Representing Religion

History, Theory, Crisis

Tim Murphy

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317491323
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

If religion is continually in a state of flux how can the study of religion critically examine contemporary religious beliefs and values? 'Representing Religion' critically examines this "crisis of representation". The volume traces the history of religious studies, critiquing the concept that "experience" is central to understanding religion. The views of influential semioticians and philosophers - notably Nietzsche, Saussure, Foucault, Barthes, and Bakhtin - are used to construct a new methodology for the critical study of religion. Representing Religion will be of interest to students and scholars of semiotics as well as theory and method in religious studies.

1 The “Crisis of Representation” and the Academic Study of Religion

Religion is solely the creation of the scholar’s study. It is created for the scholar’s analytic purposes by his imaginative acts of comparison and generalization. Religion has no independent existence apart from the academy. For this reason, the student of religion, and most particularly the historian of religion, must be relentlessly self-conscious. Indeed, this self-consciousness constitutes his primary expertise, his foremost object of study.

—Jonathan Z. Smith (1982, xi)

For discourse to be possible at all, the basic categories have to be agreed on. Nothing else but institutions can define sameness. Similarity is an institution.

—Mary Douglas (1986, 55)

What is religion? How can it be studied? Why is it the object of such diametrically opposed descriptions and evaluations? Textbooks and monographs on the subject usually begin with a definition of “Religion.” So, let us, for a moment, play the game “Definition” using “Religion” as our token.

What shall our first move be? Should we start the game with this move: “Religion is what the individual does with his own solitude” (Whitehead)? Or, perhaps this variant: “Religion is the feelings, acts and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine” (James)? But then the counter-move is played: “the construction, apprehension, and utilization of symbolic forms are social events like any other; they are as public as marriage and as observable as agriculture” (Geertz).

Perhaps then, “all known religious belief, whether simple or complex, present one common characteristic: they presuppose a classification of all the things, real and ideal, of which men think, into two classes or opposed groups, generally designated...by the words profane and sacred” (Durkheim)? Or is it that “Surely...‘sacred’ and ‘profane’ are on the same level of experience, and, far from being cut off from one another, they are so closely intermingled as to be inseparable” (Evans-Pritchard)? Because, for example, “I have not found it useful to adopt the distinction between ‘natural’ and ‘supernatural’ beings or events in order to describe the distinction between men and Powers, for this distinction...[is] quite foreign to Dinka thought” (Lienhardt).

So then, perhaps, “it seems best...simply to claim as a minimum definition of Religion, the belief in Spiritual Beings” (Tylor)? But then again, “belief in God or gods had not been central, if acknowledged at all, in at least four Asian traditions (Buddhism, Confucianism, Jainism, and Taoism)” (Schmidt).

So, shall we try, “[Religion is] the loftiest object that can occupy human beings; it is the absolute object. It is the region of eternal truth and eternal virtue...and the region of the eternal peace through which the human being is truly human” (Hegel)? But what if “religion is omnipresent fear and vast humility paradoxically turned into bedrock security” (Sapir) instead? Or, that “religion is the childlike condition of humanity” and in it, “man...projects his being into objectivity, and then again makes himself an object to this projected image of himself thus converted into a subject” (Feuerbach)? Then it would seem that religion is “the universal obsessional neurosis of humanity,” and “religious ideas...are illusions, fulfillments of the oldest, strongest and most urgent wishes of mankind” (Freud). Possibly because “this state, this society, produce religion which is an inverted world consciousness, because they are an inverted world. Religion is the general theory of this world... It is the fantastic realization of the human being inasmuch as the human being possesses no true reality” (Marx).

Or is it that “religion is a response to what is experienced as ultimate reality; that is, in religious experience we react not to any single or finite phenomenon, material or otherwise, but to what we realize as undergirding and conditioning all that constitutes our world of experience” (Wach) such as “the establishment, through human activity, of an all-embracing sacred order, that is, of a sacred cosmos that will be capable of maintaining itself in the ever-present face of chaos” (Berger)? All of this, perhaps, due to the fact that: “Religion is the state of being grasped by an ultimate concern, a concern which qualifies all other concerns as preliminary and which itself contains the answer to the question of the meaning of our life” (Tillich)?

What about the relationship between religion and ethics? Is it not the case that “religion is (subjectively regarded) the recognition of all duties as divine commands” (Kant)? Or is it that “true religion is sense and taste for the Infinite,” and, as such, we must make a “clear cut distinction between our faith and your ethics, between our piety and what you call morality” (Schleiermacher)?

How should we understand the game, “Definition” itself? Should we use “functional definitions which focus on the role that religion plays in serving human needs” (Schmidt), or “real/essentialist” definitions, the “ultimate aim [of which] is an inclusive formulation of the essence of religion” (Bleeker)? Perhaps a lexical definition, a “word-thing definition in which we are explaining the actual way in which some actual word has been used by some actual person” (Robinson) would suit us? Or, would we rather try a “stipulative definition,” which “makes a word unambiguous by stipulating that for a given work it means a single thing” (Baird)?

As we have played these few turns (and there are many more that could be played), the game as played with this token seems to break its own rules. For, on the one hand, we are struck by the cogency of most of these definitions while, on the other hand, we are struck by their near perfect incommensurability with one another. What can be the source of this strange situation? Is it the fault of this particular token? Is the term “religion” itself unsuitable for the game, i.e., indefinable? Many have argued so. Most recently, William Paden has said of this term:

The term has become completely equivocal—one word, same sound and spelling, with numerous and different meanings, endlessly flexible. That there has been no agreement on definitions should give pause. That other cultures do not even have a term corresponding exactly to the Western generic religion should also give pause. What data shall be included or excluded as “religious”? And who is to say?

(Paden 1992, 5–6)¹

The locus classicus of the problematization of the term is Wilfred Cantwell Smith’s famous work, The Meaning and End of Religion (1962). The term “religion” in the title should be in quotation marks, for the thesis of the work is that the central problem in all attempts to study things “religious” has been the term itself:

The term is notoriously difficult to define. At least, there has been in recent decades a bewildering variety of definitions; and no one of them has commanded wide acceptance... In this instance one might argue that the sustained inability to clarify what the word “religion” signifies, in itself suggests that the term ought to be dropped; that it is a distorted concept not really corresponding to anything definite or distinctive in the objective world. The phenomena that we call religious undoubtedly exist. Yet perhaps the notion that they constitute in themselves some distinctive entity is an unwarranted analysis.

(W. C. Smith 1962, 17)

Although the implication of the latter part of Smith’s remark suggests that the problem is wider in scope, he clearly sees the term itself as deeply problematic and not amenable to clear definition.

It may be concluded, then, that, at the very least, the term is problematic. However, the tack which Smith takes in making his argument has opened up an entirely new way of dealing with the problem of “religion,” viz., by a critical examination of its history. Smith traces out the development of the term “religion,” showing the varying understandings of the term (in Western societies; like most “histories,” it is not a cross-cultural comparative work) from the Romans through the medieval period. From the seventeenth century on, however, the term takes on a decidedly different life, designating only “the intellectual construct, presently the various intellectual constructs, systematic and abstract, that were to be elaborated in the religious realm. They gave the name ‘religion’ to the system, first in general but increasingly to the system of ideas, in which men of faith were involved or with which men of potential faith were confronted” (W. C. Smith 1962, 38). His most telling evidence of a profound shift is a chart (1962, 77) showing the number of books with “religion” in the title. Before the sixteenth century, there were no known books with “religion” in the title. From that time on, the number of books about, e.g., “the Christian religion” steadily increases, while books on “the Christian faith” steadily decrease. Clearly, some kind of shift in meaning is at work here.

Subsequent to W. C. Smith’s work, a number of scholars have more specific, localized histories of the term “religion.” Peter Harrison has followed up on Smith’s work by “examining in more detail this process of the objectification of religious faith, focusing particularly on the English contribution to the ideation of ‘religion’ and ‘the religions’” (Harrison 1990, 2). Harrison’s argument is that the history of “religion” lies in the interplay between three specific discourses, viz., the English Platonists, Protestant scholasticism, and Deism. These together, in relation to the emerging reconceptualization of nature, constitute the discursive formation within which “religion” emerges as a distinct object of inquiry. That is, “religion” only becomes an object of knowledge because of a number of what Thomas Kuhn would describe as “paradigm shifts” within European intellectual culture.

Both of these histories make substantive contributions to an understanding of the problem and limits of what “religion,” both as an analytical concept and, consequently, as a real human phenomenon, might be. However, even a casual reading of them reveals that these histories are seriously under theorized. For all their very real and genuine acumen, they lack a critical perspective on what a history of science, or of scientific discourse, can and should do. W. C. Smith wrote before Thomas Kuhn’s work. Harrison refers to Kuhn and even Foucault’s The Order of Things, but does not use these theoretical perspectives in his actual rendering of his history. He writes something more like a conventional history of ideas rather than the history of the constitution of an object.

A more critical history and analysis of the concept/term of “religion” must be more than a history of ideas—it is, after all, how such an “idea” arose which we wish to discover—and more than the history of a single word. To go back to the game of “Definition” for a moment, the problem that we encountered there is not only with the singular term, “religion,” but also with the game of “Definition” itself. Modern linguistics has shown that “definition” is not a natural, inevitable, activity, but is a specific trope or operation, a very particular manner for dealing with words, one which tends to reduce language to the meaning of individual words. The art historian/theorist, Victor Burgin, indicates the problem with this approach, which he rightly calls the “‘nominalist’ view of language—believing that because there is a single word, ‘art’ [in his case, ‘religion’ in ours], then there must be some singular thing, some ‘essence,’ which the word names” (Burgin 1986, 159). What this nominalist view does is efface “real history” because it claims—perhaps only very implicitly, by the very manner of its definitional act—that there is an unchanging, constant, meaning to the diffiendum which is there, irregardless of context, time or place.

Given the failures of the attempts at definition, and given the complex and heterogeneous history of “religion,” the key to critically assessing “religion” in the self-conscious manner described by Jonathan Smith in the epigram above, would seem to be its history, not its definition (or the history of its definitions). But not, nota bene, its “real history,” for that presupposes exactly what the nominalist view of language assumes, viz., that “religion” is a singular thing which has a determinate nature or essence. Nor will it suffice to look at the history of a single term. Analysis must look, rather, at the history of the discourse, or discourses, within which “religion” has taken its various meanings. Precisely what is “under theorized” in the histories noted is the lack of a critical, theoretical notion of “discourse.”

Why “discourse”? Since the advent of structuralism, it has become a well-established procedure to look for the “meaning” of a term, not by its definition, but by its place within larger units of language, i.e., in its difference from other terms in the same structure or system. As Saussure argued: “Language is a system of interdependent terms in which the value of each term results solely from the simultaneous presence of the others” (1959, 114). Consequently, the nominalist approach (as well as a functionalist, lexical or stipulative approach) to definition will never be satisfactory.

The structuralist argument applies to langue, to the abstract character of language as a system. In order to apply this insight to a concept-operation such as “religion,” such an abstract analysis will not do, precisely because of the problem of history, of language-in-use, described above. Focus must shift to a level of language use larger than individual words in isolation (definition), but “smaller” than the structure of language as such. Burgin describes (as others have) this middle-level analysis as “discourse analysis”:

[D]iscourse analysis operates at a very different level of considerations [than theoretical linguistics], being concerned with particular formations of language-in-use which emerge in a society, at a particular historical conjuncture, on the basis of langue. Discourse analysis is therefore a tool of institutional, ideological, investigation in a way that theoretical linguistics cannot be.

(Burgin 1986,183, original emphasis)²

Consequently, discourse analysis is not simply about the way in which objects in the world get “written up” by various disciplines. The argument is, rather, that discourses pre-figure their objects, i.e., the structure of the discourse determines what can and cannot be an object of its analysis. Discourse, as Hayden White argues, does not merely “present” facts, it prefigures the entire field in which facts become objects of analysis: “discourse is constitutive not only of the domain which can treat as a possible object of (mental) perception. It is also constitutive of the concepts it uses to identify the objects that inhabit that domain and to characterize the kinds of relationships they can sustain with one another” (White 1973, 31).³

Three examples of this kind of analysis will help illustrate this point further. Michel Foucault has given this argument historical substance by showing how, even in the natural sciences, objects of investigation did not become objects by virtue of being “discovered.” They are the results, rather, of theoretical, conceptual paradigm shifts. To pick one particularly dramatic example, Foucault argues that “life” did not exist as a possible object for science prior to the nineteenth century:

Historians want to write histories of biology in the Eighteenth Century; but they do not realize that biology did not exist then, and that the pattern of knowledge that has been familiar to us for a hundred and fifty years is not valid for a previous period. And that, if biology were unknown, there was a very simple reason for it: that life itself did not exist. All that existed was living beings, which were viewed through a grid of knowledge constituted by natural history.

(Foucault 1970, 127-28)

The structure of discourse is the structure of any possible object, and vice-versa. Histories of both science and of culture show that “patterns of knowledge” change and shift constan...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1 The "Crisis of Representation" and the Academic Study of Religion
• Part I Phenomenology, Consciousness, Essence: Critical Surveys of the History of the Study of Religion
• Part II Towards a Nietzschean Semiotics of Religion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index of Subjects
• Index of Names