of philosophy at the University of Brno, published a provocative intervention in the study of religion, titled Kritik der religionswissenschaftlichen Vernunft (‘Critique of Reason in Religious Studies’).113 According to him, the current study of religion severely lacks an adequate theory and methodology. This is all the more disturbing to Horyna, because there is immense pressure upon religious studies from the public sphere, which looks to religious studies for answers to questions such as how to deal with the ‘clash of civilizations’ or how to construct the dialogue between religious traditions. One of the biggest obstacles to such a theory is the problem of underdevelopment in a certain field, which he characterizes as follows:
The major problems of the study of religion […] are located in the field of language. For too long, the Study of Religion relied on narrative forms to objectify the results of its research: today it is so underdeveloped regarding the logic of its language that one is hardly able to find an analogous situation in other sciences.114
To Horyna, religious studies severely lack a satisfying theory of language based on a logic of speech, having relied too long on the narrative forms of objectivation. The reason for religious studies currently being (in his words) the academic equivalent of an underdeveloped third-world country if compared to other sciences is, that a special question has not been answered satisfactorily up to now. Horyna phrases the question in the following way:
which forms of projective reference of our language to the experienceable world of religious experience are formed in such a way that, in the field of objective (real) objects of experience, the assertions and/or the statements convey sense and meaning?115
Horyna’s question is vital for the overall effort of research on religion and religions. To put the impressive wording of the question into simpler terms: How can scientific (meta-)language be adequate for the examined objects? Or else: How can object- and metalanguage be mediated? In the following I would like to give some hints at how this problem might be solved. Most importantly, I explore the elements of assertions or propositions that might serve as mediating and meaning-bequeathing catalysts of transfer—that is, provided the way they gain their meaning is interpreted a little differently from the usual.
I would like to start my considerations with an observation: comparative religion as a scientific discipline, as well as a dialogue of religious traditions as a historical event—or even as a proposed political necessity—both seem to share the same problem. The difficulties posed by both the encounter of different religious traditions and the scientific description of religions necessitate an adequate and translatable language. The contact of object language and object language as well as the approach of scientific metalanguage towards phenomena, thus seem to be comparable with respect to this problem.
3.1 Relating Object Language and Metalanguage
A good deal of work in the study of religions is devoted to the examination of the establishment, maintenance, preservation, articulation and transfer of religious ideas that constitute a body of religious knowledge. Religious knowledge is the point of reference for every instance of ascription of religious meaning to events, experiences, objects and matter of fact. Access to religious knowledge is provided by language. As knowledge might manifest on different levels, scholars examine the utterances of religious speakers in everyday practice as well as elaborated religious doctrines; they contemplate their interrelationships and the characteristics of the knowledge emerging from them.
Therefore, the study of religions is fundamentally concerned with the phenomenon of language. The study of language within the religious field is devoted to the examination of concepts and rhetoric, the semantics, syntactic, and pragmatics of religious language. In particular, it examines the role of concepts within the examination of religious phenomena, with particular regard to the basic distinction between (religious) object language and (descriptive, analytical, and explanatory) scientific metalanguage. The emergence, intercultural diffusion and the self-reflexive analysis of religious concepts, religious notions, and religious language, which together constitute the sphere of religious knowledge are an indispensable part of the study of religion.
The use of the notions of object language and metalanguage here differs from the more sophisticated philosophical notions as prominently developed by Alfred Tarski, Bertrand Russell, and Rudolf Carnap. Meta-language, for my purposes, is language about language. To talk about language, one needs metalanguage. Here, object language is the language used to talk about objects, while metalanguage is the language used to talk about object language. Meta- language, then, is used to develop an exact semantology of formalized languages in order to prevent antinomies.116 In our present context, however, object language designates religious language as used by the religious speakers themselves, while metalanguage is the language used by the scholarly observer to describe and analyze religious phenomena, including religious object language. The two languages, thus, differ significantly, though there is no evaluative hierarchy between them involved.117
However, in the case of the scholarly metalanguage, it is claimed that the two languages are related in a manner that is analogous to the claims made in formal philosophy, i.e., that metalanguage is able to express everything that is expressed in object language. This claim notoriously gives rise to one of the most pertinent challenges in scholarly research on religion, namely the question: is scholarly metalanguage able to cover all expressions of object language? This question is usually answered in the negative, pointing at cultural constraints that lead to insurmountable differences in meaning. Hence, a secondary question arises: how can a basically inadequate metalanguage be responsibly adapted to talk about object language phenomena?
In recent years, the study of religion has been mainly occupied with meta- linguistic considerations of scholarly metalanguage, not least concerning the use and even the very possibility of employing concepts in the process of research. Here, the scholarly controversies over the concept of religion is the most prominent example. The (critical) metalanguage of metalanguage is tacitly supposed to be able to grasp and express everything that is expressed in metalanguage, even non-explicit content by means of an unveiling critique. As these attempts to develop higher orders of reflection on metalanguage can easily be continued ad infinitum, the subject of the actual research can easily become lost in meta-metalanguage sophistication.
Therefore, it is time to return to the original matter of research. The predominant methodological approach taken in the first years of the KHK’s work with regard to religious knowledge as expressed in language was the analysis of the history of concepts (conceptual history, Begriffsgeschichte).118 All basic notions (Grundbegriffe) are subject to functional and semantic changes during the course of intellectual history, not least change induced by situations of contact of religious traditions. In all cases, however, change in these basic notions induces change in religious knowledge. Conceptual history clearly shows that concepts are not ‘what they used to be’. This is an important insight; conceptual history, however, has to be put in some larger systematic context when it comes to the question of the role of language within religions (namely, religious knowledge) and their prevailing systems of description (namely, area studies and scholarly disciplines: both dealing with knowledge about religion). In addition to semantics, syntax and pragmatics are decisive elements for an examination of conceptual language.
In order to do justice to the full spectrum of linguistically mediated religious knowledge, the KHK adopted a material-based approach informed by situations of contact of religious traditions. As indicated, within the study of religions, notions and concepts appear on two main linguistic levels comprising
the wording used by the prevailing religious tradition itself (object language), as one may find in prayers, ritual language etc.
the analysis of religious phenomena and its description in scholarly metalanguage that is systematic (meta-)reflection.
The main problem is the mediation between these categorically distinguished levels, or rather, the question: How may the scholar grasp religious phenomena, via the indispensable instrument of language? The answer is through concepts (Begriffe) and notions (Vorstellungen); concepts here being defined as notions put into concrete terms and words. Here, it is of vital importance to remember the difference between object language and metalanguage in order to prevent one-sided approaches and circular reasoning.119 These approaches often contradict well-meant attempts to free metalanguage from its cultural background, above all, from theologoumena. Robert Ford Campany here points at the anti-intellectuality of such an approach to ancient texts: “The fantasy that we should use only ‘local terms’ to represent them is itself essentially theological—the Immaculate Cultural Other as a sort of numinous Ding an sich before which the only appropriate response is to be seized by its spirit and begin speaking in tongues or else to bow in silent reverence […].”120 Both naive object language paraphrase (‘theologism’), possibly inaugurated by AWS, or sterile ‘scienticism’ in scholarly research are the extremes to be avoided in any responsible scholarly work. As Edward Slingerland has inimitably put it: “We are not confronted by a forced choice between either wild-eyed Orientalism or crude positivism.”121
In order to answer this challenge, a ‘mixed-method approach’ proved to be most fruitful for the work of the KHK. Namely, the consortium’s work focused on the examination of descriptions of religious processes (religious knowledge) by reflective religious individuals within the course of history. Object-language scholarly reflection, or in other words, the reflections of religious specialists may be considered as a striking example of this process. The necessary precondition to this approach is the fact that object language is often used in a reflective way, as manifested in the occasions of meta-communication that are an element of everyday communication. According to Roman Jakobson, even for native speakers metalanguage is necessary in order to learn and to use language. Accordingly, it is an element of language itself.122 Applying this approach means allowing the subject of scholarly examination to guide the first steps of the research process and following its basic lead. It takes advantage of the fact that the metacommunicative elements of object language by their nature serve to ensure mutual understanding and agreement of the object language speakers in question. This means that the emergence of metalanguage in object language discourse has social aspects, that is, it assumes the factual or imagined presence of other speakers. In his Die Religion der Gesellschaft Niklas Luhmann has characterized this approach as follows, opposing essentializing efforts that approach religion ontologically: “We, therefore, shift the question and are asking one single observer: religion itself. […] Then, as external observers, we rely on the self-observation of religion. We do no prescribe anything, we rather accept that which describes itself as religion.”123
Therefore, the emergence of metalanguage notions or even concepts on the object language level has to be used as a starting point for the elaboration of metalanguage which takes its point of departure from the very material of research i.e., the object language in question. Its presence indicates the emergence, formation and further intensification of a (self-)consciousness of religion on the level of object language. Volkhard Krech has summarized the advantage of this approach as follows: “[M]etalanguage can best correspond with religious-historical material and avoid a sterile scientism when it links in with the reflection abductively identified as religious, in which an object-linguistic awareness of the religious arises and is actively promoted.”124 Religious object language is, thus, not something to be slavishly followed or to be explained away by metalanguage, but rather an inexhaustible field of scientific possibility: “The possibilities available for academic metalanguage to correspond with object language can be found wherever agents perceive each other through contact and are stimulated to reflect to a greater degree.”125 Object-language does not determinate or hinder metalanguage, but rather allows it.126
The emergence of metalanguage in most cases does not come out of the blue but is inaugurated by definable triggers. Accordingly, the pragmatic context of the process by which metalanguage develops becomes important. Emic self-reflection of religion arises if traditions themselves become a theme of reflection, thereby serving an analytical need for themselves. This might be the case, for instance, when traditions or elements of tradition are being compiled, reformed, criticized, or rejected. Here, the main assumption of the KHK comes into play, for it is mainly in situations of contact between religious traditions when such reflection processes are inaugurated. When challenged, traditions examine and conceptualize themselves and the challenging other. They seek to find aiming at a common denominator in order to develop a suitable basis on which to deal with the challenge.127
The contact situations that stimulate conceptual reflections are likely to include a vast range of possible encounters, including translation enterprises performed by an individual, personal encounters of traders and travelers, and official meetings of representatives.128 Religious notions and concepts, therefore, are, in many regards, to be examined as relational notions and concepts on several levels, stabilizing and dynamizing themselves (1) via situations of contact, (2) in relating object language to metalanguage, but also (3) in unfolding their descriptive potential in semantic binary codes. Examples of the latter are: believer-unbeliever, pure-impure, and, last but not least, the transcendence/immanence-distinction as the guiding distinction of religion.129 To Niklas Luhmann “it appears that religion is one of many things that signifies itself and is capable of giving itself a form. But that also means that religion determines itself and excludes everything that is incompatible. Yet how does it do so if there are (for instance) other religions, heathens, the civitas terrena [secular society, viz., Augustine’s City of Man, as opposed to the city of God (Civitas Dei)], or evil? Religion can only be the subject of itself if it includes what is being excluded, it is assisted by a negative correlate. The system is only autonomous if it is able to monitor what is not. In this light, religion can only (externally) be defined in the mode of a second-order observation, as an observation of its own self-observation—and not by the dictates of some external essence.”130
Thus, the slogan that underpins our approach to contact131 can be further explicated: There is no religion until there is another religion; the interrelation or contact of the two religions provides the trigger and the means for self-observation in the form of a (second order) metalanguage.
It was the scholarly aim of the KHK to examine processes of these forms of concept-building and notion-building in order to elaborate a suitable and adequate metalanguage as a reliable instrument for scholarly research, designed for description, analysis and explanation. This approach might allow the combination of a phenomenological (empirical) perspective, a historical perspective intended to elaborate conceptual history of the notions used, and a systematic perspective intended to produce a responsible relational metalanguage.
Via repeated situations of contact, themselves determined by previous situations of contact, we can observe the tendency towards a closer mutual interrelation (Verweisungszusammenhang: context of indication) between object- and metalanguage with regard to their mutual substantiation and explanation in the history of concepts. Once introduced and established, self-reflective notions tend to be integrated into object language description and prescription systems. Although there may have been no full-fledged notion of religion in East Asia two hundred years ago, there clearly is one now—perhaps even to the extent that it has been institutionalized in state constitutions. This tendency toward adaption leads to the consolidation of religious knowledge via religious language both on an object- and on metalanguage level.
Following the initial intellectual efforts afforded to the description of religion, the ‘most challenging goal of the study of religion: explanation’ is likewise dependent on the suitable choice of concepts, models, and notions, as “[t]oo much work by too many scholars of religion takes the form of a description or paraphrase—particularly weak modes of translation, insufficiently different from their subject matter for purposes of thought. To summarize: a theory, a model, a conceptual category cannot be simply the data writ large.”132 To paraphrase something, careful as it may be, surely does not mean to explain it. Rather, it means to describe and to explain nothing at all. Jonathan Smith’s repeatedly uttered reminder is to be kept in mind regarding the examination of object language developing metalanguage: though scholars’ metalanguage is to be related to object language, there is still a categorical difference between the two.133
Regarding the overall importance of the adequate language in the study of religion and the history of religions, the emergence of (religious) metalanguage in contact, thus, has to be subject to further scrutiny. Religious language on the conceptual level is the prime place to turn to in the effort to gain a better picture of what is going on in the religious field.
3.2 Concepts in Contact: the Emergence of Religious Concepts and Concepts of Religion in Situations of Contact134
At least since the linguistic turn,135 the first and yet still underappreciated scholarly turn, the symbiotic relationship between religion and language has been widely acknowledged, deeply and intensely reflected upon and examined in the study of religion.136 The interrelation is considered as rooted in the existence of humans and humanity alike. As Walter Burkert stresses, religion is always connected to language and one might also assume that it participates in the selection advantage provided by language, or even was co-constitutive of the advantage.137
No wonder, then, that religious studies, as an academic discipline, has taken the conjunction seriously, not least for reasons of self-reflection. In most cases, the scholarly interest is focused upon the expression of religious experience for reasons of communication. Alternatively, the possibility of communication with a transcendent sphere is scrutinized. Religious language, as defined in Metzler Lexikon Religion, is comprised of two interrelated fields: the emergence of a cult-language and the formation of a special vocabulary within the religious group in question.138 This shorthand definition benefits from some additional criteria. The corresponding article in the Handbuch religionswissenschaftlicher Grundbegriffe (‘Manual of Basic Notions in Religious Studies’) lists five ‘basic’ forms of religious language. First is the revelational language of the gods, the teaching and promising language of the gods, prayer, and expressive language all of which are under the heading of ‘communication’ (Kommunikation). Second is ‘performativity’ (Performanz) which comprises the effective word, the creative word, the effective word in history, the hypostatic word and the magical word. Third, there is ‘representation’ (Vergegenwärtigung), which is further divided into myth as the representation of the world of gods, and ritual language. Fourth, there is ‘interplay’ (Wechselwirkung), namely language describing, reporting, and passing down religious experience which in turn influences the use of language itself. Finally, there is the possibility of the ‘elimination of language (and thought)’ (Entsprachlichung) as to be found in mysticism wherein the highest levels of religious experience cannot be grasped in language at all.139 As such, the theme of ‘religion and language’ opens a vast spectrum for scholarly research.
However, with regard to this approach, religious language is both communication with the transcendent and with fellow humans, and may take certain forms among which there is the communicative possibility of non- communication. Within such a sphere of religious language, the close relation of religion to certain languages is undoubtedly stressed but, as a consequence, the scholarly examination is confined to autochthonous areas, that is, on developments within a single religious tradition. Accordingly, although the variety of aspects of religious language in such an approach is extensive, the approach itself is still reductive in a way that has effects on the possible explication of the function and the meaning of religious language as it does not take the contact of religious tradition and, consequently, the contact of languages into account. Religious language is a matter of contact and self-reflection connected to challenging situations of contact.
The study of religion, due to its origin, was well prepared for a linguistic turn. From its very beginnings, religious studies were closely connected to philology and its perspectives and methods. As one might learn from Friedrich Max Müller, one of the founding fathers of the new academic field in the nineteenth century, the only secure way to understand religion is language. Accordingly, there are important parallels between the study of religion and philology; above all, the necessity of a comparative perspective in order to arrive at valid results. Müller’s famous Goethean maxim ‘He who knows one, knows none’140 expresses a core principle for both religion and language.141 Accordingly, it is not religion and philology that are interrelated, but rather religions and philologies.
This reminder is important to answer current challenges of the study of religion. Philology has provided invaluable support to the study of religion,142 not least in emancipating the study of religion from theology.143 For Müller himself was also lucidly aware of the future precarity of a science or scholarship that takes language and concepts seriously: “I know I shall have to meet determined antagonists who will deny the very possibility of a scientific treatment of religions, as formerly they denied the possibility of a scientific treatment of language.”144 But despite the attempted abandonment of any preference for any particular religion in the process of research, the problem remains of how to conduct comparison on strictly neutral terms, how to avoid the imposition of concepts or notions thus avoiding forms of scientific imperialism that have been justifiably criticized by analysts of Orientalism in the succession of Edward Said. Müller himself was positive that his idea was soon to be realized: “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.”145 Thus, the main problem for the scholar of religions is how to do comparative work that is how to introduce adequate notions and concepts without losing touch with one’s material.
Some leading scholars of religious studies, among them Jonathan Z. Smith, claim that current scholarship has not yet met the challenge of Müller’s vision for an approach both comparative and generalizing.146 For Smith, however, there can be no question of surrender in the face of this challenge and to apply a quietist and, ultimately, religious attitude: “I am aware of the new ethos that eschews classification, comparison, and explanation. In the satiric formulation of Kimberley Patton, ‘Thou Shalt Compare Neither Religious Traditions, Nor Elements of Religious Traditions, Lest Thou Totalize, Essentialize, or Commit Hegemonic Discourse’—to which I might add, ‘Nor shalt thou consider thyself as a member of the academy’.”147 The postcolonial commandment suits a religious, but not a scholarly attitude and is, therefore, not set in stone. It may, however, well indicate a prominent challenge scholarship has to face.
Within the KHK, the challenge was met by the introduction of a contact- related perspective, stressing both the importance of situations of contact for the history of religions and for scholarly metalanguage. It is of vital importance to draw the consequence from the comparative perspective as introduced to religious studies and examine occasions where the perspective is applied by the religious traditions themselves i.e., situations of contact, and to scrutinize their reflections regarding the presuppositions for as well as the possibilities of the perspective. By doing so, one may witness the emergence of metalanguage, of comparative concepts and notions, within object language itself. Thus, by describing this process and using the concepts and notions evolving here, we remain in close contact with the material itself without imposing scientific vocabulary on the phenomena in question. The search for tertia comparationis, thus, is guided by the material of research itself, and not imposed on it by armchair scholarship.148
Accordingly, the question of the role of language in an interreligious context inevitably arises. As it is commonly accepted, religions and religious traditions are not to be described as monolithic entities, subject only to internal developments. Rather, they emerge, expand and stabilize under conditions and the attendant processes of interreligious exchange. As one may learn from the history of religions, it is the contact of different religious traditions that causes an intensified interest in language as a medium of dealing with the other tradition or traditions. This interest manifests itself, for example, in religious dialogues, but is found more often in projects of translation and the concepts developed to support them.149 In this regard, anything might be expected from the material. A medieval translator, for instance “[…] would also know the joy of cross-fertilizing languages, and of finding new contexts and audiences for text through their translation.”150 In any case, the other religious tradition provides a challenge that has to be answered explicitly. Above all, this is done via language.
Therefore, religious language could be examined twice over: on the one hand, with regard to the ways of talking about the religious, or rather, how to talk religiously. One the other hand, one might inspect how religious traditions start to introduce a meta-perspective on religion via language, that is by introducing certain patterns of language to be used for comparative purposes—including for instance general notions as the concept of religion itself. Regarding epistemology, this way of examination seems to be more promising with regard to both the internal (emic) and the external (scientific) perspective. It might even be the case that the former method may be an expression of the introduction of the meta-perspective. Dealing with religious language does not merely mean enquiring about how to speak religiously or how to do so appropriately, but also means finding the means to speak about the religious and those religious ways of speaking. Therefore, in the first place, ‘religious language’, here, means talking about religion on the object language level. To examine it is to examine a meta-communicative perspective.151 This perspective, crucially, is not the mind-child of the scholarly observer, but rather has been introduced by the observed themselves.
Methodologically, the role of the challenge of the religious other while examining a religious tradition cannot be overemphasized. It is evident that such considerations on the object language level do not appear out of the blue, but are rather triggered in situations of contact between religious traditions. The formation of religious language in this sense is, therefore, another example of a particular assumption of the KHK approach, which consists of the claim that the formation, establishment, spread and further development of religious traditions have been affected by mutual influences, as well as that the formal unity of the history of religions mainly consists of mutual perceptions of religious traditions as religious entities. As such, contacts of religious traditions constitute regional religious fields and, in the long run, lead to a global religious field.152 Here, facing the religious other, a religious tradition is forced to contemplate its own status just as it is forced to develop certain patterns of language to encompass both itself and the other to be able to deal with the other in a general way. The so-called “religious dialogues”—of medieval times for example, are predominately philosophically based answers to the challenges posed by a number of situations of religious contact. The answers to such challenges will mainly consist of a philosophy of language, either implicit or explicit, that especially examines the communicative functions of notions or structural concepts. Thus, the approach of an author who writes a religious dialogue is, therefore, not a reflection on commonality or even tolerance, but rather a reflection on language. It is performed in order to make the contact situation a matter of action-guiding knowledge that deals with the problem of transfer. The conceptual results of the reflection are, therefore, primarily related to the contact situation, which proves to be of great importance when it comes to the question of concepts and their meaning. The philosophical dialogue is thus a reflection on how language works, or rather, how it should work in order to provide both understanding and some balance of positions (which may well be an act of usurpation). Of course, one cannot expect this meta-perspective to be balanced in the way the neutral observer wishes it to be. Religious dialogues are not to be primarily considered as documents of tolerance. However, some paramount level of observation and analysis is, nevertheless, established which then might be described.
Admittedly, there are many situations of contact imaginable, from direct contact between individuals, by chance or within an institutional framework, to indirect forms such as translating texts from another tradition. It is, however, these very situations that provide the opportunity to describe processes of emergence of metalanguage on the object language level, and accordingly prevent oneself from merely imposing one’s notions on the traditions examined. In this way, scholarly metalanguage may correspond with religious-historical material and, at the same time, avoid an oppressive and, ultimately, sterile scientism: by connecting to the reflections in which an object-linguistic awareness of the religious arises and is actively promoted.153
The contact-based approach derives an advantage from the simple fact that it is outright impossible not to respond to the other. “Whenever religious entities come into contact, they do compare with each other. In this case indifference or disregard seems to be out of question.”154 Moreover, contact implies language. If there is contact, there is also conceptualization and translation. If we take the notion of religion as an example, one might assume a contact situation in which representatives of one tradition do have a conceptualized notion of religion that is, semantically clearly definable awareness of their prevailing cultural background as a ‘religion’. Here, the representatives (be they messengers, explorers, envoys, or translators) are likely to describe the other as a ‘religion’ if there are certain family resemblances that might be compared to religious elements of their own tradition. The other tradition taking part in the contact, however, which has no concept or notion of religion, still equally translates the concept of religion on the basis of resemblances and similarities to existing notions within the tradition.155 Thus, notions and concepts of religion can emerge from the situation of contact that may have nothing to do with the notions employed by one side. The new notion, however, is strongly related to the traditions in question from which it emerges. It may well be the case that the particular elements both sides adapt to the concept do scarcely overlap, if at all, that, at first, the two sides of the contact are not talking about the same things.
In this manner, situations of contact allow for the study of religious language in two perspectives: first with regard to the relationship of object language and metalanguage, and, secondly with regard to the relationships of the respective object languages of the traditions involved in the contact. In the former, the work on concepts of object language can serve as a point of reference for scholarly examinations of the conditions of the ‘baptism’ of concepts in the prevailing traditions: it is not so much the content of a concept introduced here, but rather the conditions of its introduction that define its meaning for a religious tradition. Though the introduction of the prevailing concept might be performed because of a certain family resemblance or the presumed recognition of certain elements of the notion, the meaning of the concept is not reduced to these resemblances and elements. It also depends (and continues to depend) on the situation of introduction.
Regarding the second perspective, although the contact-born notions may initially have nothing in common, nevertheless, perceiving the usage of the concept by its counterpart for certain elements, the prevailing representatives may presume that a process of translation has taken place. Then they may use that assumed process of translation as the point of reference for further elaboration and future tuning of the concepts in question. Gradually, however, by taking the concepts derived from earlier contacts as a basis, the traditions taking part in our hypothetical situation of contact are likely to be brought in line with each other, although there may still be fundamental misunderstandings.156 It might even be the case that misunderstandings are a vital and inevitable, that is, contact-promoting element between religious traditions.
The basic idea concerning the language of contact and its significance for further research is that it allows for a more careful approach than simply confronting the subject of study with one’s own linguistic apparatus. Instead of doing so, the approach aims at observing, describing and analyzing others who have done so; not through other theories or meta-linguistic models but rather object language meeting object language and trying to cope meta-linguistically with the situation, and retracing the processes that follow or, in fact, constitute the first encounter.157 The two perspectives of the study of religious language are, thus, indirectly interrelated, maintaining the categorical difference between object language and metalanguage: The contact of metalanguage and object language, thus, relies on the contact of object language and object language. (Scholarly) Meta-language is not imposed upon object language, but follows object language’s own metalanguage.
In any case, the specific nature of the concepts introduced in situations of contact has to be further examined. Both the resemblance-related and situation-dependent meaning of metalanguage notions and concepts emerging from the meeting of object languages effects their possible usages in object language and, correspondingly, in metalanguage. It is clear, however, that the semantics of these concepts are difficult to discern and are further subject to change. There is, however, more to these concepts than semantics alone.
3.3 Concepts: More than Semantics
3.3.1 Conceptual History
From 2008 to 2014 during the first phase of the KHK, a ‘research field’ and a transversal ‘focus group’ were devoted to the examination of concepts. The ‘research field’, which was loosely related temporally to the early modern period scrutinized the role of notions and concepts in the study of the history of religions, focusing on identifying and examining possible religious key concepts. The focus group concentrated particularly on the role of the concept of ‘religion’. The work of the group proceeded diachronically and interculturally by examining conceptual candidates in diverse traditions that semantically have a certain degree of family resemblance that, despite different lexis, can be instrumental for the development of a general notion of religion.
The work in the ‘research field’ as well as in the ‘focus group’ followed a particular approach related to the method of conceptual history, as introduced by the historian Reinhard Koselleck.158 To Koselleck, language in the study of history is not an epiphenomenon, but an irreducible last instance (irreduzible Letztinstanz) as both an indicator of reality and a factor of finding reality. There is no experience and no knowledge of the world without language. Conceptual history deals with the way experiences and facts are conceptualized and, in particular, with the shifting of the relationships between concept and object. Accordingly, the conceptual history approach is based on a notion of ‘concept’ that is not exclusively linguistic. Rather, it examines social, political, religious, and institutional structures that correspond to semantic structures. The proponents of conceptual history assume that there are analogies between semantic and non-semantic structures and that in examining periods of semantic change, changing structures in other fields of society may be discovered. Thus, conceptual history is a privileged tool within a sociology of knowledge (Wissenssoziologie). It is used to analyze the structural change of past societies by analyzing the semantic change.
Conceptual history is mainly concerned with salient terms, used to refer to objects outside language. As objects can only be semantically identified by discourses, to focus exclusively on certain terms would be to restrict one’s perspective. The broader context must be taken into consideration. Here, it is the concepts summarizing others, such as, for example, the concepts of ‘state’ or ‘religion’, that have become irreplaceable and unexchangeable for a given community of speakers, that emerge as a special focus of conceptual history as history’s founding concepts (Grundbegriffe).159 These concepts, far from being non-temporal ideas or ahistorical, are rather subject to change and contest, as diverse speakers claim a monopoly of interpretation for them.160
It is almost a truism that the meaning of words has changed over the course of time. In general terms, conceptual history (Begriffsgeschichte) is a method of self-reflection and, not least, self-discipline for historians concerning the concepts they employ to describe and analyze historical developments. These concepts are subject to temporal change. After all, conceptual history deals with the history of ideas, or rather, discourses in a particular twofold and interrelated way. Exploring the change of a concept means, firstly, following the changing objects in history, which are covered by one and the same word; secondly, it means tracing the changing words, which represent the same object at different times. Hence, the term ‘semantic’ as used in conceptual history relates to the meaning of a concept, and comprises several aspects: the definition of the word, the discursive explication of an object, and the rules for using the concept in certain historical situations. Research on semantics has provided important insights into how the dynamics in the history of religion might be manifested. It has also sharpened scholarly sensitivity to the fact that a present notion that is connected to a certain concept cannot be transferred easily to the same concept in earlier times, thus giving rise to the question of whether the diachronic study of concepts is possible at all and how best to integrate the necessary reservations about the applicability of the concept into one’s research and the metalanguage by which this research is presented.
However, the focus on the semantic change as determining the prevailing meaning of a concept at diverse points of time is a somewhat unsatisfying result for a discussion of the dynamics in the history of religion. Moreover, the focus on the history of semantics is likely to give rise to a very popular argument concerning the notion of religion, namely, that because religion in today’s use of the word is detectable not until modern times, it cannot be used to describe earlier phenomena, or, after all, has altogether no real referent apart from its linguistic use.161
The meaning and the linguistic function of a concept are different matters, though they are both subject to change. After all, concepts are related to different dimensions of the religious field, and additionally may be used differently as regards dimensions of action, cognition, experience, and materiality. Moreover, there is difference with regard to vertical or hierarchical aspects. To use Koselleck’s distinction, there is also a difference if a concept in question is used as a founding concept or a transformative concept that makes experience possible (as a Grundbegriff or as an Erfahrungsstiftungsbegriff),162 or as a subordinate concept to such a founding concept—that is, concepts behave differently dependent on their place within a hierarchy of concepts. Positions here may change in the course of time, the subordinate becoming the founding concept and vice versa.
As a consequence, it is not only the changing meaning of words that should play a role in examining the dynamics in the history of religions. This is well recognized in the field: “We should seek, therefore, to discover the rules of a transformative grammar which could explain patterns of religious transformation. This is obviously not an easy task, but giving up without even trying condemns us to counting trees rather than delineating the forest’s contours.”163 Stroumsa’s claim for a grammar of religious transformation goes well beyond the examination of the changing meaning of words and provides the examination of concepts with explanatory power, dependent on generic concepts (i.e., that one might be able to see forests instead of a mere multitude of trees).
Therefore, what is needed is not a phenomenology of religion,164 but rather a phenomenology of religious concepts. That is, we should explore not only the manner in which their meanings change across history, but also the specific dynamics of their syntax and pragmatics. As conceptualized by Koselleck, syntax and pragmatics can make important contributions to understanding the way concepts operate in conceptual history, through analysis of the way prevailing concepts react to challenge (pragmatics) and the slowly changing scope of the possible uses of concepts (syntax/grammar).165 It seems, however, promising to examine the concrete cases of application of these concepts in a situation of challenge (contact) with regard to all three aspects (semantics, syntax, pragmatics) of the concepts, and thus to discern the prevailing dynamizing and stabilizing effects. Moreover, it seems that it is through syntax rather than semantics that the dynamics of the objective reference of the concepts in question may be examined. Above all, it is, the linguistic level on which the prevailing notion is used that has to be scrutinized carefully, i.e. the topology of the concept.
3.3.2 Object Language Topologies
Topology, as the concept is used in the following, examines the specific place (topos) of a certain word (logos) in a particular context. Though it is basically an issue of metalanguage, it is interesting to notice that users of religious object language, such as in texts evolving from and/or staging contact situations of religious traditions, themselves comprehend the importance of levels and introduce theoretical considerations on them. Given today’s scholarly tendencies, it is sad to witness how deeply the proponents of notioclastic ideas sink below the level of their supposed object of study.
A topologically based process of notion-building can be observed in the works of the Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa (1401–1464), composed in fifteenth-century medieval Europe as it was on the brink of early modernity.166 His 1453 work De Pace Fidei is the most fruitful starting point with regard to religion. De Pace Fidei, if not in the purest sense a dialogue, is a colloquy wherein representatives of different religious traditions participate and are given voice to a certain extent.167 In a fictitious situation of contact he creates, Nicholas is stage-managing the introduction of a certain general concept of religion which is characterized by its mandatory qualities as referring to the one God. He does so by means of a certain topology, indicated in the dialogue’s setting. The concept of religion is introduced as being active on a higher level of intellectual insight. This is made perfectly clear by Cusanus in his concluding remarks to the whole work, which take the form of a vision (outlook) of the future guided by an intellectual vision (visio). It is the heaven of reason where the concept of religion is relevant: “Conclusa est in caelo rationis concordantia religionum modo quo praemittitur.”168 Therefore, it is not religion that is located on the level of diversity but different rites. Accordingly, it would be a striking example of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness—that is, to mistake the abstract for the concrete—to search for religion on a different level than the intellectual which is characterized by the rational activity of general concepts.169 ‘Religion’ here is the intellectually reflected conceptual unity of God which transcends diversity. This idea, at least to the participants present in the multilogue, provides a mandatory attribute to the general concept of religion that is characterized by Cusanus at the end of his work: “Et mandatum est per Regem regum ut sapientes redeant et ad unitatem veri cultus nationes inducant, et quod administatorii spiritus illos ducant et eis assistant.”170 At least for the sapientes i.e., the scholars of religion in Cusa’s text, the optative notion that there is but one religion is mandatory. Moreover, in order to spread this idea, the scholars are guided by the intellectual powers as introduced at the beginning of the text, that is, the reminders of the location in which the discussion has taken place. Nicholas describes them as follows: “non enim habitu ut homines sed intellectuales virtutes comparebant.”171 It becomes apparent that the names and descriptions are carefully chosen by Cusanus in order to clarify his topology. It is not simply God and angels who are present, but rather more specifically: on this level, intellectual powers/virtues are discussing issues of religion guided by a processual (i.e., unifying) unity. To Cusa, the human mind is drawn to this discussion and is transcending its way of dealing with diversity on the lower level. According to Kurt Flasch, what may be witnessed in this text is akin to the birthplace of religious studies, or rather, the study of the history of religion within object language considerations. For the second stage of their work, the scholars use the concept of religion developed here in order to illuminate the history of the diverse traditions.172
Of course, this kind of topological consideration is not confined to ‘Western’ theology. Robert Ford Campany in elaborating on his own field of Chinese religions writes “that the tendency to nominalize and reify ‘religions,’ daos, jiaos, and so on, and to conceive of them in metaphorically specific ways are most in evidence where there is heightened awareness of religious plurality and difference—and, therefore, also, very often, religious rivalry and competition for resources, patronage, and prestige, with attendant attempts to classify and narrate so as to bring some conceptual and rhetorical order to the confusing field of players. Early medieval China and early modern Europe were two such contexts. […] [M]ost human groups are at least aware of others on their margins who do things differently. In contexts where such differences become acute, where religious plurality is not only evident but also the locus of some particular problems, nominalizations and reifications […] begin to be invoked.”173 Object-language ‘players’, thus in a challenging situation reacted to the challenge by conceptualizing themselves and other players on a higher level of abstraction for ordering purposes that is, on a rationalizing level that is deliberately set apart from the confusing multiformity of everyday experience.
3.3.3 Metalanguage Topologies
If religious object language under conditions of situations of contact is able to topologically differentiate between levels of the possible usage of concepts, then scholarly metalanguage should be able to do so as well, lest a severe reductionism of theoretical sophistication be deliberately intended. Situations of contact transcend object language, forcing object language to ascend to new levels in response. Admittedly, any topologically-related notions in the process of mutual understanding might easily turn into an u-topological (utopian) enterprise (such as the proposed concept of religio in Cusanus’ thinking); however, the concepts in question might still serve as regulatory ideas for further scholarly research, as well as in interreligious action. Semantic examination of concepts is necessary, but not sufficient in finding an adequate approach for examining religious phenomena.
Following the contact-based approach, it is appropriate to relate meta- linguistic topologies of concepts closely to object language topologies in order to discern and describe the function of the prevailing concepts on the level of religious language. It is not only through the creation of typologies of concepts, that is, by means of a cluster relating words semantically to particular fields, but also through mapping topologies of concepts that we are able to interrogate the use of concepts within a particular language game.
In his enlightening study of the process of comparison in the study of religion, Oliver Freiberger has drawn attention to the diverse possible levels and scales a comparative enterprise might address. “Existing studies compare at many different points on the scale, from comparisons of particular individual persons in their local settings to comparisons of entire religions. While the scale is continuous, it might make sense to broadly distinguish, related to how much the study ‘zooms in,’ three levels: Micro, meso, and macrocomparison. Micro-comparative studies zoom in on very specific items such as certain individuals or groups, certain texts, certain objects, certain practices, etc., and compare them. Macro-comparative studies compare entire religions, or several religions in view of one phenomenon (e.g., in studies entitled ‘Sacred Places in World Religions’ or the like). Located in-between, on a mid-level scale, are meso-comparative studies, which cover more ground than micro-comparative ones but remain within clearly defined limits.”174 Here, I would argue that it is not only the items of comparison in question that have to be subject of a scale-based or topological consideration, but also the concepts employed to grasp them. Of course, the concepts used in such kinds of comparison have constraints and possibilities of their own that might render them unsuitable for use on another level. Scales of comparison, as Freiberger argues, are, above all, different levels of abstraction on which comparison is intended to take place.175 “It is therefore crucial that the selected scale matches the question that a study seeks to answer. If that is the case, from a methodological standpoint all three levels are valid.”176
Taking the necessary topological aspect of concepts into consideration not only improves the adequacy and validity of scholarly metalanguage but also proffers the study of religion with a promising future. On the metalanguage level, the importance of distinguishing between diverse levels of notions has been stressed by Jonathan Z. Smith in his introduction to the term ‘generalization’. Distinguishing concepts on the basis of their topological level may lead to a more refined metalanguage for the description of religious phenomena. It also renders metalanguage more flexible, as it may be corrected via processes of trial and error. Last but not least, it renders it more explorative by hinting at contexts that were not in the scholar’s focus before: “The ‘general’ differs from the ‘universal’ in that it admits to exceptions; it differs from the ‘particular’ in that it is highly selective. Both characteristics guarantee that generalizations are always corrigible. As with comparison, generalization brings disparate phenomena together in the space of the scholar’s intellect. As such, it often results in surprise, which calls forth efforts at explanation and rectification. One goal of the study of religion is the proposal of comparative generalizations based on the careful description of data that, nevertheless, remain firmly situated: generalizations that are advanced in the service of some stated intellectual task.”177 As a consequence, the disadvantages of generalizations on some levels (incompleteness and selectiveness) are, in turn, advantages on the other level (allowing surprising, explorative associations and being corrigible). The particular level of a particular concept, thus, allows for explorative results. It is impossible to find anything on the level of diversity.
The insights above into the relevance of the topology of certain concepts might also shed some light on the flawed basis of certain kinds of criticism of scholarly metalanguage; a criticism that is likely to block the process of inquiry. Scholarly concepts are diverse in many regards, not only in terms of their content, and not the least in their prevailing level of possible application.
3.4 The Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness in the Study of Religion
One could easily write a history of the study of religion as a history of its major fallacies, or perhaps better still, a history of what the subsequent generation of scholars considered to be the major fallacies of their immediate predecessor. Given the self-reflexive nature of the present field, much research can perhaps be described as showing that certain assumptions about and concepts of religion do not work, rather than showing how religion works. Of course, this self-reflexivity itself is the reaction to a fallacy, namely the fallacy of overtrusting concepts, theoretical considerations and preconceptions. However, in turn, putting no trust at all in concepts is clearly an overreaction and one that has done more harm to the progress of insight than the original fallacy itself did.178
Moreover, there are several fallacies current in research, derived as they are from postmodernism, postcolonialism and deconstructivism that have attracted the attention of more careful observers. Edward Slingerland, for instance, has described the fallacy of the single meaning—the idea that a word must always mean precisely the same thing every time it appears in a corpus of texts in question. He also identified the fallacy of mistaking argument for assumption: the idea that an instance of an idea is necessarily proof that it had currency within an intellectual field. Rather, context must be considered as well, as it may be the case that a certain use of a notion is serving as a thought experiment opposing a common opinion, and hence does not demonstrate the ubiquity of the notion in question.179 Fellow sinologist Michael Puett warns about this fallacy with regard to the idea of holism in early China as follows: “These ideas should not be construed as dominant assumptions at all: they were, on the contrary, consciously formulated claims within a larger debate … [T]he very fact that they were polemical strongly suggests that it is not an assumption at all, but a claim.”180
Regarding the present state of affairs in the cultural sciences and the study of religion in particular, one serious fallacy concerning the progress of science and scholarship is the fallacy of immobilizing distinctions as found in both negative and positive Orientalism i.e., the hypostasis of the ‘other’ as an unchangeable and unreachable entity. This fallacy cuts down the productive interplay of distinctions in scholarly work and inevitably leads to an intellectual dead-end situation of decidedly un-splendid isolation.
On the use of concepts, one could easily list a number of additional fallacies that result in dead-ends. To a certain degree, the fallacies are interrelated and sometimes may be merely reformulations of each other, depending on the research interest. In the following, I list and gather a few examples from my observations of discussions of the KHK and the study of religion. For example:
The genealogical fallacy—the opinion that given proof a concept has developed or was even deliberately ‘made’ up within a certain tradition automatically proves its unworthiness for scholarly work.181 The phrase ‘the invention’ of something is the most obvious example of this fallacy in action to consider the impacts of arguments concerning the invention of Hinduism, for instance. A closely related fallacy leads deep into the realm of conspiracy theory: the idea that concepts were made up and introduced by certain agents to follow sinister aims. In both cases, the difference between genesis and validity (Genesis und Geltung) is not taken into due consideration.182
The self-censoring fallacy—the opinion that the occidental origin of a concept automatically makes it unsuitable for other traditions which are thereby supposedly not given a voice of their own. This is most often seen applied to the concept of religion itself. Thus, the ‘Western’ scholar disqualifies himself from research for reasons of his own ‘Western-ness’. Sadly, this fallacy is the main result of the Orientalism-debate as inaugurated by Edward Said.
The rigid fallacy—the opinion that if the concept of religion is not applicable to every religious phenomenon, it should not to be used at all and is better replaced by another (more general) notion like that of culture. This fallacy is often connected to a misinterpretation of Wittgenstein’s idea of ‘concepts with blurred boundaries’183 that is, the claim to introduce ‘fuzzy’ concepts that are allowed to extend their extension if suitable (see 7.)
The authenticity-fallacy—the opinion that if the concept is not found among the tradition it is being employed to describe, then it cannot be used at all.184 This fallacy is closely related to the ideology of authenticity and, ultimately, identity in the methodology of current Humanities.185
The fallacy of claiming autarky—the opinion that every tradition has to be described exclusively in its own terms. This fallacy can also be described as confusion between object language and metalanguage, which are categorically different. Speaking about a tradition solely in its own terms means to speak in object language.186
The fallacy of inferring from fact to concept—the confusion of object language, where the concept might be unsuitable, and metalanguage, where the concept might be suitable in scholarly description.187
The extensional independence fallacy—the opinion that one may change the extension of a concept without reference to its intention (meaning).188 If a concept must be blurred in order to cover anything, it is all the more likely be in practice meaningless. However, deliberateness of meaning does in itself not solve the issue of concepts for the study of religion. A general concept of religion will always be presupposed but it is now often implicitly used without due reflection. The abductive potential of the concept made explicit for the progress of research is severely underestimated.
These fallacies are significant obstacles to the scientific examination and explanation of religious phenomena, especially if concentration on preventing these fallacies results in the separation of the scholarly discourse from the material and subject of the study of religion.189
Moreover, there is another important fallacy now active in the field that not only immobilizes the advancement of research, but even threatens those insights already achieved: the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. Timothy Fitzgerald famously discussed this fallacy in his article ‘A critique of “religion” as a cross-cultural category’.190 The context of its introduction is significant, as it is not used in the analysis of religion, but rather in the analysis of the academic field of the study of religion. It is a historical irony that this notion was introduced into the field of religious study by a protagonist of those people most likely to fall victim to it. Fitzgerald connects the fallacy—mistaking the abstract for the concrete—with a substantialist claim: “This notion that Buddhism is an entity with an essence which can be described and listed with other such entities as the religions or the world religions, can be described as a substantialist fallacy, a case of misplaced concreteness.”191 The notion of the fallacy, thus, is a supportive instrument in the ever-popular struggle against unsuitable reification and the very idea of world religions, a struggle that is ultimately aimed at unmasking an ideological construction. It is questionable, however, whether users, and, in particular, metalanguage users of concepts such as ‘Buddhism’ or ‘religion’, in fact do perform a process of reification. Listing ‘Buddhism’ and other ‘religions’ does not necessarily and exclusively indicate essentialism, but is, first of all, a particular use of words that expresses a certain linguistic function. If that function is not scrutinized carefully, then to describe this utterance as an instance of the fallacy is premature. Moreover, the fallacy itself might mean something very different than the equivalence Fitzgerald nonchalantly gives it with an act of essentialism.
To explain, we must turn to the original context from which the notion of the fallacy emerged. The fallacy of misplaced concreteness as a description of the shortcomings of theoretical considerations was introduced by Alfred North Whitehead, who described it, together with the fallacy of the perfect dictionary, as a major obstacle to progress in philosophical thinking. The avoidance of these two fallacies in Whitehead’s thought was employed as a measurement of the quality of a philosophy. In his Science and the Modern World, Whitehead introduced the fallacy in his discussion of the seventeenth century, which he denoted as the century of genius for its place in the development of modern science. Therein he defined it as “mistaking the abstract for the concrete.”192 Referring to the ideas of substance and quality, Whitehead notes:
My point will be, that we are presenting ourselves with simplified editions of immediate matters of fact. When we examine the primary elements of these simplified editions, we shall find that they are in truth only to be justified as being elaborate logical constructions of a high degree of abstraction. Of course, as a point of individual psychology, we get at the ideas by the rough and ready method of suppressing what appear to be irrelevant details. But when we attempt to justify this suppression of irrelevance, we find that, though there are entities left corresponding to the entities we talk about, yet these are of a high degree of abstraction.
This apparent critique of abstraction is likely to hit a nerve in current scholarly discussion. Nevertheless, it is important to notice here, that Whitehead, in describing the fallacy, does not claim that these abstractions do not exist. although he does assert that they should not be confused with the immediate matter of fact. Hence, there is no case that because of their non-existence, they also have to be abolished from philosophical use in explicatory language. To him, there absolutely are such entities, but they are characterized by a high degree of abstraction that might not be suitable to the detailedness of concrete facts. Accordingly, at the end of the chapter, Whitehead stresses the “enormous success of the scientific abstractions” as employed by the predominantly ‘mathematical mind’ active during the seventeenth century of genius, whose great characteristic is precisely the capacity for dealing with abstractions.193 To Whitehead, it is the task of philosophy to criticize abstractions, not to merely abolish them:
You cannot think without abstractions; accordingly, it is of the utmost importance to be vigilant in critically revising your modes of abstraction. It is here that philosophy finds its niche as essential for the healthy progress of society. It is the critic of abstractions.194
Therefore, in trying to evade the pitfalls of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, one has to be equally careful not to pour the baby out with the bathwater by disregarding the role of abstractions in human thinking. The fallacy of misplaced concreteness has two forms: it may, on the one hand, criticize the premature application of abstractions to facts and, on the other hand, it warns us not to treat abstractions as if they were facts and to check their validity accordingly. In the more refined explication given in Process and Reality, Whitehead describes the fallacy as follows:
This fallacy consists in neglecting the degree of abstraction involved when an actual entity is considered merely so far as it exemplifies certain categories of thought. There are aspects of actualities that are simply ignored as long as we restrict thought to these categories.195
Accordingly, the fallacy of misplaced concreteness as introduced by Whitehead denotes a confusion of the different levels on which the abstract concept might be used. It is an appropriation made too fast. Within religious studies, the notion of religion is a prime example; here specifically concerning the aim to identify ‘religion’ objectively as in the sentence: “This is religion.” The validity of the concept is put to the test by its capacity to be identified as a referent of this sentence on the level of elements of the outside world. However, religion is not an indexical notion—something to be pointed at—but an operative and discursive concept, used to point something out.196 Of course, this is not unrecognized in careful scholarship: “Religions do not exist, at least not in the same way that people and their textual and visual artifacts and performances do.”197 They exist on another linguistic level.
As a consequence, a critique of a generalized notion is by no means valid for every level of possible usage of the concept. The topology of the notion has to be taken into consideration:
There is no justification for checking generalization at any particular stage. Each phase of generalization exhibits its own peculiar simplicities which stand out just at that stage, and at no other stage. There are simplicities connected with the motion of a bar of steel which are obscured if we refuse to abstract from the individual molecules, and there are certain simplicities concerning the behavior of men which are obscured if we refuse to abstract from the individual peculiarities of particular specimens. In the same way, there are certain general truths, about the actual things in the common world of activity, which will be obscured when attention is confined to some particular detailed mode of considering them.198
What seems to be good advice in the context of philosophy might also be good advice for the self-reflection of the study of religion.199 In religious studies, scholars analyzing a notion or even a concept of religion tend to criticize it as if it were to be used on a very concrete level of research—as if it were to be used in a similar manner as the word ‘vase’, which has a referent in the real world that can be pointed at.200
In the case of the concept of ‘religion’ the reminder of Jonathan Z. Smith remains valid: “It is a second-order, generic concept that plays the same role in establishing a disciplinary horizon that a concept such as ‘language’ plays in linguistics or ‘culture’ plays in anthropology. There can be no disciplined study of religion without such a horizon.”201 One could also add the concept of ‘nature’ for the natural sciences or ‘law’ for jurisprudence. All these notions work on a certain level of generalization, but not on others.
Therefore, according to Cho and Squier, one has to relate one’s use of concepts to the chosen scale of abstraction, as “we can talk meaningfully of a staggering large entity such as ‘Buddhism’ by using an amenable scale and scope. If we wish to encompass its twenty-five centuries of history, in Asia and now Europe and the Americas, our scale of closest observation periods of time.”202 All macro-states are abstractions, which leave out an increasing number of things. Examining matters on the macro-level requires the detection of patterns that emerge at different scales and perspectives, thus it also necessitates a differentiated set of concepts. This differentiated approach, however, does not reduce, but rather increases the possibilities for insight: “When we increase our scope of observation, we necessarily sacrifice information available at the smaller scale. Contrary to the prevailing assumption, however, this is not a reduction in knowledge.” Compared at the micro-level, two subjects of investigation almost certainly have nothing much in common. But observed on macro-level, relevant information will emerge: “But looked at from afar, Earth and Jupiter appear very similar and share obvious properties, such as being spherical and orbiting the sun. This provides new information not available to the smaller perspective. […] Distinctions between ‘finer’ and ‘coarser’ scales should not be confused with differences in their reality of information.”203 It is, therefore, senseless to claim any kind of ‘reality’ for a concept of a high level of abstraction, such as religion or system. They do not correspond to something in the ‘real’ world, save from on the scholarly desk where they are employed. The ontological indifference or lack of correspondence to real objects is not a reason to abolish the notion. “Whether a system is an ontological reality or heuristic device is of little practical importance. What is important is that these conceptual tools can expand our understanding in an intellectual environment where the ever-increasing collection of observation is wasted without a means to make sense of it.”204 ‘Religion’, thus, makes scholarly sense, even while religion often does not to the common-sense observer.
However, it is not on the empirical level that the possibility of the application of a certain abstract concept is decided. Rather, it is decided on a more abstract level. To Whitehead, the true task of metaphysics is to determine the limits of the applicability of abstract concepts—and limiting the applicability of a concept means, at the same time, that the concept has a genuine field of application.205
It is for good reason that Whitehead considered abstractions as of utmost importance for the process of acquiring knowledge and maintaining the search for it, for the Adventures of Ideas. Balanced by humbleness before logic and facts, conceptual boldness can bring fertile results. As a mathematician by training, Whitehead knew about the many ways by which the mathematical treatment of abstractions had proven to be exploratory, as it led to new discoveries about what was going on in the world. In consequence, Whitehead advised natural scientists as follows:
The aim of science is to seek the simplest explanation of complex facts. We are apt to fall into the error of thinking that the facts are simple because simplicity is the goal of our quest. The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be, Seek simplicity and distrust it.206
Therefore, abstractions and general ideas cannot be given too much attention and too large a role in the process of scientific discovery—provided only that they are used at the appropriate level of insight.
General notions are, above all, not descriptive, but explorative notions. Discoveries are made via general ideas.207 There seems to be some justification to the assumption that the notion and the concept of religion have explored more and, thus, provided more information and increased knowledge than its shortcomings have prevented.
4 On Method
4.1 Retrospection: the Angel Turns His Body
And with his head over his shoulder turned,/He seemed to find his way without his eyes/For out a’ doors he went without their help/And to the last bended their light on me.
shakespeare, Hamlet
4.1.1 On Historical Investigation and the Emergence of Religion
The angel of history famously looks backwards, at least in Walter Benjamin’s intense and well-known characterization in one of his last texts ‘On the concept of history’ (Über den Begriff der Geschichte) from 1940.208 Benjamin’s characterization is rather desperate, at least from the perspective of the angel. Caught in the storm blowing from paradise, the angel cannot heal the wounds of the past, yet is driven inexorably towards the future, which he cannot see. In his considerations on the angel in Benjamin’s thought, Gershom Scholem comes to the conclusion that the angel is a melancholic figure who fails to heal the wounds of the past within history. This task can only be achieved by applying another method. According to Scholem, the past cannot be preserved in an image of perpetual continuity, but rather by rigidly relating (via a ‘leap’) it to the present.209
Scholem’s interpretation provides an important insight regarding the very basic method of writing history. Depressing the perspective of the angel may be, perhaps it is not only catastrophe the angel faces. Taken as a model, the angel’s perspective also expresses the fact that history by definition deals with matters of the past that are steadily moving towards the future, truism as that may be. There seems to be some consensus among historians that historical matters have to be displayed prospectively. In this sense, historians, and not at last historians of religion, tend to be oriented toward future, as they start their examination from an earlier point of time and proceed to a later point in time.210 Accordingly, the ‘emergence’ or ‘development’ of historical issues are examined and presented by choosing a not-too-arbitrary—perhaps popular—starting point and taking things from there.
The prospective method, however, is not without its own problematic constraints. Studying the past in this way encodes some kind of teleology: there is always a residuum of the present involved, even if the researcher claims to understand past times ‘on their own terms’. The main constraint with regard to religion is the fact that such a history may be very short indeed, as there are cultures and traditions in which an explicit notion of religion is a comparatively current phenomenon, thus supposedly rendering the time before unsuitable for the writing of a history of religion proper.211 Moreover, if it is true that the concept of religion as we know it only emerged in European early modernity, scholars of Egyptian and medieval religion alike would be out of work.
However, the examination of the history of religions cannot be based upon a historical approach in the prospective sense. To Alfred North Whitehead, any attempt to deal with religion historically is an illusion which does not grasp the depth of the phenomenon in question:
It is a curious delusion that the rock upon which our beliefs can be founded is a historical investigation. You can only interpret the past in terms of the present. The present is all you have; and unless in this present you can find general principles which interpret the present as including a representation of the whole community of existents, you cannot move a step beyond your little patch of immediacy. Thus history presupposes a metaphysic.212
Historical investigation has replaced the certainty that formerly was attributed to certain concepts. To Whitehead, however, this certainty may be treacherous, as the present, providing the instruments to do so, is the very ground from which an examination of the past has to start. In order to escape one’s little patch of immediacy, one has to apply general principles that may well collide with the aim of understanding the past in its own terms.
In contemplating the phenomenon of tradition, sociologist Edward Shils hints at the possibility that the present may change the past:
The past of hard facts is a past of unfathomable depths. We can never be finished with discovering what it was and what is it as a result of what it was. The past of hard facts is ineluctable and unchangeable in principle but we are constantly having to change our ideas about those ineluctable and unchangeable hard facts as new ones appear, take their place alongside the older ones, and, in doing so, change what we see of those we know previously. T.S. Eliot once said that the literary tradition is changed by what every important work, which has incorporated the tradition adds to it.213
It may well be the case that Whitehead’s and Shils’ musings are interpreted as obstacles to the very possibility of finding an adequate relationship to the past and the possibility of writing history. They may, moreover, be considered irrelevant in order to preserve the prospective perspective in the examination of historical issues. They may even be considered as truisms in current historical research. I would, however, suggest that their considerations may be used as a starting point for the development of an alternative perspective to the history of religion: a critical turn-away from prospection and toward retrospection.
4.1.2 The Retrospective Emergence of Religion
In parts of the Humanities, the idea that concepts coined in modernity cannot possibly be applied to facts of the past, even less to other cultures and even lesser to other cultures of the past, is repeated ad nauseam with increasing enthusiasm, joyfully mistaking redundancy for scientific care.214 However, these modern concepts are those that scholars factually have and have built their questions of research upon. What is more, even if it is true that there is nothing that may serve as references, it does not really contribute additional insight to the fact that there may now be such notions, concepts and, consequently, things now that have effects on people’s life and thoughts. Volkhard Krech has rephrased the ‘Thomas-Theorem’ as follows: if situations are defined that relate communication to religion, then religions exist in the communicative results.215 The prime example of such a concept is, of course, the concept of religion itself. Thus, the question arises, how concepts can be historicized in a rigid manner while at the same time being used to describe historical facts for the sake of scientific analysis?216
In fact, promising approaches that center on the examination of the role of the historical narrative as a method have already been proposed. In his studies on the Qur’ān and the genealogy of Islam, Reinhard Schulze has described the decisive turn from providing an answer to the question of what religion is and how it emerged to examining the question of what became religion and how it did so as the main task of scholarship in the study of the history of religions. To him, it is all about addressing the process that retrospectively may be conceptualized as the genealogy of religion.217 Thus, the narration of the historical process that retrospectively leads to religion has to be one of review (“Die Narration dieses Prozesses muß als Rückschau erfolgen”).218 Schulze, in the following, elaborates on a reverse genealogy (rücklaufende Genealogie) for the notion of religion itself, ultimately reaching the capacity of perception. More important, however, are the possibilities produced when the reverse genealogical method is applied to meso-level or micro-level processes in the history of religion.219 To me, the method seems to be more fertile if applied to questions of how certain notions can be genealogically traced back in diverse traditions. A more general musing on the macro-level of the genealogy of religion as such may lead to, though interesting, more contested discussions of the notions of (to use Schulze’s concepts) transcendence, symbol, or perception.
In contemplating the history of religion, one must not forget the concrete material of one’s study: object language self-descriptions. One has to relate them to theoretical models. In fact, above all in religious tradition that include a founding figure, certain original scenes are most likely to emerge. As Schulze put it: All traditions cannot help but self-substantiate through creation of positive genealogies.220 Of course, these genealogies cannot be taken at face value, but have to be analyzed according to their prevailing functions and the role they play in the afterworld’s imagination and the reasons they have such a strong influence. According to Schulze, the reverse genealogy in the case of the Quʾrān allows two important insights: first, to discern the role of the Islamic tradition in the reverse genealogy (
In accordance with Whitehead’s and Shils’ considerations and summarizing Schulze’s approach, Krech emphasizes that it is epistemologically negligent to think the reconstruction of religious evolution could possibly start with its chronological beginnings, and, then, move linearly towards the present. Rather, such an enterprise has to historicize the present by relating the past (in Scholem’s sense) strongly to the present, thus allowing for scholarly explication and explanation.222
The above method provides a fitting response to the supposed ever-present challenge of how scholars may ever reach or reconstruct the pure original scene (Urszene) unspoiled by tradition and biased texts.223 Herein, those same traditions and biased texts are instead considered as integral, and, in fact, decisive parts of the scene and the process in question. Accordingly, they are not to be deconstructed, but rather to be analyzed in their constructive capacity.
For the explication of the original scene a closer examination of Tomoko Masuzawa’s chapter on Freud in her book ‘In Search of Dreamtime: The Quest for the Origin of Religion’ proves fruitful.224 Of course, the quest for the origin of the notion of religion cannot be fulfilled by reliance on psychoanalysis, let alone to examine the introduction and use of certain notions in extant religious traditions. Nevertheless, and perhaps surprisingly, Freud’s most famous case study of the Wolf-Man, has some relevance for the discussion of the notion of religion and the processes involved with its usage on both metalanguage and object language levels. As Masuzawa stresses, the reference to the Oedipal drama in the case of the Wolf-man illustrates a crucial aspect of the idea of originality and the corresponding attitude towards history. For “[…] it should call our attention to the curious fact that his histories do not start from a beginning but always in the midst, not even in an ambiguously and unequivocally locatable ‘one day’.”225 This is mainly because of the special structure of time derived from Freud’s theory here: Freud’s ‘refounding of time’.
The application of the structure of re-founded time may be an important tool for further work on the history of religions. The refoundation may be described as follows: Masuzawa states that the crucial event of one’s psychological development “is not an event that can be located at a precise point in time for it is literally a complex, which arises codependently. They arise in and as the traces of diachronic cross-reference, interpenetration, and superimposition of ‘events’ dispersed in time.”226 Accordingly, the process is not related to a common interpretation of chronology as proceeding linearly from a to (some later point in time) b. Directionally, it is the other way around. Thus, the original scene itself is a product of communication in the double sense: first, it represents a challenging encounter and, second, the encounter of that encounter with later experiences. Because of that, the content and the significance of the original scene are unfixed from the very beginning: it is “not something that happens in the beginning in any simple chronological sense; it comes into effect sometime in the course of the individual’s life, and assumes the position of an origin, or Ursache [ground]. Since it does invariably come into effect, everything that came before and comes after it will equally fall under its dictate […].”227 It may well be the case that an encounter gains relevance and significance only after another event has occurred which retrospectively makes the first encounter relevant, meaningful, and important. The meaning and importance of an original scene, thus, is gained in retrospect when it is juxtaposed with later experiences all of which add to the content and the relevance of the original scene.
Thus, by this ‘refoundation of time’, a perhaps once insignificant incidence is enriched with meaning over the course of time, being modified by the experiences of the participant of the original scene in such a way becoming the decisive original scene that now determines the whole story. Therefore, it is not the case that observers of history do perceive the decisive event in time; rather it is the further course of events that makes one event decisive. Masuzawa even goes so far as to hint at the peculiar bipolar structure of the reality derived from this interplay: though the original scene may never have in fact happened, it nevertheless represents itself as real in following experiences. Thus, the reality of the subsequent experience is founded on the basis of an ‘unreal’ event, the ‘mental pole’, thus, structuring the actual—and vice versa.228 This “antihistoricist sense of time”229 as opposed to the former “logic of origination that animates and dominates much of our discursive practices, in religious studies as in many other fields,”230 however, might be useful for examining the notion of religion and of justifying its further use in scholarly metalanguage.
4.1.3 From ‘Religion’ to Back
Reversing the course of time makes things more complicated, but it also allows us to start our historical research now and then travel back in time. We do not have to assume an original point in time and start from there. The perspective of description is reversed, and the body of the historian’s work turns towards the phenomena, following the orientation to the past.
A concept acquires general and generic qualities in retrospect of the concrete situation when it was introduced. If a concept is introduced in a contingent situation of contact (i.e. an original scene of this concept) into a tradition, then it is right this concept or a translation, used because of resemblance and similarity, that is the notion of religion. The concept of religion, thus, is not a correctly derived notion as regards historical development nor is it the most adequate notion of the ‘phenomenon’ of religion. Concepts are in a permanent state of modification, that further tends towards generalization, as they are handed down. As they are transmitted, further importance is added to the original scene of introduction—the ur-usage of the term. In his considerations on religious language, Bruno Latour has described a set of characteristics that are well suited to the notion of religion that is actually used today: “This particular universal is so unlike the other kind that, far from coming down, stable, from the past to the present, it takes off from the present and goes back to the past, changing and deepening the past’s foundation. So much so that, the more time passes, the more the point of departure swells with the future. What happens after that allows the beginning to be the beginning of something. The start depends on the sequel. The father depends on the son.”231
The retrospective perspective is employed on the object language level either in emerging traditions or in situations of contact between traditions. Concerning the question of temporal priority in Zoroastrianism and Manichaeism Jason BeDuhn notes: “Yet, when set within the larger context of historical developments, the evidence suggests that Zoroastrianism was in its formative (not reformative) period at the same time as Manichaeism was; that both religions emerged only in the third century against the background of Iranian religious cultural traditions; that both religions laid claim to those older traditions, and appropriated them selectively, tendentiously, within the bounds of their distinct hermeneutics; that this process of cultural interpretation and consolidation in third-century Iran resulted in precisely the emergence of ‘religions’ as distinct institutional entities for the first time in this part of the world; but that both religions wanted to read their present into the past, and set about constructing a narrative of an earlier time much like theirs, of an earlier founding of Zarathustra’s ‘religion.’”232 Supposing that both traditions constituted themselves as ‘religions’ the predecessors they claimed for were then constituted as religions as well. However, they were interpreted in accordance with the prevailing religious teachings of the time—and as though they were also the origin of the later one.
The main fallacy regarding the examination of the origin of religion is to look for the definitory elements of religion at the earliest possible time—i.e., to search for the ‘birthplace’ of a religion, when it was still small, yet already equipped with all the elements that justify the name of religion. Having discovered its birthplace, the scholar then writes the history of religion into the form of a biography, starting with early and perhaps even pre-birth events and closing with the later events of its ‘life’. Rather, it should be written the other way around: one has to start with the refined notion of religion now and then travel back into time, accepting the risk and the probable result that the religion in question gets conceptually ‘smaller’ and the notion less and less refined in the course of time. This method is by no means a hidden apotheosis of a particular notion that has factually prevailed in the course of history (perhaps with the help of force), but rather a suggestion for an approach to deal with the fact of historically successful notions. Moreover, it may well be the case that religion proper gradually turns into the religioid. What can be written is an anti-(or kata-)biography or anti-(kata-)history of religion based on a refoundation of time. It goes without saying that within such a project, the Orientalist approach is not valid anymore, as one needs the prevailing notion of today as an inevitable starting point.
It may well be the case that there is no such notion or concept of religion that can be found in the, say, third century BCE in Japan. There is, however, such a notion now that has its counterparts with regard to supposedly corresponding notions that are presently found in Japanese culture. These notions may be traced back to earlier notions, right back to third century notions. Accordingly, it is futile to check if there is an item in third century Japan that fits with the characteristics of a notion of religion, and to state that there was religion if there is a 100 percent hit. It is not even promising to allow a lower percentage of ‘hits’. What allows for the statement ‘there is religion in Japan at that time’ is another kind of reasoning entirely. Though it might be provocative to some ears, there is much truth in the assertion that there was religion in Japan in the third century because there is religion in Japan now. What happened here was something that may be described using the model of ‘genealogical Platonism’ as introduced by Volkhard Krech. The model studies the emergence of forms from diffuse and incomplete elements, aiming at completing and achieving unambiguous patterns to adapt to known and well-established forms.233 By tracing ‘religion’ back to possible candidates from its own conceptual horizon, object language considerations retrospectively co-ordinate earlier and later patterns to a continuum of meaning that may be subject to metalanguage description. Retrospection and the examination of the conceptual processes involved in the forming of patterns are, thus, the main elements of a study of the history of religions. The instances, in which patterns are obviously and, perhaps forci- bly, coordinated to achieve a continuum are not obstacles to metalanguage description or the proof that a later concept is somehow ‘wrong’ or not suitable for the prevailing cultural context, but rather the decisive leaping points where the retrospective pattern-building process becomes obvious, differentiated and scientifically describable. They are, as decisive points of contact, the very situations in which meaning is retrospectively introduced—loaded cumulatively in the Freudian sense—with meaning and that, accordingly, make scholarly work possible.234
‘Religion’ is, thus, a permanently emerging fact of the present that is continuously retrospectively appropriated in the past. After, all this is a process that also may be witnessed on the object-language level, concerning the particular ways religious groups, if challenged internally or externally, relate themselves to temporality. Traditions dynamically stabilize themselves by retrospectively adapting the past to the present needs.
On the scholarly metalanguage level, regarding the description, analysis and explanation of historical processes, it is important to notice that the idea of the ‘invention’ of a historical item, a concept, a notion, an idea and so on, under the retrospective perspective becomes basically senseless. This is—perhaps—much of a pity if one looks at the legions of books and articles that bear the notion ‘the invention of X’ in their title. There may have been an invention of Hinduism, perhaps even performed by sinister agents of colonialism and imperialism, but Hinduism is a present-day object language reality, having communicative results that shape reality. As it makes no sense to explain it away for reasons of its inventedness, it makes also no sense to talk about the only possible history of Hinduism dating back about 200 years (as the word ‘Hinduism’ did not exist in Indian languages before 1816).235 Hinduism, from today’s perspective, is as old as the earliest manifestations of the human mind in the outside world because there is meaningful communication on Hinduism now.
It is about time to call for another scholarly turn, but this time for a turn that is really a turn. The image of the angel of history as described by Walter Benjamin is not merely descriptive, but also makes a request of the reader. The head of the angel of history is already turned: what is now required is that it turns its body as well. What is needed, is a katahistory, a turn of the body of history. Thus, moving backwards into the open that is the un-foreseen future is the only appropriate orientation for scientific enterprise.236
4.2 “He Who Wants to Travel Foreign Lands Needs Model Forms”: Model Forms in Situations of Religious Contact
Given that situations of contact are the most important events for understanding the dynamics of the history of religions, we then require appropriate scholarly instruments and models to grasp these situations of contact conceptually.237 With regard to this question, I would like to suggest the examination and use of model forms as an important tool and as a subject in themselves for scholarly work. Accordingly, in the following chapter, I hope to demonstrate how model forms are used on object language level and, correspondingly, how they can be used on metalanguage level for the description, analysis and explication of situations that dynamize the history of religions. By doing so, the process and the merits of inevitable, but also productive misunderstandings in situations of contact may be scrutinized.
To introduce and explain the notion of ‘model form’ I have to refer to one of the most dreaded pieces of writing in the history of humankind—namely the spectre of the income tax return form. People in modern societies are used to such documents which can be considered instrumental in both acknowledging and exploiting them as members of the society in which they find themselves. As frightening, bureaucratic and as specified as it may be, the model form as employed here may prove fitting for the analysis and description of what is going on in the history of religions, in particular with regard to situations of religious contact.
On a basic level, model forms (Formulare) are characterized by the inclusion of fixed text and blank spaces. The process expected by this template is that the blank spaces be filled with the personal data of the individual, for example, name, address, date of birth, income tax number, and even religion. By doing so, by filling in the blanks, the individual inscribes them into the model form. The notion of inscribing or inscription as used here refers to this process.
The example of the dreaded income tax form (Steuererklärungsformular) is, nevertheless a good example of the model form, as it is in many regards representative of the basic functions of a model form. What is peculiar about them is the fact that someone who fills the slots of the form is considered to be responsible for the way the text is read. This responsibility may result in a change of status, a requirement for additional payment or even legal persecution. In rare cases, as it seems, one may also get some money back.
The following lines are intended to provide a conceptual approach for the phenomenological reformulation of the situation of contact as a catalyst for the particular dynamics of the history of religions. It is my main thesis that by examining model form narratives the different levels of instantiation of potential and real situations of contact can be discerned. Moreover, the model form (Formular) can be described as the structural basis of communication and transfer of religious knowledge.
Model forms are a decisive element of object language communication and can be described on the level of scientific metalanguage courtesy of a structural correspondence between object language and metalanguage strategies. Meta-language model forms here can be compared to phenomenological notions such as Edmund Husserl’s notion of the ‘empty horizon’ or ‘empty (pre-)indication’ (Leerhorizont/Leervorweise). According to Husserl, in perception processes, the presence of objects is constituted both by the recognizable and the indications of the not-yet recognizable, such as a table that, at a given point of time, is partly perceived and partly not-yet perceived. Husserl explains these indications as indications of an emptiness not yet filled. The emptiness or blank is not arbitrary; rather, it is framed by prescriptive rules that determine how the blanks are to be filled, i.e. it is connected to meaning which allows the synthesis of perception. To a certain degree, and following Husserl’s notion, Martin Heidegger’s formaleAnzeige (formal indication) can be conceptualized as a phenomenological instrument that works in the manner of model forms. These instruments are intended to guarantee that the direction of explication of a phenomenon is provided by the phenomenon itself, and not by an a priori theory or preconceived concept. For this sake, suitably framed blank spaces are used, which thereby allow the phenomenologist to follow the lead of the phenomenon in question without bias.238
4.2.1 On Model Forms (Formulare)
Model forms are no mere theoretical constructs, but rather objects in and for every-day practice. It is to be expected that the very majority of the world’s population today is familiar with model forms, not least digital natives who are used to the basic procedures and elements found on the internet. In the following, I would like to concentrate on two examples of model forms that are to be found today and the historical background that led to their introduction.
4.2.1.1 In Bureaucracy
To the possible surprise of many of its hapless victims, the model form is, nevertheless, predominantly a cultural achievement. That it also might be an important scholarly tool in modeling the dynamics of the history of religion, I hope to show in the following. But first, let me stick to model form’s cultural significance as it throws some light on the possible use of the concept in scholarly work on situations of religious contact.
Especially in its modern fearsome appearance, the model form is, above all, an instrument to enhance the productivity of a given society by means of an optimization of the efficacy of communication. Model forms are the main media of communication between the individual and institutions. Though model forms undoubtedly restrict and channel communication—they inaugurate something that is called an asymmetrical dialogical situation (mostly between an authority asking and an individual answering)—they, nevertheless allow communication in the first place. This is communication of a special kind, characterized by a certain dichotomy between the individual particular and the institutionalized general, or rather, between a dynamic contingent and the stable lasting element.
Above all, it is a reliable communication. First, the complexity of communication is reduced by means of the standardization of language, of questions and answers, or rather, of texts and blank spaces. Second, many model forms have a binding quality as the filling of the blank spaces has to be confirmed through provision of a date and signature at the end of the model form. In many contexts, the model form, thus, achieves a legally relevant status. Signing your income tax form means not least that you can be made legally responsible for your entries, and that you will suffer legal persecution if these entries are found false.239
A model form functions as an interface between the contingency of an individual inscription on the one hand, and the stability and formativeness of a general text on the other hand. It produces and stabilizes in-formation via inscription. It provides a framework for communication that partly consists of variable information and partly of constant information.240 By doing so, it provides a generally readable text that mediates between the individual and society. Thus, the form can be described as a cultural achievement—as a mediator between individual and society, forms (and the form they take) are culturally determined. The individual, thus, is not dissolved, but rather maintained and specified within the spaces of a model-from-based communication. By using model forms, the individual claims to be seen (and recognized by the institution or authority). A model form, thus, allows both generalization (of the prevailing information) and the attribution of individuality as the center the information achieved by the model form is ascribed to.
The decisive characteristic of model forms are their blank spaces.241 These spaces do not only allow individual inscriptions. In inscribing these blank spaces, the individual also performs a juridical act. It might be argued that in Western societies, particularly after the Second World War, the use of model forms in bureaucracy somehow gets more democratic, as now the individual themselves fills out the model form. The task is no longer relegated to an expert, normally a civil servant. The personal inscription, however, does also enhance the degree of responsibility held by the individual for his inscriptions into the model form. Media theorist Cornelia Vismann in her book Akten, Medientechnik und Recht (2011) has stressed the legal obligation that follows the inscription into the model form:
The printed model form relates to the written filling-in as the abstract law to the concrete case. It prefigures the subsumptive proceeding for the application of abstract laws. The blank space in model forms marks the place of the concrete in the manner of blank and its infilled content. It is its hollow form.242
Model forms, thus, in-form bureaucracy via formalization. As such, bureaucracy is indebted to a binding order manifested in standardized communication processes—as well as the individual in question who completes the model form.
4.2.1.2 In Religious Contexts
The in-formative communicative function outlined above as well as the obligation that derives from the model form structure, finds its resonances in the religious sphere—as should, perhaps be of interest to scholars of religious studies.
Thus, it should not come as a surprise that the notion of model forms is not unknown to religious traditions and that forms are also used in religious contexts. They may even be the objects of some enthusiasm—for they make use of bureaucratic practice. Basil of Caesarea (Basil the Great), for example, refers to a model form of the emerging Christian church in his Homily XIII:
Come, then, at once, to me: devote thyself entirely to the Lord: give in thy name: be enrolled in the list of the Church. The soldier’s name is enrolled: the champion enters on the combat, after his name has been inscribed on the lists: a naturalized citizen is registered on the city books. By all these titles thou are bound to give in thy name, as a soldier of Christ, a champion of piety, and one who aspires to citizenship in heaven. Have it inscribed on this book, that it may be inscribed above.243
Here, in fact, it is bureaucracy multiplied: a model form then permits access to another model form, rendering the process both reliable and binding (“Be dead to sin: be crucified together with Christ”) in anticipation of a future reward gained as a result of these processes of inscription (“Through many tribulations we must enter into the kingdom of heaven: but the beatitude of the heavenly kingdom succeeds these tribulations”).244
The presence of model forms, however, is not restricted to Christian contexts. In Lucian’s Deorum Concilium one finds an interesting example of the use of model forms in an admittedly satirical literary context, in which bureaucratic, legal, and religious aspects are combined. Here, Zeus convenes an ekklesia of the gods in order to discuss how to deal with unworthy gods who have illicitly joined the table of the legitimate gods. As Momos, the god of reproach, argues, unworthy strangers, Greeks and Barbarians had themselves inscribed into the citizen’s roll of heaven, and, thus, claimed unjustifiably for the honor of divinity.
There are, I repeat it, many persons who, despite their mixed origin, have been admitted to our feasts and councils upon terms of equality; and who, not satisfied with this, have brought hither their servants and satellites, and enrolled them among the Gods; and these menials now share in our rations and sacrifices without ever so much as paying the customary tax.245
As a consequence, the table of the gods is crowded with riff-raff who are not even willing to pay the necessary ‘Metoikae’-tax. It is not by chance that one might be reminded of the model form by which one pays income tax.246
The element of obligation that is connected to model form structures can be identified in religious contexts as well. As Webb Keane has stressed, creeds are closely linked to a ‘performative of assent’: “A creed normally looks like a series of propositions about the world. But they are peculiar in certain respects. First, usually they are formulaic, condensing complex arguments about doctrine into a readily learned and reproduced form. Moreover, the propositions are attached to a performative of assent. The creed states an objective claim (it is the case that ‘Jesus is the Son of God’). As such it appears to be merely a proposition. But it has performative force; the Nicene creed begins ‘We believe’. It asserts the speaker’s alignment with the claims (‘Jesus is the Son of God’ is true about the world, and I hold that it is true). Moreover, it publicly reports this alignment (‘Jesus is the Son of God’ is true about the world, and I hold that it is true, and I hereby state so, that is, I take responsibility for the match between my words and the world itself). The creed takes the publicly circulating form of an assertion. It represents the speaker as taking responsibility for her own thoughts.”247 The same formulaic structure that is at the same time a performative of assent and of obligation, of taking responsibility, of informing and being informed—up to the point that any retraction is no longer possible save at peril of severe consequences—may be found in the Islamic šahāda “I bear witness that there is no deity but God, and I bear witness that Muḥammad is the messenger of God.” The testimony of monotheism as a declaration of allegiance and abjuration of other divinities248 also hints at a context of religious challenge, which is then met in the formulaic manner of a binding self-declaration.249
Model forms as an instrument of communication appear prominently in the context of the Christian ritual—in liturgical contexts: the formularia. Scholars of Christian liturgy date precursors of the model forms in question back as early as to the Didache, and in particular to the words that are supposed to be spoken at the Eucharist. These, in turn, may be traced back to Jewish and Pagan sources.250 Originally, from at least the Carolingian renaissance and the introduction of liturgical books (supposedly from the time of Gregory the Great) from Rome at Charlemagne’s court during the ninth century CE, formularia in liturgy of the West effect the communicative regulation of the general and the particular by imposing a model upon free improvisation within liturgy. Formularia, thus, interrelate past and present as well as temporality and eternity.251
There has been a tendency for collections of model forms created for practical purposes in liturgy to become normative. In doing so, they can become codified cult rituals insensitive to the spiritual welfare of the congregation. Yet, nevertheless, the free spaces that are contained within the model forms, as it seems, can also allow for the gradual transformation of the formularia to emancipatory elements of individual use.252 The protestant theologian Rainer Volp (1931–1998) in his two-volume study on liturgy as ‘the art to celebrate God’ described the task and the function of model forms in a corresponding fashion. Above all, formularia are introduced to combine objectified formula and subjective form. In this sense, the model form can be seen as proffing an opportunity for an individual inscription into a ritual that is intended to combine the immanent and the transcendent sphere for the sake of communication.253 According to current theological considerations, in Christian liturgy, model forms are, therefore, used to prepare and allow this kind of communicatio idiomatum with regard to general application in service, allowing participants to inscribe themselves individually into the ritual.254 The individually and temporally prevailing inscription within the ritual, therefore, allows for gradual changes of the model form.255
As such, model forms are manifestations of situations of contact. They are used to allow communication via in-formation. It is this informative and communicative aspect that may be instrumental for the description and analysis of situations of contact between religious traditions.
4.2.2 Sociological Theory of Model Forms
Model forms allow and structure communication. They do so, firstly by the mediating function they hold between the general and the particular and secondly, through their obligatory character they acquire once the blank spaces have been filled and the process of inscription has been corroborated through the act of dating and signing the form. In general, model forms objectify individuals via information, i.e. they make them visible to a greater context. It guarantees the social accountability/reliability of an individual as a generally readable sociotext.
Despite their seemingly static character, model forms can serve as a decisive building block of a processual social theory. The introduction of model forms manifests the scientific decision to read and to describe social processes as textures, and to utilize structural correspondences between social phenomena and their scholarly description. In this regard, the sociological theory of model forms is an element of a (meta-)hermeneutics that is able to describe the mutual hermeneutics of religious traditions that are in contact with each other.
The sociological theory of model forms was introduced by the social philosopher Jürgen Frese. In his work to produce a general theory located between social philosophy and social sciences, the notion of model form became relevant to Frese in the conceptual description of experience and its relation to the social context. In his book Prozesse im Handlungsfeld (‘Processes in the field of action’) from 1985, Frese claims that “one can describe social processes as meaningful filling-ins of model forms, thus generating self-identifying systems” (“soziale Prozesse sind beschreibbar als sinnvolle Ausfüllungen von Formularen zu sich selbstidentifizierenden Systemen”).256 In accordance with Niklas Luhmann’s basic idea that the essence of the social is communication, one could, accordingly, claim that communication is performed by certain model forms. In general,
model forms can be described as a partly filled-out (and, therefore, preconceived) structure with certain blank spaces, into which individualizing characteristics, data and facts can be registered. A model form is more than merely structural fixation of possible fulfillments, but less determined as regards content.257
Blank spaces allow for individual use. It is this concrete action-guiding and mediating function that provides model forms with their potential to establish sociality. According to Frese, model forms, are the ‘living common’ (das lebendig Allgemeine) in social processes, not only in linguistic expression, but rather as regards action in general.258 Thus, sociality can be defined as fulfilling blank spaces by means of concrete action. Correspondingly, responsibility for these actions depends on the character of the possible field of action within the model form.
As such, model forms instantiate a threefold connective function between the particular and the general. Firstly, model forms connect the lived experience (Erleben) of the individual to the texture of the contemporary concrete situation the individual is in. They allow for self-reference. The isolated elements of lived experience, thus, may be described as ‘fitting into’ the model form. Thus, ‘incommensurable’ lived experience becomes communicable experience (Erfahrung), and this is true, above all, for the experiencing individual themself. The description that then constitutes the experience (Erfahrung) thus follows a familiar pattern of recognition (Wiedererkennung) for oneself and others.259 Thus, unique lived experience is transformed into socially relevant experience constituting a recognizable habitus. Via model forms, the individual may even compose or write their own life story (autobiography): lived experience achieves familiarity by being informed through model forms.
At the same time, secondly, model forms connect to the event in question. That is to say, individual experience and the event are no longer basically unrelated. Individual experience is inscribed into the model form, meaning that the resulting text (the story of one’s life) affects and concerns the individual personally.
And third, and socially most important, model forms connect the self and others surrounding the self (Selbstwelt und Mitwelt) to a common environment (Umwelt). Via the medium of the general, the socially visible individual emerges (the communicative and the communicable individual) within the spaces of a model form. “By dealing with model forms, experience is structured and disciplined historically in such a way that in between general definiteness and individual contingency of an event a mutually recognizing and accounting level emerges and stabilizes.”
Model forms are also employed in order to transform individual lived experience into communicable experience.260 Experience, thus, is not hampered by communication, but in fact it provides the forms in which even the unspeakable (as the unspeakable) might be grasped. Otherwise, individual lived experience is not worth talking about.261
On this level of mutual recognition and accountability, translation processes become possible. As regards the hermeneutics of model-form-based translation processes, Frese’s following notion is particularly interesting: “The filled-in, consistent, socially defensible, sensibly readable model form forms a text, in which elements of the model form and fillings indistinguishably merge into each other. The content of the text is a story, told after the main connecting thread of the model form.”262
The concept of the story or the narrative is clearly not previously unknown to the Humanities. The relevance and importance of narrative have been stressed by many scholars and the notion is abundantly used to describe and analyze all kinds of human conduct. Phenomenologist Wilhelm Schapp (1884–1965) considered both stories (Geschichten) at the individual and family level and ‘big stories’ (Großgeschichten/Weltgeschichten/Allgeschichten), such as myths, Biblical or Qurʾanic stories as the essentials for the existence of both individuals and societies, providing and preconditioning the scope of possible action.263 It is the ‘big stories’ that provide the most telling model forms for a given society’s sociotexts.264
Model forms, so far, have been neglected in the ‘narrative turn’ in cultural sciences. Jerome Bruner in his considerations about the narrative construction of reality stresses the importance of narratives for the interpretation of social situations: “Just as our experience of the natural world tends to imitate the categories of familiar science, so our experience of human affairs comes to take the form of the narratives we use in telling about them.”265 Nevertheless, I think that the model form character of such important stories or narratives has not been stressed properly. In order to fulfill their social, mediating function, narratives have to be interpreted as model forms. It is only then that individuals can inscribe themselves to the (big) stories that exist within the relevant cultural archive. These inscriptions make them ‘visible’, that is, communicative and communicable to others.
4.2.3 Model Forms in Contact
Now, how can scholars use these findings to describe situations of contact between religious traditions more adequately? Model forms may not only provide sociotexts within a given society, but also establish sociotexts between societies, or between cultures and religious traditions. In doing so, they profit from the reliability connected to formalization. This reliability is, after all, found in bureaucratic contexts,266 but also on object language level in the religious field.267
Perhaps the model form-like qualities of sociotexts might explain the “astounding compatibility of the religious” (Walter Burkert), which has often been manifested in multifold situations of contact.268 That the ill-reputed notion of ‘religion’ is nowadays often replaced by the more agreeable notion of ‘religious tradition’ may already hint at the fact that, regarding religions, a certain narrative about themselves—a diachronic self-reference—is already employed. To overcome contingency, a story of continuity and legitimization is told.269 The traditional self-reference—the self-reference inherent to tradition—can be taken for granted in case of a religion.
Accordingly, in a situation of (religious) contact, two distinct narratives or stories of continuity and legitimization meet. These stories may be different in many regards. However, this event also means that two model forms meet as well; model forms that invite the other tradition in question to inscribe itself into the form in order to make themselves visible for the users of the model form. I know that the term ‘invites’ sounds quite positive, one could also and perhaps with more reason talk about ‘forcing the other to inscribe itself’. Nonetheless, it is the fact that communication is made possible at all that is relevant for our current context.
It is precisely because of the blank spaces inherent within the model form that distinct traditions may communicate. Inscription into a model form establishes a sociotext. In a situation of contact, the prevailing sociotext is then subject to hermeneutical processes on both sides. Both sides have to proceed by means of conjectures: they have to tentatively fill the blank spaces with possible entries derived from their own sociotext. Thus, they fill the slots provided by the other tradition regarding the possible inscriptions of their own tradition. This is bound to produce misunderstandings of the other. Nevertheless, the inscription into the model form produces a consistent and readable text that renders the other tradition visible and communicative.270 A common environment is established. Moreover, hermeneutical means of understanding, such as radical interpretation and the basic hermeneutical ‘principle of charity’, also work via model forms. In both cases, a model form text is established for the other due to the bounds of rationality within one’s own tradition which the other is invited to inscribe.
The presence of model forms is most obvious in institutionalized situations of contact, such as mission, religious disputations, or in meetings of legations. However, model forms can also be found in the more contingent meetings of individuals. The other is considered trainable, to be treated by means of a plan. The model form in this instance works to establish a certain habitus that allows the party to the encounter to react to an unknown situation and to contextualize the event into a readable and reliable sociotext. Model forms, and not least model forms of action allow connectabilites (Anschlußmöglichkeiten, points of connection) that may lead to mutual understanding.271 Here, the argument returns to its bureaucratic beginnings. Volkhard Krech, in a discussion on the model form in a meeting of the KHK,272 has put it this way: he who wants to travel unknown foreign lands, needs model forms (Wenn man in ein neues Land reisen möchte, braucht man Formulare).273 This is, not at last, true for the scholar of religions who is confronted with material from another cultural sphere: model forms might be annoying, but they allow for basic, reliable communication processes.
4.2.4 Textual and Material Examples of Model Forms in Contact
Model forms are an important item of object language, above all, if a tradition is challenged by a situation of contact. Model forms function on several levels, such as textual or material level, but also on diverse levels of scale, namely regarding macro-, meso-, and micro-processes. In the following I am going to list a few examples of the presence and usage of model forms in the context of religions and, in particular, in the context of contact of religious traditions.
Considering a special case, the phenomenon of institutionalized situations of contact between religious traditions, the aim or the aspired outcome of the situation is the elaboration of a model form of mutual recognition and future dealings. There even might be a written text in form of a contract. The participants inscribe into the model form and interpret it according to their prevailing background thus preparing the occupation or re-interpretation of the binding fixed text and the subsequent integration into the universal narration.
However, in most cases the presence and employment of model forms may be implicit but is nevertheless clearly discernable. One could think of many textual incidents for the relevance of model forms in contact. Herodotus’ famous interpretatio graeca may serve as an example, though the basic cultural technique of translation of names of Gods can already be traced back to third Millennium BCE Mesopotamia. Here, the names of the gods and their functions within a certain cosmological frame are treated as transferable, able to be slotted into the blank space where the name of a god would appear in another tradition. The substitution of name—foreign god for familiar deity—thus generates some immediate understanding of an otherwise unfamiliar tradition within that textural context. The question of whether this procedure is ‘right’ or ‘correct’ in the supposed connection of name and story that is thus made is beside the point.274 The nature of the form itself275 may present difficulties for interpretation of the other tradition—when information in a received narrative does not fit the understanding of the gods within a tradition—but these difficulties become questions of doctrine, which by prompting self-reflection then condense the self-conception of a tradition by means of a process of transcending.276
An instance from Elizabethan times provides a further telling example of the particular use of a model form in a contact situation.277 Here, it is both an expression of the perils of an encounter of belligerent religious traditions and, supposedly due to this, of the binding quality that is connected to its usage.
In 1757, a strange document was found by workers demolishing an old house in Henley Street, Stratford. As it seems, the document still displays some destructiveness on certain branches of scholarship, though the “very extraordinary manuscript [found] between the rafters and the tiling of the house […] is a small paperbook consisting of six leaves, but unluckily the first was wanting when the book was found.” Edmond Malone, the eminent scholar, lawyer and editor, who reported on the discovery of the document in 1790, furthermore claims to “have taken some pains to ascertain the authenticity of this manuscript, and after a very careful inquiry [is] perfectly satisfied that it is genuine.”278 The manuscript in question is a ‘will’, its content a written confession of faith and of the religious convictions of the person who had inserted his name into the blank spaces that were to be found in every paragraph of the otherwise set text. Additionally, the text was signed at the end by one John Shakespear. By inscribing his name into the model form of the text, William Shakespeare’s father confessed his affiliation with the Catholic Church.
In the name of God, the father, sonne, and holy ghost, the most holy and blessed Virgin Mary, mother of God, the holy host of archangels, angels, patriarchs, prophets, evangelists, apostles, saints, martyrs, and all the celestrial court and company of heaven, I John Shakespear, a unworthy member of the holy Catholick religion […] make and ordaine this my last spiritual will, testament, confession, protestation, and confession of faith, hopinge hereby to receive pardon for all my sinnes and offences, and thereby to be made partaker of life everlasting, through the only merits of Jesus Christ my savior and redeemer, who took upon himself the likeness of man, suffered death, and was crucified upon the crosse, for the redemption of the sinners.279
In the present context, the question of whether the document proves that John Shakespeare and his son were in fact secret Catholics or not, is utterly irrelevant.280 Scholarship still struggles on this question.281 Unfortunately, the pamphlet itself has not survived save for a number of copies made in the eighteenth century. Regardless of whether John Shakespear’s confession of faith was genuine, however there are other extant examples of similar fill-in-the-blank confessions of faith. The oldest of these model forms has been dated to around the year 1635.282
It is more interesting, however, to consider the historical context of religious encounter in which the document emerged than the question of its authenticity. The background concerns the Jesuit Mission of 1580–1581 to England which was itself an expression of the conflict between the Anglican and the Catholic Church. Following Pope Pius V’s excommunication of Elizabeth in 1570, Catholicism in England was supported from overseas through the seminary at Duoai (Flanders), triggering stern countermeasures from the English authorities.283 Supposedly, in these times of repression of Catholics, the Jesuit Mission circulated pre-formulated forms that could be used to confess the Catholic faith through inscribing data into the provided form. As the story goes, these forms were brought to England by the Catholic martyr Edmund Campion (1540–1581)284 and the leader of the re-catholicization movement, Robert Parsons (1546–1610).285 Perhaps for reasons of scope or poor choice of targets (the aristocracy and the gentry), the mission was heroic in its efforts— but largely disastrous, ending as it did with Campion executed and Parsons fleeing England.286
Whether the papers were really part of the 1580–1581 endeavor or date from later times, they can nevertheless be contextualized within the Catholic history of counterreformation and mission, as well as into a history of martyrs. In sum, they appear in the context (intra-)religious conflict, a particular instance of contact.287 Any possible forger of John Shakespeare’s spiritual testament would have been aware of these histories. Even in the case of genuine documents, their embeddedness into the story, of course, has effects on the function of the documents itself. The inscription of data into a binding (and potentially deadly) model form was considered at this point in time to be an adequate religious confessional reaction of an individual in a challenging situation. To profit from the benefits of the Catholic faith, one had to fill the blank spaces of the form adequately: that is, by inscribing one’s name, the name of a saint of one’s choice, and by signing the whole document at the end. By doing so, one dedicates oneself manifestly to salvation as mediated by the Catholic Church. Thus the individual relates themself to the institution, and is personally written into the general story of salvation that the institution proclaims. Once filled out, the form is considered to be unchangeable; its binding quality is in force for eternity, as the unchangeability itself is a feature written into the model form—explicitly in the case of this example: and I beseech him above all things, that he never permit any change to be made by me John Shakespear of this my aforesaid will and testament. Amen.288
In the Shakespeare example given above the significance of the material object of the model form, the form of the incriminating ‘small paperbook’ is already revealing. As this example suggests, model forms in religious contexts are by no means confined to texts alone. They are not restricted to manifest scripture or even written and printed accounts. Rather, there are many material examples that reveal themselves as being model forms via a manifest religious contact that is expressed within them.
Instead the range of material objects that can be considered model forms is far, far broader than merely texts. The shape of the crucifix is well-known: the tortured body of Jesus hanging on the cross, perhaps marked with the inscription INRI. As such, the material object might be interpreted as a texture connecting the story of Jesus, as the person depicted, to what became the symbol of the religious movement that followed him. But there are more layers to the texture here: as a whole, the crucifix fixed visibly to a wall makes a statement of confession. However, there are also incidents of objects which adapt to this form, but in which certain salient elements have been replaced. In the following example, the place of Jesus within the texture of the cross has been instead filled by a statuette of the Buddha. Hence, the cross has become another instance of a model form: the place of Jesus within the whole has become an element considered dispositional, a free space that has been inscribed with another signifier, changing the meaning of the whole.
The Buddha cross itself at first glance could be interpreted as an attempt to adapt the teachings of Buddhism to Christianity or vice versa. It might be taken to suggest that within the context of the cross, the function of Christ might be replaced by the function of the Buddha. However, the material object in question is an artefact from seventeenth-century Japan, used by Christians in a situation of repression and persecution. Beginning with the 1549 arrival of Francis Xavier in Japan, an astounding number of Japanese, estimated at over a quarter of a million, converted to Christianity courtesy of the efforts of the Jesuit Mission.289 However, following the Expulsion Edict of 1614 and the persecution of Christians in Nagasaki in 1629, the remaining Christian communities were forced to go underground. The Japanese authorities of the Tokugawa shogunate developed a cunning strategy for finding hidden Christians (kirishitan) and forced them to retract: suspects were forced to step on images (efumi/fumi-e) made of wood, stone or bronze depicting crucified Christ or the Virgin Mary. If they declined, they were tortured and eventually executed. By 1644 over two thousand people in Japan had been martyred to the Catholic faith in this way.290 The practice of trampling Christian images developed into a public festival in some regions of Japan, and was maintained even after the banishment of the last missionaries in 1639. It was not officially abandoned until 1873.291
Christianity was considered a threat to the basis of Japanese society as the Christian faith ultimately transferred loyalty to an otherworldly sphere.292 In order to maximize control of the suspected converts, all Japanese subjects were required to associate to have a bureaucratic affiliation with a Buddhist institution: “Like all persons in Japan from the mid-seventeenth century, underground Christians had to register with local Buddhist temples, which functioned as an arm of the state, registering births, deaths, marriages, and so on. This meant that all underground Christians had to master the role of being nominally Buddhist as required, and secretly something forbidden.”293 Via this procedure, bureaucratized Buddhism became an instrumental institution for the interests of the Tokugawa state.294
Despite all the measures taken to hunt converts to the forbidden faith, the extinguishment of Christianity was never completely eliminated in Japan due to some techniques of secrecy295 and subversion, many of which involved the careful use of model forms such as the crucifix mentioned above. “Many Christians secretly retained the faith by disguising their true religious identity with Buddhist paraphernalia.”296 In order to forestall being forced to desecrate Christian symbols, and, thus, endangering either one’s life or one’s spiritual salvation, or being simply detected by the religious objects they possessed, Christians changed the texture of their venerated images.297 Hence, in the crucifix mentioned above, the believer replaced the body of Christ with the figure of the Buddha on the crucifix, thus keeping the confessional symbol and its texture in place.298 For protective reasons, the crucifix in this case was treated as a model form and thus was able to retain its binding character. It was further strategically connected to a model form arising from another tradition, thereby profiting from its associate narratives. A similar phenomenon is found in the conflation of the image of Mary with the bodhisattva Kannon who had a similar role and appearance (Maria-Kannon).299 Model forms, thus, can well be employed subversively in situations of religious contact.300
As in this case, the combination of fixed and free (or open) elements within such a form,301 often results in the emergence of a new texture, thereby transforming the supposed meaning of the fixed texts and the inscribed spaces. As Elison argues, deprived of expert pastors, underground Japanese Christianity transformed into “a folk religion in which the Christian element was explicitly magical. The incantation of incomprehensible pseudo-Latin or pseudo-Portuguese formulas became the hallmark of the cult, along with the veneration of cruciform images and other such symbols concealed and absorbed within Buddhist icons. The major tenets of Christianity assumed a thoroughly legendary coloration.”302 Likewise, Shin stresses that the conflation of Christian and Buddhist imaginaries gradually led to the emergence of a new religion that was neither Buddhist nor Christian, thus hinting at the fact that the use of model forms allows for modifications of the fixed text that can dynamically lead to new contrasting religious formations.303 In their operation, model forms are not merely confined to preserving a certain state (of communication) but are also instrumental in the (unintentional) formation of new traditions.
Of course, the use of model forms in contact situations is also not confined to Christianity and is also not always a deliberate strategy. Another material example of inscription into a model form emerges from ancient animal masks that have been uncovered in China. At this time, Buddhism was spreading into China, and its adherents were facing the problem of best to communicate the teachings to another culture.
It is in this context that the images of dragons found on animal masks can be read. Here, the model form of the traditional Chinese legend of the dragon-tamer Huan Long Shi is employed to translate the Buddha for Chinese culture. “Since the Buddha was taken as a deity or shenxian, capable of flying and transmutation, in the Chinese mind it became easily associated with the dragon, which possessed the same capabilities. […] Even more revealing is a pu-shou, or animal mask, dated to the fourth century AD […] In the upper part of this work, a deity who has a high protrusion or a chignon on top of his head, and who is dressed like a Bodhisattva, holds dragons’ harnesses in each hand. This composition combines the Bodhisattva image with that of Huan Long Shi, the dragon-tamer, a famous character in a traditional Chinese legend, whose image can be found on a similar pu-shou […].”304 In the particular texture of the animal mask, the figure of the dragon-tamer has been replaced by the figure of the Buddha while the dragons he holds remain unchanged. Once again, the exchange was performed by means of treating the figure within the composition as a space that can be filled with different, although parallel content—in this case, the Buddha now holds the relationship to the dragons that the dragon-tamer once did. It is now possible to ‘read’ the Buddha in the context of the Chinese legend—and vice versa.
To give a final example from the East Asian context, Suzanne E. Cahill hints at the possibility of interpreting depictions of the Taoist Queen Mother of the West through the model form provided by common images of the Buddha. Thus, such images manifest a religious contact situation in the context of a mutual elaboration of doctrinal ideas: “The Queen Mother’s pose on the clay brick, seated and facing straight out at the viewer, along with her clothing, which resembles a monk robes, may reflect the influence of the seated Buddha image imported to China from Gandhara in northwestern India, to which it bears an uncanny resemblance. Buddhist texts and images were beginning to enter China along the Silk Road during this period. Han dynasty Chinese people may have perceived the Queen Mother and the Buddha as similar in function and meaning since both were depicted in funerary contexts and associated with the dead and with hopes for an immortal afterlife in paradise. In addition, the Chinese may have noticed a similarity in form between the Gandharan Buddha and extant representations of their goddess. The goddess’s image as it emerges in the Han may represent in art the beginning of mutual influence between Taoism and Buddhism in China that we know from the scriptures of both religions to have been taking place on the doctrinal level at the same time.”305 The emphasis on form, function, meaning, and context, likely to be solidified in religious doctrine here, shows the model form in action being inscribed by another religious tradition.
4.2.5 Model Forms and Scholarly Research
As in scholarship as in international travel, it is advisable to be equipped with appropriate model forms if one is about to cross borders. Despite their forbidding appearance, model forms could prove to be a suitable instrument or model for the description of processes involved in situations of religious contact.
As the abovementioned cases show, they are employed on object language level in situations of contact in numerous ways. Although at first glance, they seem too rigid and formulaic to promote understanding, it is precisely the reliable mode of communication found in such models that actually allows for the development of some kind of understanding. In most cases, this fits the pragmatic aims of those who are involved in a situation of contact. Even a more sophisticated or subversive use of a model form is intended to communication in its presentation of a readable sociotext, albeit one with particular ends. Establishing a readable sociotext, moreover, opens possibilities for interpretations of this text that may, ultimately, lead to modifications of the model form—thus allowing the form itself to adapt for future encounters. The description and analysis of model forms that arise from the object language level, therefore, might be a suitable starting point for scholarly investigation.
Edward Slingerland, Mind and Body in Early China. Beyond Orientalism and the Myth of Holism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 212.
Volkhard Krech, “Dynamics in the History of Religions—Preliminary Considerations on Aspects of a Research Programme,” in Dynamics in the History of Religions between Asia and Europe: Encounters, Notions and Comparative Perspectives, eds. Volkhard Krech and Marion Steinicke. DHR 1 (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 57.
Within in KHK, a working definition of the concept ‘religion’ was established that assumes religion as a communicative system being based on the distinction of transcendence and immanence and dealing with ultimate contingency. See Volkhard Krech, Die Evolution der Religion: Ein soziologischer Grundriss (Bielefeld: transcript, 2021), 24. Compare the chapter on the Transcendence/Immanence Distinction.
As usual, there is the need to defend the author of a smashing intellectual slogan, in this case Edward Said against his entourage of followers who reduce his theory to this very slogan. Said’s theory is much more sophisticated than the emphatic references to his work might suggest.
As intense philological research within the KHK has shown, even the most disputed concepts in religions studies, first of all the concept of religion itself, might have some operational value and reference in object languages that goes beyond it being an instrument of Western imperialism because of its supposed sole birthplace in Early Modern Western thought, see Reinhold Glei, “Pontes fieri iubantur: Brücken zwischen (Neo-)Latinistik, Religionsgeschichte und Orientalistik,” Neulateinisches Jahrbuch 11 (2009): 281–282 and Reinhold Glei and Stefan Reichmuth, “Religion between Last Judgment, law and faith: Koranic din and its Rendering in Latin Translations of the Koran,” Religion 42, no. 2 (2012). Also see for an even earlier date Jason BeDuhn, “Mani and the Crystallization of the Concept of ‘Religion’ in Third Century Iran,” in Mani at the Court of the Persian Kings: Studies on the Chester Beatty Kephalaia Codex, eds. Iain Gardner, Jason BeDuhn, and Paul Dilley. Nag Hammadi and Manichaean Studies 87 (Leiden: Brill, 2015). Compare Kianoosh Rezania’s complementary examination of Zoroastrian material: Kianoosh Rezania, “‘Religion’ in Late Antique Zoroastrianism and Manichaeism. Developing a Term in Counterpoint,” Entangled Religions 11, no. 2 (2020), par. 100: “Zoroastrianism provided Manichaeism with the necessary semantics in a term for religion in the third century. Having received this abstraction, Manichaeism developed the Zoroastrian dualistic concept of religion further into a hierarchical one and the Zoroastrian noun dēn into a generic term for religion. […]. The dynamics of the processes in these two religious traditions apparently differ: The Manichaean tradition more easily integrated the Zoroastrian concept of religion and developed it further; the Zoroastrian one, by comparison, shows rather conservative behavior and did not abandon its dualistic scheme of religion. In conclusion, one might say that regarding the production of an abstract concept of religion, Zoroastrianism was more formative to Manichaeism than vice versa.” Likewise, Giovanni Casadio has shown that religio in Roman antiquity also was used in the plural. Thus, Roman religion was contrasted with the religions of other peoples: Giovanni Casadio, “Religio Versus Religion,” in Myths, Martyrs, and Modernity: Studies in the History of Religions in Honour of Jan N. Bremmer, eds. Jitse H.F. Dijkstra, J.E.A. Kroesen and Y. Kuiper (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2010), 315–319.
Jeppe Sinding Jensen, “Epistemology,” in The Routledge Handbook of Research Methods in the Study of Religion, eds. Michael Stausberg and Steven Engler (London/New York: Routledge, 2011), 50.
“Wir halten es geradezu für ein Kennzeichen des Höhengrades und der Überlegenheit einer Religion daß sie auch ‘Begriffe’ habe und Erkenntnisse (nämlich Glaubenserkenntnisse) vom Übersinnlichen in Begriffen, und zwar in den eben genannten und in andern, sie fortsetzenden Begriffen. Und daß das Christentum Begriffe hat und diese Begriffe in überlegener Klarheit Deutlichkeit und Vollzahl, ist zwar nicht das einzige, auch nicht das hauptsächliche aber ein sehr wesentliches Merkmal seiner Überlegenheit über andere Religions-stufen und -formen.” Rudolf Otto, Das Heilige. Über das Irrationale in der Idee des Göttlichen und sein Verhältnis zum Rationalen (München: Beck 1997), 1–2. To Otto’s favour, however, Gregory D. Alles remarks: “Zwar vermutet man, daß Otto immer die Überlegenheit des Christentums voraussetzte, aber sein philosophischer Werkzeugschrank enthielt keine richtigen Werkzeuge, mit denen er diese Voraussetzung hätte beweisen können.” Gregor D. Alles, “Rudolf Otto (1869–1937),” in Klassiker der Religionswissenschaft, eds. Axel Michaels (München: Beck, 2004), 203.
Symptomatic for this development is a book like Břetislav Horyna, Kritik der religionswissenschaftlichen Vernunft. Plädoyer für eine empirisch fundierte Theorie und Methode (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2011), 24–25.
Alfred North Whitehead, Religion in the Making. Lowell Lectures 1926 (New York: Fordham University Press, 1996), 130–131.
Thomas A. Tweed, Crossing and Dwelling, A Theory of Religion (Cambridge/London: Harvard University Press, 2006), 29.
See chapter on Dynamics and Stability. On the more general difficulties of theories of religion see Michael Stausberg, “Prospects in Theories of Religion,” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 22 (2010): 224f.
In the following I shall use ‘concept’ in the sense of the German Begriff, whereas ‘notion’ denotes the German Vorstellung.
These are as well concepts suggested to be suitable generic concepts to be used as tertia comparationis in the online-Journal Entangled Religions: https://er.ceres.rub.de/index.php/ER/concepts.
See for example ‘The Text of the Priests—The Texts of the Laity’ on scripturalism in Zoroastrianism in February 2014, organized by Götz König; ‘Mission in Early Judaism and Early Christianity: Is there something like “mission”’ on the connection of mission and tradition in June 2014; ‘Traveling Texts and Transformative Encounters: Interreligious Networks between Medieval and Early Modern Asia, Africa, and Europe’ in July 2014, organized by Alexandra Cuffel; ‘Iran and Islam: Early Encounters. Formation of Islam and Transformation of Iranian Religious Traditions’ organized by Kianoosh Rezania (12 and 13 March 2015); ‘Tradition of Magic: Ritual Powers in Contact From Antiquity to the Middle Ages’ organized by Marielle Haase and Rebecca Lesses (20 and 21 July 2015); ‘Books as Material and Symbolic Artefacts in Religious Book Cultures’ organized by Eduard Iricinschi (28 and 29 May 2015); ‘Textual and Visual Dialogues Between Religions In South Asia’ organized by Jessie Pons (9 July 2015).
In March 2014, a Workshop on ‘Texture’ examined the role of media in processes of tradition, another workshop on 23 June 2014 dealt with the relation of tradition and innovation. A summarizing workshop ‘Media of Scripture, Scripture as Media’ (organized by Christian Frevel und Knut Martin Stünkel) was conducted in 10 and 11 December 2015. A monograph on scripturality by Knut Martin Stünkel is in preparation.
On the reestablishment of comparison as a distinguished method in the study of religion see former KHK-fellow Oliver Freiberger’s illuminating and thought-provoking study Considering Comparison. A Method for Religious Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).
See Peter Wick, Das Geheimnis des Evangeliums. Mysterien bei Paulus, Markus, Johannes und in der Apostelgeschichte als Testfall interkultureller Inklusions- und Demarkationsprozesse (Paderborn: Brill Schöningh, 2023), XII.
This is not at last because of the presentations and interventions of Kianoosh Rezania, see, above all, his study on the concepts of space in Zoroastrianism: Kianoosh Rezania, Raumkonzeptionen im früheren Zoroastrismus: Kosmische, kultische und soziale Räume (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2017).
‘Sleep in Classical, Late and Eastern Antiquity. A Comparative Inquiry’, 26 and 27 September 2017, organized by Eva Kocziszky.
On the key concept of purity see Purity and the Forming of Religious Traditions in the Ancient Mediterranean World and Ancient Judaism, eds. Christian Frevel and Christophe Nihan. DHR 3 (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2013) and Discourses of Purity in Transcultural Description (300–1600), eds. Matthias Bley, Nikolas Jaspers, and Stefan Köck. DHR 7 (Leiden: Brill, 2015).
A special issue of the journal Entangled Religions on the subject of media and religion, edited by Giulia Evolvi and Jessie Pons, has been published in 2020: “Religion, Media, and Materiality,” Special Issue, Entangled Religions 11 (2020).
Of course, I cannot but, somewhat idiosyncratically, additionally introduce ideas of those authors I dealt with in same detail before—the attentive reader will doubtlessly remark those incidents. I, nevertheless, hope that the reference to these authors clarifies the point in question and enriches the discussion on it. Reference to yet another group of authors who have been subject of my previous research, such as for example Augustine, Llull, Cusanus, or Berkeley are made in order to provide object language examples, that is, material case studies on the prevailing key concept.
Christoph Kleine, “Niklas Luhmann und die Religionswissenschaft: Geht das zusammen?,” Zeitschrift für Religionswissenschaft 24 (2016): 50.
Ibid. In his influential work on ‘Religions in Global Society’, Peter Beyer claims to be indebted to Luhmann’s basic approach, but refuses to accept substantial features of it, namely the introduction of core dichotomies or binary codes, above all, the code of transcendence and immanence, as a theoretical strategy applicable to the subject of religion; see Peter Beyer, Religions in Global Society (Oxon: Routledge, 2006), 13–14.
“Religion nimmt sich dieses Grundproblems der Kommunikation an, indem sie das Unbestimmte bestimmbar zu machen vorgibt. Sie tut dies, indem sie das in jeder Kommunikation mitlaufende Appräsentierte in der Immanenz symbolisch repräsentiert” and “Die Religion bietet Lösungen ‘für das Anwendungsproblem der Unbestimmbarkeit aller selbstreferentiell operierenden Sinnverwendung’ an. Alle Funktionssysteme sind genau mit diesem Problem der Unbestimmbarkeit konfrontiert, aber nur Religion garantiert die Bestimmbarkeit allen Sinnes gegen die miterlebte Verweisung ins Unbestimmbare.” Kleine, “Niklas Luhmann und die Religionswissenschaft,” 65, 67.
If mentioned at all, Popper is mostly subject to nonchalant and condescending references, such as Manuel Vásquez’ remark on his supposedly ‘naïve’ falsificationism, see Manuel Vásquez, More than Belief. A Materialist Theory of Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 329. Just recently, Hubert Seiwert seems to have abandoned his earlier critical rationalist position for the alternative of critical realism, see Michael Stausberg, “The Abyss of Intransitivity: On Critical Realism and Theories of Religion,” Zeitschrift für Religionswissenschaft 29 (2021): 269.
Victor Lowe, Alfred North Whitehead: The Man and His Work. Vol. II: 1910–1947 (Baltimore/London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 196. On Whitehead’s possible contribution concerning the notion of religion see Knut Martin Stünkel, “Religion, Science, and the Modern World. Alfred North Whitehead’s justification of belief in doctrine in a pluralistic universe,” Jahrbuch für Religionsphilosophie 16 (2017).
As the young Whitehead put it, see Victor Lowe, Alfred North Whitehead: The Man and His Work. Vol. I: 1861–1910 (Baltimore/London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 140.
Alfred North Whitehead, Religion in the Making. Lowell Lectures 1926 (New York: Fordham University Press, 1996). On the, for current scholarship stressing non-essentialist and dynamic approaches, attractive title of Whitehead’s book Religion in the Making see Janico Albrecht et al., “Religion in the making: the Lived Ancient Religion approach,” Religion 48 (2018): 569–70: “‘Religion in the making’ was the title of the Lowell Lectures of Alfred North Whitehead as published in 1926. Apart from a formulation in the introduction, the phrase is never used again. Whitehead’s account is of a universal history of religion, its necessary change in the course of development of a rational worldview and its permanent individual reproduction on the basis of aesthetic experiences that bring together the material and the noetic world. Whereas Whitehead’s was a philosophical critique questioning the stability of religion and dogmas in Whitehead, Rüpke’s making, instead, focuses on the inherently dynamic quality of those cultural products that we identify as a religion in the course of historical analyses.”
Christoph Schmidt, Pilger, Popen und Propheten. Eine Religionsgeschichte Osteuropas (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2014), 16.
Pascal Boyer, Tradition as Truth and Communication. A Cognitive Description of Traditional Discourse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), IX.
It was a major advantage in the work of the KHK that these swift consultations were possible, and even essentially integrated into the events and meetings there. At no point of time were our discussions confined to only the specialists in a particular field. Within the KHK these were my colleagues Licia Di Giacinto and Heiner Roetz for China, Marion Eggert for Korea, Carmen Meinert for Central Asia, Jessie Pons and Patrick Krüger for South Asia, Kianoosh Rezania and Götz König for Zoroastrianism, Eduard Iricinschi for Mediterranean Late Antiquity, Christian Frevel for ancient Israel, Giulia Evolvi and Tim Karis for contemporary religion, Alex Cuffel for the history of Judaism, Adam Knobler for the history of religions in times of colonialism, Reinhold F. Glei for classical and neo- Latin Literature. Thanks also to the some 150 fellows hosted by the KHK across the period in question.
Concerning the case of West Asia about two millennia ago Jason BeDuhn stresses: “The category ‘religion’ emerges only when it has to, when it is summoned forth by conditions on the ground that no longer abide by previous assumptions. […] The category ‘religion’, then, only emerges where there are options, alternative ways within a single ethnicity or state for relating to the gods. To be more precise, it is not simply a matter of variety, since variety of belief and practice is found everywhere and always. Rather, the key development is what might be called religious pluralism, where distinct and mutually exclusive identities exist that are not interchangeable or coterminous with ethnic identity.” Jason BeDuhn, “The Co-formation of the Manichaean and Zoroastrian Religions in Third-Century Iran,” Entangled Religions 11 (2020): 4. BeDuhn, thus, for good reason locates here in third century Sassanid Iran, and more particularly, in Mani’s teachings, the birthplace of the first formal statement of ‘religion’. Compare also Jörg Rüpke’s insistence on the “radical shift in the social role of religion,” where the problem of diversity, differences and separate groups occurred and made the talk of religious pluralism meaningful. See Jörg Rüpke, “Early Christianity out of, and in, Context,” Journal of Roman Studies 99 (2009): 191.
See chapter on Retrospection.
Volkhard Krech, “Religious Contact in Past and Present Times: Aspects of a Research Programme,” Religion 42 (2012): 192. Scholars even go so far as to extend the overall importance of contact to smaller and much earlier formations than ‘major religious traditions’, thus opposing attempts to describe religious traditions as closed and self-contained units that form and develop on their own. Given a suitable tertium comparationis, influences may be detected that were previously not in the center of scholarly attention—even if that means having to refer to a tertium like ovicaprolatry, see Victor A. Mair, “Religious Formations and Intercultural Contact in Early China,” in Dynamics in the History of Religions between Asia and Europe: Encounters, Notions and Comparative Perspectives, eds. Volkhard Krech and Marion Steinicke. DHR 1 (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 104–105: “If this investigation has shown anything, it is that the diverse early cultures of Eurasia were integrated, not isolated. Neither were the individual cultures of Eurasia isolated from each other, nor were the religions, technologies, arts, and other components that they shared transmitted separately. Cultures are integral packages. […] The free sharing of cultural attributes, however, does not necessarily imply their total acceptance as is. Societies, when they borrow elements of culture from each other, pick, choose, and transform, and they meld what they acquire into what they already have. This is what might be called the combinatorial calculus of cultural convergence. The result is neither merely what they began with nor simply what they absorbed from outside. Rather, it is something new that is more (or less) than the sum of its parts. Thus do cultures, and the religions that inform them, progress—and sometimes wane.”
Krech, “Dynamics in the History of Religions,” 70.
“When, through cultural contact or imperialism, foreign gods intruded a society, the native cults could themselves come to be more self-consciously defined over against the intrusion. Judaism, for instance, arose as native self-consciousness in response to the intrusion of Hellenism: The constituent elements were already there, pervading the religious observances of Jewish culture, but coalesced in a more sharply defined and self-consciously observed set of beliefs, practices and values in the presence of the other.” Jason BeDuhn, “Mani and the Crystallization of the Concept of ‘Religion’ in Third Century Iran,” in Mani at the Court of the Persian Kings: Studies on the Chester Beatty Kephalaia Codex, eds. Iain Gardner, Jason BeDuhn, and Paul Dilley. Nag Hammadi and Manichaean Studies 87 (Leiden: Brill 2015), 250–251.
See chapter on the Transcendence/Immanence Distinction. This important point is, in fact, raised for good reason by many scholars of the field. In the considerations on ‘contact’ in his book on the encounter of Buddhism and Islam on the Silk Road Johan Elverskog put it this way: “[…] Buddhism is not one teaching, school, or tradition. Rather, as with any religion it developed over time into an array of widely divergent and competing schools of thought. […] Similarly, no one unified group comprised ‘Muslims’. What it meant to be a Muslim was very much under debate at the time Islam came into contact with the Dharma. […] in particular, we need to recognize that Buddhism and Islam were not two monolithic and static entities crashing into one another. Rather, both religions were diverse and ever-developing traditions that were not only grappling with their own internal theological developments, but also trying to understand the world outside their own particular communities.” Johan Elverskog, Buddhism and Islam on the Silk Road (Philadelphia/Oxford: Pennsylvania University Press, 2010), 11.
Volkhard Krech, “Nachwort: Können sich Religionen begegnen?,” in Religionsbegegnung in der asiatischen Religionsgeschichte. Kritische Reflexionen über ein etabliertes Konzept, eds. Max Deeg, Oliver Freiberger, and Christoph Kleine (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 2019), 276–77.
See Guy G. Stroumsa, The Making of Abrahamic Religions in Late Antiquity (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2015), 4: “For the comparative historian of religion, the Near East and the whole Mediterranean, from the first to the seventh century, constitute a rare laboratory where a number of religious communities were in constant contact and conflict. Rather than referring to ‘sects,’ a quite loaded word alluding to doctrines deviant from the reigning orthodoxy, we should perhaps speak of communities. These communities were connected through a highly complex web which offered a kaleidoscope of sorts, in which the various crystals constantly restructured themselves in a seemingly infinite number of new structures.”
Deeg, Freiberger, and Kleine in the introduction their collected volume stress the fact that the concept of ‘religion’ is applicable to premodern Asian cultures, above all in the context of situations of contact (‘Religionsbegegnung’), where actors found it necessary to demarcate their tradition from other traditions and do so by applying a generic category for both (“[…] insbesondere in Kontexten der ‘Religionsbegegnung’, nämlich dort, wo es den Akteuren notwendig erschien, die ‘eigene’ von der ‘anderen’ Tradition abzugrenzen und im Zuge dessen beide einer generischen Kategorie zuzuordnen.”). See Max Deeg, Oliver Freiberger, and Christoph Kleine, “Einleitung,” in Religionsbegegnung in der asiatischen Religionsgeschichte. Kritische Reflexionen über ein etabliertes Konzept, eds. Max Deeg, Oliver Freiberger, and Christoph Kleine (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 2019), 8.
See Philippe Borgeaud’s reminder: “C’est de ces contacts et de ces heurts préliminaires, avant bien d’autres heurts, entre d’autres cultures encore, que sont issus les premières préconceptions et les premières controverses, les premiers préjugés et les premiers outils conceptuels d’une enquête comparatiste qui demeure la nôtre, sur des phénomènes que nous considérons comme religieux.” Philippe Borgeaud, Exercises d’ historie des religions. Comparaison, rites, mythes et émotions, eds. Daniel Barbu and Philippe Matthey (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2016), 161.
See Oliver Freiberger, “Der Buddha als Avatāra. Zur Analyse von Grenzen zwischen Religionen,” in Religionsbegegnung in der asiatischen Religionsgeschichte. Kritische Reflexionen über ein etabliertes Konzept, eds. Max Deeg, Oliver Freiberger, and Christoph Kleine (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 2019).
“Die Darstellung des Anderen mag das Ergebnis der gewissenhaften Zusammenstellung aller bekannten Daten sein, aber es kann auch auf frei erfundenen Vorstellungen beruhen oder irgendwo dazwischen liegen. […] Wenn die Akteure das Andere in einer bestimmten Weise konstruieren, ziehen sie damit auch eine Grenze zwischen ‘uns’ und ‘ihnen’.” Deeg, Freiberger, and Kleine, “Einleitung,” 8–9.
See Jan Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis. Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen (München: Beck 1999), 125, also compare Licia Di Giacinto, “The Early History of the Confucian Canon, Successes and Failures of the First Closure,” Zeitschrift für Religionswissenschaft 18 (2010): 146f.
Rather, in correspondence to Philippe Borgeaud, I would like to stress the experimental character of situations of contact: “Je voudrais pour ma part insister sur le fait que cette belle liberté, cet appel au grand large, ne doivent pas faire oublier l’intérêt de laboratoires plus limités, sinon même plus étriqués, ceux qui concernent des cultures en rapports historiques de contiguïté. L’étude des contacts, des adaptations, des rejets, des réactions et contre réactions, conduit à faire de l’histoire elle-même un laboratoire expérimental.” (Borgeaud, Exercises d’ historie des religions, 104).
See chapter on the Andy-Warhol-Syndrome.
Paul de Lagarde, “Die königliche Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften in Göttingen betreffend. Ein Gutachten,” in Paul de Lagarde. Erinnerungen aus seinem Leben zusammengestellt von Anna de Lagarde (Leipzig: Heims, 1918), 177.
Guy Stroumsa even goes so far as to relate contact-based comparison to a particular ethos of scholarly conduct: “If comparatism as a grand method searching for overarching theories has failed, comparatism as an ethos remains as valid as ever. As an ethos, comparatism is also a method, but one with much reduced ambitions, seeking only to find ad hoc isomorphisms, similitudes and parallels between phenomena. As an ethos, it may be less than a method, and is perhaps more akin to bricolage. It is an intellectual habitus to always, and immediately look also elsewhere in any investigation. We must learn to compare as we go, avoiding the essentialism of static entities through focusing on points of contact, models of transformation, dynamics of reciprocal impact between religious movements.” Guy G. Stroumsa, “History of Religions. The Comparative Moment,” in Regimes of Comparatism: Frameworks of Comparison in History, Religion, and Anthropology, eds. Renaud Gagné, Simon Goldhill, Geoffrey E.R. Lloyd (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2018), 339.
See Charles S. Peirce, Collected Papers (8 volumes), Vol. I–VI, eds. Charles Hartshorn and Paul Weiss (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1931–1935); Vol. VII + VIII, ed. Arthur W. Burks (Cambridge, Mass./London: Belknap, 1958), Collected Papers 1.35.
“I do believe, and it is most profound belief, that it is only by a terrible exaggeration of strangeness, only if it is extended to the infinite that it turns into its contrary, into absolute insight, and that it may bloom, what hovers before it as the unreachable goal of love but what it is, nevertheless, all about: the mystery of unity.”
See Paul Boghossian, Fear of Knowledge. Against Relativism and Constructivism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 1–5. ‘Culturalism’ may well be added to Boghassian’s list of academic ideas that have been transformed into ideologies.
Arthur C. Danto, Andy Warhol (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 2009), XIV.
See Kevin Schilbrack’s persistent question “[A]fter we deconstruct ‘religion,’ then what? Once we understand that the way we carve up the world is not only historical and socially dependent, but also politically implicated, then what?” Kevin Schilbrack, “After We Deconstruct ‘Religion,’ Then What? A Case for Critical Realism,” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 25 (2013): 108.
In the case of sinology, but easily to be transferred to other fields of the Humanities, Edward Slingerland has vividly described this attitude as follows: “For scholars committed to this idea […] even to attempt to talk about Chinese philosophy in a Western language is to destroy its essential nature, ripping it out of its primordial harmony with the world and forcing it into the straitjacket of alienated Western abstraction.” Edward Slingerland, Mind and Body in Early China. Beyond Orientalism and the Myth of Holism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 33.
Wouter Hanegraff in a recent article describes the dreary situation of the field correspondingly: “For about three or four decades now, in the study of religion as in the Humanities more generally, we have seen a very strong drive towards deconstructing all metanarratives and exposing any claims of ‘knowledge’ as veiled ideological moves that are ultimately not about the intellectual search for truth (which, after all, is metaphysical and hence illusionary, so the argument goes) but about social battles for hegemony and power.” Wouter J. Hanegraff, “Imagining the future study of religion and spirituality,” Religion 49 (2019), 3.
See Francis Fukuyama’s lucid considerations on the relation of the idea of identity and the ‘problem of thymos’, thymos being the part of the soul that craves the recognition of its dignity by others. The problem becomes all the more virulent as “Demand for recognition of one’s identity is a master concept that unifies much of what is going on in world politics today.” Francis Fukuyama, Identity. Contemporary Identity Politics and the Struggle for Recognition (London: Profile, 2018), XIII, XV. On the impossibility of displaying recognition without misjudgment see also Thomas Bedorf, Verkennende Anerkennung. Über Identität und Politik (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2010), 144–145.
On the therapeutic model see Fukuyama, Identity, 103 f. In their zeal, some scholars even compare the use of certain notions to a dangerous and disfiguring illness—as if Susan Sontag never had written on the intellectual perils of Illness as Metaphor and, more particular, on cancer as a metaphor: “The advent of the discourse on world religions therefore may be finally described in analogy with the onset of a certain serious illness, an illness that is deeply systemic and already metastasized at the time of its first full manifestation. The outbreak of the discourse […] effectively marked the moment when all of its ‘prehistory’ was suddenly overwhelmed, covered over in an avalanche of a new reality and thenceforth rendered unrecognizable.” Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions Or, How European Universalism was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press, 2005), 11–12.
Charles Taylor, Varieties of Religion Today. William James Revisited (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 116. Not being content with registering the fact of the religious ‘wow’, Birgit Meyer already provides an answer to the more interesting question “How to capture the ‘wow’: R.R. Marett’s notion of awe and the study of religion,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 22, no. 1 (2016).
Michael Puett has justifiably pointed to the fact that the idea of unmasking itself might as well be a product of Western modernity: “Such a theoretical move is a common one in much of twentieth century critical theory concerning religion: looking at the religious beliefs of a given area, and then unmasking those beliefs as ideological constructs that serve to render a given social order as either natural or divinely sanctioned.” Michael Puett, “Critical approaches to religion in China,” Critical Research on Religion 1 (2013): 96. The same holds true for the area of religious studies. As well as it might be possible that the things supposedly waiting to be unmasked by the critical (and, in fact, paternalizing) researcher are already subject of object language consideration (see ibid., 97), it might be the case that theorists of religion are already aware of what is behind their concepts and already use them on a reflected level and that all the more as we already witnessed this movement of unmasking for quite a long time in the Humanities.
The relish of the iconoclastic attitude towards earlier concepts, notions, theories, and, not at last, figures of a prevailing scholarly field is something that lacks some deeper scrutiny, if one does not want to end up with the mere application of the Freudian Oedipal complex to intellectual history, or rather, the history of scholarship.
See Rudolf Otto, Das Heilige. Über das Irrationale in der Idee des Göttlichen und sein Verhältnis zum Rationalen (München: Beck, 1997), 30–31. And, of course, there is a shared problem regarding the incommensurability of the other that both fascinates and makes one tremble about the unsuitability of one’s concepts: “Freilich gibt es für Otto ein großes und vielleicht auch niederschmetterndes Problem: Wenn das Numinose eigentlich mit uns Menschen inkommensurabel und ganz anders ist, was für eine Beziehung kann es zu unseren Begriffen und Moralprinzipien, zu positiver Religion überhaupt, haben?” Gregor D. Alles, “Rudolf Otto (1869–1937),” in Klassiker der Religionswissenschaft, ed. Axel Michaels (München: Beck, 2004), 205.
Slingerland, Mind and Body in Early China, 1.
Francisca Cho and Richard King Squier, “Religion as a Complex and Dynamic System,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 81 (2013): 360.
Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage, 1994), 15. Compare also ibid., XXIX, not only with regard to the modern world: “[A]ll cultures are involved in one another; none is single and pure, all are hybrid, heterogeneous, extraordinarily differentiated, and unmonolithic.”
See Jonathan Z. Smith’s critique of the language of the ‘other’: “[I]t must be insisted that the language of the ‘other’ always invites misunderstandings, suggesting, as it does, an ontological cleavage rather than an anthropological distinction. Much better is the language of ‘difference’ which is as relational and relative a terminology as the ‘other’ is absolute. ‘Otherness’ blocks language and conceptualization: ‘difference’ invites negotiation and intellection.” Jonathan Z. Smith, “Differential Equations. On Constructing the Other,” in Relating Religion. Essays in the Study of Religion (Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press, 2004), 241.
Slingerland, Mind and Body in Early China, 2. See Slingerland’s alarmingly recognizable list of the central features of the ‘Neo-Orientalist’ stance: linguistic and social constructivism, scholarly metalanguage conceptually freed from the confines of ‘Western’ (= imperialistic) logic, Plato and the Enlightenment as the (arch-)enemy, assumption of monolithic and timeless ‘other’-cultures, the ‘other’ as normatively superior (ibid., 29).
Slingerland, Mind and Body in Early China, 125. It is difficult to find object language self-descriptions of ‘western’ or ‘occidental’ authors that employ the category of ‘westerness’ or ‘occident’ as a means to characterize their own standpoint. As Reinhold Glei has shown, even those that may be considered as prime suspects of such a method that is, supposedly prejudiced and biased medieval Christian authors, do not correspond to the expectation of being orientalists in this sense: “Bei all dem bleibt festzuhalten, dass der Begriff oder das Konzept des Abendlandes in der Polemik gegen das Judentum zu keiner Zeit eine erkennbare Rolle spielt. Inhaltlich geht es immer um die rechte Bibelauslegung und die aus christlicher Sicht hartnäckige Weigerung der Juden, die christologisch-typologische Lesart der Bibel anzuerkennen. Auch die antitalmudische Polemik, die eine besondere Schärfe aufweist, bezieht sich nicht auf einen (angeblichen) kulturellen Gegensatz zwischen Orient und Okzident, sondern auf die ‘Fabeln’, d.h. letztlich auf die Fiktionalität des Talmuds sowie auf dessen unübersichtliche Struktur und die aus christlicher Sicht blasphemischen Elemente.” Concluding, Glei stresses: “Es gibt in der theologischen Traktatliteratur keine Polemik gegen Judentum und Islam speziell mit dem ‘Kampfbegriff’ des christlichen Abendlandes.” Reinhold F. Glei, “Die Polemik des ‘Christlichen Abendlandes’ gegen Judentum und Islam,” in Pluralistische Identität. Beobachtungen zur Zukunft Europas, ed. Dirk Ansorge (Darmstadt: WBG, 2016), 76–77, 82.
“The taking of a particular technical, philosophical, or scientific view, most commonly the philosophy of René Descartes, as representative of how ‘we’ think is painfully common in the literature on Chinese or Eastern ‘holism’. It really needs to stop.” Slingerland, Body and Mind in Early China, 275. Slingerland is very right to point that out. He himself, however, in arguing that “The dominance of Enlightenment rationalism still casts a heavy shadow over Western philosophy and, more insidiously, shapes mainstream views in economics and political science” (ibid., 304) makes a similar assumption, only different in degree from the postmodernist absolutism regarding views of ‘the West’. Not only that the connection of both is at best only half the truth (there is, at least, some Enlightenment Empiricism as well): ‘Enlightenment’ and ‘Rationalism’ themselves are as internally diverse as any movement in the history of ideas that has been glorified with a name. As diverse ‘Enlightenment thinkers’, such as La Mettrie, D’Holbach, Helvetius, Hume and others show, there is no reason apart from the ideological to reduce the ‘Enlightenment’ to a bunch of wealthy, white clerics, misogynists, and puritan bachelors (ibid.). Even the figure most likely to be abused as an intellectual cliché of Enlightenment matadors, namely Immanuel Kant, was far from the image made of him as a dry and pedantic bore in both his thinking and his attitude and life conduct. ‘The’ Enlightenment conceptual cocktail is not only “weird” (ibid.), but as diverse as the individuals contributing to it.
Hans G. Kippenberg and Kocku von Stuckrad, Einführung in die Religionswissenschaft. Gegenstände und Begriffe (München: Beck, 2003), 14.
See Břetislav Horyna, Kritik der religionswissenschaftlichen Vernunft. Plädoyer für eine empirisch fundierte Theorie und Methode (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2011), 169.
“Wird diese Warnung jedoch übertrieben, geht durch die Konzentration auf Metakommunikation der empirische ebenso wie der reflexive Gegenstand der Religionsforschung verloren, so daß die Metakommunikation ins Leere läuft, statt die Forschung zu stimulieren.” Volkhard Krech, “Nur wer
On the hypocrisy of supposedly ‘critical religion’ see for example Michael Stausberg’s proof that those who consider the notion of religion transculturally inapplicable are actually following a “reverse sui generis approach” Michael Stausberg, “Distinctions, Differentiations, Ontology, and Non-human in Theories of Religion,” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 22 (2010), 354, 364: “Behind the common reservation or scepticism towards the validity of the category—as understandable and laudable as they may be in light of partly justified and partly exaggerated accusations of ethnocentric, (neo-)colonial and imperialist implications—one can surmise a kind of reverse-sui-generis rhetoric, since the logical implication must be that religion is inherently different from all other categories, because it is clear that all concepts used in academic language are constructed, contextualized, fabricated, invented, selective, part of schemes of classification, and what else.”
“[…] das ist eine durchaus zutreffende Aussage über einen der charakteristischsten Züge westlicher Kultur: In kaum einer spielen materielle Gegenstände eine ähnlich herausragende Rolle.” Karl-Heinz Kohl, Die Macht der Dinge. Geschichte und Theorie sakraler Objekte (München: Beck, 2003), 8. One is, of course, reminded of Marx’ ‘material fetishism’.
Slingerland points to the fact that at some basic point, a level of correspondence is reached that makes the ‘radical other’ not quite so categorically different: “It is a laudable scholarly instinct to err on the side of caution when translating concepts from one culture and language to another. The extreme to which it has been taken in recent decades would be more justified, and may indeed prove crucial, if we are someday faced with the task of, say, decoding communications or artifacts created by creatures from Alpha Centauri, silicon-based life forms living in vast beehive-like colonies and sharing some sort of extended hive mind. When it comes to fellow human beings, however—social primates struggling to deal with the universal challenges of tribal life or moving from tribal to large-scale societies—our embodied commonality instantly puts us on firm hermeneutical grounding.” Slingerland, Body and Mind in Early China, 247.
Compare on this point Martin Riesebrodt, Cultus und Heilsversprechen. Eine Theorie der Religionen (München: Beck, 2007), 35–36: “Den Kritikern ist offenbar gar nicht bewußt, daß sie mit ihrem Beharren auf der absoluten Andersartigkeit nichtwestlicher Kulturen diese zu passiven Empfängern dessen degradieren, was der Westen vorgeblich aus ihnen gemacht hat. Offenbar folgen sie naiv romantischen Vorstellungen und deuten die Begegnung mit dem Westen als eine Art Kontamination, durch die Kulturen ihre Authentizität verloren haben. Damit machen sie aber die westliche Moderne nicht nur zur Wasserscheide der Weltgeschichte, sondern auch zu ihrem einzigen wirklichen Akteur.”
Asad’s insight here that the very process of definition might be a product of hidden Orientalism might be useful: “My argument is that there cannot be a universal definition of religion, not only because its constituent elements and relationships are historically specific, but because that definition is itself the historical product of discursive process.” Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion. Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore/London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 29. Though the wording may be slightly exaggerated, Christopher Beckwith points in the right direction with his characterization of the ‘New Intellectual’ emerging from such attitudes: “In the late twentieth century some Asian writers, led by the journalist Edward Said (1978) accused Western scholars of having ‘stolen’ Asian peoples’ cultures by studying them. This extreme anti-intellectualism has been well criticized […]. Unfortunately, many Orientalists have unknowingly accepted Said’s views and have abandoned the old word Orientalist as being somehow, vaguely, bad. From this standpoint all genuine scholars are bad, because they seek the truth and help to enlighten the world.” Christopher I. Beckwith, Empires of the Silk Road. A History of Central Asia from the Bronze Age to the Present (Princeton/Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2009), 418.
Friedrich Max Müller, Introduction to the Science of Religion, Four Lecture Delivered at the Royal Institution in February and May, 1870 (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1882), 6.
“Die kulturalistische Wende beruht auf der berechtigten Kritik eines konzeptuellen Universalismus, der sich nicht selbst durch gute Gründe ausweist und die Verallgemeinerbarkeit ‘westlicher’ Begriffe einfach unterstellt. Sie führt aber zu Aporien, allein schon deshalb, weil ihre Vertreter einen Metadiskurs zu führen beanspruchen, der seinerseits nicht der Kulturgebundenheit unterliegen soll. Hierzu kommt die Gefahr, den alten Begriffshegemonismus einfach durch die lokale Despotie der einzelnen ‘Kulturen’ zu ersetzen. Beides verträgt sich schlecht mit einer möglichen konsensualen Lösung der Aufgabe, mit der die zusammenwachsende Weltgemeinschaft—wenn wir denn von ihr noch sprechen wollen—heute konfrontiert ist: nämlich die Ausübung politischer und gesellschaftlicher Macht und die ökonomischen und technologischen Imperative, deren Verselbständigung den Planeten zu zerstören droht, in ein ethisches Rahmenwerk einzubinden.” Heiner Roetz, “Der konfuzianische Humanismus und sein Ursprung aus dem Geist der Traditionskritik,” in Menschenbilder in China, eds. Lena Hennigsen and Heiner Roetz (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2009), 34.
Roetz describes the academic situation fittingly as follows. “Wenn es um die Vereinbarkeit der chinesischen Kultur mit individuellen Menschenrechten geht, tun sich manche Sinologen noch schwerer als die Pekinger Regierung. Sie haben die chinesischen Argumente sogar noch überboten.” Roetz, “Der konfuzianische Humanismus und sein Ursprung aus dem Geist der Traditionskritik,” 39. This scholarly attitude of outdoing their supposed object of study, however, is by no means reduced to sinology and China.
See Heiner Roetz, “Tradition, Universality, and the Time Paradigm of Zhou Philosophy,” The Journal of Chinese Philosophy (2009), 371. See also Roetz, “Der konfuzianische Humanismus und sein Ursprung aus dem Geist der Traditionskritik,” 33–66, and Heiner Roetz, “Tradition, Moderne, Traditionskritik. China in der Diskussion,” in Kulturelle und religiöse Traditionen. Beiträge zu einer interdisziplinären Traditionstheorie und Traditionsanalyse, eds. Torsten Larbig and Siegfried Wiedenhofer (Münster: Lit, 2005), 135–136.
Roetz, “Tradition, Moderne, Traditionskritik,” 137.
Roetz’s point is strengthened by Hubert Seiwert, who rightly claims: “Modern Western thinkers were neither the only ones nor the first who have interpreted social realities. Historical ignorance certainly helps believe in the exceptionality of modern understandings of the world, but it is a faulty foundation of far-reaching theoretical claims. It engenders blindness for the realities beyond the scope of theoretical discourses that content themselves with the critique of other academic theories.” Hubert Seiwert, “Theory of Religion and Historical Research. A Critical Realist Perspective on the Study of Religion as an Empirical Discipline.” Zeitschrift für Religionswissenschaft 28 (2020): 216.
Cho and Squier, “Religion as a Complex and Dynamic System,” 357. As for the uncontextualized accumulation of data, Smith’s warning is still valid: “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 theory and reason, of which we have too little.” Jonathan Z. Smith, “In Comparison a Magic Dwells,” in Imagining Religion. Form Babylon to Jamestown, (Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press, 1982), 35.
Cho and Squier, “Religion as a Complex and Dynamic System,” 388.
Cho and Squier here fittingly quote Kenneth Boulding’s early dystopian warning from 1956: “One wonders sometimes if science will not grind to a stop in an assemblage of walled-in hermits, each mumbling to himself words in a private language that only they can understand.” Cho and Squier, “Religion as a Complex and Dynamic System,” 385.
Zhang Longxi, Mighty Opposites: From Dichotomies to Differences in the Comparative Study of China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 118.
Though, as Hanegraff put it, it conveniently allows to adapt the morally satisfying and comfortable role of the victim Hanegraff, “Imagining the future study of religion and spirituality,” 3.
Jonathan Z. Smith, “When the Chips are Down,” in Relating Religion. Essays in the Study of Religion (Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press 2004), 31.
See Wolfgang Künne, “Prinzipien der wohlwollenden Interpretation,” in Intentionalität und Verstehen, ed. Forum für Philosophie Bad Homburg (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1990).
Compare the ‘translatability in principle’ to be found between one empirical subject and the other as proposed by Josef Simon. According to Simon, we develop a given hypothesis derived from our personal perspective about the cognitive processes of others and address them in that way as it is suggested by the prevailing hypothesis. By the selfsame reaction to this address the hypothesis is altered, either gaining or losing degrees of probability resulting in more or less care in future uses of the hypothesis, see Josef Simon, Philosophie des Zeichens (Berlin/New York: De Gruyter, 1989), 105. Acknowledgement, in this sense, is the acknowledgement of others as having the capacity to alter our hypotheses about them.
See, for example, Campanini’s lucid analysis of Johannes Reuchlin’s reception of the cabbala and the emergence of Jewish Studies. Here, Campanini shows that it is not philological correctness or the ‘myth of scientific objectivity’ which promotes a fertile intercultural dialogue in a situation of religious contact, but rather productive misunderstandings grounded in a playful approach albeit not without rules, see Saviero Campanini, “Johannes Reuchlin und die Anfänge der christlichen Kabbala,” in Johannes Reuchlin und der ‘Judenbücherstreit’, eds. Sönke Lorenz and Dieter Mertens (Ostfildern: Jan Thorbecke, 2013). It even might be argued that deliberate misunderstandings and outright polemics positively contribute to the process of communication between religious traditions. As Garcia-Arenal and Wiegers put it, religious polemics “is more than mere invective; it involves and produces familiarity, connectedness, scientific or pseudo-scientific exchange.” Mercedes García-Arenal and Gerard Wiegers, “Interreligious Encounters in Polemics between Christians, Jews, and Muslims in Iberia and Beyond.” Medieval Encounters 24 (2018): 3.
Smith, “When the Chips are Down,” 31.
William Franke, Apophatic Paths From Europe to China: Regions Without Borders (Albany: SUNY, 2018), 134.
Ann Taves, Religious Experience Reconsidered. A Building-Block Approach to the Study of Religion and Other Special Things (Princeton/Oxford: Princeton University Press 2009), XIII.
Müller, Introduction to the Science of Religion, 28.
Cho and Squier, “Religion as a Complex and Dynamic System,” 360.
Guy G. Stroumsa, The Making of Abrahamic Religions in Late Antiquity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 26.
Cognitive anthropologist Roy D’Andrade has hinted at a cognitive explanation for the zeal for absolute alienation: “I […] believe that small differences in individual cultural items have great causal effects. Consider a society that is exactly like other societies in most ways except that rather than having the typical understanding that one should fight one’s enemies and kill them if necessary, its members have the understanding that one should whenever possible kill everyone who is not a member of one’s own society. The change in propositional content is not great, but the effects of that change would be, especially on visiting strangers. Perhaps it is for reasons such as that we humans have learned to be very sensitive to small cultural differences and to be very wary when we encounter unusual ways of acting or thinking. The sense of being in a totally different universe when one encounters small cultural differences can be very powerful. […] Perhaps this strong human sensitivity to small cultural differences has led anthropologists to experience the culture they have studied as if it were almost totally different than anything else.” Roy D’Andrade, “A Cognitivist’s View on the Units Debate in Cultural Anthropology,” Cross-Cultural Research 35 (2001), 242–257, 254.
Jonathan Z. Smith, “Religion, Religions, Religious,” in Relating Religions. Essays in the Study of Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 193.
See Kippenberg and von Stuckrad, Einführung in die Religionswissenschaft, 38.
Provided Helmut Zander is right in stating that Eurocentrism is something that the European scholar has to accept (but permanently to reflect on) it is then more fertile to accept and reflect certain notions associated to this background as well: “Den Problemen einer historischen Semantik und den damit verbundenen kontextuellen oder normativen Implikationen ist nicht auszuweichen, sondern nur, wie beim Religionsbegriff, reflexiv zu begegnen. […] Die Konsequenz lautet auch hier, einen hingenommenen Eurozentrismus kritisch zu akzeptieren und einer Dauerreflexion zu unterziehen.” See Helmut Zander, ‘Europäische’ Religionsgeschichte. Religiöse Zugehörigkeit durch Entscheidung—Konsequenzen im interkulturellen Vergleich (Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2016), 41.
See chapter on Language in Contact.
See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophische Untersuchungen, in Tractatus logico- philosophicus. Tagebücher 1914–1916. Philosophische Untersuchungen (Werkausgabe Band 1) (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1984), 280 (71).
“Man gibt Beispiele und will, daß sie in einem gewissen Sinn verstanden werden.—Aber mit diesem Ausdruck meine ich nicht: er solle nun an diesen Beispielen das Gemeinsame sehen, welches ich—aus irgendeinem Grunde nicht aussprechen konnte. Sondern: er solle diese Beispiele nun in bestimmter Weise verwenden. Das Exemplifizieren ist hier nicht ein indirektes Mittel der Erklärung,—in Ermangelung eines Besseren. Denn mißverstanden kann auch jede allgemeine Erklärung werden. So spielen wir eben das Spiel […].” Wittgenstein, Philosophische Untersuchungen, 281 (71).
It is this idea that is claimed by, for example, William James in his lectures on The Varieties of Religious Experience: “My lectures must be limited to a fraction of the subject. And, although it would indeed be foolish to set up an abstract definition of religion’s essence, and then proceed to defend that definition against all comers, yet this need not prevent me from taking my own narrow view of what religion shall consist in for the purpose of these lectures, or out of the many meanings of the word, from choosing the one meaning in which I wish to interest you particularly, and proclaiming arbitrarily that when I say ‘religion’ I mean that.” William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience. A Study in Human Nature (Mineola: Dover, 2002), 28. Blurred boundaries, therefore, allow for arbitrary definiteness in the concrete cases of scholarly research.
Tweed, Crossing and Dwelling, 41.
See as a case-study example my considerations on the concept of religion in Hermann Cohen’s systematic philosophy: Knut Martin Stünkel, “Der Religionsbegriff bei Hermann Cohen. Versuch einer Aktualisierung,” in ‘Diese Einheit von Erzeugen und Erzeugnis fordert den Begriff des reinen Denkens’—Vorträge zu Erkenntnistheorie und Religion im Denken von Hermann Cohen, eds. Görge K. Hasselhoff (Potsdam: Universitätsverlag Potsdam, 2020).
See chapter on More than Semantics.
Stephen Berkwitz, for instance, insistently stresses the importance of the early Portuguese reports on Buddhism as “significant for understanding the history of religious encounters,” despite of and apart from the fact that they are prejudiced and one-sided. See Stephen C. Berkwitz, “The Portuguese Discovery of Buddhism: Locating Religion in Early Modern Asia,” in Locating Religions. Contact, Diversity and Translocality, eds. Reinhold F. Glei and Nikolaus Jaspert (Leiden/Boston, 2017), 58. Also compare Christina Brauner, “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood. Stories of Misunderstandings, Concepts of Culture and the Process of European Expansion,” in Chaos in the Contact Zone. Unpredictability, Improvisation and the Struggle for Control in Cultural Encounters, eds. Stephanie Wodianka and Christoph Behrends (Bielefeld: transcript, 2017).
Lynn Hunt, Margaret C. Jacob and Wijnand Mijnhardt, The Book that Changed Europe. Picart & Bernard’s Religious Ceremonies of the World (Cambridge, MA/London: Belknap, 2010), 1–2. Though the authors optimistically claim that “The idea of comparing dispassionately the religions of the world is hardly surprising today, much less shocking even if we do it too infrequently or with too little willingness to suspend our own beliefs.” (ibid., 9), one cannot refrain from having the opposite impression that comparing religions is even more shocking today. This is perhaps not for the same reasons as it once was but with the same intent to defend an ‘authentic’ faith; today, that is the faith in an unsurmountable otherness and that to attempt to compare is itself degrading to the subject. But comparison as a routine cognitive activity is as such surely not at the root of such objections, but rather the political and ideological issues masked by it. See Michael Stausberg, “Comparison,” in The Routledge Handbook of Research Methods in the Study of Religion, eds. Michael Stausberg and Steven Engler (London/New York: Routledge, 2011), 22.
Guy G. Stroumsa, A New Science. The Discovery of Religion in the Age of Reason (Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press, 2010), 11–12.
Břetislav Horyna, Kritik der religionswissenschaftlichen Vernunft. Plädoyer für eine empi- risch fundierte Theorie und Methode (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2011).
Horyna, Kritik der religionswissenschaftlichen Vernunft, 116: “Die größten Probleme der Religionswissenschaft […] liegen im Sprachbereich. Die Religionswissenschaft hat sich zu lange auf die narrativen Formen der Objektivierung ihrer Forschungsergebnisse verlassen: heute ist sie sprachlogisch so unterentwickelt, dass man dafür kaum eine Analogie in anderen Wissenschaften findet.”
Horyna, Kritik der religionswissenschaftlichen Vernunft, 118: “[…] welche Form der projektiven Bezugnahme von unserer Sprache auf die erfahrbare Welt der religiösen Empirie so gebildet ist, dass im Bereich der objektiven (realen) Erfahrungsgegenstände die Sätze und/oder die Aussagen Sinn und Bedeutung haben?.”
See Thomas Rentsch, “Metasprache/Objektsprache,” in Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie. Vol. V L–Mn, eds. Joachim Ritter and Karlfried Gründer (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1980), 1301.
See Josef Simon, Philosophie des Zeichens (Berlin/New York: De Gruyter, 1989), 175. See also Volkhard Krech, “From Religious Contact to Scientific Comparison and Back: Some Methodological Considerations on Comparative Perspectives in the Science of Religion,” in The Dynamics of Transculturality, Transcultural Research—Heidelberg Studies on Asia and Europe in a Global Context, eds. A. Flüchter and J. Schöttli (Cham: Springer, 2015), 40–41.
See chapter on More than Semantics.
Horyna, Kritik der religionswissenschaftlichen Vernunft, 22.
Robert Ford Company, “‘Religious’ as a Category: A Comparative Case Study,” Numen 65 (2018): 337.
Edward Slingerland, Mind and Body in Early China. Beyond Orientalism and the Myth of Holism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 294.
See Roman Jakobson, “Zwei Seiten der Sprache und zwei Typen aphatischer Störungen,” in Aufsätze zur Linguistik und Poetik, 141 (Frankfurt: Ullstein, 1974), 127: “Die Erläuterung eines sprachlichen Zeichens durch andere in gewisser Hinsicht homogene Zeichen derselben Sprache ist eine metasprachliche Operation, die auch beim Erlernen einer Sprache durch ein Kind eine wesentliche Rolle spielt. Beobachtungen der letzten Zeit haben gezeigt, welch beachtlichen Platz das Gespräch über die Sprache im sprachlichen Verhalten der Kinder im Vorschulalter einnimmt. Die Hilfe der Metasprache ist sowohl für das Erlernen der Sprache als auch für den normalen Sprachgebrauch notwendig.”
Niklas Luhmann, Die Religion der Gesellschaft (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2002), 57–58 [my translation]: “Wir verschieben deshalb die Fragestellung und fragen nur einen einzigen Beobachter: die Religion selbst. […] Als externe Beobachter verlassen wir uns dann auf die Selbstbeobachtung der Religion. Wir schreiben nicht vor, wir nehmen hin, was sich selbst als Religion beschreibt.”
Volkhard Krech, “Dynamics in the History of Religions—Preliminary Considerations on Aspects of a Research Programme,” in Dynamics in the History of Religions between Asia and Europe: Encounters, Notions and Comparative Perspectives, eds. Volkhard Krech and Marion Steinicke, (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 21.
Krech, “From Religious Contact to Scientific Comparison and Back,” 41.
Bruno Latour introduces the concept of ‘infralanguage’ for metalanguage emerging from object language, stressing the fact that “We have to resist pretending that actors have only a language while the analyst possesses the meta-language in which the first is ‘embedded’. As I said earlier, analysts are allowed to possess only some infra-language whose role is simply to help them to become attentive to the actors’ own fully developed meta-language, a reflexive account of what they are saying.” Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social. An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 49.
Compare on this conceptual operation with regard to the concept of religion Kianoosh Rezania, “‘Religion’ in Late Antique Zoroastrianism and Manichaeism Developing a Term in Counterpoint,” Entangled Religions 11, no. 2 (2020): par. 5.
On the interrelation of the pragmatic circumstances of situations of contact and the possible employment of certain concepts, in particular: the concept of religion see Martin Riesebrodt, Cultus und Heilsversprechen. Eine Theorie der Religionen (München: Beck, 2007), 44: “Wenn sich Religionen also in ganz unterschiedlichen kulturellen Kontexten und historischen Zeiträumen wechselseitig aufeinander bezogen und geformt haben, wenn Herrscher Religionspolitik betrieben und Reisende Religionen beschreibend verglichen haben, dann kann man legitimerweise einen Religionsbegriff einführen, der sich durch Sinnstrukturen rechtfertigt, die mit universalen Mustern sozialer Beziehungen kompatibel sind.”
See chapter on the Transcendence/Immanence Distinction.
Niklas Luhmann, A System’s Theory of Religion (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013), 7. Compare Niklas Luhmann, Die Religion der Gesellschaft, 15: “Vielmehr scheint […] Religion zu jenen Sachverhalten zu gehören, die sich selbst bezeichnen, sich selbst eine Form geben können. Aber das heißt dann auch, daß die Religion sich selber definiert und alles, was damit inkompatibel ist, ausschließt. Aber wie das, wenn es zum Beispiel um andere Religionen, um Heiden, um die civitas terrena, um das Böse geht? Selbstthematisierung ist nur mit Einschließen des Ausschließens, nur mit Hilfe eines negativen Korrelats möglich. Das System ist autonom nur, wenn es mitkontrolliert, was es nicht ist. Angesichts eines solchen Sachverhalts kann Religion extern nur im Modus der Beobachtung zweiter Ordnung, nur als Beobachtung ihrer Selbstbeobachtung definiert werden—und nicht durch ein Wesensdiktat von außen.”
See chapter on Concepts and Contact.
Jonathan Z. Smith, “When the Chips are Down,” in Relating Religion. Essays in the study of Religion (Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press, 2004), 31.
See Krech, “From Religious Contact to Scientific Comparison and Back,” 41.
An earlier version of this chapter was published as the ‘Introduction’ to: Görge K. Hasselhoff and Knut Martin Stünkel, Transcending Words: The Language of Religious Contacts between Buddhists, Christians, Jews and Muslims in Premodern Times (Bochum: Winkler 2015). The book presents the results of the KHK workshops ‘Religious Language’ (May 2012) ‘Convivencia and Religious Language: Dialogue of Religion on the Iberian Peninsula’ (April 2013), and partly from a third workshop ‘The Impact of the Reformation on the Establishment of Religious Language’ (February 2014). All three workshops were organized by Görge Hasselhoff and Knut Martin Stünkel.
See the introductory sentences in Hans G. Kippenberg and Kocku von Stuckrad, Einführung in die Religionswissenschaft. Gegenstände und Begriffe (München: Beck, 2003), 11–12. Horyna even claims a ‘naively missed linguistic turn’ in the academic study of religion (Břetislav Horyna, Kritik der religionswissenschaftlichen Vernunft. Plädoyer für eine empirisch fundierte Theorie und Methode (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2011), 116).
See its prominence in introductions to the study of religion, for example in Kippenberg and von Stuckrad, Einführung in die Religionswissenschaft, ibid.; compare also Klaus Hock, Einführung in die Religionswissenschaft (Darmstadt: WBG, 2006), 29–30.
Walter Burkert, Kulte des Altertums. Biologische Grundlagen der Religion (München: Beck, 2009), 35.
See Hiroshi Kubota, “Sprache,” in Metzler Lexikon Religion. Gegenwart—Alltag—Medien. Volume 3: Paganismus—Zombie, eds. Christoph Auffarth, Jutta Bernard, and Hubert Mohr (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2000), 364.
See Reinhard Wonneberger, “Sprache,” in Handwörterbuch religionswissenschaftlicher Grundbegriffe. Volume V: Säkularisierung-Zwischenwesen, eds. Hubert Cancik, Burkhard Gladigow, and Karl-Heinz Kohl (Stuttgart/Berlin/Köln: Kohlhammer, 2001), 94–101.
Friedrich Max Müller, Introduction to the Science of Religion, Four Lecture Delivered at the Royal Institution in February and May, 1870 (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1882), 13.
On this credo of the nascent field of the study of religion see Michael Stausberg, “Comparison,” in The Routledge Handbook of Research Methods in the Study of Religion, eds. Michael Stausberg and Steven Engler (London/New York: Routledge, 2011), 23.
The current possibilities of philology as a research method as provided in the Routledge Handbook of Research Methods in the Study of Religion seem rather limited, given a disappointing half a page of ‘philology as linguistics’ dealing with lexiography and the rest being dedicated to textual studies in the article of Einar Thomassen, “Philology,” in The Routledge Handbook of Research Methods in the Study of Religion, eds. Michael Stausberg and Steven Engler (London/New York: Routledge, 2011).
Hock, Einführung in die Religionswissenschaft, 30.
Müller, Introduction to the Science of Religion, 4.
Müller, Introduction to the Science of Religion, 26.
See Jonathan Z. Smith, “A Matter of Class: Taxonomies of Religion,” in Relating Religion. Essays in the study of Religion (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2004), 173.
Smith, “A Matter of Class,” 174.
This claim counters the well-known critique raised against the use of generic concepts. The main problem with tertia in the scholarly context is that they are often not grounded in the empirical data, but rather imposed upon the data by researchers, which leads to serious distortions in our overall understanding of a given religion. The corresponding pitfalls of the scholarly practice of comparing have been well acknowledged and analyzed in scholarship, see, for example, Bruce Lincoln, Gods and Demons, Priests and Scholars. Critical Explorations in the History of Religions (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 121–123.
On translation as an example of a situation of contact see Kianoosh Rezania, “‘Religion’ in Late Antique Zoroastrianism and Manichaeism Developing a Term in Counterpoint,” Entangled Religions 11, no. 2 (2020): par. 99: “It is not far-fetched if we consider the translation of a contact situation as intra-religious contact. Translation, the transfer of a text from one language to another, constitutes a contact of two linguistic fields. Religions other than the one that the translated text belongs to influence these linguistic fields differently. This could have happened, for example, because of different geographical distributions of adherents, asynchronic features, or because of the different periods of presence of these religions in these linguistic fields, a diachronic feature. I can refer to the hypothetically supposed difference between the abstraction of dēn in Middle Persian and Parthian because of the stronger influence of Zoroastrianism in the south of the empire as an example. Therefore, if the source and target linguistic fields of the translation involve a difference in the influence of other religions, the act of translation is not a mere linguistic undertaking but presents an example of religious contact between two different religious fields.”
Catherine Batt, “Introduction,” in Translating the Middle Ages, eds. Karen L. Fresco and Charles D. Wright (Farnham/Burlington: Ashgate, 2012), 3.
See Jörn Müller, “Lessons in Communication. A New Approach to Peter Abelard’s Collationes,” in Transcending Words. The Language of Religious Contacts between Buddhists, Christians, Jews and Muslims in Premodern Times, eds. Görge K. Hasselhoff and Knut Martin Stünkel (Bochum: Winkler, 2015).
See Volkhard Krech, “Religious Contact in Past and Present Times: Aspects of a Research Programme,” Religion 42, no. 2 (2012): 192. On the problematic of this notion regarding the medieval material see Reinhold F. Glei, “Religious Dialogues and Trialogues in the Middle Ages. A Preliminary Essay,” Medievalia et Humanistica 38 (2012): 22.
See Krech, “Religious Contact in Past and Present,” 195.
Volkhard Krech, “From Religious Contact to Scientific Comparison and Back: Some Methodological Considerations on Comparative Perspectives in the Science of Religion,” in The Dynamics of Transculturality, Transcultural Research—Heidelberg Studies on Asia and Europe in a Global Context, eds. A. Flüchter and J. Schöttli (Cham: Springer, 2015), 41.
Compare Krech, “Dynamics in the History of Religions,” 52.
See Max Deeg’s reminder on the nature of dubious renderings in the early Chinese Buddhist translations: “A scheme for arranging and analyzing the early Chinese translation vocabulary should raise an awareness of these different categories, and the terminological creativity may warn us not to discard some of the renderings as crude or even ‘false’ before we try to understand why they were chosen by the translator in the first place. A correct interpretation of these early translation activities will not only throw light on some aspects of the history of Buddhist texts, especially those of early Mahāyāna, but will lay the foundation of a better understanding for the development and spread of Buddhism in India and beyond in the first centuries CE.” Max Deeg, “Creating Religious Terminology—A Comparative Approach to Early Chinese Buddhist Translations,” Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies 31 (2010): 112–113.
See chapter on Retrospection.
See for a short account of the idea of conceptual history Reinhard Koselleck, “Stichwort: Begriffsgeschichte,” in Begriffsgeschichten. Studien zur Semantik und Pragmatik der politischen und sozialen Sprache (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2010).
The most manifest expression of this focus is the encyclopedia Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe. Historisches Lexikon der politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland (1972– 1997), a project led and edited by Koselleck.
See Koselleck, “Stichwort: Begriffsgeschichte,” 99–100.
See Volkhard Krech, “Nur wer
See Reinhard Koselleck, “Die Geschichte der Begriffe und Begriffe der Geschichte,” in Begriffsgeschichten. Studien zur Semantik und Pragmatik der politischen und sozialen Sprache (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2010), 68.
Guy G. Stroumsa, The Making of the Abrahamic Religions in Late Antiquity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 1–2.
According to Gerardus van der Leeuw, phenomenology consists of talking about that that becomes visible by giving names to it. This procedure is always in danger of becoming a goal in itself as the researcher becomes intoxicated with the name he has given to the phenomenon, see Gerardus van der Leeuw, Phänomenologie der Religion, 2nd ed. (Tübingen: Mohr (Siebeck), 1956), 772. In our context, it seems, thus, more promising to examine the names given to phenomena by the traditions examined themselves and scrutinize the ways they show and function in the course of time.
See Koselleck, “Stichwort: Begriffsgeschichte,” 100.
For a more detailed discussion of Cusanus’ as well as of Llull’s and of Maimonides’ topological ideas on the notion and the concepts of religion see my monograph: Knut Martin Stünkel, Una sit religio. Religionsbegriffe und Begriffstopologien bei Cusanus, Llull und Maimonides (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2013).
In the following, I quote from the edition: Nicolai de Cusa, De pace fidei cum epistula ad Ioannem de Segobia, Opera omnia VII, eds. R. Klibansky and H. Bascour (Hamburg: Meiner, 1970) (h VII).
Nicolai de Cusa, De Pace Fidei (h VII, p. 62, 19–20). “Therefore, in the loftiest domain of reason a harmony among the religions was reached, in the aforeshown manner” (tr. Hopkins).
I use this term in the sense of Alfred North Whitehead, see Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World. Lowell Lectures 1925 (New York: The Free Press, 1967), 51; see chapter on Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness.
Nicolai de Cusa, De Pace Fidei (h VII, p. 62–63, 20–1). “And the King of kings commanded that the wise [men] return and lead their nations unto a oneness of true worship and that administering spirits guide and assist them [in this undertaking]” (tr. Hopkins).
Nicolai de Cusa, De Pace Fidei (h VII, p. 4, 18–19) “For, in form, they did not appear to be men but to be intellectual powers” (tr. Hopkins).
“Denn die Weisen der Völker machen sich gemeinsam an das Studium der Religionsgeschichte. Sie schaffen Bücher herbei, in denen die Religionsgebräuche der Völker beschrieben sind. Sie studieren die religionsgeschichtlichen Klassiker aller Völker—Varro für das antike Rom, Eusebius für die Griechen—unter dem Gesichtspunkt, wie sich die tatsächlich vorfindbaren historischen Religionen sich zu der einen Vernunftreligion faktisch verhalten. Cusanus gibt nur das Ergebnis dieser empirischen Erforschung der Religionen im Lichte der einen Vernunftreligion wieder: Die Verschiedenheiten der Religionen beziehen sich auf die äußeren Rituale.” Kurt Flasch, Nikolaus von Kues. Geschichte einer Entwicklung (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2001), 373–374.
Robert Ford Campany, “On the Very Idea of Religions (in the Modern West and in Early Medieval China),” History of Religions 42 (2003), 312–313.
Oliver Freiberger, “Elements of a Comparative Methodology in the Study of Religion,” Religions 9, no. 38 (2018), 6.
Freiberger, “Elements of a Comparative Methodology,” 5.
Freiberger, “Elements of a Comparative Methodology,” 6.
Jonathan Z. Smith, “When the Chips are Down,” in Relating Religion. Essays in the Study of Religion (Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press, 2004), 31. Koselleck describes the potentials of concepts (as opposed to mere words) correspondingly: “Als Worte waren sie nicht innovativ gewesen. Erst der kollektiv-singulare Begriff, der mit dem alten Wort transportiert wurde, hat die beschriebenen semantischen und pragmatischen Innovationspotentiale entbunden.” Reinhard Koselleck, “Begriffliche Innovationen der Aufklärungssprache,” in Begriffsgeschichten. Studien zur Semantik und Pragmatik der politischen und sozialen Sprache (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2010), 333.
To some observers, however, the history of the study of religion may present itself as a manifestation of the arrogant Wagnerian attitude towards the history of science as expressed in Goethe’s Faust: to be happy about seeing how the wise have thought before and how we have done so much better. We have supposedly done better, because we know about the ideological backgrounds of scientists and science. It has to be added, though, that the progress here merely consists of avoiding something rather than doing something. (“Verzeiht! Es ist ein groß Ergetzen,/Sich in den Geist der Zeiten zu versetzen; /Zu schauen, wie vor uns ein weiser Mann gedacht,/Und wie wir’s dann zuletzt so herrlich weit gebracht.” Faust I, Nacht, 570–574).
See Edward Slingerland, Mind and Body in Early China. Beyond Orientalism and the Myth of Holism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 103, also see ibid. 284–288.
Michael Puett, The Ambivalence of Creation: Debates concerning Innovation and Artifice in Early China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 17.
See this fallacy as described on a more general level by Jeppe Sinding Jensen, “Epistemology,” in The Routledge Handbook of Research Methods in the Study of Religion, edited by Michael Stausberg and Steven Engler (London/New York: Routledge, 2011), 43: “The history of the study of religion amply demonstrates how even erudite scholars have used their academic positions and influence to produce what was ultimately religious apologetics more than scholarly knowledge. However, this does not imply that it is in principle impossible to have a reasoned science of religion, as reasoned as any science about any other kind of human practice.”
See Pollack’s description of the deconstructivist current in the study of religion: “Offenbar geht es den Vertretern der dekonstruktivistischen Theorie nicht darum, herauszufinden, welcher Begriff von Religion der wissenschaftlichen Analyse zugrunde gelegt werden sollte, sondern darum, den Begriff zu Fall zu bringen. Welcher Begriff an seine Stelle treten kann, bleibt unklar. Möglicherweise wird in den konstruktivistischen Ansätzen die Benutzung von begrifflichen Unterscheidungen selbst schon als problematisch angesehen. Der dekonstruktivistische Ansatz trägt so wenig zum Erkenntnisfortschritt bei, sondern verbleibt in der Negation. Seine rein zerstörerische Absicht hat viel mit seinem antiwestlichen Bias zu tun. Selbst wenn der Religionsbegriff eine europäische Herkunftsgeschichte hat, ist damit ja noch nichts über seine Brauchbarkeit gesagt. Oder ist ein Begriffsvorschlag, weil er aus dem Westen stammt, automatisch diskreditiert? Es scheint, dass die dekonstruktivistische Kritik an den normativistischen Implikationen des Religionsbegriffs selbst auf normativen Vorannahmen beruht.” Detlef Pollack, “Probleme der Definition von Religion,” in Handbuch Religionssoziologie, eds. Detlef Pollack, Volkhard Krech, Olaf Müller, and Marcus Hero (Wiesbaden: Springer, 2018), 41.
See chapter on the Andy-Warhol-Syndrome.
On this fallacy see Kevin Schilbrack, “The Social Construction of ‘Religion’ and Its Limits: A Critical Reading of Timothy Fitzgerald,” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 24 (2012), 101–102. Schilbrack calls this fallacy the fallacy of ‘linguistic determinism’ (ibid., 103).
See chapter on Tradition.
On this fallacy see Smith, “When the Chips are Down,” 31.
See chapter More than Semantics.
This fallacy was described by KHK-fellow Matthias Jung in one of his presentations.
Compare the “phenomenological fallacy” as explained by Hubert Seiwert in “Theory of Religion and Historical Research,” 231.
Timothy Fitzgerald, “A Critique of ‘Religion’ as a Cross-Cultural Category,” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 9 (1997), 91–110.
Fitzgerald, “A Critique of ‘Religion’ as a Cross-Cultural Category,” 106.
Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, Lowell Lectures 1925 (New York: The Free Press, 1997), 51.
See Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, 55.
Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, 59.
Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality. An Essay in Cosmology, eds. David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne (New York/London: The Free Pressm, 1979), 7–8.
Compare the chapter on the ‘Three-level Model of Transcendence’ within the discussion of the Transcendence/Immanence Distinction. The very same thing holds true for the much-vaunted replacement for the concept of religion that is, the concept of ‘culture’. “The real point here is that it doesn’t matter that one can’t define the it that makes up culture because culture isn’t really an it at all. The total collection of cultural items is a fact but not a thing. […] Do not think of culture as a thing that does something. It doesn’t—it, as a collection has no causal powers.” Roy D’Andrade, “A Cognitivist’s View on the Units Debate in Cultural Anthropology,” Cross-Cultural Research 35 (2001), 253.
Robert Ford Campany, “On the Very Idea of Religions (in the Modern West and in Early Medieval China),” History of Religions 42 (2003), 319.
Whitehead, Process and Reality, 16–17.
In introductory secondary literature on Whitehead’s ideas the example chosen for a case of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness is taken from the religious field, where abstract and generalizing notions are used without care for their topology: “But Whitehead is keenly aware of the difference between the abstract and the concrete. And he recognized that abstractions are often credited with functions they cannot have. They are often treated as if they were concrete. Consider, for example, the statement that Buddhism teaches that all things are impermanent. Of course, one may use it as a shorthand formulation of the fact that most teachers who call themselves Buddhists affirm this. However, one may also forget that it is shorthand for something else and begin to think there is such a thing as Buddhism that has its own essence, acts in this or that way, and can accurately be described as having or lacking particular characteristics.” John B. Cobb, Jr., Whitehead Word Book. A Glossary with Alphabetical Index to Technical Terms in Process and Reality (Claremont: P&F Press, 2008), 15.
A case of the fallacy is, therefore, expressed by Manuel Vásquez in discussing McCutcheon’s critique on the manuscript of his book More than Belief: “As McCutcheon put it in his helpful review of this manuscript, today there is a new generation of scholars who critique past scholarship ‘because it did not allow them to find religion in enough places.’ While appearing radical, this critique, in fact, gives religious studies a new lease on life, since it opens the possibility of seeing religion everywhere, in everyday life.” Manuel Vásquez, More than Belief. A Materialist Theory of Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 325.
Jonathan Z. Smith, “Religion, Religions, Religious,” in Relating Religions. Essays in the Study of Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 194.
Francisca Cho and Richard King Squier, “Religion as a Complex and Dynamic System,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 81 (2013), 373.
Cho and Squier, “Religion as a Complex and Dynamic System,” 378.
Cho and Squier, “Religion as a Complex and Dynamic System,” 385.
See Whitehead, Process and Reality, 93.
Alfred North Whitehead, The Concept of Nature. The Tarner Lectures delivered in Trinity College November 1919 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964), 163.
Compare Whitehead, Process and Reality, 5.
“Es gibt ein Bild von Klee, das Angelus Novus heisst. Ein Engel ist darauf dargestellt, der aussieht als wäre er im Begriff, sich von etwas zu entfernen worauf er starrt. Seine Augen sind aufgerissen, sein Mund steht offen und seine Flügel sind angespannt. Der Engel der Geschichte muss so aussehen. Er hat das Antlitz der Vergangenheit zugewendet.” Walter Benjamin, Über den Begriff der Geschichte, ed. Gérard Raulet (Kritische Gesamtausgabe Band 19) (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2010), 35.
See Gershom Scholem, “Walter Benjamin und sein Engel,” in Walter Benjamin und sein Engel. Vierzehn Aufsätze und kleine Beiträge (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1983), 67: “Der Engel der Geschichte ist also im Grunde eine melancholische Figur, die in der Immanenz der Geschichte scheitert, weil sie nur durch einen Sprung überwunden werden kann, der die Vergangenheit des Historischen nicht in einem ‘ewigen’ Bild […] von ihr rettet, sondern in einem aus ihrem Kontinuum herausführenden Sprung in die, sei es revolutionär, sei es messianisch geladene ‘Jetztzeit’ […].”
There are some notable exceptions to this method, such as Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy’s account of Western revolutionary history that starts with the Russian Revolution in 1917 and ends with the so-called ‘Papal Revolution in the 11/12th century CE’, see Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Out of Revolution. Autobiography of Western Man (Providence/Oxford: Berg, 1993). Rosenstock defends his decision to reverse the chronology as follows: “But a great new event is more than an additional paragraph to be inserted in the next edition of a book. It rewrites history, it simplifies history, it changes the past because it initiates a new future. Anyone who looks back on his own life knows how completely anew love, a new home, a new conviction, changes the aspect of his past. How, then, can history remain a piecemeal confusion of national developments after a conflagration of the dimensions of the World War. A race that was not impressed by such an experience, that could not rewrite its history after such an earthquake, would not deserve any history” (Ibid., 5–6).
See for the case of China Wolfgang Ommerborn, Zwischen Sakralem und Säkularem. Bedeutung und Entwicklung religiöser Begriffe und Praktiken in China bis zur Han-Zeit (Bochum/Freiburg: Projekt, 2012), 11–12.
Alfred North Whitehead, Religion in the Making. Lowell Lectures 1926 (New York: Fordham University Press, 1996), 84.
Edward Shils, Tradition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1983), 196.
Jason BeDuhn fittingly evaluates the scientific surplus of this practice as follows: “It is purely tautological, however, to say that the way we moderns use the term religion is a modern invention, informed by distinctive, historically conditioned shifts in discourse and social organization. That fact does not preclude the possibility of a pre-modern concept that anticipated the modern one by identifying the same socio-cultural entities we would place at the center of the modern category of religion.” Jason BeDuhn, “Mani and the Crystallization of the Concept of ‘Religion’ in Third Century Iran,” in Mani at the Court of the Persian Kings: Studies on the Chester Beatty Kephalaia Codex, eds. Iain Gardner, Jason BeDuhn, and Paul Dilley. Nag Hammadi and Manichaean Studies 87 (Leiden: Brill 2015), 274.
Volkhard Krech, “Nur wer
“Wie können Begriffe konsequent historisiert und zugleich historische Sachverhalte mit modernen Konzepten beschrieben werden?” Krech, “Nur wer
“Die Frage ist also nicht: Wie entstand beziehungsweise was ist Religion? Sondern: Was und wie wurde Religion? Es gilt demnach, den Prozess zu benennen, der sich rückwirkend, oder genauer gesagt retrospektiv als Genealogie der Religion fassen läßt.” Reinhard Schulze, Der Koran und die Genealogie des Islam, (Basel: Schwabe, 2015), 109.
Schulze, Der Koran und die Genealogie des Islam, 117.
A corresponding approach on macro-level was taken by Stephen C. Berkwitz, “The History of Buddhism in Retrospect,” in Buddhism in World Cultures: Comparative Perspectives, ed. Stephen C. Berkwitz (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2006).
Schulze, Der Koran und die Genealogie des Islam, 170 (“Keine dieser Ordnungen verzichtet darauf, sich durch eine positive Genealogie zu begründen.”).
Schulze, Der Koran und die Genealogie des Islam, 174 (“Aber sie erlaubt zweierlei: erstens den Status islamischen Traditionsgeschehens im
“Es wäre daher epistemologisch fahrlässig zu meinen, man könne mit der Rekonstruktion religiöser Evolution bei ihren chronologischen Anfängen—und schon gar bei einem einzigen Anfang—beginnen und sich von dort aus mehr oder minder unilinear der Gegenwart nähern. […] Die Rekonstruktion religiöser Evolution ist vielmehr ein Vorgang der Erklärung ermöglichenden Vergegenwärtigung des Vergangenen sowie zugleich der distanzierend reflexiven Historisierung der Gegenwart […].” Krech, “Nur wer
I prefer the translation Urszene as ‘original scene’ as opposed to the usual ‘primal scene’ that involves a certain (temporal) priority of the scene in question.
Tomoko Masuzawa, In Search of Dreamtime. The Quest for the Origin of Religion (Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press, 1993).
Masuzawa, In Search of Dreamtime, 137.
Masuzawa, In Search of Dreamtime, 136.
Ibid.
Compare Masuzawa, In Search of Dreamtime, 129: “What remains conspicuous nonetheless is the two-point (or diphasic) structure of the ‘reality’ involved in both instances. Inferring from this, then, it might be said that […] the ‘reality’ of the primal scene is, structurally speaking a nonperception, nonexperience, and that it is only in its unexpected return that it (re)presents itself as real, that it founds the real on the basis of this never-has-been.” See chapter on the stability of dynamic bipolarity.
Masuzawa, In Search of Dreamtime, 179.
Masuzawa, In Search of Dreamtime, 4. Perhaps surprisingly to many of the current matadors of the study of religion, Masuzawa manages to show that even the supposedly outdated founding figures of the academic study of religion, such as Max Müller, had some very deviant ideas on particular notions: “What comes to the fore as a result is an unexpected image of history, seemingly uncharacteristic of his time and of his profession: ‘history’ not as an organic, continuous narrative but as a series of casualties fraught with loss, decay, incidental conjunctions of foreign elements, and fortuitous and deviant aftergrowths. Such a history is anything, but teleological; there is no font of plenitude anywhere in this history that guarantees its destiny. Above all, it is a history of going abroad and going astray” (ibid., 9).
Bruno Latour, Rejoicing or the Torments of Religious Speech (Cambridge/Malden: Polity, 2013), 47.
Jason BeDuhn, “The Co-formation of the Manichaean and Zoroastrian Religions in Third-Century Iran,” Entangled Religions 11 (2020), 2.
See Krech, “Nur wer
“Gerade deshalb ist das Verfahren der retrospektiven Genealogie zumindest wissenschaftlich notwendig. Es will nicht die epistemischen Brüche zwischen Moderne und Vormoderne auf der Objektebene nivellieren oder auch nur abschwächen. Vielmehr ist es die Bedingung der Möglichkeit, sich von der Moderne aus überhaupt der Geschichte nähern zu können.” Krech, “Nur wer
On the ‘Invention of Hinduism’-thesis (as well as the ‘premordialist-Hinduism’-thesis) see Manu V. Devadevan, A Prehistory of Hinduism (Berlin/Boston: DeGruyter, 2016), 6–7.
See Karl Raimund Popper, Das Elend des Historizismus (Tübingen: Mohr (Siebeck), 1987), XI–XIII.
A previous version of this chapter was presented at the KHK workshop ‘Ritual, Normativity and Representation. New Methods in the Study of Religious Contacts’ (9–11 May 2019), organized by Giulia Evolvi and Eduard Iricinschi.
On formal indication in Heidegger’s thinking see Knut Martin Stünkel, “Formal anzeigendes Philosophieren. Heideggers Denken 1916–1976,” PhD diss., Universität Bielefeld, 2002.
Compare on the reliability and trustworthiness of standardized juridical documents in medieval times Petra Schulte, Scripturae publicae creditor. Das Vertrauen in Notariatsurkunden im kommunalen Italien des 12. und 13. Jahrhunderts (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2003).
Benedikt Burkard, “Liste, Vordruck, Bildschirmmaske. Eine kleine Geschichte des Formulars,” Das Archiv 1 (2010), 7.
On the significance of blank spaces see the chapter on Secret.
Cornelia Vismann, Akten, Medientechnik und Recht (Frankfurt: Fischer, 2011), 161: “Das gedruckte Formular verhält sich dabei zur handschriftlichen Eintragung wie das abstrakte Gesetz zum konkreten Fall. Es präfiguriert das subsumptive Verfahren zur Anwendung von abstrakt gefaßten Gesetzen. Die Lücke auf den Formularen markiert ‘nach dem Muster slot and filler’ den Platz des Konkreten. Sie ist die Hohlform dafür.”
Basil the Great, “Exhortation to Baptism,” in A Treatise on Baptism: With an Exhortation to Receive it, translated from the Works of St. Basil the Great, ed. and trans. Francis Patrick Kenrick (Philadelphia: Fithian, 1843), 237.
Basil the Great, “Exhortation,” 226.
See Wolfgang Spickermann, “Lukian von Samosata und die fremden Götter,” Archiv für Religionsgeschichte 11 (2009), 233.
Webb Keane, “The evidence of the senses and the materiality of religion,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 14 (2008), 123.
See Aziz Al-Azmeh, The Emergence of Islam in Late Antiquity. Allāh and his People (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 369. On the Paleo-Islamic move from alliance to allegiance in Arab politics that is, to an unequal commitment of “formal obeisance and a habitus of routinised obeisance” see ibid., 132–133.
Al-Azmeh also stresses the lack of content of the formula that, at the beginning of the emergence of Islam “had yet to enter the moulds of theological sublimation, doxological expression, interpretation and mythological elaboration”: “But overall, and beyond formulaic statements that betokened more ritual utterances than doctrinal substance, the creedal content was meagre, and the formulaic statements characteristic of the new movement were open to all manner of possible interpretations in term of the generally scant theological ideas in place in the newly conquered lands, senior clergy excepted.” Al-Azmeh, The Emergence of Islam in Late Antiquity, 369–370.
See Marcel Metzger, Geschichte der Liturgie (Paderborn: Schöningh 1998), 26–27, 49. See Dietmar von Huebner, “Formular, liturg.,” in Lexikon des Mittelalter, Vol. IV: Erzkanzler-Hiddensee (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1999), 656–657.
Concerning liturgy (and, as a consequence, model forms) Martin Riesebrodt raised an important point that well contributes to the model of the model form, i.e. that all religious liturgies contain some kind of promise about what they are able to do. The promising aspect, thus, might correlate to the binding aspect, thus making the employment of model forms to deal with challenges more comprehensible, see Martin Riesebrodt, Cultus und Heilsversprechen. Eine Theorie der Religionen (München: Beck, 2007), 109.
See Metzger, Geschichte der Liturgie, 125. On the formularia as an issue in the period of Reformation see Anders R. Messner, Die Meßreform Martin Luthers und die Eucharistie der Alten Kirche. Ein Beitrag zur systematischen Liturgiewissenschaft (Innsbruck: Tyrolia, 1989), 190.
See Rainer Volp, Liturgik: die Kunst, Gott zu feiern. Vol. 2: Theorien und Gestaltung (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlags-Haus, 1994), 1014–1015: “Formulare sind operative Hilfsmittel, die das Zusammenspiel von objektivierten Formeln und subjektiven Formen erleichtern. Sie sind weder zu reproduzieren noch zu produzieren, sondern je neu zu redigieren. […] Die kompositorische Einheit des Gottesdienstes zu erstellen ist die je neue Aufgabe […] Denn die angestrebte Form ist das optimale Zusammenspiel aller Kombinationsregeln: Sie sollen gestatten, daß im Erleben der Beteiligten das Ereignis weder durch entleerte Vorgaben noch durch zufällige Kombinationen verstellt wird. Das im Formular vorgesehene ‘Ordinarium’ enthält lediglich das Minimum rechtlich notwendiger und häufig wiederkehrender Rahmenbedingungen. Der weithin schlechte Ruf sogenannter ‘agendarischer Formen’ liegt weniger in der Beschaffenheit der Formulare als vielmehr in der Unfähigkeit, situations- und sachgerecht mit ihnen umzugehen.”
“Gottesdienstformulare sind keine beliebig auffüllbaren oder kürzbaren Gerüste. Es sind Überlieferungen dichter Erfahrungen, Ausschnitte eines Syntagmas, das einmal in sensibler Abstimmung als strukturierte Ganzheit geplant war. Was immer man davon übernimmt, Ordinariumsstücke, Propriumsstücke bzw. Gebetsformulierungen: die leitende Frage ist nicht die einer sensationellen Attraktion oder einer unanstößigen Repetition, sondern die nach dem Optimum des inneren Mitvollzugs der Anwesenden; da sich diese aber nur unterschiedlich zu eigenständiger Interpretation bereitfinden, sind Freiräume in der dramaturgischen Einheit jedesmal neu aufzuspüren.” Volp, Liturgie: die Kunst, Gott zu feiern, 1017.
“Operationen an einem Formular haben dem Grundsatz zu entsprechen, daß einerseits die Überfülle der Botschaften Freiräume für Innovationen braucht, andererseits aber die Änderung jedes Details die Dramaturgie des Ganzen mitbetrifft. […] Formulare bewahren vor Willkür, indem sie den Sprachlosen mit den Regeln des Brauchs bekannte Räume zur Verfügung stellen. Diese Rituale enthalten Spuren vergangener Entscheidungen, die jedoch bei zunehmender Disfunktionalität merkliche Innovationsschübe brauchen. Die Änderung auch nur eines Elements betrifft immer auch das Ganze.” Volp, Liturgie: die Kunst, Gott zu feiern, 1018–1020.
Jürgen Frese, Prozesse im Handlungsfeld (München: Boer, 1985), 16.
Frese, Prozesse im Handlungsfeld, 155: “[So kann] das Formular […] beschreiben werden als bereits teilweise ausgefüllte, dadurch inhaltlich stark vorgeprägte Struktur mit bestimmten Leerstellen, in die individualisierende Charakteristika, Daten und Fakten eingetragen werden können. Ein Formular ist mehr als bloß strukturelle Festlegung möglicher Erfüllungen, aber weniger als inhaltliche Determination.”
Frese, Prozesse im Handlungsfeld, 156.
Frese, Prozesse im Handlungsfeld, 157: “Das Durchprüfen von Erinnerungselementen mit Formularen kann zu einem systematisierten Prozeß des Wiedererkennens entwickelt werden, und zwar so, dass das isolierte Element von Erleben beschreibbar wird als einsetzbar in das Formular.”
In his study on the Piedmontese Waldensian Sebastian Bazan (d. in 1623), Giovanni Tarantino examines the emotional strategy of taking on the language of Christian sacrifice and martyrdom to make sense of suffering in instances of persecution. Here, in a situation of synchronic violent contact with the catholic inquisition, religious object language employs emotional rhetoric that connects its user diachronically to the revered original martyrs of the Christian faith. His formulaic story, thus, could be used to arouse demarcating emotion in contemporary anti-papal circles and countries, such as anti-Jacobite England where it could be used for both religious and political purposes, see Giovanni Tarantino, “‘I am contented to die’: The letters from prison of the Waldensian Sebastian Bazan (d. 1623) and the Anti-Jacobite narratives of the Reformed martyrs of Piedmont,” in Feeling Exclusion. Religious Conflict, Exile and Emotions in Early Modern Europe, eds. Giovanni Tarantino and Charles Zika (New York: Routledge, 2019), 139.
Compare Hubert Knoblauch’s claim regarding not only modern popular religions: “Darüber hinaus werden die Erfahrungen von der Kommunikation nicht nur behindert, wie gerne unter Hinweis auf die sogenannte Unaussprechlichkeit bzw. ‘Ineffabilität’ behauptet wird. Die Kommunikation ermöglicht es ja erst, von der ‘Unaussprechlichkeit’ zu sprechen, also der Differenz zu dem, was man alltäglich mitzuteilen gewohnt ist. Die Kommunikation bietet auch Formen, in den die Erfahrungen gefaßt werden können. Die Legende, das Gleichnis und die Wundergeschichte stellen klassische Gattungen dar, aber auch die Predigt und ihre weltliche Variante, die Moralpredigt, zählen dazu.” Hubert Knoblauch, Populäre Religion. Auf dem Weg in eine spirituelle Gesellschaft (Frankfurt: New York, 2009), 149. The conversion narrative, Knoblauch continues, in ancient as well as in modern times follows the pattern of Paul’s Damascus-experience, thus prevailingly referring to the individual experience of transcendence and the interpretation of the whole biography of the convert. Here, the model form is again mediating between the individual and the general by providing a recognizable sociotext.
Frese, Prozesse im Handlungsfeld, 162: “Das fertig ausgefüllte, konsistente, sozial vertretbare, sinnvoll lesbare Formular bildet einen Text, in dem (grundsätzlich) Formular-Elemente und Ausfüllungen ununterscheidbar ineinander übergehen. Inhalt des Textes ist eine am Leitfaden des Formulars erzählte Geschichte.”
See Wilhelm Schapp, In Geschichten verstrickt. Zum Sein von Mensch und Ding, 3rd ed. (1953; repr. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2004), 198–201. Compare also Wilhelm Schapp, Philosophie der Geschichten (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1981), 182 f. A corresponding idea was elaborated by cognitive linguist Mark Turner: “The literary mind is not a separate kind of mind. It is our mind. The literary mind is the fundamental mind. Although cognitive science is associated with mechanical technologies like robots and computer instruments that seem unliterary, the central issues for cognitive science are in fact the issues of the literary mind. Story is a basic principle of mind. Most of our experience, our knowledge, and our thinking is organized as stories. The mental scope of story is magnified by projection—one story helps us to make sense of another.” Mark Turner, The Literary Mind: The Origins of Thought and Language (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), V.
Compare the idea of ‘Narrated Religion’ in the ‘Lived Ancient Religion’ approach in Janico Albrecht et al., “Religion in the making: the Lived Ancient Religion approach,” Religion 48 (2018), 583: “Narratives are a powerful instrument for the formation of groups. The very process of narrative emplotment renders persons, objects and events meaningful by setting them into temporal, spatial and social frames. Narratives however are rarely ‘closed’: the biographical narrative of the individual, for example, necessarily alludes to, even incorporates, the ‘public’ narratives of families, groups and polities, thus creating a complex narrative identity, which is not the mere sum of all the narrative vectors, but has been filtered through a variety of institutions and interests, each of which can be understood as itself a complex network of narratives and practices, whose ramifications have no natural limits.”
Jerome Bruner, “The Narrative Construction of Reality,” Critical Inquiry 18 (1991), 5.
Of course, the bureaucratic element is not to be neglected in situations of religious contact comprising a tradition with a strongly bureaucratized political environment such as in the Chinese case. In his considerations on the chances of success of a foreign religion in China, Max Deeg asks: “What could a religion, especially a foreign, non-Chinese religion claim to bring as a benefit to the state and to the ruling dynasty? If one looks at the rhetoric of Chinese religious documents two things become clear very soon: first of all, it had to adapt itself to the mainstream terminology of official documents and had to use this discourse in claiming to have gained the support of the emperor who was ruling at a particular historical moment when the religious document was composed, or at least to have had the support of emperors which official historiography found worthy of being ‘good rulers’.” Max Deeg, “The Rhetoric of Antiquity: Politico-Religious Propaganda in the Nestorian Stele of Chang’an,” Journal for Late Antique Religion and Culture 1 (2007), 17–18.
Pascal Boyer, in examining the claims for truth connected to traditional discourse on object language level has stressed this model from-character with regard to ritualized speech: that “the utterances are supposed to convey a truth not in spite of, but because of their formalization. This of course goes against the common idea, that such forms of discourse consist in the expression of world-views or cultural ‘conceptions’. It we analyse ritual discourse in this way, we are led to focus on aspects which are either nonexistent or irrelevant, while the aspects considered crucial by the actors, notably the formalization, are just ignored. […] The more formalized the utterances, the more they are conceived of containing some truth.” Pascal Boyer, Tradition as Truth and Communication. A Cognitive Description of Traditional Discourse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 81.
Walter Burkert, Kulte des Altertums. Biologische Grundlagen der Religion (München: Beck, 2009), 14.
Compare chapter on Tradition.
See, for example, Marianna Ferrara’s analysis of the first Portuguese reports on supposed Indian ‘Christians’ and the ambiguity of the model form ‘sacrifice’ in these reports: Marianna Ferrara, “The Sacrifice of Others. South Asian Religious Practices in Early Modern European Vocabulary,” Studi e Materiali di Storia delle Religioni 82 (2016), 609–615. Summarizing her point, Ferrara claims: “What happened in South Asia should be rethought keeping into account two levels of stereotypisation. On the one hand, the circulation of standardised descriptions of the Amerindians in Europe provided an iconographic and imagological repertoire which would have been used, redefined or domesticated, and enriched for sure with new data from Asia. On the other one, the term ‘sacrifice’ was useful to consider the Indian practices as different but comparable with the Christian religion” (Ibid., 619).
In this sense, the flexibility, or rather, the lack of imagery in her texture as a deity made the goddess Nanaya a likely subject of adaption among the diverse religious traditions on the Silk Road and from the Sumerians to the Sogdians, see Joan Goodnick Westenholz, “Trading the Symbols of the Goddess Nanaya,” in Religions and Trade. Religious Formation, Transformation and Cross-Cultural Exchange between East and West, eds. Peter Wick and Volker Rabens. DHR 5 (Leiden/Boston: Brill 2014), 195: “What place do her symbols play as attractors? Nanaya’s symbols were flexible. She was not the embodiment of one sign. her ability to absorb other symbols may be the factor that made her worship attractive. She underwent various transformations and was worshipped as a native deity by the local populace along the trade routes of the historical Silk road that crisscrossed Eurasia from early first millennium CE through the middle of the second millennium CE.”
In his lecture ‘Spurenlese: Religiöse Prozesse im Handlungsfeld’ Krech states in more detail: “Wenn man aus dem Niemandsland in ein neues Land einreisen und sich dort beheimaten möchte, braucht es Formulare.” Volkhard Krech, “Spurenlese: Religiöse Prozesse im Handlungsfeld.” (lecture, Frese-Gedenk-Symposion, 23 July 2008), 10.
This also seems to be true for the very final journey. It should not come as a surprise that Chinese bureaucratic afterworld needed model forms to function properly. Accordingly, in tombs of the Han period, one finds model forms such as ‘celestial ordinances for the dead’ issued by exorcists, and contracts to buy land. Michèle Pirazzoli-t’Serstevens characterizes these texts as follows: “The document is written for the administration of the other world, as are the inventory lists. Tiandi’s representative orders the celestial administration to deliver the deceased from punishment and the living from calamity, that the sepulture may be maintained in peace and the descendants be happy. The text ends with an administrative formula copied from official documents: ‘Promptly, promptly in accordance with the statutes and ordinances’ (jiji ru lüling
The Manichean and the Zoroastrian usage of Avestan ritual texts of obscure meanings could be another example of the reading of unknown textures as a model form that can be freely inscribed with regard to their own teachings, see Jason BeDuhn, “The Co-formation of the Manichaean and Zoroastrian Religions in Third-Century Iran,” Entangled Religions 11 (2020), 38: “The exact meaning of such Avestan ritual texts was already obscure in Sasanid times, as the Middle Persian glosses make evident […]. As Pallan Ichaporia has demonstrated, the creators of the Pahlavi ‘translations’ misunderstood much of the language of the gāthās, or perhaps creatively read into them their own later religious culture […]. In these conditions, Manichaeans were as free as Zoroastrians to make what sense of these obscure chants they could, and to employ them in whatever ritual context they thought appropriate.”
Jan Assmann hints at this point by stating with reference to the ancient Mesopotamian cultural technique of translating of gods or names of gods: “Andere Völker, Kulturen, politischen Systeme konnten so fremd sein, wie sie wollten—solange sie nur irgendwelche definierbaren und identifizierbaren Götter verehrten, von deren Rechtsautorität man überzeugt sein konnte, ließ sich diese Fremdheit überwinden und eine gemeinsame Basis der Allianz und Verständigung finden.” (Jan Assmann, Moses der Ägypter. Entzifferung einer Gedächtnisspur (Darmstadt: WBG, 1998), 75 [my emphasis]).
On the macro-level, the idea of the model form could be used in the description of translation processes that are not subject to the modern idea that translation has to be as close as possible to the original. These were, in part, large-scale endeavors that gained particular influence, not only on individuals but on the development of cultures. In his examination of the Graeco-Arabian translation movement from the eighteenth century CE onwards, Dimitri Gutas has described prevalent theoretical aims of translations at this early stage. Referring to object language considerations of Isḥāq ibn-Ḥunayn Gutas states: “[T]he primary quality that defined what a ‘(source) text’ is was not the physical form (i.e. the precise and unique concatenation of words) given to it by its author, but rather its contents and the use for which it was consulted. This would also seem to be indicated by Ḥunayn’s stressing […] that it is important to know for whom the work was translated in order to evaluate its quality. The obligation of the ‘target text,’ accordingly, would be to reproduce these features, and not a presumed ‘integrity’ of the source text as we assume today.” The contents of the translated text were by translation inscribed into the model form provided by the dominant interests of the client, who ordered the translation in the first place. Thus translators were provided with both the model form to use as well as the model form’s authority. It is, therefore, important to note that it is according to this process that “the translation movement itself [was] generated” with spectacular results for the Arabic language. “The translators developed an Arabic vocabulary and style for scientific discourse that remained standard well into the present century.” Dimitri Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture. The Graeco-Arabic Translation Movement in Baghdad an Early ʿAbbāsid Society (2nd–4th/8th–10th centuries) (Oxon: Routledge, 2005), 140–141. On this creative process of translating Gutas concludes: “This means that some of the translations were deliberately not literal because they were made for a special purpose and to serve certain theoretical positions already held. Thus, just as certain Greek texts were selected for translation because they were expected to provide information and arguments in discussions in progress in ʿAbbāsid society, the ideological or scientific orientation of these very discussions influenced the way in which the texts were translated” (ibid., 146). I owe the reference to this example to a presentation of the former KHK-fellow Mohsen Zakeri.
Also compare my article Knut Martin Stünkel, “Inschrift—Einschreiben—Formular,” in Poetik der Inschrift, eds. Ulrich Rehm and Linda Simonis (Heidelberg: Winter, 2019).
Edmond Malone, “An Historical Account of the Rise and Progress of the English Stage and of the Economy and Usage of our Ancient Theatres,” in The Plays of William Shakespeare. Volume the Third containing Prolegomena etc. (London: Basil, 1800), 205.
Malone, “An Historical Account,” 208.
On the question of William Shakespeare’s religiosity see David Scott Kastan, A Will to Believe, Shakespeare and Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). It should be mentioned, however, that, albeit in a quite different context, William Shakespeare made use of model forms as well, by characterizing his Falstaff in The Merry Wives of Windsor, Act II, 1 by means of letters he wrote to some ladies, Mrs Ford and Mrs Page: “Mrs Ford: […] Did you ever hear the like? Mrs Page: Letter for letter, but that the name of Page and Ford differs. —To thy great comfort in the mystery of ill opinions, here’s the twin brother of thy letter. But let thine inherit first, for I protest mine never shall. I warrant he hath a thousand of these letters, writ with blank space for different names—sure, more—and these are of the second edition. He will print, them, out of doubt; for he cares not what he puts into the press, when he would put us two. I had rather be a giantess and lie under Mount Pelion. Well, I will find you twenty lascivious turtles ere one chaste man.” Mrs Ford: “Why, this is the very same: the very hand, the very words. What doth he think of us?”
Malone himself seems to have changed his mind on the authenticity of the manuscript: “Edmund Malone suspected […] that this document bears all the hallmarks of an eighteenth century hoax and that subsequent attempts to link it to the Jesuit Mission of the early 1580th are unjustified.” Robert Bearman, “John Shakespeare: A Papist or Just Penniless?,” Shakespeare Quarterly 56 (2005), 412.
See Robert Bearman, “John Shakespeare’s ‘Spiritual Testament’. A Reappraisal,” Shakespeare Survey 56 (2003).
See Ulrich Suerbaum, Das elisabethanische Zeitalter (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2003), 154–155.
On Campion’s role in the mission see Sonja Fielitz, “Shakespeare and Catholicism: The Jesuits as Cultural Mediators in Early Modern Europe,” Critical Survey 21 (2009), 71–86.
On Parson’s motivation and strategy for his mission see Michael J. Carafiello, “English Catholicism and the Jesuit Mission of 1580–1581,” The Historical Journal 37 (1994), 761–774. If Carafiello is right in assuming that the Jesuit mission concentrated on high-standing Catholics to promote a possible reconversion of England by force, then it becomes even more mysterious that the missionaries should bother with comparatively lower-standing figures such as John Shakespeare (see ibid., 771).
Compare Robert E. Scully, “Trickle Down Spirituality? Dilemmas of the Elizabethan Jesuit Mission,” Nederlands archief for kerkgeschiedenes 85 (2005), 285–299.
Carafiello characterizes the aims of the Jesuit leader as follows: “The English mission had taken on the importance and urgency of a holy war in the mind of Parsons, and he came to believe that it was inextricably tied to the very survival of Catholicism in Europe.” Carafiello, “English Catholicism and the Jesuit Mission of 1580–1581,” 768.
Malone, “An Historical Account,” 213.
See Peter Nosco, “Secrecy and Transmission of Tradition: Issues in the Study of the ‘Underground’ Christians,” Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 20 (1993), 5.
See Junhyoung Michael Shin, “Avalokiteśvara’s Manifestation as the Virgin Mary: The Jesuit Adaptation and the Visual Conflation in Japanese Catholicism after 1614,” Church History 80 (2011), 6.
In Gulliver’s Travels Swift used the practice with satirical intention: “To this I added another petition, that for the sake of my patron the king of Luggnagg, his majesty would condescend to excuse my performing the ceremony imposed on my countrymen, of trampling upon the crucifix: because I had been thrown into his kingdom by my misfortunes, without any intention of trading. When this latter petition was interpreted to the Emperor, he seemed a little surprised; and said, he believed I was the first of my countryman who ever made any scruple in this point, and that he began to doubt whether I was a real Hollander or not, but rather suspected I must be a Christian.” Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (London: Penguins, 1994), 237–238.
See George Elison, Deus Destroyed. The Image of Christianity in Early Modern Japan (Cambridge, MA. /London: Harvard University Press, 1988), 1: “Japanese thought held no preconception corresponding to the Christian predicate. The Japanese Critic found the notion of an omnipotent personal deity specious, its consequence disastrous. The foreign religion could be accused of otherworldliness; for the Christians removed the justification of human action from the social sphere to an extraterrestrial locus. The Christian dictate of supernal loyalty pre-empted loyalty to a secular sovereign.”
Peter Nosco, “The Experiences of Christians During the Underground Years and Thereafter,” Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 34 (2007), 91.
Elison stresses the intensity of bureaucratic control with a telling example: “Forced registry of all the land’s people in Buddhist temples made of Buddhism an instrument applied to the elimination of religious heterodoxy. […] The suspiciousness of the Tokugawa officials, and the thoroughness of their control measures, reached a hysterical pitch akin to that of their Spanish contemporaries (or of those petty bureaucrats of modern Germany) who were bent on enforcing ‘racial purity’. Entry into almost any sort of service occupation involved the prior attestation that the person was not a Christian. For instance, a whore’s initial contract required such a formula; for officialdom was most concerned that the lady’s customers not be contaminated.” Elision, Deus Destroyed, 4–5.
On these techniques see Nosco, “Secrecy and Transmission of Tradition.” Also compare Nosco, “The Experience of Christians,” 91 on the strategy of over-fulfillment of expectations: “[U]nderground Christians, both individually and collectively, had begun to master the best disguise of all, that is, the invisibility of the model subject and neighbor. Everywhere the evidence points to underground Christians being model cultivators, herders and other dwellers of the countryside.”
Shin, “Avalokiteśvara’s Manifestation as the Virgin Mary,” 1.
“One distinctive feature of the nontextual material culture of the underground Christians is that it was, in general, visually indistinguishable from nonproscribed objects of everyday use associated with the Buddhist and eclectic folk religious traditions. What distinguished most of these objects to underground Christians was only the fact that they were of ritual or symbolic import to their communities, and so only rarely were underground Christians uncovered through discovery of their religious possessions.” Nosco, “Secrecy and Transmission of Tradition,” 14.
Shin identifies some images of the Buddha used in this way as Amida, “the savior and lord of afterlife paradise, […] the most appealing Buddha to the Japanese populace.” Shin elaborates on this idea as follows: “Amida, unlike other Buddhas, has two distinctive theological aspects that are closely analogous to Christianity. First, the terms of salvation do not rely on the part of the believer, but on the compassion and will of Amida. […] Since sinful men do not have the capacity to be freed from the eternal chain of karmic reincarnation and suffering, Amida allows them transferred to his paradisiacal Pure Land, where reborn believers will receive the profound teaching […] and eventually proceed to nirvana.” Shin, “Avalokiteśvara’s Manifestation as the Virgin Mary,” 28–29, 32–33.
See Shin, “Avalokiteśvara’s Manifestation as the Virgin Mary,” 4. “The double circumstances of persecution and isolation were bringing their religious imagery of Mary close to that of Kannon, since the latter not only protected their identity, but was filling in their incomplete and fading knowledge of Marian imagery and theology” (ibid., 14). In another context of contact, the model form of Mary serves as an interface as well. In her article “Beyond Muslim and Christians. The Moriscos Marian Scriptures,” Amy Remensnyder describes the function of the figure of Mary as a model form that is, on the one hand, suitable for processes of demarcation of religious traditions (in this case, Old Christians and Moriscos), but may also be used to adapt—and, perhaps, subvert—the hegemonic tradition by employing a version of Christianity “carefully cut along the patterns of Islam.” As such, the figure of Mary works as an interface of communication in a particular contact of religious traditions, though its revolutionary possibilities have been tamed in later times by the official Roman Church, see Amy Remensnyder, “Beyond Muslim and Christians. The Moriscos Marian Scriptures,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 41 (2011): 551, 568.
In a recent article, Reinhold Glei examined a situation of contact manifested in the writings of the Orientalist and protestant theologian Johann Michael Lange (1664–1731), in which subversive elements are present that both conceal an affirmative and philological approach to the Qurʾan and an implicit provocation of (co-)Christian viewpoints towards it. As Glei points out, Lange made use of the formal compatibility of Christian and Muslim introductory formulas to counteract his theological profession’s obligation to promote the conversion of Muslims. Reinhold F. Glei. “Bismiʾllāhi … Three Dissertations by Johann Michael Lange on Editions and Translations of the Koran,” in Early Modern Disputations and Dissertations in an Interdisciplinary and European Context, eds. Meelis Friedenthal, Hanspeter Marti, and Robert Seidel (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2021), 455–456.
On the form as the continuous element in hidden Japanese Christianity see Yoshie Kojima, “Orthodoxy and Acculturation of Christian Art in Japan: The Transformation of the Eucharistic Representation of ‘Hidden’ Christians,” in Interactions between Rivals. The Christian Missions and Buddhist Sects in Japan (c. 1549–c. 1647), eds: Alexandra Curvelo and Angelo Cattaneo (Frankfurt: Lang, 2021), 399: “It is significant that the continuity of Christian tradition in Kakure Kirishitan practice is largely formal, as with the sounds of prayers in Latin as mentioned before, and is combined with a substantial loss of meaning. This presumably happened also to the ‘
Elison, Deus Destroyed, 222.
Shin, “Avalokiteśvara’s Manifestation as the Virgin Mary,” 3.
Wu Hung, “Buddhist Elements in Early Chinese Art (2nd and 3rd centuries AD),” Artibus Asia 47 (1986): 269–270. I owe this example to Licia Di Giacinto. Also compare ibid., 268: “A further example was found in the tomb at Yinan, Shandong province. On four main sides of an octagonal pillar in the back chamber, there are carvings of Dong Wanggong, Xi Wangmu and two standing figures with halos […]. Dong Wanggong wears a flat-topped cap, and Xi Wangmu, an elaborate flower hat. Their hands are concealed inside long, wide sleeves, and both are holding flat ceremonial objects in their arms. They are seated under a canopy on the magic mountain Kunlun which, in the illustrations, has three peaks held up by a huge turtle. The two standing figures with halos are in positions matching those of Dong Wanggong and Xi Wangmu. They are dressed alike in a narrow-sleeved top and a short skirt with tassels, and wear the same ornaments. There are differences between the two figures. For instance, one holds a bird on his arm and stands on a mythical animal, the dragon; the other holds nothing, and stands on a divine plant, the glossy ganoderma. Therefore, their divine characteristics are indicated by sacred marks from different religious traditions: the halo is the symbol of the Buddha, while the dragon and ganoderma are traditionally connected with Chinese immortals. These mixed features are shared by another figure on the south side of the same pillar […]. He is winged, like Dong Wanggong and Xi Wangmu, and is held up by an immortal. His right hand is raised in a distinct abhaya mudrā gesture, like that of the Buddha in the Mahao tomb. A protuberance on his head suggests an attempted uṣṇīṣa but on top of it there is a small cap or a ribbon. Owing to these mixed or non-standard iconographic features, it is difficult to identify these three figures definitely as Buddha. What we can say is that they combine artistic representations both from the Buddha’s image and from the Chinese immortals. Together with Dong Wanggong and Xi Wangmu, they were carved in the tomb to symbolize the wonderland to which it was hoped the deceased would go.”
Suzanne E. Cahill, Transcendence & Divine Passion. The Queen Mother of the West in Medieval China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 27.