04. Classification of Religion.
(Ñòàòüÿ èç Áðèòàíñêîé ýíöèêëîïåäèè – Britannica)
the attempt to systematize and bring order to a
vast range of knowledge about religious beliefs, practices, and institutions.
It has been the goal of students of religion for many centuries but especially
so with the increased knowledge of the world's religions and the advent of
modern methods of scientific inquiry in the last two centuries.The
classification of religions involves: (1) the effort to establish groupings
among historical religious communities having certain elements in common or,
(2) the attempt to categorize similar religious phenomena to reveal the
structure of religious experience as a whole.Copyright
© 1994-2002 Encyclop?dia Britannica, Inc.__
Function
and significance
The many schemes suggested for classifying religious communities and
religious phenomena all have one purpose in common; i.e., to bring order,
system, and intelligibility to the vast range of knowledge about human
religious experience. Classification is basic to all science as a preliminary
step in reducing data to manageable proportions and in moving toward a
systematic understanding of a subject matter. Like the zoologist who must
distinguish and describe the various orders of animal life as an indispensable
stage in the broad attempt to understand the character of such life as a whole,
the student of religion also must use the tool of classification in his
outreach toward a scientific account of man's religious experience. The growth
of scientific interest in religion in Western universities over the past 130
years has compelled most leading students of religion to discuss the problem of
classification or to develop classifications of their own.
The difficulty of classifying religions is accounted for by the
immensity of religious diversity that history exhibits. As far as scholars have
discovered, there has never existed any people, anywhere, at any time, who were not in some sense religious. The individual who
embarks upon the arduous task of trying to understand religion as a whole
confronts an almost inconceivably huge and bewilderingly variegated host of
phenomena from every locale and every era. Empirically, what is called religion
includes the mythologies of the preliterate peoples on the one hand and the
abstruse speculations of the most advanced religious philosophy on the other.
Historically, religion, both ancient and modern, embraces both primitive
religious practices and the aesthetically and symbolically refined worship of
the more technologically progressive and literate human communities. The
student of religion does not lack material for his studies; his problem is
rather to discover principles that will help him to avoid the confusion of too
much information. Classification is precisely the appeal to such principles; it
is a device for making the otherwise unmanageable wealth of religious phenomena
intelligible and orderly.
The endeavour to group religions with common characteristics or to
discover types of religions and religious phenomena belongs to the
systematizing stage of religious study. According to Max Muller,
All real science rests on classification and only in case we cannot
succeed in classifying the various dialects of faith, shall we have to confess
that a science of religion is really an impossibility
.Principles of classification The criteria
employed for the classification of religions are far too numerous to catalogue
completely. Virtually every scholar who has considered the matter has evidenced
a certain amount of originality in his view of the interrelationships among
religious forms. Thus, only some of the more important principles of
classification will be discussed.
Copyright © 1994-2002 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.____
Principles
of classification
Normative
Perhaps the most common division of religions—and in many ways the most
unsatisfactory—distinguishes true religion from false religion. Such
classifications may be discovered in the thought of most major religious groups
and are the natural, perhaps inevitable, result of the need to defend
particular perspectives against challengers or rivals. Normative
classifications, however, have no scientific value, because they are arbitrary
and subjective, inasmuch as there is no agreed method for selecting the criteria
by which such judgments should be made. But because living religions always
feel the need of apologetics (systematic intellectual defenses), normative
classifications continue to exist.
Many examples of normative classification might be given. The early
Church Fathers (e.g., Clement of Alexandria, 2nd century AD) explained that
Christianity's Hellenistic (Greco-Roman culture) rivals were the creations of
fallen angels, imperfect plagiarisms of the true religion, or the outcome of
divine condescension that took into account the weaknesses of men. The greatest
medieval philosopher and theologian, Thomas Aquinas, distinguished natural
religion, or that kind of religious truth discoverable by unaided reason, from
revealed religion, or religion resting upon divine truth, which he identified
exclusively with Christianity.
In the 16th century Martin Luther, the great Protestant Reformer,
forthrightly labelled the religious views of Muslims, Jews, and Roman Catholic
Christians to be false and held the view that the gospel of Christianity
understood from the viewpoint of justification by grace through faith was the
true standard. In Islam, religions are classified into three groups: the wholly
true, the partially true, and the wholly false, corresponding with Islam, the
Peoples of the Book (Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians), and polytheism. The
classification is of particular interest because, being based in the Qur'an,
(the Islamic sacred scripture), it is an integral part of Islamic teaching, and
also because it has legal implications for Muslim treatment of followers of
other religions.
Although scientific approaches to religion in the 19th
century discouraged use of normative categories, elements of normative judgment
were, nonetheless, hidden in certain of the new scientific classifications that
had emerged. Many evolutionary schemes developed by
anthropologists and other scholars, for example, ranked religions according to
their places on a scale of development from the simplest to the most
sophisticated, thus expressing an implicit judgment on the religious forms
discussed. Such schemes more or less clearly assume the superiority of the
religions that were ranked higher (i.e., later and more complex); or,
conversely, they serve as a subtle attack on all religion by demonstrating that
its origins lie in some of humanity's basest superstitions, believed to come
from an early, crude stage. A normative element is also indicated in
classification schemes that preserve theological distinctions, such as that
between natural and revealed religion. In short, the normative factor still has
an important place in the classification of religions and will doubtless always
have, since it is extraordinarily difficult to draw precise lines between
disciplines primarily devoted to the normative exposition of religion, such as
theology and philosophy of religion, and disciplines devoted to its description
or scientific study.
Geographical
Geographical
distribution of the religions of the world in the early 1980s.
A common and relatively simple type of classification is based upon the
geographical distribution of religious communities. Those religions found in a
single region of the earth are grouped together. Such classifications are found
in many textbooks on comparative religion, and they offer a convenient
framework for presenting man's religious history. The categories most often
used are: (1) Middle Eastern religions, including Judaism, Christianity, Islam,
Zoroastrianism, and a variety of ancient cults; (2) Far Eastern religions,
comprising the religious communities of China, Japan, and Korea, and consisting
of Confucianism, Taoism, Mahayana (“Greater Vehicle”) Buddhism, and Shinto; (3)
Indian religions, including early Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism, and Sikhism, and
sometimes also Theravada Buddhism and the Hindu- and Buddhist-inspired
religions of South and Southeast Asia; (4) African religions, or the cults of
the tribal peoples of black Africa, but excluding ancient Egyptian religion,
which is considered to belong to the ancient Middle East; (5) American
religions, consisting of the beliefs and practices of the Indian peoples
indigenous to the two American continents; (6) Oceanic religions—i.e., the
religious systems of the peoples of the Pacific islands, Australia, and New Zealand;
(7) classical religions of ancient Greece and Rome and their Hellenistic
descendants. The extent and complexity of a geographical classification is
limited only by the classifier's knowledge of geography and his desire to seek
detail and comprehensiveness in his classification scheme. Relatively crude
geographical schemes that distinguish Western religions (usually equivalent to
Christianity and Judaism) from Eastern religions are quite common.
Although religions centered in a particular area often have much in
common because of historical or genetic connections, geographical
classifications present obvious inadequacies. Many religions, including some of
the greatest historical importance, are not confined to a single region (e.g.,
Islam), or do not have their greatest strength in the region of their origins
(e.g., Christianity, Buddhism). Further, a single region or continent may be
the dwelling place of many different religious communities and viewpoints that
range from the most archaic to the most sophisticated. At a more profound
level, geographical classifications are unacceptable because they have nothing
to do with the essential constitutive elements or inner spirit of religion. The
physical location of a religious community reveals little of the specific
religious life of the group. Though useful for some purposes, geographical
classifications contribute minimally to the task of providing a systematic
understanding of man's religions and religiousness.
Copyright © 1994-2002 Encyclop?dia
Britannica, Inc.__
Principles
of classification
Ethnographic-linguistic
Max Muller, often called the “Father of the history of
religions,” stated that “Particularly in the early history of the human
intellect, there exists the most intimate relationship between language,
religion, and nationality.” This insight supplies the basis for a genetic
classification of religions (associating them by descent from a common origin),
which Muller believed the most scientific principle possible. According to this
theory, in Asia and
Because Muller was a scholar of the first rank and a pioneer in several
fields, his ethnographic-linguistic (and genetic) classification of religions
has had much influence and has been widely discussed. The classification has
value in exhibiting connections that had not been previously observed. Muller
(and his followers) discovered affinities existing among the religious
perspectives of both the Aryan and Semitic peoples and set numerous scholars on
the path of investigating comparative mythology, thus contributing in a most
direct way to the store of knowledge about religions.
There are, nevertheless, difficulties with the ethnographic-linguistic
classification. To begin with, Muller's evidence was incomplete, a fact that
may be overlooked given the state of knowledge in his day. More important is
the consideration that peoples of widely differing cultural development and
outlook are found within the same racial or linguistic group. Further, the
principle of connection among race, language, and religion does not take
sufficiently into account the historical element or the possibility of
developments that may break this connection, such as the conversion of the
Aryan peoples of
Other scholars have developed the ethnographic classification of
religion to a much higher degree than did Muller. The German scholar Duren J.H. Ward, for example, in The
Classification of Religions (1909) accepted the premise of the connection
between race and religion but appealed to a much more detailed scheme of
ethnological relationship. He says that “religion gets its character from the
people or race who develop or adopt it” and further that the same influences,
forces, and isolated circumstances which developed a special race developed at
the same time a special religion, which is a necessary constituent element or
part of a race.
In order to study religion in its fullness and to bring out with clarity
the historical and genetic connections between religious groups, the
ethnographic element must thus have adequate treatment. Ward devised a
comprehensive “Ethnographico-historical Classification of the
Human Races to facilitate the Study of Religions—in five divisions.” These
major divisions were (1) the Oceanic races, (2) the African races, (3) the
American races, (4) the Mongolian races, and (5) the Mediterranean races, each
of which has its own peculiar religion. The largest branch, the Mediterranean
races, he subdivided into primeval Semites and primeval Aryans, in order to
demonstrate in turn how the various Semitic, Indo-Aryan, and European races descended
from these original stocks.
Philosophical
The past 150 years have also produced several classifications of
religion based on speculative and abstract concepts that serve the purposes of
philosophy. The principal example of these is the scheme of G.W.F. Hegel, a seminal German
philosopher, in his famous Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion (1832). In
general, Hegel's understanding of religion coincided with his philosophical
thought; he viewed the whole of human history as a vast dialectical movement
toward the realization of freedom. The reality of history, he held, is Spirit,
and the story of religion is the process by which Spirit—true to its own
internal logical character and following the dialectical pattern of thesis,
antithesis, and synthesis (the reconciliation of the tension of opposite
positions in a new unity that forms the basis of a further tension)—comes to
full consciousness of itself. Individual religions thus represent stages in a
process of evolution (i.e., progressive steps in the unfolding of Spirit)
directed toward the great goal at which all history aims.
Hegel classified
religions according to the role that they have played in
the self-realization of Spirit. The historical religions fall into three great
divisions, corresponding with the stages of the dialectical progression. At the
lowest level of development, according to Hegel, are the religions of nature,
or religions based principally upon the immediate consciousness deriving from
sense experience. They include: immediate religion or magic at the lowest
level; religions, such as those of China and India plus Buddhism, that
represent a division of consciousness within itself; and others, such as the
religions of ancient Persia, Syria, and Egypt, that form a transition to the next
type. At an intermediate level are the religions of spiritual individuality,
among which Hegel placed Judaism (the religion of sublimity), ancient Greek
religion (the religion of beauty), and ancient Roman religion (the religion of
utility). At the highest level is absolute religion, or the religion of
complete spirituality, which Hegel identified with Christianity. The
progression thus proceeds from man immersed in nature and functioning only at
the level of sensual consciousness, to man becoming conscious of himself in his
individuality as distinct from nature, and beyond that to a grand awareness in
which the opposition of individuality and nature is overcome in the realization
of Absolute Spirit.
Many criticisms have been offered of Hegel's classification. An
immediately noticeable shortcoming is the failure to make a place for Islam,
one of the major historical religious communities. The classification is also
questionable for its assumption of continuous development in history. The
notion of perpetual progress is not only doubtful in itself
but is also compromised as a principle of classification because of its value
implications.
Nevertheless, Hegel's scheme was influential and was adapted and
modified by a generation of philosophers of religion in the Idealist tradition.
Departure from Hegel's scheme, however, may be seen in the works of Otto
Pfleiderer, a German theologian of the 19th century. Pfleiderer believed it
impossible to achieve a significant grouping of religions unless, as a
necessary preliminary condition, the essence of religion were first isolated
and clearly understood. Essence is a philosophical concept, however, not a
historical one. Pfleiderer considered it indispensable to have conceptual
clarity about the underlying and underived basis of
religion from which all else in religious life follows. In Die Religion, ihr Wesen und ihre
Geschichte (“Religion, Its Essence and History”), Pfleiderer held that the
essence of religious consciousness exhibits two elements, or moments,
perpetually in tension with one another: one of freedom and one of dependence,
with a number of different kinds of relationships between these two. One or the
other may predominate, or they may be mixed in varying degrees.Pfleiderer
derived his classification of religions from the relationships between these
basic elements. He distinguished one great group of religions that exhibits
extreme partiality for one over against the other. The religions in which the
sense of dependence is virtually exclusive are those of the ancient Semites,
the Egyptians, and the Chinese. Opposite these are the early Indian, Germanic,
and Greek and Roman religions, in which the sense of freedom prevails. The
religion of this group may also be seen in a different way, as nature religions
in the less-developed cultures or as culture or humanitarian religions in the
more advanced. A second group of religions exhibits a
recognition of both elements of religion, but gives them unequal value.
These religions are called supernatural religions. Among them Zoroastrianism
gives more weight to freedom as a factor in its piety, and Brahmanism and
Buddhism are judged to have a stronger sense of dependence. The last group of
religions is the monotheistic religions: Islam, Judaism, and Christianity,
which are divided again into two sub-groups, i.e., those that achieve an exact
balance of the elements of religion and those that achieve a blending and
merging of the elements. Both Judaism and Islam grant the importance of the two
poles of piety, though there is a slight tendency in Islam toward the element
of dependence and in Judaism toward freedom. It is Christianity alone, he
claimed, that accomplishes the blending of the two, realizing both together in
their fullness, the one through the other.The
intellectual heritage that lies behind this classification will be immediately
apparent. The classification reflects its time (19th century) and place
(western Europe) of conception in the sense that the study of religion was not
yet liberated from its ties to the philosophy of religion and theology.Copyright © 1994-2002 Encyclop?dia
Britannica, Inc.___
Principles
of classification
Morphological
Considerable progress toward more scientific classifications of
religions was marked by the emergence of morphological schemes, which assume
that religion in its history has passed through a series of discernible stages
of development, each having readily identifiable characteristics and each
constituting an advance beyond the former stage. So essential is the notion of
progressive development to morphological schemes that they might also be called evolutionary classifications.
Trends in the comparative study of religions have retained the interest in
morphology but have decisively rejected the almost universal 19th-century assumption
of unitary evolution in the history of religion. The crude expression of
evolutionary categories such as the division of religions into lower and higher
or primitive and higher religions has been subjected to especially severe
criticism.
The pioneer of morphological
classifications was E.B. Tylor, a British
anthropologist, whose Primitive Culture (1871) is
among the most influential books ever written in its field. Tylor developed the
thesis of animism, a view that the essential element in all religion is belief
in spiritual beings. According to Tylor, the belief arises naturally from
elements universal in human experience (e.g., death, sleep, dreams, trances,
and hallucinations) and leads through processes of primitive logic to the
belief in a spiritual reality distinct from the body and capable of existing
independently. In the development of the idea, this reality is identified with
the breath and the life principle; thus arises the
belief in the soul, in phantoms, and in ghosts. At a higher stage, the
spiritual principle is attributed to aspects of reality other than man, and all
things are believed to possess spirits that are their effective and animating
elements; for example, primitive men generally believe that spirits cause
sickness and control their destinies.
Of immediate interest is the classification of religions drawn from
Tylor's animistic thesis. Ancestor
worship, prevalent in preliterate societies, is obeisance to the spirits of
the dead. Fetishism, the veneration
of objects believed to have magical or supernatural potency, springs from the
association of spirits with particular places or things and leads to idolatry,
in which the image is viewed as the symbol of a spiritual being or deity. Totemism, the belief in an association
between particular groups of people and certain spirits that serve as guardians
of those people, arises when the entire world is conceived as peopled by
spiritual beings. At a still higher stage, polytheism,
the interest in particular deities or spirits disappears and is replaced by
concern for a “species” deity who represents an entire class of similar
spiritual realities. By a variety of means, polytheism may evolve into
monotheism, a belief in a supreme and unique deity. Tylor's theory of the
nature of religions and the resultant classification were so logical,
convincing, and comprehensive that for a number of years they remained
virtually unchallenged.
The morphological
classification of religions received more sophisticated expression from C.P. Tiele, a 19th-century Dutch scholar and an important
pioneer in the scientific study of religion. His point of departure was a pair
of distinctions made by the philosophers of religion Abraham Kuenen and W.D.
Whitney. In the Hibbert Lectures for 1882, National
Religions and Universal Religions, Kuenen had emphasized the difference between
religions limited to a particular people and those that have taken root among
many peoples and qualitatively aim at becoming universal. Whitney saw the most
marked distinction among religions as being between race religions (“the
collective product of the wisdom of a community”) and individually founded
religions. The first are the result of nature's unconscious working through
long periods of time, and the latter are characterized by a high degree of
ethical awareness. Tiele agreed strongly with Whitney in distinguishing between
nature and ethical religions. Ethical religion, in Tiele's
views, develops out of nature religion,
But the substitution of ethical religions for nature-religions is, as a
rule, the result of a revolution; or at least of an intentional reform.
Each of these categories (i.e., nature or spiritualistic–ethical) may be
further subdivided. At the earliest and lowest stage of spiritual development
was polyzoic
religion, about which there is no information but
which is based on Tiele's theory that man must have
regarded natural phenomena as endowed with life and superhuman magical power.
The first known stage of the nature religions is called polydaemonistic (many spirits) magical religion, which
is dominated by animism and characterized by a confused mythology, a firm faith
in magic, and the preeminence of fear above other religious emotions. At a
higher stage of nature religions is therianthropic
polytheism, in which the deities are normally of mixed animal and human
composition. The highest stage of nature religion is anthropomorphic polytheism, in which the deities appear in human
form but have superhuman powers. These religions have some ethical elements,
but their mythology portrays the deities as indulging in all sorts of shocking
acts. None of the polytheistic religions, thus, was able to raise itself to a
truly ethical point of view.
Ethical religions fall into two subcategories. First are the national nomistic
(legal) religions that are particularistic, limited to the horizon of one
people only and based upon a sacred law drawn from sacred books.
Above them are the universalistic religions, qualitatively different in kind,
aspiring to be accepted by all men, and based upon abstract principles and
maxims. In both subtypes, doctrines and teachings are associated with the
careers of distinct personalities who play important roles in their origin and
formation. Tiele found only three examples of this highest type of religion:
Islam, Christianity, and Buddhism.
Tiele's
classification enjoyed a great vogue and influenced many who came after him. Nathan Soderblom,
a Swedish archbishop who devoted much energy to problems of classification,
accepted the division of higher religions into two great groups but used a
varied terminology that pointed to some of the characteristics of the two types
of religion. In addition to natural religion and revealed religion, or religions of nature and religions of
revelation, Soderblom spoke of culture religions
and prophetic religions, of culture religions and founded religions, and of
nature religions and historical religions. The highest expression of the first
category is the “mysticism of infinity” that is characteristic of the higher aspects
of Hindu and Buddhist religious experience. The apex of genuine prophetic
religion is reached in the “mysticism of personality.” All these distinctions
mean the same thing, and all are indebted to Tiele's
thought. Soderblom, however, sharply disagreed with Tiele's thesis of continuous development in the history of
religion. In Soderblom's view, the line between
nature religion and prophetic religion is a deep and unbridgeable chasm, a
qualitative difference so enormous that one type could never evolve by natural
historical processes into the other. Prophetic religion can be explained only
as a radical and utterly new incursion into history. As Soderblom
was a churchman and theologian as well as a distinguished historian of
religion, there is without doubt an element of theological judgment influencing
his stand on this matter. Soderblom was eager to
defend the uniqueness of biblical religion, and he believed that his historical
and scientific studies provided an objective basis for asserting not only the uniqueness
but also the superiority of Christianity.
Tiele's
enduring influence may also be seen in the classification of religions advanced
by Mircea Eliade, a
Romanian-American scholar who was one of the most prolific contemporary
students of religion. Eliade, who in other respects
might be considered among the phenomenologists of religion, was interested in
uncovering the “structures” or “patterns” of religious life. The basic division
that Eliade recognized is between traditional religions—including
primitive religions and the archaic cults of the ancient civilizations of Asia,
Europe, and America—and historical religions. The distinction is
better revealed, however, in the terms cosmic religion and
historical religion. In Eliade's
estimation, all of traditional religion shares a common outlook upon the
world—chiefly, the deprecation of history and the rejection of profane, mundane
time. Religiously, traditional man is not interested in the unique and specific
but rather exclusively in those things and actions that repeat and restore
transcendental models. Only those things that participate in and reflect the
eternal archetypes or the great pattern of original creation by which cosmos
came out of chaos are real in the traditional outlook. The religious activities
of traditional man are the recurring attempts to return to the beginning, to
the Great Time, to trace again and renew the process by which the structure and
order of the cosmos were established. Traditional religions may, therefore,
find the sacred in any aspect of the world that links man to the archetypes of
the time in the beginning; thus, their typical mode of expression is
repetitive. Further, their understanding of history, as far as they are
concerned with it at all, is cyclical. The world and what happens in it are
devalued, except as they show forth the eternal pattern of the original
creation.
Modern, postarchaic, or historical religions
(e.g., Judaism, Christianity, Islam) show markedly
other features. They tend to see a discontinuity between God and the world and
to locate the sacred not in the cosmos but somewhere beyond it. Moreover, they
hold to linear views of history, believing it to have a beginning and an end,
with a definite goal as its climax, and to be by nature unrepeatable. Thus, the
historical religions are world affirming in the double sense of believing in
the reality of the world and of believing that meaning for man is worked out in
the historical process. By reason of these views, the historical religions
alone have been monotheistic and exclusivist in their theologies. Although Eliade outstripped his predecessors in delineating the
qualities of traditional religion in particular, much of his thought was
anticipated in Soderblom's descriptions of nature
religion and prophetic religion.
Phenomenological
All the principles thus far discussed have had reference to the
classification of religions in the sense of establishing groupings among
historical religious communities having certain elements in common. While
attempts have been made to classify entire religions or religious communities,
in recent times the interest in classifying entire religions has markedly
declined, partly because of an emerging interest in the phenomenology of
religion.
This new trend in studies, which has come to dominate the field, claims
its origin in the phenomenological philosophy of Edmund Husserl, a German Jewish–Lutheran scholar, and has found its greatest exponents in The Netherlands. Phenomenology
of religion has at least two aspects. It is first of all an effort at devising
a taxonomic (classificatory) scheme that will permit the comprehensive
cataloging and classifying of religious phenomena across the lines of religious
communities, but it is also a method that aims at revealing the self-interpretation
by religious men of their own religious responses. Phenomenology of religion
thus rejects any overview of religion that would interpret religion's
development as a whole, confining itself rather to the phenomena and the
unfolding of their meaning for religious men. Phenomenologists
are especially vigorous in repudiating the evolutionary schemes of past
scholars, whom they accuse of imposing arbitrary semiphilosophical
concepts in their interpretation of the history of religion. Phenomenologists also have little interest in history for
its own sake, except as a preliminary stage of material gathering for the
hermeneutical (critical–interpretive) task that is to follow.
One of the earliest Dutch phenomenologists, W. Brede Kristensen
(1867–1953), spoke of his work as follows: Phenomenology
of Religion attempts to understand religious phenomena by classifying them into
groups . . . we must group the phenomena according to characteristics which
correspond as far as possible to the essential and typical elements of
religion.
The material with which phenomenology is concerned is all the different
types of religious thinking and action, ideas about divinity, and cultic acts. Kristensen's systematic organization of religious phenomena
may be seen in the table of contents of his Meaning of Religion in which he
divides his presentation of material into discussions of (1) cosmology, which
includes worship of nature in the form of sky and earth deities, animal
worship, totemism, and animism, (2) anthropology,
made up of a variety of considerations on the nature of man, his life, and his
associations in society, (3) cultus, which involves
consideration of sacred places, sacred times, and sacred images, and (4) cultic
acts, such as prayer, oaths and curses, and ordeals. Kristensen
was not concerned with the historical development or the description of a
particular religion or even a series of religions but rather with grouping the
typical elements of the entire religious life, irrespective of the community in
which they might occur.
Probably the best known phenomenologist is G. van der Leeuw, another Dutch scholar. In his Religion in Essence and Manifestation, van
der Leeuw categorized the
material of religious life under the following headings: (1) the object of
religion, or that which evokes the religious response, (2) the subject of
religion, in which there are three divisions: the sacred man, the sacred
community, and the sacred within man, or the soul, (3) object and subject in
their reciprocal operation as outward reaction and inward action, (4) the
world, ways to the world, and the goals of the world, and (5) forms, which must
take into account religions and the founders of religions. Van der Leeuw was not interested in
grouping religious communities as such but rather in laying out the types of
religious expression. He discussed distinct religions only because religion in
the abstract has no existence. He classified religions according to 12 forms:
(1) religion of remoteness and flight (ancient China and 18th-century deism),
(2) religion of struggle (Zoroastrianism), (3) religion of repose, which has no
specific historical form but is found in every religion in the form of
mysticism, (4) religion of unrest or theism, which again has no specific form
but is found in many religions, (5) dynamic of religions in relation to other
religions (syncretism and missions), (6) dynamic of religions in terms of
internal developments (revivals and reformations), (7) religion of strain and
form, the first that van der Leeuw
characterizes as one of the “great” forms of religion (Greece), (8) religion of
infinity and of asceticism (Indian religions but excluding Buddhism), (9)
religion of nothingness and compassion (Buddhism), (10) religion of will and of
obedience (Israel), (11) the religion of majesty and humility (Islam), and (12)
the religion of love (Christianity). The above is not a classification of
religions as organized systems. Categories 3, 4, 5, and 6 relate to elements
found in many if not all historical religious communities, and the categories
from 7 onward are not classifications but attempts to characterize particular
communities by short phrases that express what van der
Leeuw considered to be their essential spirit. The
“primitive” religions of less-developed peoples are not classified.Copyright
© 1994-2002 Encyclop?dia
Britannica, Inc.___
Principles
of classification
Other
principles
William James, the American philosopher and psychologist, in his book
The Varieties of Religious Experience, differentiated two types of religion
according to the attitude toward life—the religion of healthy-mindedness, which
minimizes or ignores the evil of existence, and that of morbid-mindedness,
which considers evil as the very essence of life. Max Weber, a German
sociologist, distinguished between religions that express themselves primarily
in mythopoeic ways and those that express themselves
in rational forms. The distinction comes very close to that between traditional
and historical religions, though its emphasis is somewhat different.
Nathan Soderblom, in his prolific scholarly
career, devised several classifications other than the principal one discussed
above. In his great work on primitive religions, Das Werden des Gottesglaubens
(“Development of the Belief in God”), Soderblom
divided religions into dynamistic, animistic, and theistic types according to
the way primitive peoples apprehend the divine. In other works (Einfuhrung in die Religionsgeschichte,
or “Introduction to the History of Religion,” and Thieles Kompendium
der Religionsgeschichte neu bearbeitet, or “Tiele's Compendium of the History of Religion Revised”) he
contended that Christianity is the central point of the entire history of
religions and, therefore, classified religions according to the historical
order in which they came into contact with Christianity. Similarly, Albert
Schweitzer, the French theologian, medical missionary, and Nobel laureate, in
Christianity and the Religions of the World, grouped religions as rivals or nonrivals of Christianity. Still another scheme may be seen
in Soderblom's Gifford Lectures, The Living God, in
which religions were divided according to their doctrines of the relation
between human and divine activity in the achievement of salvation. Thus, among
higher religions there are those in which man alone is responsible for
salvation (Buddhism), God alone is responsible (the Bhakti
cults of India), or God and man cooperate (Christianity).The American
sociologist Robert Bellah, having in mind the
advances of the social sciences in their understanding of religions, offers a
refurbished and more highly sophisticated version of an evolutionary scheme
that he thinks to be the most satisfactory possible in the present state of
scholarly knowledge. He views religion as having passed through five stages,
beginning with the primitive and proceeding through the archaic, the
historical, and the early modern to the modern stage. The religious complexes
that emerge in each stage of this evolution have identifiable characteristics
that Bellah studies and differentiates according to
the following categories: symbol systems, religious actions, religious
organizations, and social implications. Two basic concepts run through Bellah's classification, providing the instruments for the
division of religions along the evolutionary scale. The first is that of the
increasing complexity of symbolization as one moves
from the bottom to the top of the scale, and the second is that of increasing
freedom of personality and society from their environing circumstances or, in
other words, the growing secularization of the religious field. Bellah's classification is important because of the wide
discussion it has awakened among social scientists.
One may find additional classifications based upon the content of
religious ideas, the forms of religious teaching, the nature of cultus, the character of piety, the nature of the emotional
involvement in religion, the character of the good toward which religions
strive, and the relations of religions to the state, to art, to science, and to
morality.
Conclusion
The classification of religions that will withstand all criticism and
serve all the purposes of a general science of religions has not been devised.
Each classification presented above has been attacked for its inadequacies or
distortions, yet each is useful in bringing to light certain aspects of
religion. Even the crudest and most subjective classifications throw into
relief various aspects of religious life and thus contribute to the cause of
understanding. The most fruitful approach for a student of religion appears to
be that of employing a number of diverse classifications, each one for the
insight it may yield. Though each may have its shortcomings, each also offers a
positive contribution to the store of knowledge and its systematization. The
insistence upon the exclusive validity of any single taxonomic effort must be
avoided. To confine oneself to a single determined framework of thought about
so rich and variegated a subject as religion is to risk the danger of missing
much that is important. Classification should be viewed as a method and a tool
only.
Although a perfect classification lies at present beyond scholars'
grasp, certain criteria, both positive and negative in nature, may be suggested
for building and judging classifications. First, classifications should not be
arbitrary, subjective, or provincial. A first principle of the scientific
method is that objectivity should be pursued to the extent possible and that
findings should be capable of confirmation by other observers. Second, an
acceptable classification should deal with the essential and typical in the
religious life, not with the accidental and the unimportant. The contribution
to understanding that a classification may make is in direct proportion to the
penetration of the bases of religious life exhibited in its principles of
division. A good classification must concern itself with the fundamentals of
religion and with the most typical elements of the units it is seeking to
order. Third, a proper classification should be capable of presenting both that
which is common to religious forms of a given type and that which is peculiar
or unique to each member of the type. Thus, no classification should ignore the
concrete historical individuality of religious manifestations in favour of that which is common to them all, nor should it
neglect to demonstrate the common factors that are the bases for the very
distinction of types of religious experience, manifestations, and forms.
Classification of religions involves both the systematic and the historical
tasks of the general science of religion. Fourth, it is desirable in a
classification that it demonstrate the dynamics of religious life both in the
recognition that religions as living systems are constantly changing and in the
effort to show, through the categories chosen, how it is possible for one
religious form or manifestation to develop into another. Few errors have been
more damaging to the understanding of religion than that of viewing religious
systems as static and fixed, as, in effect, ahistorical.
Adequate classifications should possess the flexibility to come to terms with
the flexibility of religion itself. Fifth, a classification must define what
exactly is to be classified. If the purpose is to develop types of religions as
a whole, the questions of what constitutes a religion and what constitutes
various individual religions must be asked. Since no historical manifestation
of religion is known that has not exhibited an unvarying process of change,
evolution, and development, these questions are far from easily solved. With
such criteria in mind it should be possible continuously to construct
classification schemes that illuminate man's religious history.
Charles Joseph Adams Copyright © 1994-2002 Encyclop?dia Britannica, Inc._
ÀÂÒÎÐ ÑÒÀÒÜÈ: Charles Joseph Adams. Emeritus Professor of Islamic Studies,
