Discovering Religious History in the Modern Age

by Kippenberg, Hans G.; Harshav, Barbara

• ISBN13: 9780691009094
• ISBN10: 0691009090
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2002-02-11
• Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr

Summary

This book makes an unparalleled attempt to analyze the rise of comparative religion as a particular response to modernization. In the mid-nineteenth century and continuing into the twentieth, Western scholars began to interpret religion's history, drawing on prehistorical evidence, recently deciphered texts, and ethnographical reports. Religions that had been rejected as irrational by Enlightenment philosophers were now studied with enthusiasm. Using comparative methods, scholars identified in their own culture traces of ancient, oriental, and tribal religions--not merely as survivals but increasingly as powerful manifestations of a human existence not subdued by rationality. Hans Kippenberg shows how F. Max Muuml;ller, E. B. Tylor, W. Robertson Smith, J. G. Frazer, Jane Harrison, R. R. Marett, E. Durkheim, Max Weber, William James, and Rudolf Otto included in their reconstruction of the religious past a diagnosis of modern culture. Mysticism, soul, ritual, magic, pre-animism, world-rejection, and other notions were developed into a theory, disclosing in modern culture an ignored continuity of worldviews and attitudes. These scholars saw the modern world as still dependent on religion and believed that a history of religion could speak to questions about morality and identity that Enlightened thinkers or theologians could no longer answer. The study of ancient and non-Western religions, they believed, could help establish awareness of a genuine human culture threatened by an increasingly mechanized world. Their work shows how the historical concept of religion emerged and became plausible in the context of modernization, and peoples' experiences of modernization determined the meanings that religion assumed.

Author Biography

Hans G. Kippenberg, Professor at the University of Bremen and Fellow at the Max-Weber-Kolleg of the University of Erfurt, is the editor of the journal Numen, the author of numerous publications

Table of Contents

Introduction to the American Edition	vii
Introduction	xiii
From the Philosophy of Religion to the History of Religions	1	(23)
Deciphering Unknown Cultures	24	(12)
What Languages Tell of the Early History of the Religions of Europe	36	(15)
The Presence of the Original Religion in Modern Civilization	51	(14)
On the Origin of All Social Obligations: The Ritual of Sacrifice	65	(16)
Under Civilization: The Menacing Realm of Magic	81	(17)
The Unfathomable Depths of Life in the Mirror of Hellenic Religion	98	(15)
The Productive Force of World Rejection	113	(12)
Competing Models of the Recapitulation of the History of Religions	125	(11)
Religion and the Social Bond	136	(19)
The Great Process of Disenchantment	155	(20)
Religion as Experience of the Self	175	(12)
How Descriptions of the History of Religion Reflect Modernization	187	(10)
Notes	197	(28)
Bibliography	225	(32)
Index	257