2. Religión y Estudios Religiosos

(Religions and Religious Studies)

Both Jonathan Z. Smith and Tomoko Masuzawa address the 19th century’s need to classify religions into neatly labeled boxes. In The Invention of World Religions, Masuzawa traces the roots of this need to classify back to the 17th century when historians sought to “Europeanize” Christianity by proposing that the true history of Christianity, i.e. the religion of Europe, was not to be found in the Hebrew Bible, but rather in a Hellenic tradition (Masuzawa, xiii).

There was a dual purpose for this hellenization and aryanization of Christianity. Primarily, it was to distinguish it from the increasingly Semitic seeming tradition of Islam. Secondly, the ideals of empirical data were becoming progressively more widely accepted and expected. The ‘modern’ notion that most of the prized institutions of the West (i.e. science, art, rationality, democracy, etc) were of Greek origin conspicuously highlighted Christianity as the non-Hellenic anomaly among the Hellenic pedigree of the European heritage (Masuzawa, 18-19).

This focus on the scientific as the ideal is what characterized the 19th century. It was the 19th century that gave rise to the notion of ‘social sciences’ – that is, empirically studying those fields that had traditionally been viewed through a philosophical lens. Masuzawa holds that at the end of the 18th century, history was no longer a narration of morally and spiritually edifying tales of the past. Rather, for the first time, history had become the work of researchers, whose cardinal objective was to establish certain undeniable facts (or, truths) about the past (Masuzawa, 15). In his article Eastern Scripture Among the World’s Religions, Robert Van Voorst asserts that the 19th century saw European scholars begin a systematic enterprise of critically investigating religious traditions. These scholars became concerned primarily with context rather than with content - paying attention to proper translation rather than theology (Van Voorst, 2).

Smith states that the issue of classifying ‘religions’ arose in response to the “explosion of data” (Smith, 275). Tools such as first-hand missionary testimonies of foreign ‘religions’, ethnographic research, encyclopedias of religions, lexica, and handbooks were used to organize the empirical data regarding ‘religions’ (Smith, 275).

To classify a set of data causes it to become pigeonholed into that category rather than exist in its organic form. Unlike the data achieved in a Chemistry laboratory (where nonetheless human error is inevitable), the ‘data’ of human phenomena cannot be neatly boxed into groups with no outliers. For this very reason, applying the supposedly higher ideals of science to the traditionally philosophy-focused fields of human nature proves problematic.

In order to properly classify religions in the 19th century, certain basic schemes had to be employed. Masuzawa writes, “the ‘great’ religions of the world are often classified with binary, tripartite, or even multifarious divisions” (Masuzawa, 2). The basic divide in the binary schema was Christianity versus everything else. This ambiguous ‘everything else’ category was further broken down by Abrahamic traditions versus the other, more mysterious, ‘religions’. Masuzawa refers to this distinction as “prophetic religions” versus “wisdom religions” (Masuzawa, 3). Under the tripartite scheme of classification, religious traditions are broken down by geography: the Near East, South Asia, and the Far East. Furthermore, this schema seems to give credence to a racially divisive notion of ethnic difference (Masuzawa, 3). Additionally, religions that do not fit into this neat cookie-cutter diagram fall into the more minor categories of primitive, tribal, or basic religions (Masuzawa, 4). Apparently, a lack of written history equals a lack so of history in general, hence the term ‘primal’ for religious traditions that are pre-literate! Masuzawa asserts that the 19th century obsession with the primitive and the original is that it was also a turn away form the euro-centric and euro-hegemonic conception of the world – moving toward a more egalitarian and later delineation. The Van Voorst article holds on several instances that the presence of scripture is the binding feature of a religious tradition.

To empirically historicize the world’s religions, Smith outlines four basic assumptions that underlie the act of classification itself: 1) ‘Religion’ is a category that is imposed from the outside on a culture. 2) ‘Religion’ is thought to be a universally present human experience. 3) The characteristics of ‘Religion’ are universally apparent to everyone. And 4) ‘Religion’ as an anthropological, rather than a theological, category (Smith, 269).

To conclude I would like to bring up a point that is sort of highlighted in the Van Voorst article, that also came up in a conversation that I was having with a friend recently. That is, the idea and practice of categorization, while a 19th century development, has become a 20th - and 21st - century mainstay. These broad stroke categories are how we are thought about the world's religions, but also how we learn about the world in general. For instance, Hindus today refer to themselves as such - they may not be able to explain what that means or identify with a different type of "Hindu" but each Hindu is convinced of the banner under which he or she falls. An interesting example of this is the RLG205 - Introduction to South Asian Religions course - the professor for that course was constantly challenged because a practicing Hindu student in the class hadn't learned, or didn't subscribe to, what was being taught. Although there were often contradictory viewpoint, each practicing Hindu student was convinced that he or she was the 'real' Hindu! So, my point and question is this: while we are self-aware enough to acknowledge the categories that exist, how do we reformulate a schema that, while only a couple hundred years old, seems ingrained in our sense of (religious) self?