Is Religion Available for Disinterested Study?

If our brief discussion of the search for religion’s essence raises a question mark over a fully scientific explanation of religion, it remains to be con­sidered how far a more modest scientific approach to religion is possible.

them. It assumes, in short, that understanding a religion is possible without believing it.

Whether belief and understanding can thus be sepa­rated is something we must now pursue, as well as the related issue of how the historian’s or sociologist’s description of a religion is related to the beliefs of those who actually practise it. Many have thought that a neutral under­standing of religion is impossible in some degree or other. This may reflect either a worry about a neutral approach to any human institution or doubts arising from the specific institution religion is. To tackle these doubts we must remind ourselves that we have defined ‘religion’ in terms of genus and differentiae. Its genus is a human institution—a complex of theoretical, practical, sociological and experiential dimensions. Its differentiae are pro­vided by the characteristic object, goal and function of this complex. Our question about whether it is possible to have a neutral, outsider’s understand­ing of religion now divides into two: Is it possible to have a neutral under­standing of any complex of human belief, behaviour etc.? Can we have such an understanding for the specific types of belief, behaviour etc.

The general question about the relation between understanding and belief raised here is important because of the common recognition that human behaviour has an ‘inside’ as well as an ‘outside’. This distinction is evident if we reflect on the difference between the behaviour of an inanimate object and even a moderately complex piece of human behaviour, such as a gesture of greeting. The difference between say, describ­ing a kettle boiling and describing something like the latter is shown in the way an account in terms of mere externals will do in the first case but not in the second. A kettle’s boiling is a sequence of physical changes and to describe it is to do no more than plot these changes. But a description of the externally observable events that constitute one person’s act of greeting to another would leave out some vital features of the act altogether. It would ignore those features which gave it its meaning as this act rather than another. It is an act of greeting because it has a certain kind of point. Its having this point is a matter of its being informed by beliefs and desires of a given kind and of it conforming to accepted conventions and rules for giving expression to those beliefs and desires. Unlike a sequence of mere physical changes, we may say that a piece of human behaviour has an ‘inside’ as well as an ‘outside’. It is informed by beliefs and desires, and is related to conventions and rules of a human community. This ‘inside’ to human behaviour is even more apparent if we consider the experience and feelings that accompany behaviour and which also inform and shape it. Attention to both the externals and the inside of human behaviour is necessary if its meaning is to be discovered and hence if it is to be understood.

We might seem able to conclude quickly that an understanding of any human institution cannot be separated from the beliefs of those who participate in it. For any such institution will have an inside as well as an outside.

If we equate a scientific approach to the description of religion with one that is neutral, scholarly and disinterested, we have not ruled it out in noting the importance of the ‘inside’ to any human institution. A scientific approach would only have been defeated if we assumed that neutrality, scholarship and disinterest meant being confined to the externals of an institution only. But there is no reason to suppose that the elements of objective study exclude the sympathetic and imaginative insight needed to penetrate beyond the externals of an institution. In the case of human belief and behaviour sympathy and imagination turn out to be the preconditions for the discovery of the whole range of data needed by objective scholarship.

This conclusion about the relation between belief and understanding drawn from the general character of a human institution can be applied to the specific case of a religion in the following way. Consider a scholar describing the meaning of the ritual of the Eucharist in a particular Christian denomination.

Our brief discussion of the general difficulties in describing human institutions has revealed a complexity in the relationship between an outsider’s understanding of them and a participant’s beliefs and experiences. The latter are crucial in yielding an understanding of the institu­tion but not because endorsing them is a precondition of understanding them. Rather, uncovering and describing them will reveal to the outsider the full meaning of what goes on in the institution. The object of the outsider’s reflection and, he hopes, understanding is in large measure the participant’s beliefs.

One common way of arguing from the specifics of religion to the impossibility of a neutral understanding of it has been found in its experiential dimension. Thus it has been argued that religion’s essence lies in its experiential dimension and that in the case of religion the experiential dimension is beyond definition or description (see Wiebe, 1981: 9-10). If this were the case, the only means of understanding the ‘inside’ to the institution is actually to have the experiences which determine it. Since they are beyond description nothing believers say or write can help the non-participant under­stand religion. Only by becoming a participant can one understand the unique, inexpressible experience that lies at the heart of religion. This fine of thought is suggested by Otto’s comments on the numinous experience:

This mental state is perfectly suigeneris and irreducible to any other, and therefore, like every absolutely primary and elementary datum, while it admits of being discussed, it cannot be strictly defined. There is only one way to help another to an understanding of it. He must be guided and led on by consideration and discussion of the matter through the ways of his own mind, until he reaches the point at which ‘the numinous’ in him perforce begins to stir, to start into life and into conscious­ness. (Otto, 1950: 7)

No doubt part of the reasoning behind Otto’s conclusion that we can under­stand religious experience, and thus the core of religion, only ifit is awakened in us lies in his stress upon it as the experience of something ‘wholly other’. The observer of religion doesn’t merely confront beliefs about and experi­ences of objects he happens not to have met himself, but could still under­stand. For he cannot be apprised of the character of these alleged objects by the use of general categories of which he has had experience in other cases.

There can be no question that the content of religious beliefs and experiences is out of the ordinary in a quite special sense and that this creates peculiar difficulties in understanding. The resources of imagina­tion, sympathy and insight that the neutral scholar must employ will have to be greater than in the description of many other aspects of human life. Further reflection, however, will show that he is not without important aids in understanding even the content of beliefs and experiences focusing on the sacred.

One source of interpretation comes from the fact that beliefs and experiences concerning the sacred do not exist in isolation. It is, for example, clear from Otto’s discussion of the numinous experience that it is in concrete cases always found connected with a web of notions and doctrines in particular religions. It is shaped by these connections and in turn contributes to the concepts and beliefs that surround it. In its developed forms it is not a bare experience but an encounter with the object of a specific refigion. Thus its character can in part be ascertained by noting the connec­tions established between it and other things in the various dimensions of a religion. The fact that particular beliefs and experiences concerning the sacred are connected with other beliefs and experiences, and with practices and sociological structures, brings with it a further source of understanding for the non-participant. These connections entail that such beliefs and experi­ences are parts of a publicly shareable and shared human institution. Experi­ences of the sacred may in a manner be private and unique but they are bound up with dimensions of belief, behaviour, experience and social organisation that define a human, cultural phenomenon (see Wiebe, 1981: 9-10). Being a cultural phenomenon religion exists as a public entity. The experiential dimension to religion does not militate against this fact. For what makes an individual’s experiences of the sacred religiously significant (as opposed to being merely private experiences of one knows not what) is that they do connect with and contribute to the public phenomenon that is a religion. To be counted as experiences of the sacred they must be characterised as experi­ences of something, where the relevant concept used to delineate the object is recognisably drawn from some system of religious thought or other, even if it is a system initiated by the experience itself. This entails that all experiences of the sacred have the public connections described if they are to be counted as experiences of the sacred. If someone had an experience that was literally indescribable or literally of nothing, there would be no more reason to classify it as a religious experience than there would to classify it as belonging to some totally different area of life.

One cannot deny that there are esoteric experiences in the religions. There are experiences (sometimes associated with forms of mysticism) described as being of the Ineffable or of Nothingness. Such experiences do of course create a problem for the interpreter. But it should be noted that words like ‘Ineffable’ and ‘Nothingness’ do function here as descriptions: they are means of positively characterising the experiences in question, which in turn connect the experiences with doctrines, rituals etc. in comprehensible ways. Thus ‘Ineffable’ gets its force from associations with doctrines to the effect that the sacred object surpasses and is distinct from all mundane things. ‘Nothingness’ as a characterisation may be connected with doctrines and practices associated with the religious importance of the extinc­tion of the self or of the emptying of mind of all discrete, finite objects of consciousness. Such characterisations do not, then, blunt the force of what has been urged concerning the publicity and connectedness of individual religious experiences and beliefs. In the last analysis the force of these charac­terisations is derived from what comes before and what comes after them in the life of religion.

A further source of help to the observer trying to understand the character of beliefs and experiences comes from the undoubted fact that the sacred connects with the mundane in countless ways. Thus, to cite Otto’s particular account of the sacred again, it is evident that both the numinous experience itself and the concepts used to rationalise it are connected with experiences and descriptions of the ordinary and everyday. Otto notes how the numinous experience has ‘numerous analogies’ with other experiences, despite being qualitatively sui generis in some sense. He mentions the experience of the sublime in nature as a closely analogous feeling (Otto, 1950: 44). If the experience is rationalised in the manner of Christian theology (in terms of an all-powerful, all-good creator God), then it is being shaped by concepts derived from public conceptions of mundane things (power, goodness, making). For all the unique and ‘wholly other’ character of the numinous, one who has not had experience of it is not without bearings in understanding it. A general truth about the character of the sacred here emerges. The characteristic objects of religion may be regarded as distinct from ordinary, mundane things in various and varying respects. But they are all regarded as connected with and related to ordinary things in important ways.

There are two strong reasons from within the dynamics of religion why the sacred should thus be connected with the ordinary. In the first case: if it were not it would be of no interest and importance. Religion does not merely focus on realities felt to be extraordi­nary but on ones which are vital to human life. They must be realities which suggest a goal for human striving, the following of which will have an important role in human individual or social life. They must therefore be thought of as interacting in important ways with ordinary life and its con­cerns. In addition, if the sacred were not related to ordinary things and realities there would be no route into religion for even those who aspire to be participants. Religion would be a completely closed book quite incapable of being comprehended by anyone. Nothing else in human culture would provide a means for being able to understand or participate in it. Not only the phenomenon of conversion, but also the obvious interpenetration of religion and the other aspects of human culture shows the connectedness of religious belief and experience with other things. If religion were completely esoteric, it would be of no interest to anyone; and it would not exist. We do not, again, deny that religion may speak of the ‘ineffable’ or the ‘utterly mysterious’. One way of relating a felt reality to ordinary things may be the way of differencing and distinguishing it from them. The importance for us of the religious object might lie in its unlikeness to anything ordinary. We can describe and relate one thing to another by stressing unlikeness and difference.

If we consider the differentiae of religion as a human institution, we must conclude that it has many aspects which will stretch the sympathetic and imaginative resources of the neutral scholar to the utter­most. We have not, however, found anything to suggest that, unlike other phenomena in human culture, it is not available for disinterested study. ‘Disinterest’ and ‘neutrality’ are not labels for ‘lack of sympathy’ or ‘external observation’. The scholar must get to grips with the living ‘inside’ of re­ligion, but he need not share the beliefs, experiences etc. which make up that ‘inside’. Nor need he govern his research and observation by the desire to make them prove preconceived theological commitments.