Schmidt's legacy: The strategic rescue of Andrew Lang's High Gods as an early home run for post-truth

The Origin of the Idea of God was a groundbreaking accomplishment in the most literal sense: to reprise our geological metaphor, The Origin of the Idea of God shattered what remained of the old comparative science of religion and, in the collision between the Victorian approach and the new phenomenology, something radically different was born.

The short answer to all these questions is no. Schmidt's academic work might be best understood as a decoy used to promote an ideologically conservative agenda which had few, if any, epistemic warrants, and which was genealogically nested within the fringe Victorian anti-rational reaction. Let us review and briefly comment on the evidence.

First, the cognitive intuitions which, according to Schmidt, allowed for the understanding of the divine revelation (and religion in general), were not accounted for as biases (i.e. causal and teleological thinking plus anthropomorphism), but fallaciously assumed ipso facto as divine, rightful and unbiased mental tools themselves (cf. De Cruz and De Smedt 2015). Epistemologically speaking, around this theological kernel Schmidt built its entire pseudo-historical reconstruction, bypassing Hume's natural history and resurrecting Vico's cultural layers, resorting to Bachofen's penchant for cultural substrates and developmental history towards patriarchy, and interpreting Smith's Semitic totemism as a degenerate cult identifiable in Judaism (Spottel 1998: 146; Rudolph and Ciattini 2005: 5259).

for one, however, who has had the misfortune of never possessing this belief in God, or who has lost this faith, we have here another powerful proof for the existence of God, a religious-historical proof. The oldest commonly held religions of mankind, taken in their entirety, cannot be understood in their fullness and uniqueness unless we accept the existence and reality of a God who founded this religion inasmuch as He himself personally instructed the people of the earliest time in their faith, in their moral obligations by giving them His commandments and in the ceremonies of worship they were to follow.

Schmidt 1935a: 491-8; from Brandewie 1983: 283

Second, Schmidt elaborated his ideas in the wake of Andrew Lang's (1844-1912) second-hand identification of a Supreme Being who created the world, or the universe, in all the so-called ‘primitive' societies. Described as being ‘at his best a gifted amateur and at his worst a polemical bore' (Turner 1981: 119), Lang was a Scottish Calvinist by upbringing who studied at St Andrews, Scotland, and Oxford, where he became fellow at Merton College from 1868 to 1874. After a spell as anthropologist there, he left to pursue a career in journalism (Wheeler-Barclay 2010: 110). Author of more than 100 books, which quite inevitably for the most part were ‘both trivial and superficial' (Wheeler­Barclay 2010: 110), Lang began as an armchair scholar interested in Tylorian survivals as a lens through which to study folklore scientifically (he was one of the founders and presidents of the Folklore Society, established in 1878), and ended as a relentless and tiresome opponent of the Victorian science of religion (specifically focusing on Max Muller's solar mythology and Tylor's evolutionary animism).

Most importantly for the legacy of the HoR and Schmidt's work had been Lang's fideistic degenerationism, within which Lang collocated the beliefs of ‘the lowest savages known to entertain ideas of a Supreme Being such as we find among Fuegians, Australians, Bushmen and Andamanese' as proofs of the absolute precedence of the idea of the High Gods, afterwards seemingly forgotten in favour of ghosts and animistic beliefs: ‘[...] if, as a result of the ghost theory, the Supreme Being came last in evolution, he ought to be the most fashionable object of worship, the latest developed, the most developed, the most powerful, and most to be propitiated. He is the reverse' (Lang 1898: 230).²⁰ Anticipating Otto's ganz Anderes, Lang also stated that the core of religion might be intended as an ‘unanalysable sensus numinis' puzzlingly appealing to an understanding of religion as a sort of traditionally validated, tried-and-true science of the supernatural, implying that modern positivistic science itself was ‘very far from being exhaustive of the truth' (Lang 1898: 51).

In hindsight, Schmidt's Kulturkreislehre provides the first fully fledged case study in the modern history of post-truth HoR, where all the following items, before scattered here and there or contested, were now gathered to form a consistent and coherent anti­Enlightenment worldview:

1. the adoption of a scientific jargon to pretend epistemic and virtuous prestige;

2. a willingness to bend the rules of scientific research, and to manipulate data, within an explicit pro-religious, irrational and actively anti-scientific framework;

3. the assumption of a confirmationist stance, according to which research is conducted by discarding disproving data;

4. the building of a community of ‘belief buddies' (Koertge 2013);

5. the control of internal dissent and the neglect of external criticism;

6. an obsessive focus on the hypothetically homological nature of religio-cultural data, that is, descended from a single origin, minimizing the possible role of analogy, namely, parallel but independent development;

7. the construction of a nostalgic pseudo-history based on theological and political a priori assumptions;

8. a frankly racist, colonialist and anti-Semitic perspective;

9. the institutional support from conservative, theocratic or fascist governments;

10. the presence of anti-modern ideas supported by logical fallacies, such as:

a. ad hominem attacks via ‘black-listing' and ‘derogatory word associations' (Andriolo 1979: 142 n. 6);

b. the use of a domino technique to suggest a chain of guiltiness by association in order to discredit opponents;

c.

In a metaphorical sense, Schmidt had started the construction of an epistemic surrounding wall around a non-negotiable core of religious ideas to rationalize the failure of theological interpretations away from positivistic disconfirmation (see Boudry and Braeckman 2012). The anti-rational dangerousness and misleadingly intuitive appeal of the Schmidtian defence mechanism have been recognized as far back as 1931 by Canadian humanist and Chicago University professor of Comparative Religion A. Eustace Haydon (1880-1975) who, in a review, stated that ‘it is doubtful whether even the vast erudition and amazing industry of Roman Catholic scholars can make plausible the theory of primitive monotheism to scientists trained in the field. The uninitiated lay reader, however, will probably agree with Father Schmidt, for this is learned and persuasive apologetics' (Haydon 1931: 611). But what if the ‘scientists' in the field were to give way to scholars prone to be fascinated by Schmidt's ‘persuasive apologetics'? By mixing intuitive biases mediated by faith and theology with appealing fallacies and an avowed political stance, while at the same time expanding on Lang's ambiguous anti-positivism and rejecting the scientific legacy of the natural history of religion, Schmidt had just sneaked onto the academic High Table.