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

by Robert N. Bellah

  35. Stephen Jay Gould, Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin (New York: Harmony Books, 1996).

  36. Leszek Kolakowski, Modernity on Endless Trial (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).

  1. Religion and Reality

  1. Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Karen E. Fields (New York: Free Press, 1995 [1912]), 44. Durkheim’s full definition reads as follows: “A religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden (separees, interdites)-beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them.” In the original the entire definition is in italics. See Emile Durkheim, Les formes elementaires de la vie religieuse (Paris: Presse Universitaires de France, 1968), 65.

  2. Alfred Schutz, “Multiple Realities” (1945), in Collected Papers, vol. 1, The Problem of Social Reality (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1967), 207-259.

  3. Weber contrasted the extraordinary to the everyday, and argued for a special relation between the extraordinary and “charisma,” a key term in his sociology, especially his sociology of religion. Weber’s is one influential version of a contrast we will observe repeatedly in this chapter. See Weber, “Charisma and Its Transformations,” in Economy and Society, ed. G. Roth and C. Wittich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978 [1921]), 2:1111-12.

  4. Alfred Schutz, “Multiple Realities,” 229.

  5. The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu, trans. Burton Watson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968) [hereafter cited as Chuang Tzu], 49.

  6. Freud pointed out this difference when he saw dreams as operating with what he called primary process, quite different from the secondary process that governs our world of daily life. See Freud, The Interpretation ofDreams (London: Allen and Unwin, 1954 [1900]), chap. 7, sec. E, “The Primary and Secondary Processes-Regression,” 588-609.

  7. William James, The Principles of Psychology (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983 [1890]), 929. This reference is to chapter 21, “The Perception of Reality,” where James speaks of multiple “realities” and “worlds” interchangeably. Schutz, at the beginning of his famous essay “Multiple Realities,” acknowledges James as the source of his terminology. For James, however, realities are subjective, whereas in Schutz’s phenomenological approach they are intersubjective. James is concerned with mental realities, Schutz with reali ties that are also cultural. In general, however, James’s insistence on “pluralism” was as much ontological as it was psychological.

  8. Chuang Tzu, 47-48.

  9. Abraham Maslow, Toward a Psychology of Being (Princeton: Van Nostrand, 1962). Maslow is particularly interested in what he calls peak experiences, which may or may not be explicitly religious.

  10. Michael Murphy, in The Future of the Body (Los Angeles: Tarcher/Perigree, 1993), 444, writes that in sports, “concentration can produce a state of mind graced by extraordinary clarity and focus. British golfer Tony Jacklin said, for example: `When I’m in this state, this cocoon of concentration, I’m fully in the present, not moving out of it. I’m aware of every half inch of my swing … I’m absolutely engaged, involved in what I’m doing at that particular moment. That’s the important thing. That’s the difficult state to arrive at. It comes and it goes, and the pure fact that you go out on the first tee of a tournament and say, “I must concentrate today,” is no good. It won’t work. It has to already be there.’ Many sportspeople have described `the zone,’ a condition beyond their normal functioning. Describing such a condition to me, quarterback John Brodie said: `Often in the heat and excitement of a game, a player’s perception and coordination will improve dramatically. At times, and with increasing frequency now, I experience a kind of clarity that I’ve never seen adequately described in a football story.’ As they try to describe such experience, athletes sometimes begin to use metaphors similar to those used in religious writing. Listening to such accounts, I have come to believe that athletic feats can mirror contemplative graces.”

  11. Herbert Richardson, Toward an American Theology (New York: Harper and Row, 1967), 57.

  12. Ibid., 60, quoting Edwards, “Memoirs,” in The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 1 (New York, 1881), 16.

  13. Vaclav Havel, Letters to Olga (New York: Knopf, 1988 [1984]), 331-332.

  14. Wallace Stevens, from “Notes toward a Supreme Fiction,” in The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (New York: Knopf, 1955), 386.

  15. Alfred Schutz, “Symbol, Reality, Society” (1955), in Collected Papers, 1:287-356.

  16. Kenneth Burke, Language as Symbolic Action (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), 298-299. Burke proposes a new English verb, “to beyond,” which would mean to see something in terms of something beyond it. Burke argues that Aristotle’s theory of tragedy involves a kind of beyonding when catharsis transcends pity and fear. He gives as an example Sophocles’s Oedipus at Colonus: “We feel pity and fear at his [Oedipus’s] death precisely when he is transcending the miseries of this world-that is, going beyond them, and becoming a tutelary deity” (299, Burke’s italics).

  17. Alasdair Maclntyre, After Virtue (South Bend, Ind.: Notre Dame University Press, 1981), 174-183.

  18. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (New York: Harper and Row, 1990), chap. 7.

  19. Victor Turner, “Liminal to Liminoid in Play, Flow, and Ritual: An Essay in Comparative Symbology,” Rice University Studies 60, no. 3 (1974): 53-92. Ritual in the pejorative sense, as, for example, in Robert Merton’s notion of ritualism, means meaningless or obsessive repetition. See Robert K. Merton, Social Structure and Social Theory (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1957), 150, 184.

  20. George Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1984), 16, 31-41.

  21. Jean Piaget and Barbel Inhelder, The Psychology of the Child (New York: Basic Books, 1969), 22. On the basis of recent research, Piaget’s notion of adualism must be qualified, or even, perhaps, applied only to the period before birth. George Butterworth has argued that “a boundary exists in infant perception between infant and the world such that the absolute `adualism’ assumed by Piaget is not supported.” But he adds, “On the other hand, it is clear that the very young infant has no objective, reflective self-awareness.” George Butterworth, “Some Benefits of Egocentrism,” in Making Sense: The Child’s Construction of the World, ed. Jerome Bruner and Helen Haste (London: Methuen, 1987), 70-71.

  For a discussion of the relation between psychological regression and mystical union, see Herbert Fingarette, The Self in Transformation: Psychoanalysis, Philosophy, and the Life of the Spirit (New York: Basic Books, 1963), chap. 7, “The Consummatory Phase: Mystic Selfishness.”

  22. Jerome Bruner, Studies in Cognitive Growth (New York: Wiley, 1966), 12-21. Although “enactive” is the only term I have taken directly from Bruner, his typology of representations in the opening chapters, “On Cognitive Growth,” is the source of my three major modes of religious representation. But where Bruner calls his second type iconic (sometimes spelled ikonic) and his third symbolic, I call the second type symbolic (with iconic being a subtype of symbolic) and the third type conceptual. Bruner’s typology explicitly owes much to Piaget. The clearest exposition of Piaget’s three categories that are cognate with Bruner’s, and so with mine, can be found in Jean Piaget, Play, Dreams and Imitation in Childhood (New York: Norton, 1962), a book whose original title, Laformation du symbole, is more accurately descriptive. There Piaget speaks of “sensory-motor activity,” “egocentric representative activity,” and “operational activity.” Piaget uses the term “symbol” to characterize what he calls egocentric representational activity, for reasons that will be explained below. My use of the term “symbolic representation” is thus closer to Piaget’s original usage. Because there is no agreement about terminology in this area, one can only try to be clear about what one means by particular terms.

  23. The Somnium
Scipionis is found in book 6 of Cicero’s De Re Publica, in Cicero, De Re Publica, De Legibus, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1923), 260-283.

  24. Robert N. Bellah, Tokugawa Religion (New York: Free Press, 1957), 201-202.

  25. Emile Durkheim, Elementary Forms, 218.

  26. Bruner, Studies in Cognitive Growth, 16. Bruner notes the priority of “looking behavior” to sensorimotor manipulation in early childhood learning, which is a modification of Piaget’s view, but Bruner still affirms Piaget’s insight. On how much the very young child can “know” just by looking, see Michael Tomasello, The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 57-58.

  27. Bruner, Studies in Cognitive Growth, 17, quoting from Jean Piaget, The Construction of Reality in the Child (New York: Basic Books, 1954).

  28. Bruner, Studies in Cognitive Growth, 11. Bruner notes that in a personal communication Piaget “doubts whether what we have been calling enactive representation ought to be called representation at all, for it is questionable whether action `stands for’ or represents anything beyond itself” (10).

  29. Ibid., 6-8. Bruner’s distinction is similar to the distinction between models of and models for in Clifford Geertz’s “Religion as a Cultural System” [1966], in The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 93-94.

  30. Bruner, Studies in Cognitive Growth, 8. The reference is to A. R. Luria, The Role of Speech in the Regulation of Normal and Abnormal Behavior (New York: Pergamon, 1961).

  31. Bruner, Studies in Cognitive Growth, 19.

  32. Ibid., 21.

  33. George Herbert Mead, Mind, Self and Society, ed. Charles W. Morris (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1934), 42-43. See also “Social Consciousness and the Consciousness of Meaning” (1910), in Mead, Selected Writings, ed. Andrew J. Reck (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 123-124.

  34. Dogen (1200-1253) in the “Bendowa” section of the Sbobogenzo said: “The view that practice [zazen, sitting zen] and enlightenment are not one is heretical. In the Buddhadharma they are one. Inasmuch as practice is based on enlightenment, the practice of a beginner is all of original enlightenment. Therefore, in giving the instruction for practice, a Zen master advises his disciples not to seek enlightenment beyond practice, for practice itself is original enlightenment. Because it is already enlightenment of practice, there is no end to enlightenment; because it is already practice of enlightenment, there is no beginning to practice.” Hee-Jin Kim, Dogen Kigen-Mystical Realist (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1975), 79. For another translation, see Masao Abe and Norman Waddell, trans., “Dogen’s Bendowa,” in The Eastern Buddhist 4 (1971): 144.

  35. R. R. Marett, The Threshold of Religion, 2nd ed. (London: Methuen, 1914), xxxi. Marett’s contrast is inaccurate to the degree that enactive representation is also a kind of thinking-thinking with the body. As Piaget says, “language is not enough to explain thought, because the structures that characterize thought have their roots in action and in sensorimotor mechanisms that are deeper than linguistics.” Jean Piaget, Six Psychological Studies (New York: Random House, 1967), 98. If, however, Marett is arguing that religion is not simply a matter of conceptual belief, as many of his contemporaries thought, his oft-quoted remark still has a point.

  36. Richard Ellmann, Yeats: The Man and the Masks (New York: Macmillan, 1948), 285.

  37. Piaget and Inhelder, Psychology of the Child, 57-63. In Piaget’s theoretical vocabulary, assimilation involves the transformation of reality to suit the preexisting schemas of the child, whereas accommodation involves the alteration of those schemas in order to adapt to reality. Thus there is something “subjective” about assimilation.

  38. Exercise play involves, for example, banging. When the child learns to bang, it will bang any object within reach for the sheer pleasure of exercising this new capacity. Ibid., 59.

  39. Jean Piaget, The Child’s Conception of the World (Paterson: Littlefield, Adams, 1960), 169-251. The qualifications about Piaget’s notion of adualism also apply to his idea of egocentrism.

  40. Piaget and Inhelder, Psychology of the Child, 60.

  41. Jerome Bruner, Child’s Talk: Learning to Use Language (New York: Norton, 1983), 46.

  42. Jerome S. Bruner, “Nature and Uses of Immaturity,” in The Growth of Competence, ed. Kevin Connolly and Jerome Bruner (London: Academic Press, 1974), 32.

  43. Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” in Collected Papers, vol. 4 (London: Hogarth, 1956 [1917]), 152-170.

  44. Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism ofEvil (New York: Harper and Row, 1967), 12-13. In speaking of hierophanies Ricoeur is drawing on the work of Mircea Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1958 [1949]).

  45. Bruner, Studies in Cognitive Growth, xv. Just because images or symbols “have muscles,” we must add to Paul Ricoeur’s dictum that “the symbol gives rise to thought” the notion that the symbol gives rise to acts. Ricoeur, The Symbolism ofEvil, 347-355.

  46. Rhoda Kellogg and Scott O’Dell, The Psychology of Children’s Art (New York: CRMRandom House, 1967), 19-25. The joy of this book is in the reproductions of children’s paintings, so full of life, particularly before they become literal.

  47. Ibid., 27-34.

  48. Ibid., 35-41.

  49. Ibid., 53-63. See also Jose and Miriam Arguelles, Mandala (Berkeley: Shambala, 1972); and Carl G. Jung et. al., Man and His Symbols (Garden City: Doubleday, 1964). Jung treats mandala forms primarily as expressions of “individuation,” thus perhaps unduly psychologizing them.

  50. Susanne K. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key (New York: Penguin, 1948 [1942]), 198. Chapter 8, “On Significance in Music,” is an excellent review of the older modern literature on symbolism in music.

  51. Alfred Schutz, “Making Music Together,” in Collected Papers, vol. 2 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1964 [1951]), 173.

  52. Ibid., 175.

  53. Patricia Cox Miller, “In Praise of Nonsense,” in Classical Mediterranean Spirituality, ed. A. H. Armstrong (New York: Crossroad, 1989), 498.

  54. Ibid., 499.

  55. Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987). Bloom writes: “My concern here is not with the moral effects of this music-whether it leads to sex, violence or drugs. The issue here is the effect on education, and I believe it ruins the imagination of young people and makes it very difficult for them to have a passionate relationship to the art and thought that are the substance of liberal education. The first sensuous experiences are decisive in determining the taste for the whole of life, and they are the link between the animal and the spiritual in us. The period of nascent sensuality has always been used for sublimation, in the sense of making sublime, for attaching youthful inclinations and longings to music, pictures and stories that provide the transition to the fulfillment of the human duties and the enjoyment of the human pleasures … Rock music encourages passions and provides models that have no relation to any life the young people who go to universities can possibly lead, or to the kind of admiration encouraged by liberal studies. Without the cooperation of the sentiments, anything other than technical education is a dead letter” (79-80).

  56. Arthur Waley, The Analects of Confucius (London: Allen and Unwin, 1938), 68.

  57. Confucius, TbeAnalects, trans. D. C. Lau (New York: Penguin, 1979), 133-134.

  58. Analects, trans. Lau, 87.

  59. Eric Voegelin, Order and History, vol. 3, Plato and Aristotle (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1957), 268.

  60. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key, chap. 4, “Discursive and Presentational Forms.”

  61. Piaget, Child’s Conception of the World, 69-70.

  62. From “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,” in Collected Poems, 473. Or again, from “Man Carrying Thing” (1947), in Collected Poems, 350: “The poem must resist the intelligence / Almost successfully.”

  63. Schutz, “Making Music Together,�
�� 173.

  64. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key, 212.

  65. John L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962).

  66. Helen Vendler, “Shakespeare’s Sonnets: Reading for Difference,” Bulletin of theAmerican Academy ofArts and Sciences 47 (1994): 37-41.

  67. Mons Teig, “Liturgy as Fusion of Horizons: A Hermeneutical Approach Based on Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Theory of Application” (Ph.D. diss., Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, California, 1991), 295-296.

  68. Bruner, “Immaturity,” 34-35.

  69. Bruner, Child’s Talk, 129, 131.

  70. Basil Bernstein, Class, Codes and Control (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971).

  71. Mary Douglas, Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982 [1970]), 10-11, 21.

  72. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1991 [1983]), 145, 147.

  73. Wallace Stevens, from “Owl’s Clover” (1936), in Opus Posthumous (New York: Knopf, 1989 [1936]), 85. Adelaide Kirby Morris, in her Wallace Stevens: Imagination and Faith (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), has explored the background and implications of Stevens’s relation to religion. She examined the sense in which the imagination, for Stevens, transcends the individual (114-115).

  74. Wallace Stevens, from “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour,” in Collected Poems, 524. In a 1955 letter Stevens wrote, “In spite of its solemnity, Easter is the most sparkling of all fetes since it brings back not only the sun but all the works of the sun, including those works of the spirit that are specifically what might be called Spring-works: the renewed force of the desire to live and to be part of life.” Letters of Wallace Stevens, ed. Holly Stevens (New York: Knopf, 1966), 879, italics added.