Religion and the Humanities: A Lovers’ Quarrel
Thank you, Diana [Eck].
Bob Orsi invited me to examine the relationship between the study of religion and the humanities more broadly. In the hope that at least some measure of specificity may help us to get traction on this admittedly highly general set of questions, I will focus first on the particular context here at Harvard. And I will begin at the beginning!
The Study of Religion at Harvard: A Historical Survey
From 1636, when Harvard was established by vote of the General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, it had a commitment to educating religious leaders. In the words of an early brochure (published in 1643):
After God had carried us safe to New England and wee had builded our houses, provided necessaries for our livelihood, rear’d convenient places for God’s worship, and settled the civil government: One of the next things we longed for and looked after was to advance learning and perpetuate it to posterity; dreading to leave an illiterate ministry to the churches, when our present ministers shall lie in the dust.
This concern to continue the tradition of a learned ministry figured predominantly in the first decades of the College and is reflected, for example, in the first endowed professorship at Harvard, and the oldest in the country: the Hollis Professorship of Divinity, established in 1721.
In the early nineteenth century, a discreet graduate program in theology was developed—initially with the organization of an advanced program for ministerial candidates in 1811 and then with the establishment of the Divinity School in 1816. The relationship between the Divinity School and the broader university, with all of its ups and downs over the years, is one significant perspective from which to view the relationship between the study of religion and the humanities more broadly. But before considering that theme further, I will note four other points in this synoptic overview of the study of religion at Harvard.
I refer first to the establishment of a formal Ph.D. program in the Faculty of the Arts and Sciences. Called the “history and philosophy of religion,” it was initiated in 1934. Certainly there was substantial attention to religion in the arts and sciences over the proceeding almost three centuries, but this Ph.D. program was the first instance at Harvard of formal graduate studies in religion as distinguished from theology.
The second of my further historical notes is the establishment of the Center for the Study of World Religions, which opened in 1960 and is based on an anonymous donation given in 1957. While the endowment of the Center is technically part of the funds of the Divinity School, it has from the beginning served as a bridge between the Faculties of Divinity and Arts and Sciences. In terms of financial arrangements, the Center’s endowment includes funds that allow significant discretion for investments in Arts and Sciences. In broader terms, the Center has attracted both students and scholars from around the world for the historical and comparative study especially of other than Christian traditions. Any of us who have had the privilege of living there know from our experience that such historical and comparative study is enormously enriched when it is complemented with personal interaction among Center residents who embody a variety of traditions.
As a third point in this overview of recent developments in the study of religion at Harvard, I note the 1963 renaming of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Ph.D. program as the more generic “study of religion,” to signal the inclusion of historical and comparative study across traditions. The committee charged with overseeing this program also administers the Th.D. program of the Divinity School and comprises equal numbers of Arts and Sciences and Divinity faculty members. This structural arrangement has been a significant bond that has kept Divinity and Arts and Sciences colleagues in contact over the years—in contrast to institutions in which the respectivedoctoral programs were administered through entirely separate arrangements.
A final point in this historical survey is the establishment in 1974 of the undergraduate concentration in comparative religion. Harvard was much later than almost all other private American colleges in establishing a curricular option for undergraduates to concentrate their studies in religion. Indeed, it was later than most of the best public colleges and universities, despite concerns about the separation of church and state. Furthermore, even when Harvard did finally venture into this area, it did so very cautiously. The program was a concentration, not a major; it therefore did not warrant the creation of a department but rather could be administered by the already existing Committee on the Study of Religion. The concentration was in comparative religion, to register unambiguously that it could not have been a vehicle for indoctrination in a single tradition. Even more remarkably, the initial faculty leader for the program was a “loaner”: Richard Niebuhr would take a leave from his duties at the Divinity School to become the founding director of the undergraduate concentration, but his permanent appointment would remain at the Divinity School. (I have a perhaps more vivid sense of the oddity of this arrangement, because I first returned to Harvard to teach at the Divinity School with the explicit understanding that my appointment was a five-year dead-end arrangement, since Dick would be returning after that period. The arrangement also accounts for why I left after only three years: I found dead-end appointments unattractive.)
The Study of Religion vs. Theology
I hope that will suffice for a thumbnail sketch of the study of religion at Harvard over the last 370 years. It may be a reflection of our culture of narcissism that I have focused on recent decades. Still, as crucial as a long-term historical perspective is for a fuller view not only of the past but also of the best ways forward, our current issues are ones that have taken shape in the last half century.
It is entirely appropriate to celebrate the voteof the Faculty of Arts and Sciences in 1963 to establish the Committee on the Study of Religion and to authorize its joint membership from the Faculty of Divinity as well as the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. The continuing role of this Committee both in doctoral education and in administering the undergraduate Concentration in Comparative Religion have, to repeat, been helpful in resisting the split between religious studies an theological studies—as exemplified, for example, at Yale in the almost entirely separate trajectories of the Divinity School and the Department of Religious Studies (also founded in 1963). But our celebration of the institutional arrangements here should not be without reservation.
While most of us have long given up on insisting on purity of motivation, the establishment of the Committee on the Study of Religion is surely a case of motives that are decidedly mixed. For the Divinity School, the joint committee was a way to seek academic legitimization for a suspect area of study—and to do so in a way that allowed the conferring of the Ph.D. rather than only the Th.D. at a time when other theological schools were awarding the Ph.D. for theological programs. At the same time, Arts and Sciences was able to acknowledge the study of religion as legitimate while still retaining exclusive control of the Ph.D.—and also undergraduate programs, when the Concentration in Comparative Religion was established a decade later.
If we now move from a focus on developments here at Harvard to patterns across higher education, we cannot but observe that the very jointness of the Committee on the Study of Religion reflects the underlying tensions between theological education and religious studies. Even though the stated intention of this structure is to assure collaboration across what otherwise could be an unhelpful divide, the formulation of this goal presupposes the distinction. It is therefore worth examining the underlying contrast in a little more detail.
At its worst the contrast degenerates into mutual stereotyping. The stereotypes have arisen primarily because of the concern of scholars in the historical and philological study of religious traditions to distinguish themselves from theological inquiry. The result has been a self-characterization of historical and philological scholarship as objective study of other traditions in their own right rather than for apologetic purposes. In this self-characterization is the implied and not infrequently also explicit contrast to traditional theology, which is suspect insofar as it combines the description of data with concern for the normative commitments of a particular religious community. In its sharpest form the contrast is, in short, between objective and value free study on the one hand and ideologically determined apologetics on the other.
It is worth noting how recent and uncharacteristic in human history is a clear differentiation between theology and the historical and philological study of religion. In the West before the Enlightenment and throughout the histories of virtually all other traditions, theologians or those in similar positions of intellectual responsibility in other religious traditions were presumed to have such knowledge as was available or desirable concerning what has come to be understood as the study of religion. That there should be a separate scholarly guild to provide information about other religious traditions is an innovation of the Enlightenment in the West. Even more recent is the intention that this information should be objective as distinguished from either serving the apologetic purposes of religious community or debunking the pretensions of one tradition through unfavorable comparison to another.
Despite its relatively brief duration, a clear differentiation of the historical and philological study of religion from theology has been notably productive. The aim of accurately and systematically describing the religious traditions of others in principle apart from both apologetic and iconoclastic interests has contributed immeasurably to the philological and historical understanding of the data of religious history. Indeed, this study has often been in the forefront of cross-cultural understanding as Western universities have only gradually moved out of very provincial conceptions—especially of the humanities.
Two Contributions of the Study of Religion to the Humanities
In assaying the contributions of the study of religion to the humanities, this serious engagement with other than Western traditions has been conspicuously significant. Especially in relatively small institutions, courses in Hindu, Buddhist, and Muslim traditions have been far more typical in religion departments than have courses in other than Western cultures in literature or history or philosophy departments. Similarly, faculty appointments and research foci have been less provincial soonerin religion than in other humanities departments.
This early interest in the value of studying other than Western traditions constitutes a contribution of the study of religion to the humanities that few would dispute. If one accepts the stereotypical dichotomy between the study of religion and theology, this contribution seems clearly to accrueto the study of religion side of ledger. But even at this admittedly superficial curricular level, the dichotomy is seriously misleading, since Christian missionary impulses animated much of the earliest phase of the careful study of other religious traditions.
At a more basic intellectual level, the engagement with other than Western traditions undermines the dichotomy between theology and the study of religion because it presses the entire enterprise toward the normative questions that have received insufficient careful study in the modern secular university. Historical study of developing traditions that interact with one’s own almost unavoidably raises comparative questions about relative adequacy to an increasingly shared experience. The process works in both directions: appraisal is directed toward what is observed and also reflected back on the values of the observer. As a result, both our awareness of others and our self-understandings increasingly focus on the question of truth from a critical and comparative perspective.
This critical and comparative perspective provides the opportunity to question the conception of academic study as value-free inquiry—instead of appealing to that very conception in attempting to secure respectability for the study of religion. Put positively, the study of religion should aspire to become a model of responsible attention to normative questions. This attention to questions of meaning and value is potentially a further positive dimension to the relationship of the study of religion to the humanities.
To play this constructive role, we must recognize that both theology and the study of religion are engaged in a critical and comparative process of inquiry. There is, to be sure, the limiting case of investigators who insist that they are only describing what they see and that they are interested neither in assessing it nor in allowing it to impinge on their views. This orientation has contributed extensively to the accumulation of data about other traditions and in this regard is worthy of respect. But the stated intention of this approach, to understand another tradition on its own terms, may have the effect of refusing to entertain even the possibility of its truth. Of course, the further result may then be that the adequacy of the investigator’s own views is simply presumed. Ironically, this uncritical stance toward one’s own values and disinterest in the normative claims of others is not altogether unlike the position of theologians who focus only on commending their own views in comparison to the commitment of others.
To participate self-consciously and self-critically in two or more traditions as parts of a more inclusive community of inquiry is to reject every such presumed adequacy of one’s own views. For the historian of religions—and certainly for the comparative historian of religions—the result is that study becomes fully cross-cultural as inquiry directed toward understanding the other also invites reexamination of one’s own traditions. Similarly, for the theologian, exposition and advocacy of his or her own position cannot proceed on the basis of authorities simply presumed to be incommensurate with those of other communities and inaccessible to participants in other traditions.
Religion Today: Both Vital and Contested
This view of not only the study of religion but also theology as constructive participants in the humanities is starkly at odds with the conventional wisdom of the academy a generation ago. While the then prevailing view welcomed historical and philological studies, it more or less explicitly deemed religious affirmations or claims to be remnants of a soon-to-be overtaken traditionalism. In short, such affirmations or claims were vestiges of the past that would die out in the near future.
The intervening decades have not been supportive of this view. In the American context, first Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority in the 1980s and then the more recent resurgence of Christian conservatives have demonstrated that religion can be a potent political force even in an affluent, pluralistic, and nominally secular country. At the same time the flourishing of extremist Muslim, Hindu, and even Buddhist movements around the world has illustrated a remarkably resilient power of religion in the contemporary international scene.
The unexpected and perhaps unwelcome or even undesirable resurgence—or at least continuingvitality—of religion serves to underscore how crucial it is that both the study of religion and theology contribute effectively to the academy. Certainly academic inquiry by itself will not be able to account fully for the impact of religion on contemporary society. But understanding the religious traditions that inspire committed individuals and shape devout communities can still play an indispensable role in interpreting our world today.
Beyond understanding religious traditions is the imperative that we engage the challenge that extremist religion poses for the modern secular world. In this context, the comparative and critical enterprise that theological inquiry at its best represents is even more indispensable than the historical and philological study of religion. There can be no interaction with the most relentless critics of the modern West that those critics consider satisfactory unless the claims of what we deem to be extremist views are taken seriously. That means allowing encounters in which critics of the West are not required to accept in advance the premises of their antagonists. As a result, precisely the normative questions that have received insufficient careful study in the modern secular university must again become a focus of attention.
Here both comparative historians of religion and theologians can play a significant role—a role that is directly continuouswith the two contributions I have identified: cultivating appreciation for other than Western traditions; and recognizing a comparative dimension to normative questions. Historians of religion and increasingly also theologians recognize that traditions develop over time and also that at any point in time there are multiple claimants for the authority of most adequately representing a nominally unified tradition. As a result not only scholars but also adherents of a religious tradition are constantly engaged—whether or not there are aware of it—in a process of comparative appraisal.
The novelty of the contemporary situation should not be overstated. After all, awareness of differences among religious traditions on virtually every issue, including the question of how the ultimate is most appropriately conceived or addressed or realized, is scarcely an unprecedented development. Within nominally unified communities, there have always been controversies among competing alternative interpretations of shared traditions. Similarly, conflict between clearly distinguished communities has been only too characteristic of the religious landscape over the centuries. But what is new is the increasingly widespread recognition both of substantial change over time within continuing communities and of systematic parallels in the development of traditions that are historically only remotely related.
Both change within a continuing community and apparent similarities across distinct communities allow traditionalist interpretations. Change over time is in this case construed as a series of heretical deviations from what can be identified and must be affirmed as the strictly maintained standard of orthodoxy. Similarly, the impression of parallels in quite different traditions is resisted because it is held to result from a comparison of positions that are, when rightly viewed, incommensurable. In the case of such traditionalist interpretations, increased awareness of both change within and parallels between religious communities is resisted and in turn countered through reiterated appeals to an inerrant authority that guarantees unique truth.
This assertion of traditional authority continues to exercise impressive and at times volatile power, perhaps especially in the face of anxiety over change within and parallels between communities. It cannot, however, alter the increasing recognition of the comparative context of such appeals. The Theravada Buddhist who relies on the inerrant authority of the Pali canon, the fundamentalist Christian who bases his or her certainty on the verbally inspired Word of God, and the Wahhabi Muslim who cites the infallible Qur’an all may give each other pause—the more so as they become aware of the extraordinarily impressive figures in their own traditions who have not shared their appeal to inerrantly authoritative, verbally inspired, and infallibly accurate texts. Similarly, appeals to supernatural events or precisely prescribed ritual practices or incommunicable self-authenticating experiences have less self-evident authority as there is increased awareness of differing interpretations within a single community and intriguing parallels in other traditions.
Religion, Comparative Appraisal, and the Humanities
The effect of the historical and cross-cultural awareness is, then, frequently—even characteristically and in the end perhaps unavoidably—to call into question every appeal to a putatively inerrant authority. Awareness that has a comparative dimension and in that comparison is not only appreciative but also critical and self-critical in effect relativizes every such appeal. Diversity within a tradition renders problematical every sharply delineated standard of orthodoxy; and comparison among communities invites appeal to considerations not confined to any one tradition. Thus in practice even if not consistently in theory, the authority of any one tradition is subjected to appraisal on the basis of criteria that are arguably applicable over time and across traditions. The criteria on which such comparative appraisal is based are themselves subject to evaluation. There is not surprisingly also a plurality of positions on the issue of how most adequately to construe those criteria. But however diverse may be the specific criteria employed, they are all expressions of the general recognition that appeal to the authority of tradition alone does not suffice.
Here again, the novelty of the contemporary situation should not be overstated. Even cursory reading in the history of any religious community offers ample evidence that the truth of particular positions has been commended not only through appeals to traditional authorities but also through claims to illumine and in turn influence contemporary experience. References to the tradition and either implicit or explicit claims to represent that tradition on the one hand and arguments about the capacity to interpret and shape life today on the other of course appear in greatly differing ratios. But both forms of appeal are almost always present. In Christian traditions, for example, dogmatic and philosophical theology suggest poles between which there is a spectrum of approaches. Even in those traditions for which the designation “dogmatic” is invariably pejorative, there is also a combining of appeals to authoritative traditions and contemporary experience. Similarly, the most insistently dogmatic theology still at least tacitly claims to focus and clarify the ultimately crucial features of lived experience.
But while claims to illumine and influence contemporary experience have ample precedents in virtually all religious traditions, such claims have not been the focus of attention to the extent that they are in the context of increased awareness of change within and parallels between communities. As this double awareness in effect relativizes the authority of tradition, it at the same time increases the force of claims to interpret and in turn shape the whole of human experience. As a result, the question of criteria for adjudicating the relative adequacy of such claims becomes an inescapable issue for theology and its counterparts in nontheistic traditions. These criteria must address the two sets of considerations implied in references not only to interpreting but also to shaping the whole of human experience—that is, the criteria must address both descriptive and normative adequacy.
To aspire to interpret the whole of human experience entails a commitment to comprehensiveness that precludes retreat into a private or even a socially and culturally provincial sphere. Standards of descriptive adequacy thus seek to measure the extent and the depth to which the symbolic resources of a tradition have the capacity to incorporate into that frame of reference any and every datum of experience. Included here are, of course, the perennial questions, crises, and transitions that all religious traditions address: the relationship of the human to the natural, the cosmic, the ultimate; the realities of evil and suffering, of compassion and liberation; the meaning of life itself from birth through the struggles for and support of various communities to its end in individual and perhaps collective death. But also included are particular historical developments—the missionary success of Islam, the economic power of capitalism, techniques for family planning and organ transplants, the prospect of nuclear annihilation. The criterion of adequacy to experience measures the capacity to interpret the entire range of data through the symbolic resources of the tradition, a capacity that in turn requires the vitality to accommodate new insights not anticipated in the tradition itself.
Important as is the capacity to interpret all of life, this descriptive adequacy is incomplete apart from its normative dimension. Indeed, mutual assessment of religious positions probably more often than not focuses on this dimension of implications for shaping the world. What is the hierarchy of values presupposed in religious positions that take the goal of religious discipline or devotion to be deliverance to a realm or an existence sharply distinguished from life in space and time? What are the consequences of construing the individual self as an illusion or as an infinitely valuable personality with an eternal destiny or as only provisionally discrete from the ultimate reality of which it is an expression? What is the impact on human being and value of trust in a deity who governs the whole of history, or of commitment to a moral order that elicits fervent obedience, or of insight into the ultimate emptiness of all reality?
Interaction among traditions that includes both comparative understanding and also at least tacit mutual appraisal will not, of course, reach easy or early agreement on judgments of relative descriptive and normative adequacy. Indeed, the least of the benefits of such interaction is any anticipated agreement. But what may and will occur is an acceleration of the ongoing process of development within each of the communities involved. For example, members of a community may discover that their tradition has attended insufficiently to the implications of astronomy or physics or genetics in its representation of the human condition and may, therefore, seek to take those data more thoroughly into account. Others may work to develop new emphases to counteract traditional tendencies toward tolerating or even legitimating social inequities that on reflection they do not want to affirm. Still others may conclude that the insistent iconoclasm of their traditions requires rethinking in view of the beauty of painting and sculpture evident in other communities but proscribed from theirs.
Such interaction and change do not require prior agreement on criteria for mutual appraisal. Instead, members of the various communities may bring to the process quite different and perhaps very particular criteria for assessing descriptive and normative adequacy. Differences in the criteria employed are not, however, disabling insofar as the initial and probably most crucial outcome of the process is change in one’ s own position. For in the case of such reflexive change, the criteria guiding the process are precisely the ones that are compelling to those who are modifying or developing their own positions.
This focus on reflexive change is a third contribution of the study of religion not only to the humanities but also to the encounter of the modern West with religious convictionworldwide. What makes that encounter especially explosive is the sense on the part of religiously committed individuals and communities that the standpoint of the secular West is not prepared to engage any other perspectives on their own terms. To open up the prospect of change in their own positions on the part of all participants is a major advance beyond the current standoff. For those citizens of the West—in particular for those members of the academy—who are critical of major trends in modern Western secular society, this openness to self-criticism and reflexive change is in any case welcome. But it also affords an opportunity for constructive encounterwith self-proclaimed antagonists.
To summarize, there are, then, at least three contributions of the study of religion to the humanities and therefore to the academy and the larger world. First, the study of religion and theology at their best have played an historically significant role in serious engagement with other than Western traditions. Second, the study of religion and theology at their best have insisted on addressing normative issues even when the prevailing ethos of the academy focused almost exclusively on descriptive concerns. Third, the study of religion and theology at their best have pressed the case for comparative appraisal that allows for self-criticism along with a critique of the positions of others.
I submit that this three-fold contribution provides ample warrant for the housing of the study of religion (including theology) in every college or university, certainly including Harvard.
Thank you for your attention.
I look forward to your responses and our discussion.