Religion

I

Introduction

Religion, broadly, way of life or belief based on a person's ultimate relation to the universe or a god or gods. In this sense such diverse systems as Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Judaism, and Shinto may be considered religions. In a more commonly accepted sense, however, the term religion refers to faith in a divinely created order of the world, agreement with which is the means of salvation for a community and thus for each individual who has a role in that community. In this sense the term applies principally to such systems as Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, which involve faith in a creed, obedience to a moral code set down in sacred Scriptures, and participation in a cult. In its most specific sense the term refers to the way of life of a monastic or religious order.

It is impossible to find a satisfactory definition of religion or a realistic way of classifying the various kinds of so-called religion because of the important differences of function among the various systems known. A general survey and comparison of religions would therefore be misleading if the material to be examined were all assumed to be of the same kind. It is a historical accident that the earliest European students of foreign or primitive cultures used the term religion for phenomena of which they had only a rudimentary knowledge. They jumped to the conclusion that other cultures must have institutions of the same type and function as Christianity or Judaism in their own culture. This premature assumption is at the root of much of the confusion.

In light of more advanced knowledge, a survey of religions must therefore begin by restricting the term religion to those institutions for which it has customarily been used—Judaism and its descendants, Christianity, and Islam. If this restriction is somewhat arbitrary, it nevertheless has the merit of giving the word a clearer meaning by confining it to institutions that have much in common.

The next step must be to examine the so-called religions found in other cultures, noting the degree to which they correspond to the term in its restricted sense and then employing new ways of classifying them when no correspondence is to be found. Such correspondence is not a matter of doctrinal agreement or disagreement, for example, as to ideas of God or of moral conduct. It is a matter of deciding whether institutions that have been called religions have the same function in their various cultural contexts that such an institution as Christianity has in the West.

Another difficulty that appears in attempting a survey of religions from the historical standpoint is the customary notion of so-called primitive religion as the earliest and most undeveloped form of human religious feeling and practice. It is not safe, however, to assume that non-Western forms of culture lacking technological development are necessarily representative of the first gropings of the human race towards spiritual insights. The more that is known about different types of culture, the more difficult it becomes to fit them into any simple evolutionary scheme or even into any clear system of types.

For present purposes the treatment of religion will be concerned with a comparative account of three principal forms of consciousness about the human relationship to the universe or Deity, one found in the primitive religions, one in the religions as commonly defined, and the third in the various oriental systems of belief and practice that may be termed “ways of liberation”. Social and moral rituals lie outside the scope of this article.

II

Primitive Religions

The varieties of feeling and behaviour known as primitive religion constitute a type of consciousness that Western civilization has lost.

A

Internal and External World

The main feature of primitive religious consciousness, as studied among peoples such as the Polynesians or Africans, is the absence of any sharp boundary between the spiritual and the natural world, and thus between the human mind or ego and the surrounding world. The French philosopher Lucien Lévy-Bruhl called this absence of boundary participation mystique (“mystical participation”), denoting a sense of fusion between the human organism and its environment. This feeling may be described as corresponding on its own level with the modern intellectual grasp of humanity's interrelationship with nature in the science of ecology. A similar absence of boundary prevails also between the worlds of waking experience and dream, and between the individual will and the spontaneous emotions and drives of the psyche. As a result the whole external world is charged with powers that may be called mental or spiritual. Material objects, as stable and comprehensible features of the external world, do not exist, for everything seems to behave as whimsically as the events in dreams. Uncontrolled as the contents of experience may be in this state of mind, they would appear to be so lively, mysterious, and fascinating, as well as terrifying, that the whole of nature is suffused with an atmosphere of the awesome and uncanny. The German religious historian Rudolf Otto referred to such an atmosphere as the “numinous”.

B

Numinous Atmosphere

Basically, the numinous atmosphere is attached to the entire natural world and every object within it. A good example may be seen in Shinto, a present-day “primitive” religion practised in the sophisticated civilization of Japan. The Japanese term shinto (Japanese shin, “spirit”) means “the way of the gods” or “the way of spirit”. In the view of Shinto, every rock, tree, animal, and stream has its own shin or kami (Japanese, “god” or “goddess”). It is, however, misleading to call the kami a god in any Western sense of the word; similarly, the term shin means “spirit” only in an extremely vague sense, for it is used often simply as an exclamation similar to “Wonderful!” Shinto has no system of doctrine, no creed, and no formulated religious ideas; it is fundamentally concerned with expressing wonder, respect, and awe for everything that exists. This concern involves treating everything as if it were a person, not always in the sense that it is inhabited by some humanlike ghost or spirit, but in the sense of having a mysterious and independent life of its own that may not be taken for granted.

Obviously some things such as the sun, the moon, the ocean, and certain mountains and places of peculiar strangeness or beauty seem more highly charged with the numinous atmosphere than others. As the intensity of the numinous at particular spots differs, so the qualities or aspects of the atmosphere itself differ. Anthropologists commonly use the Polynesian words mana and taboo to typify the positive and negative aspects of the numinous. When it appears as mana, it is potent and useful, but when as taboo, it is fearsome and forbidden.

In primitive religions not only external things and places but also human beings are, on occasion, felt to be charged with the numinous in a peculiar way. The type of person gifted with special access to the mana or power-aspect of the world in such religions is the shaman or medicine man or woman. This role is significantly different from that of the priest or minister of such a religion as Christianity, for the power of the shaman is not traditional but personal in origin. It is his or her own peculiar discovery, brought forth in solitude from commerce with dreams.

The numinous is more than the sensation of awe and mystery in the presence of an uncanny world. The absence of a clear boundary between the human mind and its environment, in a world in which both inner and outer events seem merely to happen, brings ecstasies as well as fears. Among the Navajo, for example, this enthralling aspect of the numinous is called hozon, a term referring to a sensation of intense beauty and peace that may be evoked by rituals of chanting, dancing, and sand painting. Such rituals of sympathetic magic, whether for evoking hozon, rain, or fertile crops, have their origin in the same sense of fusion between the human and the natural world and between the events of the mind and the events of the outside world.