Several years ago, Russell McCutcheon identified two very different strategies for historicizing religion.Footnote 1 At one end of the field, there were those who accepted Wilfred Cantwell Smith's diagnosis that the category misleads its users and distorts its data. On this account the modern religion category—a tell-tale product of European Protestant history—is the primary obstacle to understanding religious phenomena. Indeed, W. C. Smith proposed that this troublesome Christian artifact should be simply dropped since, “men throughout history and throughout the world have been able to be religious without the assistance of a special term.”Footnote 2
At the other end of the field, McCutcheon located those who embraced Jonathan Z. Smith's judgment that there is nothing inherently religious against which the category's adequacy can be measured. Considered in this light, to say that one studies religious phenomena but has abandoned the religion category makes as little sense as saying that one studies neurotic disorders but has no use for the neurosis category: it is the local classificatory system that turns some otherwise anonymous aspect of the world into an example of this rather than that. Without the myth of the religious given to anchor its existence, religion begins to look like the expression of a historically formed and politically situated taxonomic will to order. From this perspective, much of what we need to know about religion can be gleaned from what J. Z. Smith says about the “dubious category” of world religion: “A World Religion is a religion like ours; but it is, above all, a tradition that has achieved sufficient numbers and power to enter our history, either to form it, interact with it, or thwart it.”Footnote 3 The key term to note in all of this is neither religion nor tradition, but our.
I have introduced this oversimplified map of the contemporary religion wars because it provides a useful backdrop for evaluating A New Science: The Discovery of Religion in the Age of Reason.Footnote 4
Over the past quarter century, the suggestion that religion is a modern invention—a claim that Ivan Strenski once ridiculed as the product of “naiveté, bad faith, or ignorant mischief”—has gradually acquired the reassuring patina of legitimacy.Footnote 5 However, I have not decided whether this state of affairs is something worth celebrating or lamenting, as it often seems as though scholars are quoting J. Z. Smith but thinking like W. C. Smith. That is to say, it is still too early to tell whether the widespread recognition of religion's historicity signals a fundamental reorientation in scholarly habitus or illustrates how entrenched institutions preserve their supremacy by absorbing and domesticating critical dissent.
One sign of this uncertain state of affairs is that in the process of historicizing the category, scholars often produce a puzzling admixture of invention-talk and discovery-talk. “This book explores the epistemological foundations of the new cognitive structures invented for understanding religious phenomena at the dawn of the new age,” Stroumsa writes in the introduction: “In this sense, the birth of the modern comparative history of religions can be called the discovery of religion” (5). At first glance, these two sentences appear to be at cross-purposes. How are we to make sense of the claim that the early modern invention of religion as a “cognitive structure” paved the way for the discovery of what had been there all along? There is nothing intrinsically awkward about this suggestion since the ontological relativity that complicates our use of higher-order concepts need not apply to their lower-order kin. While it makes sense to maintain that “genes” did not exist before the gene concept was invented, it is almost impossible to persuasively argue that “DNA” did not exist until the DNA concept was constructed. The effects of our world-making may be extensive, but they do not go that far.
Stroumsa is not alone when it comes to blurring the distinction between making and finding. For example, after embracing the thesis that religion is as much an artifact of Christian European history as mysticism, Richard King goes on to write that one of “the central tasks of the scholar of non-Christian religions is precisely to work towards untangling some of the Christian presuppositions that have framed the discussion so far.”Footnote 6 In other words, the very category used to frame various features of collective life as a (relatively) distinct something stands accused of thwarting our attempts to make sense of a (relatively) distinct something which can only be identified with the aid of the maligned category! Is this an impossible position or merely another case where the inscrutability of reference muddies the water? By focusing on this conceptual ambiguity in A New Science, I hope to both outline the book's historical case and get to the bottom of a fundamental issue in the contemporary study of religion.
I. Stark Facts and Bare Religions
Rather than locating the site of religion's discovery on the Continent, Stroumsa draws our attention to the New World outposts of late Renaissance and early modern European power. The immediate payoff for this shift is that all of the reports about religion's inherently Protestant nature begin to seem greatly exaggerated. The dominant colonial forces on the world stage were Catholic Portugal and Spain: “It should not come as a surprise, then, that the first to speak of the religions of the world, in the plural, were the Catholics (as early as 1509). Through their missionaries in China, Central, South America, and elsewhere, they had been confronted, earlier and more concretely than Protestants, with the variety of faiths and practices around the world” (27). Nothing back home prepared the wandering Europeans for what they found, and Stroumsa contends that this confrontation between Old and New Worlds established the conditions of possibility for religion's invention. As he puts it, “the intellectual and religious shock caused by the observation of all-but-unknown religious rituals and beliefs in the Americas and Asias provided the trigger without which the new discipline could not have been born” (2).
In this sense, Stroumsa is offering an analogue to what is sometimes described as the collapse of the “emblematic world view.”Footnote 7 Fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Europeans came across flora and fauna in the New World that were completely unknown to naturalists back home—which made the dense web of resemblance and allegory that had once rendered Nature intelligible seem frail and imperfect. “The animals of the new world had no known similitudes,” William Ashworth explains, “Anteaters and sloths do not appear in Erasmus or Aliciati or Piero Valeriano; they are missing in all the writings of antiquity. They came to the Old World naked, without emblematic significance.”Footnote 8 In this semiotic vacuum the scholastic tradition of blending empirical descriptions with classical literary allusions, etymological histories, and moral assessments was out of the question. The natural world of cold, objective facts had been born.
That Stroumsa has something like this historical dynamic in mind when it comes to religion can be gathered from a few different corners of his project. For example, he insists that it was the Catholic exposure to Amerindian culture which yielded a “radical semantic externalization of ‘religion’ and its transformation from inner piety to social patterns of behavior” (27). That is to say, the modern ethnographic sense of religion as a distinctive set of beliefs and practices that can be “objectively” cataloged was a by-product of the sudden, accidental discovery of a proximate religious other. In this way, the modern study of religion helped to bridge the cognitive fissure between the Old and New Worlds. Rather than merely dismissing the Amerindian religions as false or idolatrous when compared to European Christianity, Stroumsa believes that missionaries, soldiers, and explorers began to describe what they saw and heard as accurately as they could. Ethnographic curiosity was the offspring of taxonomic confusion rather than vaulting imperial ambition.
Once this sweeping account of ethnographic religion's meteoric rise has been presented, the book quickly turns to examine the discourses on ancient Israelite, Greek, Iranian, Islamic, and Roman religions. These chapters represent the bulk of A New Science, as well as its most enduring contribution to the academic study of religion. Stroumsa is at his best when discussing texts that have been lost to most scholars beneath centuries of dust and neglect. In his hands, John Selden's De Diis Syris Syntagmata (1617) and Richard Simon's Comparaison des céremonies des Juifs et de la discipline de l'Eglise (1681) take their rightful place next to Edward Brerewood's Enquiries Touching the Diversity of Languages and Religions (1613), Alexander Ross's Pansebia (1614), and Ephraim Paggitt's Christianographie (1635) as highpoints of the seventeenth-century comparative imagination. Apart from Peter Harrison's “Religion” and the Religions in the English Enlightenment, I can think of no other survey that is as meticulous and erudite about the early modern study of “religion.”Footnote 9
With that said, however, there is a fatal conceptual problem afoot that threatens to undo much of the good that has been done. The issue comes into view when we take Stroumsa at his word and read A New Science as an addendum to The Order of Things that draws attention to “a science left aside, or forgotten, by Michel Foucault's ‘archaeology of knowledge in the age of reason’” (38).
II. From Natural Creatures to Living Beings: The Short, Happy Life of Natural History
Summarizing Foucault's archaeological masterpiece is a fool's errand. Fortunately, for my present purposes I only need to highlight one of the book's crucial themes: the rise and fall of natural history. Renaissance natural philosophy had been organized around the search for the secret, figurative language in which God had composed the Book of Nature. The natural world was a coherent and stable text because its physical features were signs which pointed beyond themselves to a providentially instituted Order of Meaning. Yet, as with any text, the conditions of intelligibility for the Book of Nature necessarily existed outside of itself. As Foucault observes: “There is no commentary unless, below the language one is reading and deciphering, there runs the sovereignty of an original Text. And it is this text which, by providing a foundation for the commentary, offers its ultimate revelation as the promised reward of commentary.”Footnote 10 Like a sovereign king who establishes the contours of a juridico-political order but remains beyond the reach of its legal mechanisms, the symbolic order of nature acquired its significance from a God who forever stood beyond the web of signification itself.
However, as the emblematic worldview began to disintegrate toward the end of the sixteenth century, the nascent empirical sciences were charged with bridging the disquieting gap that had opened up between words and things (les mots et les choses). As Foucault makes the point in his own inimitable style:
The whole of animal semantics has disappeared like a dead and useless limb. The words that had been interwoven in the very being of the beast have been unraveled and removed: and the living being, in its anatomy, its form, its habits, its birth and death appears as though stripped naked. Natural history finds its locus in the gap that is now opened up between things and words—a silent gap, pure of all verbal sedimentation and yet articulated according to the elements of representation, those same elements that can now without let or hindrance be named (141).
Instead of searching for the divine meanings that were always already there but hidden beneath the coded veil of resemblances, seventeenth-century naturalists were now obligated to “fabricate a language, and to fabricate it well—so that, as an instrument of analysis and combination, it will really be the language of calculation” (63). That is to say, the study of nature was now conceived as a search for the methods of inquiry and technical vocabularies that would yield an accurate representation of the providentially arranged order of empirical regularities. Early modern science was as much a matter of naming as it was a matter of discovery.
Over the next two centuries, the dream of constructing an exhaustively organized body of knowledge that labeled the world's fundamental structures sustained the study of Nature. Considered in this light, the Linnaean project of assembling an exhaustive, binomial system of nature that described plants in terms of number, form, position, and relative size epitomizes Classical natural history.
Yet, by the early nineteenth century, this order of knowledge lay in ruins and the threshold to modernity had been crossed. We are told that “it took a fundamental event—certainly one of the most radical that ever occurred in Western culture—to bring about the dissolution of the positivity of Classical knowledge, and to constitute another positivity from which, even now, we have doubtless not entirely emerged” (220). Foucault may be hard to pin down on what triggered this rupture in the history of Western thought, but he is doggedly articulate about its consequences.
On his account, science in the Age of Reason had been underwritten by the pre-reflective confidence in language to act as a translucent medium of representation. The Aufklärer were not concerned with whether or how language represented the world, but rather with finding the right words to identify the right things and thereby arrive at the true knowledge of nature. But then suddenly, toward the end of the eighteenth century—Foucault confidently tells us that it happened “more or less around the years 1795–1800”—the ground shifts and this unified field of words and things is dragged into the abyss (221). Much as supernovae fashion a space for the production of new stars, the death of natural history created an opening for the birth of a new science. Biology is not the form that natural history assumes once our knowledge of the natural world becomes recognizably “scientific.” It is an order of knowledge that was unthinkable and impossible so long as the Classical modus vivendi survived. Foucault insists that:
we must not seek to construe these as objects that imposed themselves from the outside, as though by their own weight and as a result of some autonomous pressure, upon a body of learning that had ignored them too long; nor must we see them as concepts gradually built up, owing to new methods, through the progress of sciences advancing towards their own rationality. They are fundamental modes of knowledge which sustain in their flawless unity the secondary and derived correlation of new sciences and techniques with unprecedented objects (252–53; my emphasis).
If read in an uncharitable and facile way, it looks as though he is peddling a childish brand of irrealism here. However, despite an unfortunate habit of garrulous imprecision, Foucault did not doubt that there was an objective reality “out there” to be discovered.Footnote 11 The driving theoretical intuition of The Order of Things is that the inscrutability of reference guarantees that any kind of object-talk can only be a locally coherent taxonomic practice: brute things cannot tell us which words best describe them. Thus, in place of the Classical Linnaean desire to describe plants in terms of number, form, position, and relative size, we begin to find the modern Cuvierian preoccupation with identifying their anatomical structures and organic functions. On this point, Foucault could not be more explicit:
From Cuvier onward, it is life in its non-perceptible, purely functional aspect that provides the basis for the exterior possibility of a classification. The classification of living beings is no longer to be found in the great expanse of order; the possibility of classification now arises from the depths of life, from those elements most hidden from view. Before the living being was a locality of natural classification; now the fact of being classifiable is a property of a living being. . . . Life is no longer that which can be distinguished in a more or less certain fashion from the mechanical; it is that in which all the possible distinctions between living beings have their basis. It is this transition from the taxonomic to the synthetic notion of life which is indicated, in the chronology of ideas and sciences, by the recrudescence, in the early nineteenth century of vitalist themes. From the archaeological point of view, what is being established at this particular moment is the conditions of possibility of a biology (268–69).
The general lesson here is that every science is ideally equipped to study its specific domain since a local classificatory system is responsible for creating both sides of the ledger simultaneously. Biology did not and could not exist prior to the nineteenth century for a relatively simple reason: life did not exist until 1800. The conditions for life could only be established by the death of nature and the disintegration of natural history.
III. One of These Things Is Not Like the Other
I have taken this lengthy detour through The Order of Things because Stroumsa explicitly invites us to view his own project as kind of a supplement to this imposing text. He writes that Foucault's book
enabled us, one generation ago, to recognize more clearly the depth and shape of the intellectual shift that transpired in the seventeenth century. From the scrutiny of deep-seated similarities among phenomena, which had governed Renaissance study, the scholar's mind now learned to focus on differences and to build taxonomies. What Foucault was able to diagnose in fields such as linguistics and grammar was also true in the field of religious phenomena. Since the sixteenth century, the discovery of new cultures had also permitted the birth of an ethnological curiosity to an extent previously unknown, at least in Europe (41).
Unfortunately, this gesture invites a sort of Trojan horse into the heart of A New Science.
Recall what Stroumsa has to say about the radical “semantic externalization” of religion in the seventeenth century. We are told that, much as the discovery of unknown animals had provoked a crisis in the emblematic framework of Renaissance natural history, the Christian discovery of “New World religious phenomena, for which traditional categories stemming from medieval theology offered no adequate concepts, entailed a broadened idea of religion” (21). Did you catch that? Allow me to go over it again, this time drawing attention to the sleights of hand: “New World religious phenomena, for which traditional categories stemming from medieval theology offered no adequate concepts, entailed a broadened idea of religion.”
Given the category's unquestionable Latin pedigree, we can be reasonably confident that these New World communities did not describe their own practices (to themselves or others) in terms of religion. So, here's the difficulty: How did the Europeans know that it was the category of religion that needed to be broadened rather than some other category within their socio-taxonomic order? How did they know that a particular constellation of words, things and behaviors was in fact a collection of religious phenomena? If nothing else, the long-standing colonial dilemma of determining whether the local natives “had a religion” demonstrates that there was never anything self-evident about the category's application at a given time or place.Footnote 12 Indeed, there even seems to have been some confusion on the European side of these encounters about whether or not the newly discovered creatures should be classified as animals or people.
On Stroumsa's account, the semantic “externalization” of religion represents nothing less than the bouleversement of the semantic “internalization” that the category had experienced in late antiquity. In a passage worth quoting at some length, we read:
To sum up the key characteristic of the transformation of the concept of religion in the early modern age, one could perhaps speak of its externalization. As a concept, religion always had a double edge, referring both inward, as a set of beliefs, and outward, as a pattern of behavior. In antiquity, however, religion had primarily been perceived as collective or public behavior within the city. Among both Jews and pagans, religion was essentially a pattern of behavior, most clearly exemplified by public animal sacrifices. In this respect, late antiquity had shown a deep transformation of the very idea of religion, which now became interiorized, as it were, reflecting essentially a set of beliefs. True religion (vera religio, in Augustine's terms) was now orthodox Christianity, while all other forms of religion were identified as heresies or forms of idolatry and hence false. In many ways, this internalized conception of religion would remain prevalent throughout the Middle Ages (25).
There are a few noteworthy elements in this proposed genealogy of religion. First, fewer and fewer historians are prepared to accept the notion that Christianities were a unique development in the Empire because of their commitment to right belief.Footnote 13 Second, Stroumsa's thesis that the Western turn toward interiority starts in the ancient world is difficult—if not impossible—to reconcile with the general consensus that the associated virtues of privacy, intimacy, and subjectivity only begins to emerge in the late medieval era.Footnote 14
Nevertheless, the single most perplexing aspect of this line of thought is that, unlike The Order of Things, it makes no attempt to correlate the techniques of this new science with the production of an unprecedented object. “Historians want to write histories of biology in the eighteenth century,” Foucault observes, “but they do not realize that biology did not exist then, and that the pattern of knowledge that has been familiar to us for a hundred and fifty years is not valid for a previous period. And that, if biology was unknown, there was a very simple reason for it: that life itself didn't exist” (128). If A New Science really is the Foucauldian supplement that it intends to be, one might expect that it would hit similar notes about how “religion” does not exist prior to religion.
In Stroumsa's hands, however, religion as a natural object of curiosity seems to have always been there—only the awareness of its presence seems to shift. Thus, we read about the “transformation of the categories through which European intellectuals, both Catholic and Protestant, perceived the religions of humankind,” or the early modern epistemic revolution “which in turn allowed a radical transformation in the perception of religious phenomena” (1, 2). In other words, A New Science is underwritten and undone by the sort of historiographical Platonism that Foucault's “archaeological” analysis was explicitly designed to upend. As a result, the book's desire to speak of “a deep transformation of the very idea of religion,” is at odds with its insistence that, as the monumental tides of history rise and fall, the West has limited itself to embracing only one aspect of a concept that has always had a double edge! Stroumsa nearly gives the game away when he glosses the “radical semantic externalization” of religion as a sort of homecoming: “in the age of discoveries and the Reformation, religion came to refer mainly to a system of ritual practices. A turn can be detected to a new perception of religion as a public activity—a return, as it were, to the primary sense of the word in the ancient world” (29). One cannot help but notice that on this account the very idea of religion never really changes. It just shifts its weight back and forth every thousand years or so.
IV. Conclusion
I began this essay by suggesting that the uneasy relationship between making and finding in A New Science might shed some light on why so many scholars create a quizzical blend of invention-talk and discovery-talk when they set out to historicize the category of religion. It is time to make good on this promise. As it turns out, I think Stroumsa's curious decision to lash the fate of his book to The Order of Things provides the key.
Whatever one thinks about Foucault's tale of jagged discontinuities in the order of knowledge, it never wavers in its bid to write a history of science that discards the pure gaze of a transcendental subject. Another way of putting this is to say that Foucault never once confuses making with finding because the “archaeological” approach is designed to brush away any lingering intuitions about our direct access to the world. In The Archaeology of Knowledge, he summarizes the austere methodological principle that scaffolds this line of attack in these terms: “To substitute for the enigmatic treasure of ‘things’ anterior to discourse, the regular formation of objects that emerge only in discourse. To define these objects without reference to the ground, the foundation of things, but by relating them to the body of rules that enable them to form as objects of a discourse and thus constitute the conditions of their historical appearance.”Footnote 15 So construed, the history of knowledge begins where the Barthesian “tyranny of the referent” ends.
In The Order of Things, the only approach that was explicitly rejected by name was the phenomenological approach “which gives absolutely priority to the observing subject, which attributes a constituent role to an act, which places its own point of view at the origin of all historicity—which, in short, leads to a transcendental consciousness” (xiv). Despite the fact that Foucault-inspired “archaeologies” and “genealogies” have become run of the mill, it strikes me that the academic study of religion has stubbornly refused to let go of its pre-reflective confidence in knowing religious phenomena when it sees religious phenomena. Absolute priority, to borrow Foucault's turn of phrase, has been and continues to be given to the pure gaze of the scholar.
I believe that this is what encourages the dream of emptying the religion category of its traditional content and installing new ballast to right the ship. For example, it is what allows Barbara Holdrege to condemn the Eurocentric, Protestant preoccupations of religion and then suggest that we take our cues from Hinduism and Judaism, two traditions that “construct different categories and taxonomies that bring to light different sets of relationships, such as those between religion and culture, ethnic identity and religious adherence, observance and nonobservance.”Footnote 16 It is also what obliges Richard Cohen to recognize the historicity of the religion category and then observe: “The study of religion is less central to the modern academy, in part because we lack an adequate vocabulary through which to articulate religion's worldliness and therefore to represent it as vital, integral factor in the secular, profane sphere.”Footnote 17 And it is what compels Stroumsa to argue that the modern academic study of religion can trace its pedigree back to the seventeenth century, when a few scholars “learned to recognize, although in different ways and from different perspectives, the multiplicity of observable religions, past and present” (11).
When Foucault proposed that man had not existed prior to the nineteenth century, he anticipated what the likely objections would be—and then pressed on. Man, he writes, “is a quite recent creature which the demiurge of knowledge fabricated with its own hands less than two hundred years ago: but he has grown old so quickly that it has only been too easy to imagine that he had been waiting for thousands of years in the darkness for that moment of illumination in which he would finally be known” (308). Man was too near to us to be seen as the strange creature that he is. If the academic study of religion has a more difficult time letting go of religion than Man, it is understandable. After all, religion is twice as old and, perhaps, twice as dear. Nevertheless, until we come to see “the very idea of religion” as an object of knowledge that we have fabricated with our own hands—as an artifact that is made rather than found—all the history in the world will not save us from ourselves.
