What is religion? the Sacred: Eliade

In getting back to the  Eight Theories of Religion by Pals, I am going to talk about Mircea Eliade–a theorist who I find difficult to give a fair evaluation of because he theorized from the point of view of religion being true. Unlike the other theorists so far discussed (Tylor, Frazer, Freud, Durkheim, and Marx), Eliade viewed religion positively.

Eliade resisted a reductionist theory of religion as Karl Marx and Durkheim had done. Understanding religion by one overarching theory failed to understand the complexity of the religious experience.  Religion is autonomous. It is not a psychological by-product of another reality.

Born in Bucharest in 1907, he had one of his formative moments while studying in India. In 1928, he took a trip to India to study with Surendranath Dasgupta, with whom he studied until getting into an affair with his daughter. Probably not the best idea. In India, he came to the conclusion that “sacramental experience” can change life; that symbols are the key to spiritual life; and that one could learn a lot from studying the heritage of folk religion.

In his scholarly work, Eliade was influenced by the theory of religion given by Durkheim; this is most evident in his book The Sacred and the Profane (1957) where he took the definition of the sacred from Durkheim.  The sacred is the extraordinary, supernatural, and momentous separating us from the profane. The profane is the normal, banal, quotidian.

Eliade’s notion of religion was different than Durkheim’s in that he thought the sacred dealt with the supernatural, which was closer to the definition of Tylor and Frazer.  Durkheim thought religion ultimately dealt with the social. Eliades’ sacred is the encounter with otherworldly experience (he was channeling the idea of Rudolph Otto here) and is a thing in-and-of-itself.

To understand religion clearly, we must step out of modernity and into the archaic. Among archaic societies, the sacred was integrated into the social. For example, archaic people built their towns around a sacred center or in a design that symbolized the divine order. Archaic people sought to create a mirror image of their divine mythologies.

They wanted to live in the sacred because they sought to remedy an element of the human condition: the feeling of being estranged–disconnected. Being thrust into the world, we are aware of an absence at the core of our being, a kind of separation that needs to be repaired.  We have a sense we are not in the place we are supposed to be.  We feel a lack, an insufficiency. Eliade gave this the elegant name the “nostalgia for Paradise”.  This was Eliade’s description of spirituality and it characterizes the need and desire to return to the gods or the supernatural.

In a kind of Jungian way (that Joseph Cambell would also later borrow), Eliade suggested we tap into a deep spiritual reservoir connected to us all. Spirituality is a real experience, not something reduced and explained away by psychology. In his mind, humans are spiritual animals–for Eliade, I believe, this is a hidden proof of the truth of a greater supernatural order.

Eliade argued we must study religion through “phenomenology” that examines a thing through comparative analysis and by what the appearance of religion presents to us.  Eliade was looking for general commonalities shared across cultures and religions. He looked for them through indirect expression: through symbols and myth. He explored this in his book Patterns. He used examples such as Sky Gods, the Sun and Moon, water and stones, etc. that showed similarities across cultures. For example, for the gods of the sky, their stories and myths symbolized the reenactment of the human drama of life, birth, and death.  Personally, I am not sure how this is any more impressive than storytelling in general–unless Eliade would have suggested all of our stories are looking to reconnect us to something greater (the social to Durkheim, the supernatural and sacred to Eliade).

One of Eliade’s most important books was The Myth of the Eternal Return (1949). His thesis in this work stated that “the one theme which dominates the thought of all archaic peoples is the drive to abolish history–all of history–and return to that point beyond time when the world began” (Pals 179).  We all possess a longing to return back to the beginning, to creation, to be with god.  Religion and ritual allow  us to reenact these desires.

Interestingly, Eliade said one reason for the myth of eternal return is that humanity has an intuition that life is an empty spectacle and a pointless exercise.  This is the “terror of history” said Eliade.  Ordinary life is insignificant and we are unable to find any true meaning in history.  Archaic people overcame this feeling by creating meaning outside of history. They denied the meaninglessness through symbols and myths that refer back to a primordial state of perfection.

A major turn in the history of human consciousness occurred when Judaism declared that the sacred could be found within history as well as outside it. The next major shift happened recently, in modern Europe and America.  Something quite new to human history emerged–secularity, by the denial of the value and  existence of the sacred altogether.  In embracing an entirely secular life, the secular western subject must create meaning entirely themselves. For example, coming after WW2, Eliade saw Marxism and fascism as representing two attempts to create a secular, profane meaning in history.

Eliade thought the loss of the sacred was a true loss, expressing his doubt that modern replacements could satisfy the human personality. His major contribution was to read religion through a process of interpretation via symbols and universal characteristics. To Eliade, spirituality and religion are real phenomena that have structured and upheld human society. The loss of the sacred is a human loss.

Take it as you like. I think in refusing to be a reductionist, Eliade actually refused to see the totality of the phenomenon he sought to understand. It would be more impressive to combine, add to, and modify the prior theories than to dismiss them. He ironically saw religion through another form of limitation, ignoring the realities that create what the sociologist Berger called the “social construction of reality.”

What is religion? The opiate of the oppressed: Marx

In the next chapter of Eight Theories of Religion, Pals considers Karl Marx’s analysis of religion. Marx’s influence is, of course, enormous in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.  He is best known for his theory of history (historical materialism) and for providing a total system of thought (that curiously resembles a religion in its own way, with its sacred readings, heroes, need to convert others, etc).  However, his focus was on how society changed over time and Marx never wrote a thorough account of religion. Rather his analysis of religion was a token element in his larger analysis of economic and material life.

He had rejected religion early in his life.  As an atheist, he believed religion to be an invention of humanity. “Man makes religion, religion does not make man,” he declared.[1]  Religion is treated in two different ways, as either the tool of the ruling class or the expression of the suffering masses. This is a functional theory of religion. Marx is not interested in religious content but the roles these beliefs play in social struggle, we discover the key to religion only when we discover what role religion plays socially or psychologically.

His ideas of religion were greatly influenced by the philosopher Hegel. Marx was born in 1818 in Trier, part of the Prussian Rhineland of the time (modern Germany now).  Thus, he studied at the University of Berlin, which had been dominated by the ideas of Hegel and played a central role in Marx’s thought.  Hegel held that mind/consciousness was more fundamental than matter.  Material things and reality were the expression of an underlying universal consciousness that progressed through a dialectic.  As our consciousness changed  and progressed through the process of overcoming inherent problems, humanity shaped and changed material reality. Marx reverses this insight and says that matter comes before mind–the shape of ideas and culture are a product of material reality.

The most fundamental part of human life is our interaction with the material forces of reality. Economic reality shapes and informs culture and society, which is a struggle over scarce goods. As one group gained an advantage over another, history became a class struggle, a perpetual dialectic among the socials classes between those who own the means of production and those who must work.  The economic base produces the various forms of the division of labor, the struggle of the classes, and human alienation. Those aspects that are impacted by the base belong to the superstructure, such as laws, culture, and the arts.  Our cultural and intellectual life is a reflection of our economic organization.

The institutions of human life such as family, government, the arts, philosophy, ethics, and religion are developed to control and maintain the deep tensions that emerge from internal contradictions within the social structure and also between the social structure and the economic base.  The production of artists, politicians, and theologians creates “ideology”, i.e. a systematic defense of the present state of affairs. In reality, they are the expression of class interests that defend the system of privileges.

Religion is an ideology and a product of the tensions between the base and the superstructure. It is a belief system that provides reasons to maintain the status quo in favor of the ruling class. Thus, belief in God or gods is a by-product of the class struggle and an illusion that is detrimental to social health. Further, religion is the expression of an “inverted world” where the pain of humanity seeks solace in another source because it cannot find amelioration in its material conditions. Marx says in one of his many immortal phrases, “Religious suffering is the expression of real suffering, religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of the heartless world, as it is the spirit of spiritless conditions. It is the opium of the people.”[2]

Consequently, the social effect of Religion is social pacification. It is a mystification that keeps people from seeing the truth of reality. Marx’s view of religion was significantly influenced by the work of Ludwig Feuerbach. In 1841, Feuerbach published his book The Essence of Christianity, a philosophical attack on Christianity that blamed it for alienating human consciousness.  Feuerbach argues that Christian theology proposes an alien being that possesses our most highly held personal qualities such as “goodness, beauty, truthfulness, wisdom, love steadfastness, and strength of character and project them onto God” (Pals).  Rather than attribute these qualities to ourselves, they are attributed to a God. In reality, the subject of theology is humanity. In looking for heaven, humanity found a reflection of itself.

Marx accepted Feuerbach’s critique, seeing religion as a mystification that alienated humanity from the truth of its condition. Religion is just the expression of the greater distress of the economic and material alienation of  humanity. Marx did not blame the problems of society on religion. The problem is not state religion but the mystifications that hide the causes of inequality and suffering. Religion is the mere surface problem because the true problem is social injustice.

[1] Marx, “Toward A Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction,” Selected Writings, 28.

[2] Karl Marx, “Toward A Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction,” Selected Writings, 28.

 

What is religion? a way for society to worship itself: Durkheim

The next theory of religion from Pals’ Eight Theories of Religion comes from Emile Durkheim, a sociologist born in 1858 in Strasbourg, France. Durkheim provided a powerful and influential theory.

An advocate of the scientific method, he wanted the study of society to be as scientific as possible. He approached the question as a nonbeliever, although his father had been a rabbi, and he had been greatly influenced by a Roman Catholic school teacher in his youth.

The study of the human being had to be done scientifically, which Durkheim called sociology, whose purpose was to uncover the social facts of humanity. Social facts are the fundamental and collective elements that shape and influence our lives. A social fact, although intangible, is a real mass phenomenon manifested by the whole that affects individual consciousness. People always belong to something and this social identity precedes individual identity. A person cannot simply be reduced to biological instinct, individual psychology, or personal interests. We are far more the products of society than of our individual choices. The fact that this idea sounds so mundane  today is just an indicator of how influential and successful this point of view has become.

In looking at religion in terms of its social impacts, Durkheim asked why is religion so important and prevalent in human affairs? What function does it play in the life of the individual and in the workings of society?

In his work The Elementary form of Religious Life (1912), Durkheim concludes that religion is more than just the separation of the natural and the supernatural. Rather, religion is the institution that divides things between the sacred and the profane. Sacred things merit our respect because they are set aside as superior, powerful and forbidden to normal contact. The profane is the mundane, everyday, and practical. Sacred things always concern the group while profane things are less important, smaller, often individual matters. Religion resides within the sacred. Durkheim defines religion as “a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden.” The purpose of the sacred is to “unite into one moral community called a church, all those who adhere to them” (Durkheim).

Durkheim dismisses the idea that religion has its origins in magic. Magic is a private matter. Religious rituals and beliefs manifest when people invoke the group or collectivity. A magician might have clients, but he or she does not have a congregation. Durkheim suggests that theories about magic and animism misunderstood the function of religion. Further, he critiques the theory of religion by Tyler for being insufficiently scientific. Rather than giving a conjecture about how people invented the gods in the time before the historical record, as Tylor did, Durkheim stated we should look at the evidence available now for the “ever present causes” and find its “elementary forms.”

He did this by looking at studies of people living in hunting and gathering societies. His theory of religion is based on anthropological research of the communities in Australia, who practiced a totem religion.  The native Australian people divided themselves into clans that each had an individual animal, plant or object as their totem. The totem animal was sacred and forbidden to eat. The clan was also sacred as it was united with the totem. This was religion in its most elementary form and still in existence in his day.  We cannot know what caused the origin of religion in the past because there is no evidence; therefore, science must then take totemism, the simplest, most basic, original form of religion, as the basis for religion in general and from which all other religions arise.

In totemism, the clans do not actually worship the mundane animal itself, but rather an anonymous and impersonal force that stands beyond the totem and has enormous power. The totem has a physical and moral force over the clan that inspires respect and moral obligation to observe its ceremonies, and most importantly, through the totem, the clan feels a deeply connecting bond and abiding loyalty.

The totem is a symbol of the god and of the clan. Thus, they are really one and the same. Durkheim’s insight was that devotion to the totem was really the way primitive peoples express and reinforce their devotion to the social organism. The function of religion is to provide and reinforce social belonging. Society is an abstraction that exists in the individual consciousness. Religion penetrates our consciousness and provides the social glue for the individual to the group, which is manifested and reinforced in important ceremonies. In the ecstasy of the ritual, they unite and feel connected to the group.

The totem remains the fixed and permanent symbol of the clan. From this the other phenomena of religion follow. For example, the belief in spirits or souls  comes from the totemic spiritual force that is spread out into each individual. As the totem is spread among the group, each individual portion becomes the “soul.” The soul is thus the voice and conscience of the clan, separate from our personal bodies. Likewise, the growth and importance of the clan and the totem make the guardian spirit more and more powerful until they acquire “mythical personalities of a superior order.” Indeed, the aborigines also had a notion of a high god that united and stood above the totem gods– a kind of creator god.

Religion fills a primary role in uniting people to a community. When people worship, they are really worshiping the collectivity that reminds them of the importance of the group over the individual. Beliefs are only the speculative side of religion that allow for theological distinctions but make little functional difference. What is important is ritual practice and ceremony for social unity.