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

by Robert N. Bellah

  The third contribution of the symbolic capacity to the evolution of religion is to the development, out of the raw material of basic emotions shared with other primates and with other mammals as well, of more complex emotions such as “piety, awe, equanimity, self-transcendence, and spiritual renewal (to name a These complex spiritual emotions, together with moral intuitions such as compassion and even love of enemies, are not simply continuous with emotions that we continue to share with other animals but emergent in the context of cultural reformulation. Deacon’s ideas about these emotions and their human importance is suggestive, and I think basically right, even though I cannot here go into them in detail. It is worth noting, though, that it is just these complex spiritual and moral emotions that Goodenough and Deacon in the earlier article most strongly affirm. Religion, with its taint of supernaturalism, cannot be so easily affirmed as can spirituality, a tendency more widespread in contemporary thought than just among evolutionary biologists.

  Why Is Religion So Often Concerned with the Personal?

  I will now try briefly to relate what emergentist biologists can affirm (spirituality) to what they cannot affirm (theism) in my own conception of religion as a cultural system. I have insisted that the idea of gods and certainly of God is not primordial in the evolution of religion. But when members of a community enact stories, myths, in rituals, they are actors who represent humans, animals, or powerful beings (whether they should be called spirits, gods, or something else depends on the case). But it is surely the case that what rituals and the narratives they enact are about is personal. Many evolutionary biologists think human intelligence grew beyond that of any other species not because we were so clever technologically but because we developed very complex societies and the capacity for shared intention and shared attention that made an entirely new level of cooperation possible. Thus it is not surprising that what rituals and myths are about is socially interrelated “persons,” their trials, foibles, and insights.l65

  I mentioned earlier, in connection with how we relate to animals, Martin Buber’s distinction between the I-It relation and the I-You relation, noting that the You can even be extended under certain circumstances to animals. But in a species that has come to be what it is primarily because it is social, even, as some have said, supersocial, it is not surprising that the I-You relation would at the highest level of meaning trump the I-It relation. To put it bluntly, there is a deep human need-based on 200 million years of the necessity of parental care for survival and at least 250,000 years of very extended adult protection and care of children, so that, among other things, those children can spend a lot of time in play-to think of the universe, to see the largest world one is capable of imagining, as personal.

  We see it appearing, spontaneously and unthinkingly, even among our scientists. When Steven Weinberg says that the earth “is just a tiny part of an overwhelmingly hostile universe,” or Jacques Monod says that man lives in “a world that is deaf to his music, and as indifferent to his hopes as it is to his sufferings or his crimes,” we must remember that only persons can be hostile or deaf and indifferent. On the other hand, even someone like Richard Dawkins, who believes the universe is fundamentally meaningless, can still call it “friendly” when discussing the anthropic principle, and our emergentist friends believe in a universe whose highest form of emergence is the emergence of persons, and for whom our most highly evolved emotions have to do with respect for the dignity of others.

  For Buber the relation becomes the key to the understanding of reality. He does not deny the world of I-It; on the contrary, he affirms it. But he writes, “And in all the seriousness of truth, listen: without It a human being cannot live. But whoever lives only with that is not human.””’ The starting point of Buber’s reflections on the I-You relation is the immediate presence of another: “When I confront a human being as my You and speak the basic word I -You to him, then he is no thing among things, nor does he consist of things. Neighborless and seamless, he is You and fills the firmament. Not as if there were nothing but he; but everything else lives in his light.“167

  Though the relation exists between persons, Buber feels it can also exist in some other relations, such as between humans and animals and even between humans and trees.”’ In his answer to critics, written in 1957, 34 years after the original publication, he defends his position. With respect to animals he writes, “Some men have deep down in their being a potential partnership with animals-most often people who are by no means `animalic’ by nature but rather Even with a tree, it depends on the nature of the encounter whether there is an I-It relation or an I-You relation: “The living wholeness and unity of a tree that denies itself to the eye, no matter how keen, of anyone who merely investigates, while it is manifest to those who say You, is present when they are present: they grant the tree the opportunity to manifest it, and now the tree that has being manifests it.“170

  For Buber the You that can be encountered in humans and in nature is fundamentally a way of moving beyond the world of things into the world of ultimate reality, which is the eternal You:

  In every sphere, in every relational act, through everything that becomes present to us, we gaze toward the train of the eternal You; in each we perceive a breath of it, in every you we address the eternal You, in every sphere according to its manner. All spheres are included in it, while it is included in none.

  Through all of them shines the one presence.171

  Buber speaks in a deliberately oracular and poetic voice. His translator, Walter Kauffmann, points out that his German, often uncolloquial, is distinctly odd. This is because Buber wants to avoid being too easily understood, too easily put in categories that people carry with them in advance. For Buber most talk of God is I-It talk: God becomes a thing whose nature people claim to understand, about which they can endlessly talk, but which is not the God of relation, which for him is the only God there is. He writes, “But whoever abhors the name [of God] and fancies that he is godlesswhen he addresses with his whole devoted being the You of his life that cannot be restricted by any other, he addresses God.“72 Buber spoke unabashedly out of the tradition of Judaism, but he was also speaking to the modern world, where nothing could be taken for granted in the sphere of religion or in language about God. What is important for my argument is his insistence on religion as a form of life, one based on relation, on presence, as opposed to the perfectly valid parts of our lives that are devoted to objects, to things. Confusing the two realms is to miss the point of both.

  Although Buber did not discuss the relation between religion and science, I want to call another witness, one who was deeply involved in science and who couldn’t think of religion except in relation to science. He was at once a major mathematician, a major scientist, especially in the realm of physics, and a major theologian. If there is another example of someone so distinguished in these three fields, I don’t know who it would be. His name is Blaise Pascal and he lived from 1623 to 1662, in the seventeenth century when science as we know it was rapidly coming into existence. Pascal was a child prodigy in mathematics and published his first treatise on the subject, one that Descartes envied, when he was only 16. He helped to prove, against Descartes’s argument, that a vacuum can occur in nature. He was an inventor and was most widely known in his early years for his mechanical calculator, which he invented for his father, who was an official involved in taxation. He was in correspondence with the leading thinkers of his day, and he was accepted as one of them.

  On November 23, 1654, between the evening hours of 10:30 and 12:30 he experienced what we called in Chapter 1 a unitive event. He later sewed into his clothing a piece of parchment on which he had written an account of this event, if one can call a series of exclamations an account. The document begins, before the exclamations, with one word: “Fire.” Fire is a central religious symbol in many cultures, but as a scientist Pascal was perfectly aware of its physical properties. The exclamations begin:

  and continue i
n the same vein for some 21 further lines, never becoming a connected narrative. Since 1646 Pascal and his family had come under the influence of Jansenism, a rigorist Catholic movement based on a religious community at Port Royal, and his previously conventional Catholic practice took a more serious turn. The international fame that his scientific work brought him and his growing friendship in aristocratic circles became matters of concern to him-he worried about the sin of pride.

  After his conversion experience, however, he did not abandon science, for he continued to work on mathematical problems until he became too ill to go on. He did, however, give increasing time to religious matters, defending the Port Royal community against attacks mainly from members of the Jesuit Order, in the Provincial Letters. These letters, written in 1656 and 1657, purely as writing were said to have created modern French prose, but they were also substantively a searching critique of what Pascal believed were distorted views of the faith particularly among the Jesuits. In his later years he devoted himself to notes for a projected Apology for the Christian Religion, addressed to his elegant skeptical friends whom he wished to show what was missing in their lives. These notes were never drawn together as a continuous discourse, but when published after his death, where they were given the title of Pensees, “thoughts,” they became the best-known and most influential of all his works, recognized as a literary, philosophical, and theological classic.

  The question of how one of the leaders of early modern science could address matters of religion as his primary (though never exclusive) concern in his later years is one that has drawn a vast amount of comment. I want, simply and briefly, to note how Pascal himself viewed what he was doing, how he distinguished the various spheres of his life. The key sentence here is: Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connait point. Of the various translations, for me the simplest is: “The heart has reasons reason knows not o£“174 It would be easy to give this sentence an antirationalist interpretation, but only if we don’t try carefully to understand what Pascal meant by heart and reason. Pascal had the idea that there are actually three orders of knowledge, which should not be confused because they operate on different levels: that of the body (the senses), that of the mind (reason), and that of the heart, which we will have to try to understand, as it is not as obvious as the first two. For one thing, Pascal was aware of the role of the heart in human anatomy, so the heart as a source of knowledge must be metaphorical, but then religious language is usually metaphorical and this metaphorical usage of “heart” was already ancient in Pascal’s time, having a strong biblical base.

  Pascal held that each kind of knowledge-from the senses, from reason, and from the heart-is each valid in its own way, but we should not confuse them. Of faith, which comes from the heart, and the senses, he wrote, “Faith certainly tells us what the senses do not, but not the contrary of what they see; it is above, not against them.“175 The heart is the source of innate knowledge, such as space, time, motion, and number, from which reason starts but which it cannot produce. It is also the source of love and, with the help of God, of faith. Faith based on reason alone is “only human and useless for salvation.“176 Consequently, Pascal believed that metaphysical proofs of the existence of God are useless.177 Reason, however, can tell us a lot about the world:

  Let man then contemplate the whole of nature in her full and lofty majesty, let him turn his gaze away from the lowly objects around him, let him behold the dazzling light set like an eternal lamp to light up the universe, let him see the earth as a mere speck compared to the vast orbit described by this star, and let him marvel at finding this vast orbit itself to be no more than the tiniest point compared to that described by the stars revolving in the firmament.178

  Not only can reason give us truth in it own sphere, as can the senses in theirs, but reason is a deep source of human dignity. In a famous passage Pascal wrote,

  Man is only a reed, the weakest in nature, but he is a thinking reed. There is no need for the whole universe to take up arms to crush him: a vapour, a drop of water is enough to kill him. But even if the universe were to crush him, man would still be nobler than his slayer, because he knows that he is dying and the advantage the universe has over him. The universe knows none of this.179

  Pascal lived at a moment of a vast increase of our knowledge of the universe in which we live. The telescope and microscope were, with the help of reason, opening up realms unknown to earlier humans. Pascal could only marvel at the greatness and dignity that reason gives us. But in the end reason also gives us knowledge of our wretchedness, of our inability, unaided, to save ourselves. That is the business of the heart when it leads us to the presence of God. Only that presence can save us, as Pascal found out in November 1654. From the point of view of my argument Pascal gives an example of how a great mathematician and scientist can see knowledge as coming from several spheres. Without in any way denying the greatness and dignity of reason, he found that faith comes from the heart-it has reasons reason knows not of.

  Religion as Play Again

  To see Pascal’s Pensees as play, even serious play, is not easy. It is a book full of anguish, and he even characterizes his conversion experience as Fire. Perhaps his mathematics, with which he was obsessed from an early age, was a kind of play for him. Many serious thinkers have had to admit that their most serious work was their play. We can close this chapter by turning to another great thinker, Plato, who gave us some of the most remarkable words about play that have ever been written. I have long been aware that book 2 of Plato’s Laws is one of the brightest, most joyous passages in all his writings, and I could not help but wonder at it the more when I remembered that later in the Laws one finds some of the darkest passages he ever wrote. It was Huizinga’s great book that reminded me that some of those bright passages I remembered are about play. In book 2 Plato explains the value of festivals and links them by origin to the play of children:

  This education [based on the proper ordering of passions in childhood] which consists in correctly trained pleasures and pains tends to slacken in human beings, and in the course of a lifetime becomes corrupted to a great extent. So, taking pity on this suffering that is natural to the human race, the gods have ordained the cycle of festivals as times of rest from labor. They have given as fellow celebrants the Muses, with their leader Apollo, and Dionysus-in order that these divinities might set humans right again. Thus men are sustained by their festivals in the company of gods.

  It is necessary to see whether or not the things the argument is singing to us now are true according to nature. The argument asserts that every young thing, so to speak, is incapable of remaining calm in body or in voice, but always seeks to move and cry: young things leap and jump as if they were dancing with pleasure and playing together, and emit all sorts of cries. The other animals, the argument goes, lack perception of orders and disorders in motions (the orders which have received the names of “rhythm” and “harmony”); we, in contrast, have been given the aforementioned gods as fellow-dancers, and they have given us the pleasant perception of rhythm and harmony. Using this they move us, and lead us in choruses, joining us together in songs and dances; and that is why they bestowed the name “choruses”-from the “joy” (chard) which is natural to these activities.180

  Huizinga has brought another passage of equal or greater importance to my attention, and I have found his translation the most satisfactory:

  I say that man must be serious with the serious. God alone is worthy of supreme seriousness, but man is made God’s plaything, and that is the best part of him. Therefore every man and woman should live life accordingly and play the noblest games and be of another mind from what they are at present … For they deem war a serious thing, though in war there is neither play nor culture worthy the name which are the things we deem most serious. Hence all must live in peace as well as they possibly can. What, then, is the right way of living? Life must be lived as play. Playing certain games, making sacrifices, singing and dancing,
and then a man will be able to propitiate the gods, and defend himself against his enemies and win in the contest.181

  If, for Plato, Apollo and Dionysus lead humans in dancing and God seems to want humans above all to play, what about Plato himself? Is he playing? Plato often uses myths to express essential parts of his teachings. Huizinga believes myths are part of the “play-habit of the mind” that we find in children: “Involuntarily we always judge archaic man’s belief in the myths he creates by our own standards of science, philosophy or religious conviction. A half-joking element verging on make-believe is inseparable from true myth.””’ He gives Plato as an example. Plato, even while often using myths to make his most important points, will then say about the story that it is on the whole true, or “something like the truth,” or “likely,” making clear that he is using the myth to get across an idea not a story to be set in stone. For example, in the Statesman, the stranger (who stands in for Socrates in this dialogue), after getting bogged down in a very abstruse argument, asks his youthful interlocutor whether they shouldn’t turn to “ancient legends,” which would involve “mixing in an element of play.” The young man says to go ahead, and the stranger replies, “In that case, pay complete attention to my story, as children do; you certainly haven’t left childish games behind for more than a few