Discovering religious history in the modern age
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Discovering religious history in the modern age
Princeton University Press, c2002
- : pbk
- Other Title
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Entdeckung der Religionsgeschichte
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Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. [225]-255) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
This book makes an unparalleled attempt to analyze the rise of comparative religion as a particular response to modernization. In the mid-nineteenth century and continuing into the twentieth, Western scholars began to interpret religion's history, drawing on prehistorical evidence, recently deciphered texts, and ethnographical reports. Religions that had been rejected as irrational by Enlightenment philosophers were now studied with enthusiasm. Using comparative methods, scholars identified in their own culture traces of ancient, oriental, and tribal religions--not merely as survivals but increasingly as powerful manifestations of a human existence not subdued by rationality. Hans Kippenberg shows how F. Max Muller, E. B. Tylor, W. Robertson Smith, J. G. Frazer, Jane Harrison, R. R. Marett, E. Durkheim, Max Weber, William James, and Rudolf Otto included in their reconstruction of the religious past a diagnosis of modern culture. Mysticism, soul, ritual, magic, pre-animism, world-rejection, and other notions were developed into a theory, disclosing in modern culture an ignored continuity of worldviews and attitudes.
These scholars saw the modern world as still dependent on religion and believed that a history of religion could speak to questions about morality and identity that Enlightened thinkers or theologians could no longer answer. The study of ancient and non-Western religions, they believed, could help establish awareness of a genuine human culture threatened by an increasingly mechanized world. Their work shows how the historical concept of religion emerged and became plausible in the context of modernization, and peoples' experiences of modernization determined the meanings that religion assumed.
Table of Contents
Introduction to the American Edition vii Introduction xiii CHAPTER ONE: From the Philosophy of Religion to the History of Religions 1 CHAPTER TWO: Deciphering Unknown Cultures 24 CHAPTER THREE: What Languages Tell of the Early History of the Religions of Europe 36 CHAPTER FOUR: The Presence of the Original Religion in Modern Civilization 51 CHAPTER FIVE: On the Origin of All Social Obligations: The Ritual of Sacrifice 65 CHAPTER SIX: Under Civilization: The Menacing Realm of Magic 81 CHAPTER SEVEN: The Unfathomable Depths of Life in the Mirror of Hellenic Religion 98 CHAPTER EIGHT: The Productive Force of World Rejection 113 CHAPTER NINE: Competing Models of the Recapitulation of the History of Religions 125 CHAPTER TEN: Religion and the Social Bond 136 CHAPTER ELEVEN: The Great Process of Disenchantment 155 CHAPTER TWELVE: Religion as Experience of the Self 175 CHAPTER THIRTEEN: How Descriptions of the History of Religion Reflect Modernization 187 Notes 197 Bibliography 225 Index 257
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