Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age

by Robert N. Bellah

  If all were well and all manner of things were well, why would we need narrative? Unitive events with their profound sense of wholeness do not give rise to narratives, though they may form the culmination of a narrative, the discovery of a new order out of disorder. We have said, following Schutz, that the world of daily life is characterized by lack, by a fundamental anxiety. Narrative, like all the forms of representation we have discussed so far, does not operate under the terms of the world of daily life, but it does not avoid the fundamental anxiety. Rather it takes the fundamental anxiety into itself and, except in postmodern narrative, which leaves us more anxious than ever, transforms the anxiety into some kind of resolution: not necessarily a “happy ending,” perhaps a tragic understanding. Because it is through religion, and religious narrative, that human beings have commonly dealt with the immemorial misdirection of life, we will return to these issues frequently.

  Finally, as Bruner notes, “[Children] produce and comprehend stories, are comforted and alarmed by them, long before they are capable of handling the most fundamental Piagetian logical propositions that can be put in linguistic form. Indeed, we even know that logical propositions are most easily comprehended by the child when they are imbedded in an ongoing story. So one is tempted to ask whether narratives may not also serve as early interpretants for `logical’ propositions before the child has the mental equipment to handle them by such later-developing logical calculi as adult humans can

  That even the narratives of early childhood are organized through relationships that are in some sense logical warns us against assuming that nar rative, or symbolic representation generally, is “irrational.” Art, music, poetry, and narrative are not just effusions of feeling. They are all forms of thought and are in principle as deeply rational as mathematics or physics. It is easier for adults as well as children (even for theoretical physicists) to think narratively than it is to think conceptually, so it is not surprising that logical relationships are often expressed in narrative form. Once again Kenneth Burke is helpful. In his commentary on the first three chapters of Genesis, he points out that narrative can be rephrased in terms of logical entailment: a God with authority to command and human beings with the capacity to choose lead to the logical possibility of disobedience and punishment. What is unfolded narratively in a succession of events can be restated logically as entailed in the initial formulation of the problem of order and The logical restatement is by no means fully equivalent to the narrative, but it does help us see that the narrative, whatever else it is, is not illogical or irrational. Narrative, with its capacity to reach into our bodies and reformulate our identities, individually and socially, also contains, in its womb so to speak, conceptual possibilities. But the attainment of conceptual representation is an achievement in its own right.

  Conceptual Representation

  Jean Piaget has perhaps done more than anyone else to show how the child moves from symbol to concept in making sense of the world. The transition occurs (in mid-twentieth-century Switzerland) roughly between 7 or 8 and 11 or 12 years of age. The child moves from an egocentric (with the qualifications I have given to that term) world (“Oh, the sun has come with me”) to a decentered world. The self and the sun are now seen as independent elements in a world of standard time and space. Even as late as 10 to 12, however, the child still attributes will and intention to a river or the sun (and, I would hold, in dreams and some moods so do adults of any age).8”

  Piaget notes, in a way reminiscent of George Herbert Mead, that the shift occurs in connection with social learning: “Only toward the end of the egocentric period does the child become capable of distinguishing between points of view, and thus of learning both to recognize his own (as distinct from other possible ones) and to resist suggestion.“90 It is also at this time that the child becomes adept at what Piaget calls “formal operations”logical thought and mathematics.

  The “decentered” world of late childhood approximates what we have called the world of daily life. It is not a world entirely controlled by what I will describe in a moment as conceptual representation, for narrative of a certain sort-realistic, literal narrative-and dialogue are indispensable resources for the world of daily life. But literal narrative is already halfway to conceptual representation, for it implies stable terms that correspond more or less accurately to a reality that is really there. Concepts are based on clear definition and accurate observation, so that they are concepts of something definite. When logic and observation are methodically combined, they render knowledge, episteme as the Greek philosophers put it, as opposed to doxa, opinion. Knowledge is based on demonstration; narrative does not demonstrate; rhetoric can persuade but not demonstrate. The world of daily life normally is constituted much more by opinion, by narrative and rhetoric, than by demonstration. Indeed, the world of strict demonstration, of science (the Greek episteme can also be translated as “science”), is as much an alternate reality relative to the world of daily life as is music or religion.

  Nonetheless, a degree of practical demonstration is an indispensable part of the world of daily life. If the world of daily life is also the world of working, then accuracy in relating means to ends is certainly part of it. Often this feature of the world of daily life is referred to as rationality, as in rational choice or rational actor theory, but this is to use the term in its narrowed sense of instrumental rationality, important enough, but hardly exhaustive. It is equally unfortunate to refer to music, say, or religion, as irrational, or to attempt to explain them as “really” forms of instrumental rationality. Music and religion have their own rationality, which is not instrumental.

  Some ability to use conceptual representation is characteristic of late childhood in every culture. Conceptual representation renders possible a world of objects independent of subjects, a world that is “decontextualized.” This is part of the enormous power of conceptual representation, the ability to manipulate objects without being disturbed by subjective impulse, wish, or whim. But the independence of the world of objects is also the source of the limitation of conceptual consciousness. Everything is now an object, even one’s own self, and certainly other selves. On the one hand, the emergence of conscious reflection (of the mature ego for the first time-which makes it problematic to use the term “egocentric” for small children), with the capacity to think clearly about objective reality, is a triumph. On the other hand, if conceptual representation is not reintegrated with the other forms of representation, then serious distortion may occur. This is not usually a problem in the world of daily life, where conceptual representation makes itself felt only momentarily and in fragments. However, in those cultures where conceptual representation has achieved significant spheres of dominance, difficulties can indeed emerge.

  The discovery of the concept, in ancient Greece by Socrates or Plato, had powerful consequences. Plato used concepts to criticize myth but then reintegrated them into dialogue, narrative (the life and death of Socrates), and even myth (the myths near the end of several major dialogues). Greek philosophy, not without tension to be sure, could be fruitfully integrated with Christian religion for centuries. But in early modern Europe the liberation of the concept took a more radical turn. In connection with the rise of modern science the rejection of metaphor, symbol, and myth became explicit. Hobbes, for example, in a passage we could interpret as intended to refute Yeats’s notion of embodied truth, which we considered above, said: “Now these words true, truth, and true proposition, are equivalent to one another; for truth consists in speech, and not in the things spoken of; and though true be sometimes opposed to apparent or feigned, yet it is always to be referred to the truth of a proposition.“91 In Leviathan Hobbes takes on the role of word policeman. In listing the abuses of speech, he writes: “Secondly, when [people] use words metaphorically; that is, in other sense than that they are ordained for; and thereby deceive others.” He condemns talk of transubstantiation as a kind of “absurdity” that “may rightly be numbred among
st the many sorts of Madnesse.” And he tells us that there is no such thing as “Finis ultimis, (utmost ayme,) nor Summum Bonum, (greatest Good,) as is spoken of in the Books of the old Morall Philosophers.“9’ Reality is matter in motion and our language should conform to it. Thus, Hobbes would banish the language of poetry, theology, and traditional moral philosophy.

  Descartes was as concerned as Hobbes to remove the vestiges of preconceptual thought. As Rosenstock-Huessy writes:

  In his booklet on method, [Descartes] seriously, without any trace of humour, complained that man had impressions before his mind developed to the full power of logic. For twenty years, so his complaint runs, I was impressed confusedly by objects which I was unable to understand. Instead of having my brain a clean slate at twenty, I found innumerable false ideas engraved upon it. What a pity that man is unable to think clearly from the day of his birth, or that he should have memories which antedate his maturity.

  Rosenstock-Huessy points out that Descartes’s conceptual asceticism might have helped his mathematical and scientific studies, but “the truth is that the great Cartesius, when he obliterated the impressions of the child Rene, maimed himself for any social perception outside natural science.“93

  However problematic, something of the greatest importance was going on in the writings of the best minds of the seventeenth century in Europe. A radical shift from previous forms of thought was occurring. Ernest Gellner calls it the “Big Ditch” in the history of human cognition because it separates the modern West (and by now most of the world) from everyone else in history.14 Just to suggest the magnitude of the change, we may turn to Lucien Febvre, as summarized by Stanley Tambiah, who pointed out that the following terms were not yet in use in the sixteenth century:

  Adjectives such as “absolute” or “relative”; “abstract” or “concrete”; “intentional,” “inherent,” “transcendental”; nouns such as “causality” and “regularity”; “concept” and “criterion”; “analyses” and “syntheses”; “deduction” and “induction,” “coordination” and “classification.” Even the word “system” came into usage only in the middle of the seventeenth century. “Rationalism” itself was not christened till very late in the nineteenth century.95

  But the process of scientific discovery has never been as pristine as Descartes and Hobbes would have liked. Michael Polanyi has written extensively of the “intellectual passions” that underlie any significant scientific discovery.96 Jerome Bruner has developed the well-known distinction between scientific discovery, which is indeed passionate, sometimes chaotic, and often governed more by symbolic representation, by metaphor or even dream, than by conceptual reason, and the process of verification, or, as Karl Popper says, of falsification, where scientific method rules in all its stringency.97

  Early modern science is full of examples where symbolic representation seems to be the midwife of conceptual discovery. Copernicus cannot be fully understood except in the context of Neoplatonic mysticism with its preoccupation with the heavenly bodies, especially the sun. In De Revolutionibus (1543) he wrote, “In the middle of all sits the sun enthroned. How could we place this luminary in any better position in this most beautiful temple from which to illuminate the whole at once? … so the Sun sits upon a royal throne ruling his children the planets which circle around him.“98 Kepler, expanding the Copernican theory by modeling the orbits of the planets, recounts his discovery in ecstatic terms:

  That for which I have devoted the best part of my life to astronomical contemplations, for which I joined Tycho Brahe … at last I have brought it to light, and recognized its truth beyond all my hopes … So now since eighteen months ago the dawn, three months ago the proper light of day, and indeed a very few days ago the pure Sun itself of the most marvelous contemplation has shown forth-nothing holds me; I will indulge my sacred fury; I will taunt mankind with the candid confession that I have stolen the golden vases of the Egyptians, in order to build of them a tabernacle to my God, far indeed from the bounds of Egypt.

  Kepler’s great work, from the fifth book of which this quotation is taken, was entitled, significantly, Harmonice Mundi (1619). Kepler speculates that “in the sun there dwells an intellect simple, intellectual fire or mind, whatever it may be, the fountain of all harmony.” If the sun is itself nous (Reason, containing Plato’s notion of measure, God), then it is the ultimate source of cosmic harmony in general and planetary harmony in particular. Kepler, as Polanyi tells us, “even went so far as to write down the tune of each planet in musical notation.“99 All this might be frivolous if Copernicus and Kepler had not laid the foundations of our modern understanding of the cosmos. There is something marvelous in the fact that the man who confirmed the Copernican heliocentric theory of the solar system actually “heard” the music of the spheres.

  It is not surprising that metaphor should be so important in scientific discovery. Seeing something “as” something else, or “in terms of” something else, perhaps as something from an unexpectedly different realm, as Kenneth Burke explained the metaphorical process, provides the generative idea that can lead to a radically new hypothesis.10° But new hypotheses must be tested (confirmed, falsified) in the much more mundane process of what Thomas Kuhn calls “ordinary science.“101 It is this process that operates under the constraints that Descartes and Hobbes proposed. It is here that the “positivist” process of testing theoretical propositions against real data takes the form of a commonsense correspondence theory of truth, whatever the philosophers may think.

  Yet, as Gellner has reminded us, it is no good turning up our noses at such a process.102 It has provided sure knowledge, knowledge that has allowed human beings to understand and transform the natural world-though, for reasons that should be obvious from the argument of this chapter, it has not yet similarly transformed, and is unlikely to transform, our knowledge of the human world, where scientific forms of knowledge, always appropriate, must be complemented by other ways of knowing, what we call the humanities. Yet it is not science as another reality that has transformed the world, but its application through technology, a form that unites scientific knowledge and the concerns of the world of daily life. Like the world of daily life, technology is preoccupied with lack and its overcoming, economically, politically, militarily. The instrumental reason of the world of daily life, armed with the new scientific knowledge, can become the victim of hubris and megalomania. Medicine is pushed to overcome death itself, but military technology is pushed to the brink of total annihilation. Given the enormous richness of human consciousness and culture, the multiple realities that the various forms of representation can call forth, the band of technology would seem to be narrow. Yet its discovery has consequences beyond calculation. Robinson Jeffers commented laconically on those consequences:

  For that little knowledge not to be too much, it must be reintegrated with the other forms of knowing that we have been considering in this chapter, and with ethical reflection, which itself unites conceptual thinking with forms more deeply embedded in human experience.

  Yet science itself is without utilitarian concern, is an effort of pure understanding, however involved, as is every other sphere, in mundane preoccupations. The contemplative moment of sheer wonder is not limited to Copernicus and Kepler but occurs wherever the pursuit of knowledge bears fruit. At its highest level conceptual knowing returns to the symbolic, the musical, in the appreciation of pure form, or to the enactive, a sense of bodily delight. For the person who understands it, reading Aristotle’s Metaphysics or Hegel’s Logic can set off a subliminal dance. Bertrand Russell wrote, “The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as in poetry.“104 A true understanding of science can be a barrier to our megalomania.

  In this chapter we have considered the building blocks out of which will come ritual, myth, and theology (and the traditions of reflective thought of the non-Christian
religions), the cultural forms around which religion develops. They will take on new meaning as we consider them in the life and history of actual societies.

  Chapter 1 was about religion and ontogeny. It was not an effort to understand the development of religion in the life course of the individual, though that would be a valuable undertaking; instead its purpose was to look at human development as the acquisition of a series of capacities, all of which have contributed to the formation of religions. This chapter is about religion and phylogeny, religion in deep history. When did religion begin? If only among humans, were there earlier developments that made its emergence possible, even in other species, and that might help us understand it? If we assume, as I do, that religion as defined in the Preface and Chapter 1 is confined to the genus Homo and perhaps even to the species Homo sapiens, where do that genus and species stand in relation to the whole story of evolution as far back as we can go? And what do I mean by evolution as a process that includes everything from single-cell organisms to contemporary human society and culture? That is what this chapter is about.