Netherlands, 1870s: Chantepie's theological reaction

As Donald Wiebe has remarked, Tiele's successors neutralized his attempts, however tentative, to distinguish between theology and science and implement a sort of cultural evolution dealing with religion (Wiebe 1999: 44; Molendijk 2005: 26).

Indeed, after Tiele, this ‘stand-in-someone-else's-shoes' attitude would result in two interrelated branches, i.e. phenomenology and morphology. The morphological aspect, recontextualized within an increasingly anti-scientific and theological framework, was to provide a new rationale for the existence of the discipline itself.

A more explicit anti-evolutionist stance was advanced by Amsterdam University professor and minister in the Dutch Reformed Church Pierre Daniel Chantepie de la Saussaye (1848-1920). Since the very beginning of his career, Chantepie spearheaded a theologia religionum in which all the elements implicitly unresolved in Tiele's thought became endorsed as the disciplinary methodology. As summarized by Jan G. Platvoet (1998a), Chantepie's approach was built around three main metaphysical axioms:

1. The relationship between God and men (masculine plural) forms the basis for an ‘objective Science of Religion'.

2. The existence of God supports and grants the existence of religion as a subject of study and, consequently, the discipline itself. The acceptance of this ‘realm of the unprovable' (Chantepie 1871: 81) entailed that:

a. God and man are longing for each other;

b. human origins place humankind above all Creation;

c. Darwinian evolution is to be firmly rejected (a position based on Max Muller's early writings);¹²

d. primordial monotheism was the result of God's revelation, the degraded signs of which were still discernible in non-monotheistic religions.

3. Religious history reveals the patterns of human disclosure towards God's revelation as it unfolds in just three ways:

a. in history itself;

b. in nature;

c. in human conscience (Chantepie 1871; from Platvoet 1998a: 123-5; cf. Molendijk 2005:111-13).

This early manifesto is conceptually enclosed within the boundaries of natural religion and natural theology, with religious beliefs assumed as both method and aim (for a European contextualization of Dutch natural theology, see Mandelbrote 2013: 89-90). With regard to evolution itself, Chantepie held that Darwin's theory was a ‘“disorderly pile of hypotheses” which even plain common sense must dismiss' (Chantepie 1871: 12-15; from Platvoet 1998a: 124). Humankind, endowed with an inner religious sense, was the pinnacle of Creation, and an unbridgeable chasm separated it from other animals, and this because ‘of the very simple rule that a religious being cannot evolve from a non-religious being' (Chantepie 1871: 10-14, 87; from Platvoet 1998a: 124). No wonder that Tiele, despite being somewhat uncomfortable with biological evolution, readily replied to Chantepie's account, defending a scientific approach based on psychology and anthropology, for the defining features of religion, according to Tiele, are to be found in the human mind and not in some supposedly ‘objective' external factors like beliefs and rituals, and certainly not in supernatural assumptions (Tiele 1871: 374-80; from Platvoet 1998a: 126; see Molendijk 2005: 112).

Chantepie is officially credited with having implanted into the field the term ‘phenomenology' of religion (Chantepie 1887), albeit without providing a clear definition or a specific context and saving any treatment of the concept for a future work which actually was never completed (Molendijk 2005: 28, 30-6, 117-21; cf. Sharpe 1986: 122; Wiebe 1999: 184). The typological classification derived from morphological approaches, lacking a proper epistemic core, was to be more or less closely associated with religiously applied phenomenology, which, as formalized later, became a loose epistemological set of research rules in turn characterized by the following features (cf.

1. Religion is something completely different from ordinary reality which deserves a dedicated (i.e. sui generis and sui juris) approach.

2. Religion cannot be reduced nor scientifically analysed via positivistic methods, lest its core lose its meaning.

3. However, given that the essence of religion per se is inaccessible, religious experience is accessible only through its phenomena (i.e. what appears is or indexes what lies beyond).

4. In order to gain an eidetic vision on such phenomena (i.e. a factual grasp on the things as they appear), the insider's point of view should be adopted while engaging an empathetic approach. This means that religious phenomena as intended by those who believe in them, whatever they might be, are to be assumed precisely as that, as ontologically believed-in realities. Likewise, the scholar's own religious sensibilities become a heuristic tool.

5. A neutral ‘bracketing' or ‘suspension' (in Greek, epoche) of any critical enquiry on religious beliefs and practices themselves is further practised as to renounce disbelief and value judgement. While apparently this point might seem something ‘scientific', it was also an implicit concession to immunize the scholars' own beliefs.¹³

6. In further iterations of historico-religious phenomenology, a subjective, hermeneutic, interpretation was to be assumed as the gold standard of a meta-historical enquiry. ‘Understanding' every part of the whole religious system at hand became the primary concern, while interpretation (i.e. the explanation of facts) was mostly discarded (in classical philosophical terms, respectively, Verstehen vs. Erklären).

In all likelihood, Kristensen was the first scholar to come up with something resembling this set of features, although he failed to promote it as a new method (Molendijk 2005: 33-5). It is certain, instead, that Kristensen's pupil Gerardus van der Leeuw properly developed this approach into a fully independent branch.