The Focus of Attention
One of the reassuring things about study rather than speculation or free association is that study is always study of something. Study has an object upon which we focus our attention and which helps define the nature of the study.
Hence it is reasonable to ask, ‘If one seeks knowledge and understanding through study where should one focus one’s attention?’We have already spent some time analysing the variety of really rather different possibilities which are included under the general heading of‘Knowledge and Understanding’, and there is no need to retrace our steps in detail. Rather we should be applying what we have already learned.
We have also noticed the importance of drawing a distinction between the study of religion (singular) and the study of religions (plural). This will be the starting-point for our short excursion into identifying the focuses of attention in our study. Again, of course, the variety which we find will depend upon the variety of types of knowledge or understanding which we seek. There are three different types of focuses of attention.
In the first place in setting out to study religion(s) we may be interested in some specific aspect of religion or religions. Two different examples of such study can give some indication of the range of possibilities and the implications of this range.
In a classic work first published at the beginning of the century, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber examined the question of the relation between the development of capitalist civilisation and the type of ethical outlook and practice which he believed lay at the heart of Protestant and in particular Calvinistic religion. This is to focus one’s study upon a very specific aspect of one particular religion. It also illustrates the intimate connection between the specific nature of the focus of attention, the type of method used, and determining both of these, the question set about the psychological conditions which made possible the development of capitalist society.
Much of what counts as the study of religion(s) will be of this form and since the possible questions are without limit so in one volume, while accepting the constraints of finitude, we must attempt to give some sense of the range of possible specific focuses of attention which are required by the search for answers to specific questions.The temptation to oversimplify is ever present and, in his foreword to the English translation, R.H. Tawney expresses it well:
It is the temptation of one who expounds a new and fruitful idea to use it as a key to unlock all doors, and to explain by reference to a single principle phenomena which are in reality the result of several converging causes, (p. 7)
Weber is less guilty of this than most, but the danger is inevitably there.
A rather different example of focusing on one aspect of religion is to be found in another classic of the same decade, William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience. James’s book, subtitled A Study in Human Nature, is clearly centred upon close observation of and classification of the variety within one aspect of religion—religious experience. But there is not, as in Weber’s case, the organising pressure of a single question. The study is classificatory and extends as widely as this aspect of religion and human nature require. Equally there is not the constraint of a single method brought to bear on a recalcitrant subject matter, and as a study in ‘religion’ so evidence is produced as it is considered relevant from a variety of ‘religions’.
These two examples show how the type of question asked—the sort of knowledge or understanding sought—require a focus upon some aspect of religion which may belong to only one religion, or which may span several religions. The method or methods to be used will vary according to the question asked.
A second general type of focus of attention is not some aspect of religion, but is a particular religion or religious tradition. Here one might be studying—seeking knowledge or understanding of—the religion in question a religion, not for example as a social or anthropological phenomenon.
This clearly differs from Weber’s interest which is in an aspect of a religious tradition as an explanation of particular social changes. The appropriate form of study here is usually called the History of Religions and is to be distinguished from Comparative Religion which is the comparative study of more than one religion or religious tradition.It may be that in defining this focus of attention we are on much clearer and firmer ground, but we do run into some of the problems already uncovered in Peter Byrne’s essay on ‘Religion and Religions’. How do we define what counts as a religion? It is consonant with his arguments there and with the general approach of this volume that there will be borderline cases, and some of the general issues arising out of this are discussed in Anders Jeffner’s essays on ‘Religion and Ideology’ and ‘Atheism and Agnosticism’.
The uncertainties there are as nothing, however, when compared with the problems of the third most general focus of attention. What if, as is a fairly widespread desire on the part of many students of religion, one wishes to focus not upon particular traditions, nor particular aspects of religion, but upon religion as such. By now we ought to realise that there is an element of intellectual hubris in such a hope, but perhaps of such things are real scholars made. If our aim is to understand religion, then we ought to aim to do so with the widest possible focus of attention which we can achieve.
The unclarities and uncertainties of such an aim, however, have been documented at some length and I shall not repeat them again. One point of summary and recapitulation will suffice. Attempting to focus one’s attention upon ‘religion in itself or ‘religion in general’ is to focus upon what is diffuse and infinitely varied and it is to do so with a variety of methods which are subject only to the nature and scope of the question being asked.