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

by Robert N. Bellah

  For Huizinga, myth is never far from the world of play. We can ask if Plato is ever far from play either. It is said that in his early life he wanted to be a writer of tragedies-of plays-even that, after beginning to understand Socrates, he burned his tragedies. Nonetheless, except for a few letters of doubtful authenticity, all his writings have a dramatic form: they are dialogues. From Huizinga we learn that according to Aristotle, the source of Plato’s dialogue form was not tragedy, but farce; he claimed Plato followed “Sophron, a writer of farces-mimos-and Aristotle bluntly calls the dialogue a form of mimos, which itself is a form of comedy.” 114

  One could argue that there is one “serious myth” at the very center of all of Plato’s work: the life and death of Socrates, and that that myth is a tragedy. Certainly there is much of tragedy in the dialogues explicitly devoted to the trial and death of Socrates. Yet Socrates is never as serious as his friends when they are begging him to escape from the death sentence by leaving Athens as everyone expected him to do. At the age of 70, he declares that he has lived as a citizen of Athens and will die a citizen of Athens, and that he has no intention of fleeing. He also makes it clear that he has no fear of death. One is reminded of the discussion of tragedy and comedy at the end of the Symposium, when Socrates and Aristophanes are arguing about whether the same man could write tragedies and comedies. Aristophanes held that it would be impossible for one man to write both, but Socrates held that “the same man might be capable of writing both comedy and tragedy-that the tragic poet might be a comedian as Is he describing not only himself, but Plato too?

  So, with Plato, I have returned to the central theme of this chapter-the emergence of religion from mammalian play. I have gone deep into our evolutionary past to discover the origin of parental care and of play many millions of years ago, in the leaping and jumping of “young things,” as Plato said. Play is so important to me because long before Homo sapiens, probably long before primates, play had already emerged in the evolution of mammals as a sphere sheltered to some degree from selectionist pressures, having its end internal to its practice, however much it may have proved adaptive in secondary and tertiary forms. Language and culture have given play the possibility of enormous creative elaboration, and, with the constant help of Johan Huizinga and with the passages in Plato that Huizinga pointed out, I have found ritual and religion emerging from play. Here, too, we find practices whose good, first of all, is internal to the practices, though they may have adaptive or maladaptive consequences as they reflect back on the world of daily life. But if ritual comes from play, many other spheres of life develop out of ritual and its cultural implications. I have tried above to indicate what a complex historical process this has been.

  At several places relatively late in the day, science emerged as one of those spheres whose good is internal to it, and again leading to enormous adaptive consequences later on. In a culture that privileges theory, we have tended to think of these spheres, religion and science in particular, as cognitive, as ways of knowing above all. But I have been arguing that first of all they are practices, not theories, ways of living more than ways of knowing. In rereading this chapter the words of Steven Weinberg impressed me vividly with this point. Though the more he comprehends the universe, the more pointless it seems, the activity of inquiry, the “research itself,” “the effort to understand the universe,” even if what he understands is not comforting, is a good in itself, is a source of meaning in itself. In my reading for this chapter I have learned just how exciting the practice of natural science is, how much there is to learn, how many of the most important issues are still in dispute. The openness of the search, the sense that some new door will open soon, some new idea that no one had thought of before, of which Darwin’s idea of natural selection is the archetype, creates an existential engagement with inquiry itself, regardless of where it will lead.

  I wrote this chapter in a world where the culture wars between science and religion continue to rage, and it was only as I was completing it that Barbara Herrnstein Smith’s excellent book Natural Reflections was published and I could take advantage of her calm, perceptive view of major aspects of these wars. I am interested to find myself on both sides of the far too polarized opposition, not only between science and religion, but between the methodologies of scientific explanation and humanistic understanding.186 Smith places two figures that have influenced me enormously, Emile Durkheim and Max Weber, on the side of “naturalistic explanation,” and she is surely right to do so, yet both of them, and Weber very explicitly, were also engaged in humanistic interpretation.187 Weber called this method Verstehen, which can be loosely translated as “understanding” or “interpretation.” The Wikipedia article on Verstehen describes it as “nonempirical, empathic, or participatory examination of social phenomena,” but there is nothing “nonempirical” about empathic or participatory examination of social phenomena. Such inquiry involves the effort to put oneself in the place of the person or persons under scrutiny and try to see the world as they do. That seems eminently empirical to me, in that it is a valid effort to get at one rather central aspect of what is really going on among the people under study. One way of making the distinction between scientific and humanistic methodologies is to say that scientific explanations are concerned with the causes and functions of the activities under study; humanistic understanding is concerned with their meaning. It seems to me that both kinds of methodologies are required in both science and the humanities.

  I have been very interested in the biological evolution of parental care and the “cherishing” behavior that developed between mother and child from the earliest mammalian times. Of course one can avoid such a word as “cherishing,” though I got it from an ethologist, Eibl-Eibesfeldt, and it does seem to capture something important about what is going on. Frans de Waal somewhere says that when some biologists insist that one can speak of chimpanzees “raising the corners of their mouths,” but not of them “smiling,” they are actually limiting the possibility of full scientific understanding.

  Another feature of the culture wars and methodological polarization, pointed out by B. H. Smith, is that it posits each side of a radical dichotomy to be monumentally homogeneous, whereas in fact each of them is such a miscellaneous array of activities, practices, beliefs, and claims to knowledge, that it is quite impossible to see them as unified wholes, but only as loosely related Some deny that the term “religion” is even useful, because it covers such a variety of things, and B. H. Smith herself believes that the distinction between science and technology is inapplicable through most of history, where they are aspects of a continuum with no simple differentiation. 189

  While I believe definitions, though always problematic, are unavoidable in order to delineate, however roughly, a field of inquiry, this whole book is a collection of very diverse cases, and anyone who reads it to the end will have a lively sense of how extremely variable this thing called “religion” is on the ground. But because religion deals with issues so central to human identity, to one’s sense of self and world and the relation between them, a purely causal, functional analysis will leave out the most important part. I think this issue is very much related to the difference between reductionists and emergentists in the field of biology. The reductionist thinks an explanation is complete when it has uncovered the components and forces that have led to the phenomenon in question-when one has moved one level down to see where something came from. The emergentist thinks that many phenomena have properties that are genuinely new, not just an extrapolation of the properties of their components, and cannot be understood except at their own level. Kant made this point when he said that machines can be disassembled and put back together again but organisms, when disassembled, die. When Terrence Deacon speaks of complex emotions that develop among humans after the acquisition of culture and language, such as awe, equanimity, and self-transcendence, he notes that they are based on more rudimentary emotions that we still share with primates, such as f
ear and joy, but are not reducible to them, he makes a move that would be familiar to humanists.

  Not only should various spheres of life, cultural systems, multiple realities, not be reified and imagined as more homogeneous than they are, but, contrary to Gould’s argument about non-overlapping magisteria, we should note how much they not only overlap but participate in each other. B. H. Smith reminds us that religion and science were not always seen as being at odds, because for centuries what science there was took place in the West in universities founded by religious orders or other entities of the Catholic Church and was seen as part of a larger religious culture, not at war with it.190

  As societies have grown in size and complexity, more differentiated spheres have developed, yet they have continued to intersect and influence each other. Nor should we forget that they all relate to and are influenced by Schutz’s world of daily life. The remarkable (though relative) egalitarianism of hunter-gatherer cultures, noted above, is reflected in rituals in which the whole society participates, sometimes, as we will see, gender groups expressing their own identity in conflict and reconciliation with each other. As hierarchy returned to human societies, religions too became more hierarchical, often reinforcing a stronger male dominance than that found among huntergatherers. No student of Weber could fail to see both how the larger society, particularly in the fields of politics and economics, influences religious developments, but also the powerful influences in the other direction.

  Just because religion is often so close to personal and group identity, the failure to understand or respect it either by those concerned only with what they believe is objective inquiry or by those who believe all religion is harmful and would best be eradicated, has given rise to great resentment from believers. Scientists have suffered similar blows to their own identity from those who would restrict science from certain kinds of inquiry (rather few in number), or offer their own kinds of science that should be taught together with “normal science,” such as creation science (rather more numerous). I have accepted the validity of science as a provisionally accurate account of “nature,” and see no point in trying to limit it or to imagine non-natural forces at work that would offer additional explanations. But again, B. H. Smith has pointed out not only that much of the world for a long time lacked an idea of “nature,” but that even where it exists, definitions of it are problematic and involve the circular tendency to define nature as not supernature and vice versa, both depending on a far from clear definition of the other.”’

  I have insisted that the various spheres of life have their own practices whose good is internal to the practice, however often commandeered for other uses by outside forces. I have also argued that practice is prior to belief and that belief is best understood as an expression of practice. Thus scientific truth, about which I have no doubt, is an expression of scientific practice and has no metaphysical priority over other kinds of truth. When we find Buber speaking of the eternal You, who shines through the faces of other humans, sometimes the faces of animals, even at moments through trees, rocks, and stars, it would be easy to try to find a scientific explanation of why he would say that. But such an explanation, which might well be true, would in no way refute the truth of which Buber speaks. Similarly Pascal’s encounter in November 1654, which he characterized as “Fire,” has validity beyond any evolutionary psychological explanation of it. Science is an extremely valuable avenue to truth. It is not the only one. To claim it is the only one is what is legitimately called “scientism” and takes its place among the many fundamentalisms of this world.112

  The story of cosmic and biological evolution, which I have tried to tell in very condensed form, is, to me and to many, powerful and convincing. For many scientists it leads to what they themselves express as a sense of awe. This is a perfectly natural and legitimate response, but, and here the religious naturalists I have described above would agree, it is a case where the religious sphere and the scientific sphere come together, indeed overlap. Given the level of tension in current discussions of these issues, I do not expect agreement, or even, necessarily, understanding. I am simply trying to be clear about where I stand.

  In Chapter 3 I will describe the scheme of cultural and religious evolution that I have found most helpful, that is, the work of Merlin Donald. And then I will begin to consider the main subject matter of this book, the description of particular forms of religion and how they actually work.

  In I offered a typology of religious representation-unitive, enactive, symbolic, and conceptual-to describe the ways in which religions have understood reality. The concepts of enactive, symbolic, and conceptual representation were adapted from the work of Jerome Bruner on child development. According to Bruner, who is in turn adapting his categories from Piaget, the child first learns about the world by acting on it. It is by holding, throwing, reaching for, that the children come to know the objects that surround them. In early language learning the symbol and the object are fused-the sun and the word for sun are not differentiated-and the commonest use of language is narrative. Although concept learning begins by 5 or 6 years of age, it doesn’t become mature until adolescence. I argued that religion draws on all these forms of representation: just as the child continues to use enactive and symbolic representations, even after becoming conceptually sophisticated, so do religions. I prefaced Bruner’s three stages of the development of representation with an initial stage, a kind of zero stage because it can’t be represented, of unitive consciousness that turns up in religious experience in many times and places.

  In Chapter 2 I located the evolution of religion in the deep history of the cosmos and of life on earth, concentrating on those features of mammalian evolution that provided the conditions for the emergence of ritual, possibly as a development out of animal play, but only alluding indirectly to the forms of religious representation described in Chapter 1. It is now time to consider how these ways of understanding may have arisen in evolutionary history and to look more closely at ritual and myth, and at the tribal and archaic religions where they are so prominent.

  My task is greatly facilitated by the work of Merlin Donald, whose book Origins of the Modern Mind.- Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition,1 offers a picture of the development of human culture that parallels phylogenetically what my typology of religious representation had described largely ontogenetically. His three stages of human culture-mimetic, mythic, and theoretic-parallel my enactive, symbolic, and conceptual types of religious representation, and his baseline prehuman but advanced mammalian stage, episodic culture, even has some possible resonance with my unitive type. In this chapter I want primarily to use his description of mimetic and mythic culture to help understand ritual and myth in tribal societies, followed in the next chapters by a discussion of ritual and myth in chiefdoms and archaic societies, but later in the book I will turn to Donald’s idea of theoretic culture, which grows out of and significantly criticizes, but never abandons, the earlier stages.

  Episodic Culture

  I will begin with a brief look at Donald’s baseline stage, episodic culture. It is an open question how far back one can push the idea of culture. Some have argued that all learned behavior, as opposed to what is genetically determined, even if learned by trial and error by the individual organism, can be seen as culture, though others would reserve culture for behavior that is transmitted, by imitation if not teaching, from one animal to another. Donald’s description of episodic culture holds for many advanced mammalian species, but he draws his examples largely from nonhuman primates:

  Their [the great apes’] behavior, complex as it is, seems unreflective, concrete, and situation-bound. Even their uses of signing and their social behavior are immediate, short-term responses to the environment. In fact, the word that seems best to epitomize the cognitive culture of apes (and probably of many other mammals as is the term episodic. Their lives are lived entirely in the present, as a series of concrete episodes, and the highest element
in their system of memory seems to be at the level of event representation. Where humans have abstract symbolic memory representations, apes are bound to the concrete situation or episode; and their social behavior reflects this situational limitation. Their culture might be therefore classified as an episodic culture.2

  What is cultural about episodic culture is that individuals learn from the experience of previous events what kind of event they are facing, how the elements in it are situated, so that an appropriate response is possible. For example, a chimpanzee menaced by a more dominant ape must decide whether to behave in a submissive way, or to flee, or to look for possible allies to resist the menace. Only a good memory of how such situations have worked out in the past will lead to a good decision in the present. A great deal of learning about how to respond to events goes on from early infancy, largely through the observation of the behavior of other chimps. What is learned in one band, because it is not genetically coded (though the capacity for subtle learning is), will be slightly different from what is learned by other chimps in other bands, and thus can be called culture.

  I emphasized in Chapter 2 that two critically important features humans share with higher mammals are attention and intention, and their significance becomes clearer in the context of episodic culture. Apes must be fully attentive to what is going on in the here and now. Acute attention to the present situation, informed by memories of previous similar events, allows them to act effectively to fulfill their intentions-that is, to attain the goals around which their action is organized. Episodic or event perception remains significant for human beings-our understanding of the world also starts with episodic culture. Although on the whole the capacities for intention and attention are mutually enhancing, they are not necessarily simultaneous and may, of necessity, be both alternatives and alternating. The capacity for intentional behavior is certainly critical for any complex forager, but so is the capacity for attention. An excess of goal-oriented intentionality could lead to a failure of attention. A good forager, human or nonhuman, needs to cultivate the capacity for attention. John Crook points out that in a hunter-gatherer economy, “Attentiveness in the here and now would have high value when a hunter, weapon poised, and quietly moving through the landscape, heard a sound. At once, a totally focused here and now condition arises in which attention is wide open to the slightest situational change which might presage either the appearance of prey or of danger. This openness is quite unreflective for purposive intentionality has receded out of awareness.“3