History

EIGHT THEORIES OF RELIGION

SECOND EDITION

Daniel L. Pals

University of Miami

New York Oxford

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

2006

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Pals, Daniel L.

Eight theories of religion / by Daniel L. Pals. — 2nd ed.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-13: 0-19-530458-9 (hard : alk. paper)—ISBN-13: 0-19-516570-8 (pbk. : alk. paper)

ISBN 0-19-530458-6 (hard : alk. paper)—ISBN 0-19-516570-5 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Religion–Study and teaching–History. I. Pals, Daniel L. Eight theories of religion.

II. Title.

BL41.P36 2005

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Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

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To the memory of my father, Herbert H. Pals (1916–2004).

Filiis caritatem maiorem posset nullus pater habere.

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CONTENTS

Preface ix

Introduction 3

1. Animism and Magic 18

E. B. TYLOR AND J. G. FRAZER

2. Religion and Personality 53

SIGMUND FREUD

3. Society as Sacred 85

éMILE DURKHEIM

4. Religion as Alienation 118

KARL MARX

5. A Source of Social Action 149

MAX WEBER

6. The Reality of the Sacred 193

MIRCEA ELIADE

7. Society’s “Construct of the Heart” 229

E. E. EVANS-PRITCHARD

8. Religion as Cultural System 260

CLIFFORD GEERTZ

9. Conclusion 292

Index 325

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PREFACE

Over the years since it was first published, Seven Theories of Religion seems to have found a

serviceable niche on the shelf of books that discuss modern efforts to explain and understand

religion. Its original purpose was not just to acquaint nonspecialist readers with general patterns of

interpretation but to offer a sequence of intellectual portraits centered on theorists at work,

reviewing the kinds of evidence they adduce, tracing the forms of argument they advance, and

appraising, amid comparison, both the agendas and achievements they promise. The focus fell on

certain classic formulations—a sequence of theories that by merit and historical influence have

managed to chart the main paths of discussion over the last century and more. Judging by the

responses of most readers, that approach has proved helpful, especially to students and their

instructors in both college and university classrooms. Accordingly, at the editors’ invitation, I

agreed to revisit the original and offer certain improvements.

Though it (necessarily) carries a new title, this book forms a second edition of Seven Theories,

revised and amplified in ways meant to enhance its overall design. While reproducing the main

sequence of discussion in the original, the present work seeks to extend its reach by offering 1) a

revised introduction, 2) a new chapter on the work of German social theorist Max Weber, 3)

associated other revisions that bring Weber into the earlier analyses and comparisons, and 4) a

revised and enlarged conclusion that traces patterns of recent inquiry against the background of

these classic approaches. In addition, a few minor clarifications suggested by observant critical

readers have been included.

The addition of Max Weber, now the fifth in the new sequence of eight theorists, merits a brief note

of explication. For all his originality and historical importance, Weber was omitted from Seven

Theories, mainly because the aim of the book was to present classic theories of a pure, or ideal, type

(a rationale Weber himself certainly could have appreciated). Because of their

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power to provoke or promote debate, the accent fell on explanations advanced in support of a single

overriding thesis—as in Freud’s finding that all religion reduces to neurosis—rather than those that

rely on complex multidimensional constructs. The latter, of course, is the kind of approach that

Weber preeminently represents; hence he was excluded. Over time, however, more than a few

thoughtful readers have come to take a different view of this matter. Consistency, they contend,

ought not to come at the price of completeness. In a work specifically centered on theorists who

have virtually defined the field known as “theory of religion,” the absence of Weber is a void too

large to overlook. His pioneering labors in social theory, especially as it bears on religion, argue for

his birthright in any sequence of classic figures, whatever we may think of the proper fit between

his program and those of others on the list. On rethinking the matter, this argument now strikes me

as persuasive. So Weber has here been included, taking what I hope will be an instructive place

alongside his theoretical peers.

The original conclusion to Seven Theories offered a set of structured comparisons among the

theorists presented. That material has now also been revised to include Weber in the sequence. The

idea of enlarging the final chapter to trace recent developments in the theory of religion comes at

the suggestion of Executive Editor Robert Miller and Oxford’s readers. I have followed their advice

in the discussion that now opens the concluding chapter. It seeks to show how the themes addressed

by these classic interpreters have evolved into the corollary issues, variant formulations, and newly

framed questions that stand at the center of today’s discussion and debate. Finally, in the interest of

economy in the presentation of scholarly citations, a substantial number of endnotes in the first

edition have been deleted or abbreviated in those places where close scholarly verification is not

absolutely essential to the exposition.

It is perhaps needless to say that this edition, no less than the first, bears prints of assistance from

multiple hands. For more than two decades, I have profited from the cordial atmosphere of

dedication to both learning and teaching fostered by thoughtful colleagues in the Department of

Religious Studies at the University of Miami. For the last eight years, members of the department

have enjoyed the further benefit of wise, patient leadership provided by Professor Stephen Sapp, a

chair who knows instinctively how to promote the mission of his faculty and, deservedly, gets their

best efforts in response. In this collegial context, I must especially thank longtime colleague and

friend David Kling, who carefully read through all the new materials and improved them with his

customary blend of pertinent query, apposite clarification, and constructive criticism. My nephew,

Derek John Brouwer of Denver Theological Seminary, gave the manuscript a similarly close

reading. Both know already how helpful their efforts have been. A more general word

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of appreciation is also due to Robert Miller, whose skills as an editor include persistence, patience,

and a capacity to routinely offer good literary advice. I am most grateful to him—and to the entire

team of skilled professionals on staff at Oxford Univesity Press who have assisted at various phases

of the production process. That group surely includes more than those whom I have come to know

by name: Emily Voigt, Sarah Calabi, and Celeste Alexander.

On a personal level, my wife, Phyllis, and my daughter, Katharine, already know how crucial they

are to every joy in my life. Seven Theories was dedicated to them. With their warm approval, this

work is dedicated to the memory of my father—a man who answered lifelong hardship only with

quiet sacrifices for his three sons and a simple ethic of hard work that expected neither fair reward

nor fitting recognition. He is a treasure that cannot be lost because he cannot be forgotten.

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EIGHT THEORIES OF RELIGION

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Introduction

On a February day in the winter of 1870, a personable middle-aged German scholar rose to the

stage of London’s prestigious Royal Institution to deliver a public lecture. At the time, German

professors were famous for their deep learning, and this one was no exception, though as it

happened, he had also become very English. His name was Friedrich Max Müller. He had first

come to Britain as a young man destined for Oxford, where his plan was to study the ancient texts

of India’s Vedas, its books of sacred knowledge. He soon settled in, married a proper English wife,

and managed to acquire a position at the university. Müller was admired for his knowledge of

ancient Hinduism, but he also acquired a mastery of written English, which he applied with

admirable skill in popular writings on language and on mythology that appealed widely to curious

Victorian readers. On this occasion, however, he proposed a different subject: He wished to

promote something he called “the science of religion.”

Those words in that combination doubtless struck some in Müller’s audience as puzzling in the

extreme. After all, he was speaking at the end of a decade marked by furious debate over Charles

Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) and its startling theory of evolution by natural selection.

Thoughtful Victorians had heard so much of science pitted against religion that a science of religion

could only fall on the ears as a curious combination, to say the least. How could the age-old

certainties of faith ever mix with a program of study devoted to experiment, revision, and change?

How could these opposing systems, these two apparently mortal enemies, meet without one

destroying the other? These were understandable concerns, but Müller was of a different mind. He

was quite certain that the two could meet and that a truly scientific study of religion had much to

offer to both sides in that controversy. His lecture, the first in a series that was later published as an

Introduction to the Science of Religion (1873), was designed to prove just that point. He reminded

his

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listeners that the words of the poet Goethe on human language could also be applied to religion:

“He who knows one, knows none.”1 If that is so, then perhaps it was time indeed for a new and

objective look at this very old subject. Instead of following the theologians, who wanted only to

prove their own religion true and all others false, the time had come to take a less partisan approach,

seeking out those elements, patterns, and principles that could be found uniformly in the religions of

all times and places. Much could be gained by proceeding like any good scientist, gathering the

various facts—the customs, rituals, and beliefs—of religions throughout the world and then offering

theories that compare and account for them, just as a biologist or chemist might explain the

workings of nature.

Certainly not everyone, even among scholars, agreed that something of value could be gained from

the study of many religions. Back in Germany, Adolf von Harnack, the foremost Church historian

of the age, insisted that Christianity alone is what matters; other faiths do not. “Whoever does not

know this religion knows none,” he wrote in pointed rejection of Müller’s view, “and whoever

knows it and its history, knows all.”2 It was useless, he added with a certain disdain, to go to the

Indians, the Chinese, or even the Negroes or the Papuans. Christian civilization was the only one

destined to endure. Harnack was unusually blunt, but his view itself was not so unusual. There was

a fairly wide consensus among theologians and historians across Europe that Christian ideals and

values, which formed the spiritual center of the West, expressed the highest in human moral and

cultural achievement. To imagine that something significant could be learned from others was to

think inferiors can tutor their betters. Disagreement of this kind did not discourage Müller, however.

He was entirely confident that serious study would show how certain profound and shared spiritual

intuitions link the sages of distant India and China to the saints and martyrs of the Church.

Ancient Theories

Müller’s program may have been unwelcome to some at the time and new to others, but elements of

what he proposed in his lecture were in fact very old. Questions as to what religion is and why

different people practice it as they do doubtless reach back as far as the human race itself. The

earliest theories would have been framed when the first traveler ventured outside the local clan or

village and discovered that neighbors had other gods with different names. When on his travels the

ancient historian Herodotus (484–425 B.C.E.) tried to explain that the gods Amon and Horus,

whom he met in Egypt, were the equivalents of Zeus and Apollo in his native Greece, he was

actually offering

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at least the beginning of a general theory of religion. So was the writer Euhemerus (330–260

B.C.E.) when he claimed that the gods were simply outstanding personages from history who began

to be worshipped after their death. According to Cicero of Rome, the Stoic Chrysippus (280–206

B.C.E.) was a thoroughly systematic student of the customs and beliefs of as many tribes and races

as his travels led him to encounter. Some Stoic philosophers accounted for the gods as

personifications of the sky, the sea, or other natural forces. After viewing the facts of religion, they

and others sought, often quite creatively, to explain how it had come to be what it was.3

Judaism and Christianity

Thinkers such as these lived in the classical civilizations of ancient Greece and Rome, where many

divinities were worshipped, and the idea of comparing or connecting one god with another was a

natural habit of mind. Judaism and Christianity, however, took a very different view of things. To

Isaiah and other prophets of Israel, there was no such thing as a variety of gods and rituals, each

with a different and perhaps equal claim on our interest or devotion. There was only the one true

God, the Lord of the covenant, who had appeared to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and had revealed

the divine law to Moses on Mt. Sinai. Since this God alone was real and all others were mere

figments of the human imagination, there was very little about religion that needed either

comparison or explanation. The people of Israel were to trust in Yahweh because God had chosen

only them and had spoken to them directly; other nations worshipped idols, their eyes being

darkened by ignorance, wickedness, or both. Christianity, which arose out of later Judaism, took

over this perspective of Isaiah almost without change. For the apostles and theologians of the early

Church, God had put himself on clear display in the human person of Jesus the Christ. Those who

believed in him had found the truth; those who did not could only be regarded as victims of the

great deceiver Satan—souls destined to pay the bitter price of eternal suffering in Hell. As

Christianity spread across the ancient world and later to the peoples of Europe, this view came to

dominate Western civilization. There were occasional exceptions, of course, but the prevailing

attitude was expressed most clearly in the great struggle against Islam during the age of the

Crusades. Christians, the children of light, were commanded to struggle against the children of

darkness. The beauty and truth of God’s revelation explained the faith of Christendom; the

machinations of Satan explained the perversions of its enemies.4

For the better part of a thousand years after the Roman Empire had become Christian, this militant

perspective on religions outside the creed of the Church

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did not significantly change. But around the year 1500, as the epoch of world explorations and the

age of the Protestant Reformation arrived, the beginnings of a new outlook began to take shape. The

voyages of explorers, traders, missionaries, and adventurers to the New World and to the Orient

brought Christians into direct encounters with alien peoples who were neither Jews nor Muslims,

both of whose religions were readily dismissed (the first as a mere preface to Christianity, the

second as a perversion of it). Missionaries, traveling with those who explored and conquered, were

at the leading edge of the engagement. Their aim was to bring “heathen nations” to Christ and the

Church, and so they certainly did with many whom they converted, but that process brought some

surprises. When the Jesuit father Matteo Ricci (1552–1610) took residence at the court of the

emperor in China, the missionary very nearly became the convert. The Chinese, he discovered, had

a real civilization, with art, ethics, and literature. Their ways were rational, and they followed the

impressive moral wisdom of their own Moses, the ancient teacher Confucius. Another Jesuit,

Roberto di Nobili (1577–1656), had a similar experience in India. The spiritual wisdom of India

captured his imagination, and he studied the sacred books so intensively that he became known as

“the white Brahmin.” Still other missionaries, at work in the New World, discovered something like

a Supreme Being among the tribes of American “Indians.” As these reports filtered back to Europe,

it occurred to some in thoughtful circles that the condemnation of such peoples as disciples of the

Devil seemed inappropriate and misguided. China’s Confucians may not know Christ, but

somehow, without a Bible to guide them, they had produced a civilization of mild manners and high

morals. Had the apostles visited, they too would have admired it.

At the very same moment that these contacts were being made, the Christian civilization that Jesus

presumably had established found itself plunged into bloody and violent turmoil. Led by Martin

Luther in Germany and the lawyer John Calvin in Switzerland and France, the new Protestant

movements of Northern Europe challenged the power of the Church and rejected its interpretations

of Biblical truth. While the explorers traveled, their homelands often came ablaze with the fires of

persecution and war. Communities were split apart by ferocious quarrels over theology, first

between Catholics and Protestants and later among the scores and even hundreds of different

religious groups that began to appear in once-unified Christendom. Amid the storms of

ecclesiastical conflict and political struggle that gripped the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it is

not surprising that concerned believers on all sides grew ever less certain that they alone held God’s

final truth in their hands. The deadly, destructive wars of religion, which persisted for more than a

hundred years in some lands, led people to believe that the truth about religion

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cannot possibly be found in sects that were prepared to torture and execute opponents, confident

their work was God’s will. Surely, some said, the truth of religion must be found beyond the

quarrels of the churches, beyond the tortures of the stake and the rack. Surely, the faiths of Europe

could find a pure and common form, a more universal framework of belief and values.5

The Enlightenment and Natural Religion

It was this great quest, set against the bloody background of the previous era, that thinkers of the

eighteenth century, the Age of Enlightenment, embarked upon when they proposed the idea of a

pure and ancient “natural religion” shared by the entire human race. Natural religion formed the

basic creed of Deism, as it commonly came to be called. It enlisted the most articulate voices and

celebrated names of the age: philosophers such as John Toland and Matthew Tindal in Britain, the

American colonial statesmen Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin, brilliant men of letters such as

Denis Diderot and the great Voltaire in France as well as the dramatist Gotthold Lessing and

philosopher Immanuel Kant in Germany. Nearly all in this group endorsed the idea of a universal,

natural religion. It included the belief in a Creator God who made the world and then left it to its

own natural laws, a parallel set of moral laws to guide the conduct of humanity, and the promise of

an afterlife of rewards for good and punishments for evil. To the Deists this elegantly simple creed

was the faith of the very first human beings, the common philosophy of all races. The best hope of

humanity was to recover this original creed and to live by it in a universal brotherhood of all

peoples—Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Confucians, and all others—under their one Creator

God.

In addition to its commendable work in promoting tolerance, the Deist notion of an original natural

religion of humanity opened the door to a new way of explaining the many forms of religion in all

their conflicts and confusions. Whatever the different beliefs of the various Christian sects, the

rituals of America’s Indians, the ancestral rites of the Chinese, or the teachings of Hindu sages, all

could ultimately be traced back to the natural religion of the first human beings and then followed

forward as that wisdom was gradually transformed and dispersed into its modern variants. China

especially offered proof of this point. As trading ships from the Orient began to arrive regularly in

the 1700s, fascination attended all forms of Chinoiserie. Fabrics, spices, porcelains, teas, and

furnishings gave evidence of China’s civility, elegance, prosperity, and piety, all obviously acquired

without any help from the Bible. These graces, and the ethics of Confucius especially, exhibited the

virtues of natural religion.

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Modern Theories

There was, of course, another side to the Deist agenda. To praise natural religion was also to blame

revealed religion, which by the Deists’ estimate was little more than the twisted handiwork of

priests and theologians. By and large, the Christian Church was seen by Deists as filled with

retailers of ignorance and superstition, revelations and ceremonies, miracles and confessions,

sacraments and saints, and sacred rites and texts in languages none could understand. Natural

religion, on the other hand, was emphatically not a set of truths revealed directly by God to the

Church and withheld from the rest of humanity. True religion was natural and primeval—the one

universal faith of humanity long before it had been corrupted by churches and dogmas and clerics.

Because it was natural rather than supernatural, religion could also be explained rationally, just as

the laws of motion and gravitation had been shown by Newton the mathematician to be implanted

in the world as it came from the Creator’s hand.6

Deists prized rationality but showed little appreciation for the deep emotions that give life to

religion or for the enchantments of its rich history and its wealth of diverse cultural forms. That

posture deeply alienated those who saw traditional devotion as the very heart of religion. Devout

Catholics, fervent Protestants (called Pietists), and revivalists such as John Wesley protested the

Deist program by celebrating a religion of the heart, rather than a dry, rationalistic religion of the

head. Their appreciation of the emotions was shared by religious Romantic writers, scholars, and

poets who joined to it a deep appreciation of just what Deists despised—the glory of churches and

temples, the surpassing beauty of rituals and ceremonies, the power of sacraments and prayers, the

entire rich and colorful history of religious faith, especially (but not only) the Christian faith. The

historical forms and institutions of religion, they contended, are not enemies of the religious spirit;

they are its guardians and they bear its torch. The accents of this Romantic reaction are perhaps best

illustrated in the great French historical novelist Vicomte de Chateaubriand, whose book The

Genius of Christianity (1802) savors the beauty and history of Catholicism.

It is fair to say that both of these historical streams—the cold current of Enlightenment Deism and

the warm waters of religious Romanticism— converged in the mind of Max Müller and others

among his associates. As a thinker, Müller was a virtual Deist. He relied on the philosopher

Immanuel Kant, Germany’s voice of Enlightenment, who centered religion on the two cardinal

doctrines of Deism: a belief in God and “the moral law within.” As a personality, however, Müller

was a Romantic. His young life overlapped the later years of Chateaubriand, and though he was a

German Protestant rather

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than a French Catholic, he was just as deeply affected by the same mystical spirit and attuned to the

presence of the divine wherever it could be discerned, either in the beauty of nature or in the

spiritual strivings of humanity. Wherever in nature or history clues to the divine might appear, he

was prepared to find them.

This blend of contrasting perspectives—Deist and Romantic—furnished Müller and others like him

with both a motive and rationale for the study of all religions. They believed that it was possible to

find the root impulse, or cause, of religion everywhere, and they made use of methods that were

mainly historical. By sustained and diligent inquiry, they would reach far back in time to discover

the earliest religious ideas and practices of the human race; that accomplished, it was a natural next

step to trace their development onward and upward to the present day. Müller and his associates

believed not just that they could do such a thing but that in their time it could be done better than

the Deists ever imagined, largely because of great advances made in the study of archaeology,

history, language, mythology, and the newfound disciplines of ethnology and anthropology.7 In

addition to his knowledge of the Vedas and mythology, Müller was himself one of Europe’s

foremost names in the field of comparative philology, or linguistics; the Hindu Vedas that he edited

were then thought to be the oldest religious documents of the human race. Archaeologists in the

early years of the nineteenth century had made significant discoveries about earlier stages of human

civilization, historians had pioneered new critical methods for studying ancient texts, students of

folklore were gathering information on the customs and tales of Europe’s peasants, and the first

anthropologists were beginning to draw on reports from those who had observed societies of

apparently primitive people still surviving in the modern world. In addition, there was now the very

successful model of the natural sciences to imitate. Instead of just guessing about the origins and

development of religion or naively assuming with some Deists that to know the writings of

Confucius was to know all of Chinese religion, inquirers could now systematically assemble facts—

rituals, beliefs, customs —from a wide sample of the world’s religions. With these in hand and

properly classified, they could infer the general principles—the scientific “laws of development”—

that would explain how such things arose and what purposes they served.

By the middle decades of the 1800s, then, a small circle mainly of French, German, and British

scholars felt that both the methods and materials were on hand to leave behind unfounded

pronouncements about the beginnings of religion and formulate instead systematic theories of its

origin that could claim the authority of science. Not only in Müller’s lectures but in other writings

of the time as well, we can notice an optimism, an energy, and a confidence

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about the research that was being undertaken. Their aim was not just to offer another guess or a set

of speculations but to frame theories based on evidence. Like their counterparts in the physical

sciences, students of religion would work from a solid foundation of facts and formulate

generalizations that could be carefully tested, revised, and improved. To all appearances, this

scientific method had the further advantage that it could be applied independently of one’s personal

religious commitments. Müller was a deeply devout, almost sentimental Christian who believed that

the truth of his faith had nothing to fear from science and would in fact shine brighter if it were

explained in the context of other religions. As we shall soon see, E. B. Tylor, Müller’s

contemporary and critic, took an opposite view, feeling that his scientific inquiry gave support to

his personal stance of agnostic religious skepticism. Both, however, believed that a theory of

religion could be developed from a common ground of objective facts that would provide all

theories with both evidentiary support and a final test of truth. Both also believed that they could

reach theories that were comprehensive and general in nature. Such was the confidence they had in

both their science and the body of facts at their disposal that they felt no hesitation in claiming they

could explain the entire phenomenon of religion—not just this ritual or that belief, not just religion

in one place or time, but the worldwide story of its origin, development, and diversity. In stating

this bold ambition, they laid out the issues that the major theorists of the twentieth century (those

whose names figure most prominently in this book) would later need to address.8

When we look back on it from the present, this hope of forming a single theory of all religions

astonishes us by its vaulting ambition. Thoughtful observers today are inclined to be far more

modest. Impressive books have been written just to explain one belief of one religion or to compare

a single feature—a specific custom or ritual—of one religion with something similar in another.

Nonetheless, the hope of one day discovering some broad pattern or general principle that explains

all (or even most) religious behavior has not been given up easily. As will be clear in some of the

chapters to come, several important theorists of the twentieth century have been inspired by this

very same ideal, and for understandable reasons. Physicists have not given up on Einstein’s unified

field theory even though finding it has proved far more difficult than any of them imagined. In the

same way, religionists, despite the difficulties, have also been inspired by the scientific ideal of a

general theory that can draw many different phenomena into one coherent, widely illuminating

pattern. Moreover, explanations need not be valid to be of value. In religion, as in other fields of

inquiry, a suggestive and original theory can, even in failure, stimulate new inquiry or reformulate

problems in such a way as to promote fruitful new understandings. Thus, even if most of what they

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say were found to be in error, the theorists who appear in these pages would still deserve our time

and attention because their ideas and interpretations often filter well beyond the sphere of religion

to affect our literature, philosophy, history, politics, art, psychology, and indeed almost every realm

of modern culture.

It is interesting in this connection to notice how well hidden are the origins and first advocates of

ideas now regarded as belonging to the stock of common knowledge. How many people who

casually refer to religion as a superstitious belief in spirits realize that they are essentially repeating

E. B. Tylor’s famous theory of animism as explained in Primitive Culture, a work now over a

hundred years old? Would they today recognize the name of either the author or his once-revered

book? Who among those who argue that science replaces religion can recall the fame of James

Frazer at the turn of the twentieth century, when he placed that thesis at the center of his

monumental Golden Bough? How many general readers with a curiosity about religion would

recognize the unusual name and provocative theory of Mircea Eliade, even though his influence on

the study of religion in America over the last four decades has been quite remarkably widespread?

How many know the role that anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard’s work has played in recent

philosophical debates over rationality and relativism? How readily can people who conveniently

refer to the Protestant work ethic in everyday conversation identify the German sociologist Max

Weber, who first defined it? The views associated with the great radical thinkers of our time,

especially Marx and Freud, tend to be better known, of course, but all too often in ways that are

vague, fragmentary, or distorted. In consequence, a great deal of current debate about such theories

often goes on without a very clear and precise grasp of the assumptions, evidence, and logic to be

found in them. One service this discussion can render is to help readers relatively new to this

subject avoid making just this mistake.

Eight Theories

The following chapters consider eight of the most important theories of religion that have been put

forward since the idea of a scientific approach to religion first caught the imagination of serious

scholars in the nineteenth century. In each case, the theory is presented first by discussing the life

and background of its major spokesman, then by treating its key ideas as presented in certain central

texts, and finally by noticing its distinctive features in comparison with other theories and recording

the main objections raised by its critics.

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Principle of Selection

Out of a number of theories that might have been chosen for this purpose, this book selects eight

that have exercised a shaping influence not only on religion but on the whole intellectual culture of

the twentieth century. The representative spokesmen selected for each are 1) E. B. Tylor and James

Frazer, 2) Sigmund Freud, 3) Emile Durkheim, 4) Karl Marx, 5) Max Weber, 6) Mircea Eliade, 7)

E. E. Evans-Pritchard, and 8) Clifford Geertz. Knowledgeable observers will notice at once that

several highly regarded names, including the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung and even Max Müller

himself, fall outside this group. Omissions as large as these are not easy to justify; indeed, another

author might well have chosen differently. But the choices do have a rationale. Important as he was

in promoting the idea of a science of religion, Max Müller has been left aside because his own

theory, which found religion to originate in nature worship, was for the most part rejected in his

own time and had only limited influence thereafter. Again, the influential French philosopher

Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, who is noticed briefly in chapter six, is a theorist who some would say deserves

admission here, but Lévy-Bruhl too is a complex figure whose views changed significantly over

time; moreover, since the major issues he took up were also considered by E. E. Evans-Pritchard,

who had the further benefit of grounding his views in actual fieldwork among tribal peoples, the

latter seems for our purposes the better of the two to select. The same is true to a degree in the case

of Carl Jung. It is well known that Jung took a subtle, sympathetic, and textured approach to

religion and that he made extensive use of religious materials in his psychological research. For just

that reason, however, he offers a somewhat less rigorously consistent example of a psychologically

functional interpretation than we find in Freud. Jung’s influence on the field, though great, was less

extensive, so Freud seems the better choice. In the end, of course, any book must have limits, and

some choices will always appear to some readers more arbitrary than astute. The important thing is

to grasp that these classic theorists offer models of how some—but certainly not all—of the most

influential interpretations of religion have made their mark over the last century.

Definition of Terms

Before we begin, some comment may be needed on the two terms that are most basic to the

discussions that follow: “religion” and “theory.” Most people, even if they are coming to this

subject for the first time, have some idea of what the term “religion” means. They are likely to think

of belief in a God or gods, in supernatural spirits, or in an afterlife. Or they are likely

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to name one of the great world religions, such as Hinduism, Christianity, Buddhism, Judaism, or

Islam. They also probably have some general idea of what the term “theory” means. Having heard

the term most often in the context of science, they think of it as a kind of explanation—an attempt

to account for something that is not at first understood, usually by offering an answer to the

common question “Why?” Most of us readily admit that we do not understand the theory of

relativity, but we do recognize that it somehow accounts for the connection between space and time

in a way that no one had imagined before. At the start of things, there is no need for us to go beyond

everyday notions such as these. Whatever their limitations, ordinary understandings of general

terms such as “religion” and “theory” are indispensable for a book such as this—not only as starting

points but as guideposts while we proceed. At the same time, we should also notice that few of the

theorists we shall consider are content to stay with these intuitions of common sense once they have

seriously worked their way into the issues.

When discussing the term “religion,” some observers find that “belief in a God or gods” is far too

specific, far too theological a definition to use for certain people such as Buddhists, who worship no

God, or for specific groups such as Jews, who think of their faith chiefly as a matter of activities

rather than ideas. To accommodate such instances, which clearly belong to the sphere of religion, a

theorist might follow the path chosen by Durkheim and Eliade, who prefer a broad concept like “the

sacred” as the defining essential of religion. They note that the Buddhist who does not believe in

God does, after all, have a sense of the sacred. So they find this abstract term more suitable when

one is considering the entire span and story of religion in the world rather than traditions of just one

place or time or type. Again, some theorists strongly prefer substantive definitions, which closely

resemble the commonsense approach. They define religion in terms of the beliefs or the ideas that

religious people commit to and find important. Other theorists think this approach just too

restrictive and offer instead a more functional definition. They leave the content or the ideas of

religion off to the side and define it solely in terms of how it operates in human life. They want to

know what a religion does for an individual person psychologically or for a group socially. Less

concerned with the actual content of people’s beliefs or practices, they are inclined to describe

religion, whatever its specific content, as that which brings a sense of comfort or well-being to an

individual or provides support for a group. As we proceed, it will be wise to keep in mind that the

matter of defining religion is closely linked to the matter of explaining it and that the matter of

definitions is considerably more difficult than common sense at first look leads us to believe.

The same can be said for the term “theory.” At first glance, the idea of an explanation of religion is

not hard to understand, but again, the more deeply

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one moves into the actual business of explaining, the more complex it seems to become. Two brief

illustrations can demonstrate the problem. First, a theorist who proposes to explain religion by

showing its “origin” can mean by this word any of several things: its prehistorical origin—how, at

the dawn of history, the first human beings acquired a religion; its psychological or social origin—

how, at all times in human history, it arises in response to certain group or individual needs; its

intellectual origin—how, at one time or all times, certain perceived truths about the world have led

people to believe certain religious claims; or its historical origin—how, at a specific time and place

in the past, a certain prophetic personality or a special sequence of events has created a religion and

given it a distinctive character or shape. Both in describing and in evaluating a theory, it is

important to know what kind of origin of religion it is seeking and what connection one kind of

origin may have with the other kinds.

The second problem has already been alluded to: Theories of religion, no less than definitions, may

also be either substantive or functional in character. Theorists who advocate substantive approaches

tend to explain religion intellectually in terms of the ideas that guide and inspire people. They stress

human intention, emotions, and agency. People are religious, they say, because certain ideas strike

them as true and valuable and therefore ought to be followed in the framing of their life. Theorists

who stress this role of human thought and feeling are sometimes described as interpretive rather

than explanatory in their approach. Religions, they contend, are adopted by persons and are about

things that have meaning to human beings; accordingly, interpretations, which take account of

human intent, best explain religion, which after all is the product of human thoughts and purposes.

Interpretive theorists tend to reject “explanations” because they are about things, not persons. They

appeal only to impersonal processes rather than to humanly meaningful purposes. Functional

theorists, by contrast, strongly disagree. They think that though explanations are of course good for

things—for physical objects and natural processes—they are just as useful in understanding people.

Functional theorists strive to look beneath or behind the conscious thoughts of religious people to

find something deeper and hidden. They routinely contend that certain underlying social structures

or unnoticed psychological pressures are the real cause of religious behavior. Whether they are

individual, social, or even biological, these compelling forces—and not the ideas that religious

people themselves imagine to be governing their actions—form the real sources of religion

wherever we find it. We will be able to trace these differences in some detail later on in our

discussion.9 For the moment, however, they can serve as fair warning that with theories of religion,

no less than with definitions, the seemingly simple often masks the deceptively complex.

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In the chapters that follow, we will need to attend to the definitions as well as the explanations

advanced by our theorists, taking notice of the links that in each case connect the one with the other.

Along the way, it should become apparent how and why each theorist is moved to consider both the

obvious and the unnoticed, the surface and the substrate, in the effort to understand religion. It

should also be clear that these theories have been placed in a sequence, both chronological and

conceptual, that is meant to show a pattern. After starting with the classic intellectualist theories of

Tylor and Frazer, we move next to explanatory approaches, tracing the lines of psychological,

social, and economic functionalism through Freud, Durkheim, and Marx, respectively. We then turn

to Weber, who marks a qualified dissent, and Eliade, who strikes a more assertive protest, against

the more extreme form of the explanatory approach, usually called “reductionism.” We finish with

the more recent theories of Evans-Pritchard and Geertz, both of which may be seen as attempts to

overcome the interpretive-explanatory divide. The conclusion will offer a brief review of what has

happened among theorists in the interval since these classic theories came into currency, and it will

ask some final comparative and analytical questions.

Notes

1. F. Max Müller, Lectures on the Science of Religion (New York: Charles Scribner and Company,

1872), p. 11. This was also published under the title Introduction to the Science of Religion. On

Müller’s interesting life, see Nirad Chaudhuri, Scholar Extraordinary: The Life of Professor the Rt.

Hon. Friedrich Max Müller (London: Chatto & Windus, 1974).

2. Cited in Helwig Schmidt-Glintzer, “The Economic Ethics of the World Religions,” in Hartmut

Lehman and Guenther Roth, Weber’s Protestant Ethic: Origins, Evidence, Contexts (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 350.

3. On these ancient precursors of the modern theory of religion, see Eric J. Sharpe, Comparative

Religion: A History (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1975), pp. 1–7.

4. Sharpe, Comparative Religion, pp. 7–13.

5. On the connection between the wars of religion in Europe and the effort to explain religion

comparatively, without theological judgments, see J. Samuel Preus, Explaining Religion: Criticism

and Theory from Bodin to Freud (New Haven, CN: Yale University Press, 1987), pp. 3–20.

6. On early Deism and later skepticism in the Age of Enlightenment, see the discussions of Herbert

of Cherbury and David Hume in Preus, Explaining Religion, pp. 23–39, 84–103.

7. On the rise of anthropology in the mid-Victorian years, see (among others) Richard M. Dorson,

The British Folklorists: A History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968); Paul Bohannan,

Social Anthropology (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1969), pp. 311–15; J. W. Burrow,

Evolution and Society (Cambridge: Cambridge

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University Press, 1970); and George W. Stocking, Jr., Victorian Anthropology (New York: Free

Press, 1987).

8. On these early efforts to develop theories of religion with the help of anthropological and other

research, see Brian Morris, Anthropological Studies of Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1987), pp. 91–105.

9. The most important and provocative analyses of this division are to be found in two collections of

trenchant essays by Robert A. Segal: Religion and the Social Sciences: Essays on the Confrontation

(Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1989) and Explaining and Interpreting Religion: Essays on the Issue (New

York: Peter Lang Publishing, 1992).

Suggestions for Further Reading

Chaudhuri, Nirad C. Scholar Extraordinary: The Life of Professor the Rt. Hon. Friedrich Max

Müller. London: Chatto & Windus, 1974. A detailed study of the life and some consideration of the

theories of Friedrich Max Müller.

Eliade, Mircea, Editor in Chief. The Macmillan Encyclopedia of Religion. New York: Macmillan,

1987. At present the most useful and comprehensive Englishlanguage reference work on religion.

Evans-Pritchard, E. E. Theories of Primitive Religion. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1965. A

brief and penetrating analysis of certain classic approaches to the explanation of religion.

Fitzgerald, Timothy. The Ideology of Religious Studies. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

A controversial critique of the study of religion on the grounds that the term “religion” is impossible

to define, so explanations that appeal to the concept are neither meaningful nor useful.

Harrison, Peter. “Religion” and the Religions in the English Enlightenment. Cambridge, England:

Cambridge University Press, 1990. An informative historical study which shows how the thinkers

and ideas of the Enlightenment in England contributed to the rise of the scientific study of religion.

Kunin, Seth. Religion: The Modern Theories. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press,

2003. An informative, concise survey of most efforts to explain religion carried out over the last

century. Especially helpful short discussions of theories and theorists not mentioned in the present

work.

Masuzawa, Tomoko. In Search of Dreamtime: The Quest for the Origin of Religion. Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 1993. An original but difficult book that examines the presuppositions

behind the keen interest of earlier, evolutionary theorists in the historical origin of religion.

McCutcheon, Russell T. Manufacturing Religion: The Discourse on Sui Generis Religion and the

Politics of Nostalgia. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. A provocative critique of the

recent approaches to the study of religion, including that of this book, and similar research pursued

in Religious Studies departments of American universities.

Morris, Brian. Anthropological Studies of Religion. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University

Press, 1987. A comprehensive survey of scientific theories of religion in the nineteenth and

twentieth centuries.

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Preus, J. Samuel. Explaining Religion: Criticism and Theory from Bodin to Freud. New Haven:

Yale University Press, 1987. A study much-praised by current theorists that follows the history of

thinking about religion over most of the last three centuries.

Segal, Robert A. Religion and the Social Sciences: Essays on the Confrontation. Brown Studies in

Religion, no. 8. Atlanta, Georgia: Scholars Press, 1989. Trenchant essays by a keenly analytical

recent theorist who sees an inescapable conflict between the theories of those who personally

sympathize with religion and the critical explanatory methods of the social sciences.

Sharpe, Eric J. Comparative Religion: A History. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1975. A

wide-ranging overview of theories and theorists of religion. Helpful both as an introduction to the

field and for short accounts of the lives and thought of leading figures in the field.

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1

Animism and Magic:

E. B. Tylor and J. G. Frazer

Are the forces which govern the world conscious and personal, or

unconscious and impersonal? Religion, as a conciliation of the

superhuman powers, assumes the former. … [I]t stands in fundamental

antagonism to magic as well as to science [which hold that] the course

of nature is determined, not by the passions or caprice of personal

beings, but by the operation of immutable laws acting mechanically.

James Frazer, The Golden Bough1

Our survey begins with not one but two theorists whose writings are related and whose ideas closely

resemble each other. The first is Edward Burnett Tylor (1832–1917), a self-educated Englishman

who never attended a university but, through his travels and independent study, arrived at the theory

of animism, which in his view held the key to the origin of religion. The second is James George

Frazer (1854–1941), a shy, scholarly Scotsman who, unlike Tylor, spent virtually all of his life in a

book-lined apartment at Cambridge University. Frazer is often associated with what is sometimes

called the “magic” theory of religion, rather than with Tylor’s animism, but in fact he was a disciple

of Tylor, who readily took over his mentor’s main ideas and methods while adding certain new

touches of his own. As we shall see in our discussion, the two theories are so closely related that we

can more helpfully consider them as differing versions—an earlier and later form—of the same

general point of view. Tylor is perhaps the more original thinker, while Frazer enjoys the greater

fame and influence.

E. B. Tylor

E. B. Tylor’s first interest was not religion but the study of human culture, or social organization.

Some, in fact, consider him the founder of cultural,

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or social, anthropology as that science is now practiced in Britain and North America. He was born

in 1832 to a family of prosperous Quakers who owned a London brass factory.2 The Quakers

originally were an extreme, almost fanatical group of English Protestants who dressed in plain,

unfashionable clothes and lived by the inspiration of a personal “inner light.” By the 1800s,

however, most had discarded their unusual dress, earned social respect, and moved all the way over

to very liberal, even nonreligious views. This perspective is clearly present in Tylor’s writings,

which show throughout a strong distaste for all forms of traditional Christian faith and practice,

especially Roman Catholicism.

Because both of Tylor’s parents died when he was a young man, he began preparations to help in

management of the family business, only to discover his own health failing when he showed signs

of developing tuberculosis. Advised to spend time in a warmer climate, he chose travel to Central

America and left home in 1855, at the young age of twenty-three. This American experience proved

decisive in his life, for it kindled his keen interest in the study of unfamiliar cultures. As he traveled,

he took careful notes on the customs and beliefs of the people he saw, publishing the results of his

work on his return to England in a book entitled Anahuac: Or Mexico and the Mexicans, Ancient

and Modern (1861). On his journeys, Tylor also met a fellow Quaker, the archaeologist Henry

Christy, who sparked his enthusiasm as well for prehistoric studies. Though he did not travel again,

Tylor began to study the customs and beliefs of all peoples who lived in “primitive” conditions,

whether from prehistoric ages (insofar as they could be known from archaeological finds) or from

tribal communities of the present day. Soon he published a second book, Researches into the Early

History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization (1865). And six years later, after much

more work on these subjects, he published Primitive Culture (1871), a large twovolume study that

became the masterwork of his career and a landmark in the study of human civilization. This

important book not only appealed to a wide audience of general readers but also cast a spell over a

number of brilliant younger men who were to become Tylor’s enthusiastic disciples. Through their

further outstanding work, the systematic study of folklore and the newly developing science of

anthropology made great strides in the later years of the nineteenth century.3 Though it was not the

only such book, Primitive Culture served as a virtual bible for all those who were inspired by what

some called “Mr. Tylor’s science.”

Tylor too continued to work, and in 1884 was appointed by Oxford University to be its first reader

in the new field of anthropology. Later on he became its first professor in the discipline, enjoying a

long career that extended all the way to World War I. Even so, none of his later writing matched the

importance

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of Primitive Culture. Since this influential book presents his theory of animism in definitive form, it

is the natural centerpiece for our examination of Tylor’s

views.

Primitive Culture

BACKGROUND

The significance of Tylor’s work is best appreciated within its historical and religious context.

Primitive Culture was published in Victorian Britain at a time when thoughtfully religious people

were wrestling with more than a few disturbing challenges to their faith. Since the early years of the

century, a number of philosophers, historians, and naturalists in the field of geology found

themselves drawn to the idea of very long-term development both in nature and human society. To

some, the earth and human life were beginning to look far older than the mere 6000 years that

theologians had assigned to them from their readings in the biblical book of Genesis. The young

Tylor was well acquainted with these discussions and was strongly disposed to think in similar

terms.4 Then, in 1859, Charles Darwin published his famous Origin of Species, perhaps the most

important single book in science or any other field during the entire nineteenth century. The theory

of evolution by natural selection that he presented struck many as shockingly contrary to the

scriptures but irresistibly persuasive nonetheless. It was followed in 1871 by The Descent of Man, a

work just as controversial because of its startling thesis about the animal origins of the human race.

After the Origin the controversy over “evolution” was on almost everyone’s lips, and the idea of

development took an even stronger hold on Tylor’s thought. Moreover, while these disputes raged,

other thinkers were raising further troublesome questions about some of the most basic elements of

Christian religious belief, including the historical accuracy of the Bible, the reality of miracles, and

the divinity of Jesus Christ. Thus, when Primitive Culture appeared, with its new theory on the

origin of all religious belief systems including the Christian one, it seemed to send yet another

tremor of doubt through an already unsettled populace.

Tylor also drew upon new trends in research. He placed a pioneering emphasis on “ethnography”

and “ethnology.” These were the labels he and his associates gave to a distinctive new kind of

study: the description (ethnography: from the Greek grapho, “to write”) and scientific analysis

(ethnology: from the Greek logos, “study”), of an individual society, culture, or racial group (from

the Greek ethnos, a “nation” or “people”) in all of its many component parts. They also used the

term “anthropology,” the scientific study of mankind (from the Greek “anthropos, “man”). In

addition, as a

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personally nonreligious man, Tylor refused to settle any question by an appeal to the divine

authority of the church or the Bible.

Prior to Tylor’s day and still during much of his career, people of traditional views insisted that the

origin of the Christian religion, at least, had to be understood as something miraculous in character,

primarily because it had been revealed as such by God in the scriptures and affirmed in church

traditions. Over against this orthodox view, Christian scholars of liberal inclinations pursued a more

naturalistic understanding of things, but still in a manner quite supportive of traditional religious

beliefs. They were led by Friedrich Max Müller, the learned and eloquent German whom we met in

our opening pages.

Müller and Tylor shared the view that appeals to the supernatural should be left out of their

discussions, but they disagreed strongly on the value of Tylor’s ethnological research. Müller felt

that the key to religion, myth, and other aspects of culture lay in language. He and other students of

comparative philology (the forerunner of today’s linguistics) had shown that the forms of speech in

India and most of Europe belonged to a group of languages that originated with a single ancient

people known as Aryans.5 By comparing word parallels across these languages, they tried to show

that the thought patterns of all these “Indo-European” Aryans were largely the same, and that, in

this large portion of the human race, religion began when people reacted to the great and powerful

workings of nature. In awesome natural processes like the sunrise and sunset, these ancient Aryans

experienced a dim “perception of the infinite,” the sense of a single divinity behind the world.

Unfortunately, when they expressed this feeling in their prayers and poems, their speech betrayed

them. They personified things. The Greeks, for example, belong to the Aryan family; for them the

word “Apollo” once simply meant “sun” and “Daphne,” the “dawn.” Over time these simple

original meanings came to be forgotten; at the same time, because the words were nouns with either

masculine or feminine gender and because they were used with verbs expressing activity, the names

for these natural objects came gradually to suggest personal beings. As Müller put it in a clever

wordplay of his own, the nomina (Latin for “names”) became numina (Latin for “gods”). Instead of

recalling that every day the dawn fades as the sun rises, people began to tell fanciful tales of the

goddess Daphne dying in the arms of the god Apollo. Through this strange process, which Müller

called a “disease of language,” words meant to describe nature and hint at the infinite power behind

it degenerated into silly stories of many different gods, along with their misdeeds and often comical

misadventures. Instead of framing a pure, natural religion drawn from an inspired and beautiful

perception of the infinite, people succumbed to the absurd stories of mythology.

Tylor, who had little training in languages, thought a few of Müller’s ideas made sense and even

incorporated them into his own. But he strongly

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disagreed with Müller’s method of building a theory almost entirely on little more than language

habits and word derivations. One needed much more than mere verbal misunderstandings of events

like the sunrise to explain the beginnings of the complex systems of belief and ritual that go under

the name of religion—or even the tales of mythology, for that matter. One purpose of Primitive

Culture, accordingly, was to present Tylor’s decidedly different approach. Even without knowing

the language, he felt, it was far better to study a given culture in all of its component parts—to

explore the actual deeds, habits, ideas, and customs that language describes—than to make far-

fetched guesses based only on the analogies and origins of certain words. Ethnology was clearly

better than etymology.

AIMS AND ASSUMPTIONS

It was against this backdrop—of evolutionary ideas at odds with the Bible and ethnologists opposed

to philology—that Tylor introduced his book, announcing it in quite grand fashion as an attempt to

pursue a new “science of culture.” The proper subject of such an inquiry, he claimed, is not just

language, but the whole network of elements that go into the making of what is commonly called

human civilization. Ethnology assumes that any organized community or culture must be

understood as a whole—as a complex system made up of knowledge and beliefs, of art and morals,

tools and technology, language, laws, customs, legends, myths, and other components, all of which

fit themselves into a singular whole. Ethnology further requires that these complex systems be

explored scientifically. It tries to find patterns, or laws, of human culture and expects these laws to

be “as definite as those which govern the motion of waves” and “the growth of plants and

animals.”6 Like the chemist or biologist, the ethnologist gathers facts, classifies and compares them,

and searches for underlying principles to explain what has been found. Tylor was convinced,

moreover, that when this work is properly done, and when the whole span of the human past is

placed under observation, two great laws of culture come clearly into view. They are (1) the

principle of psychic unity, or uniformity, within the human race and (2) the pattern of intellectual

evolution, or improvement, over time.

With regard to the psychic unity of the race, Tylor maintained that throughout the world many

things done or said by human beings at different times and places quite obviously resemble each

other. Though it may be true that some of these likenesses have come from “diffusion”—from one

people managing to teach another its good ideas—it is more often the case that different people

discover the same ideas and invent the same customs quite independently. In other words, the

similarities are not coincidental; they

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demonstrate the fundamental uniformity of the human mind. Unlike the “racialists” of his day, who

saw fixed and unalterable differences separating various groups within the human race, Tylor and

his associates contended that all human beings are in essence the same, especially with regard to

their basic mental capacity. When in different cultures we observe very similar things, they may be

presumed to be products of a single, universal rationality. With respect to logic—that is, the

capacity to follow certain formal and necessary procedures of reasoning—humans of all places and

times are the same. For Tylor, as one observer has put it, “all the world is a single country.”7 But if

this is true (and here the second principle plays its role), then whenever variations do occur, they

cannot be evidence of a difference in kind, only of a difference in degree, or a change in the level of

development. When two societies are seen to diverge, it is because one must be higher and the other

lower on the scale of cultural evolution. Tylor thought evidence of these grades of development

could be found everywhere. Because in all cultures each generation learns from the last, he believed

he could trace through human history a long pattern of social and intellectual improvement, from

the first savages, who hunted and gathered their food, through the cultures of the ancient world and

the Middle Ages, which were based on farming, up to the modern era of trade, science, and

industry. In history, each generation improves upon the last by standing on its shoulders and starting

where the earlier has left off. In brief, Tylor believed firmly that the story of civilization told the tale

of “the ascent of man.”

THE DOCTRINE OF “SURVIVALS”

With his assumptions in place, Tylor proceeds to the evidence. We cannot speak of progress, he

says, without noticing in some cultures certain things that do not look progressive at all. If a London

physician prescribes surgery for an ailment while a doctor in a rural village advises bloodletting, we

can hardly say that all of modern English medicine is progressive. We must account also for what is

backward. Tylor chooses to do so by outlining his muchdiscussed “doctrine of survivals.”8 He notes

that not all cultures and not all things in any one culture evolve at the same pace. Some practices,

proper at a given time, linger long after the march of progress has passed them by. Among these are

curious pastimes, quaint customs, folklore, folk medicine, and assorted superstitions associated with

almost every conceivable sphere of human endeavor. For example, while no serious modern hunter

would still use a bow and arrow to kill game, the skills of archery are still with us; now a sport or

hobby, archery “survives” from a bygone age when gathering food was the central task of life.

Again, nothing is more common than for people

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everywhere to give a blessing after a sneeze; it seems trivial. Yet this was once a serious gesture,

associated with the belief that at that very moment a spirit, or demon, had come out of the body.

Today the blessing survives, but as a meaningless custom whose original intent has been long

forgotten. In many countries, people urge, strangely, that one should never try to save a drowning

person. Though to a modern view such advice may seem cruel and selfish, it was in earlier cultures

perfectly rational, for it was everywhere held that the river or sea, deprived of its almost captured

victim, would take revenge on the very person who made the rescue! Tylor observes that the record

of human history is filled with superstitions such as these, which perfectly illustrate the fact that

while the stream of social evolution is real and its current is strong, a trail of cultural “leftovers”

always floats in its wake.

If the principle of evolution shows why survivals exist, then it is the companion principle of

uniformity, says Tylor, which enables us to understand and explain them. Since—regardless of race,

language, or nationality—all human beings reason the same, we can always enter the minds of

people in other cultures, even though the level of their knowledge may have been very different

from our own. Modern primitives, like ancient peoples, know less than we do and fail to test their

opinions sufficiently, but Tylor is certain they still think with the same mental mechanism as ours.

So even amid great differences, the uniformity of mind unites the human race.

ASPECTS OF HUMAN CULTURE

For Tylor the connection between basic rational thinking and social evolution is apparent in all

aspects of a culture if we only take time to look at them closely enough. He furnishes as a prime

example the use of magic, which is common everywhere among primitive peoples. Magic is based

upon the association of ideas, a tendency which “lies at the very foundation of human reason.”9 If

somehow in thought people can connect one idea with another, then their logic moves them to

conclude that the same connection must also exist in reality. Primitive people believe that, even at a

distance, they can hurt or heal others just by acting on a fingernail, a lock of hair, a piece of

clothing, or anything else that has been in contact with their persons. Or they think that a symbolic

resemblance matters. Some tribal peoples imagine that because certain diseases tint the skin yellow

and because gold is of the same color, jaundice in the body can be cured with a golden ring. Others

who practice primitive agriculture have been known to torture human victims brutally in the belief

that their tears of pain will bring showers of rain to the fields. To us such actions may seem stupid

or cruel; to believers in magic, they are rational efforts to influence the world.

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Tylor finds the same pattern of rationality in two of humanity’s most basic and significant

accomplishments: the development of language and discovery of mathematics. In each case, the

process starts very simply, with single words that mimic the sounds of nature and with counting

systems based on fingers and toes. Then, through the centuries, these concepts are slowly built up to

produce the very complicated systems of speech and number that today we master even in

childhood and apply with ease in everyday affairs. Over the long span of history, Tylor explains,

this process has required countless trials and ended in many errors, but through them all the line of

progress makes itself visible. Even mythology, that storehouse of seemingly irrational ideas and

often comical stories, is in fact governed by a similar pattern of rational thinking. Myths arise from,

among other things, the natural tendency to “clothe every idea in a concrete shape, and whether

created by primitives of the remote past or those of modern times, they tend to follow orderly laws

of development.”10 Myths originate in the logical association of ideas. They account for the facts of

nature and life with the aid of analogies and comparisons, as when the Samoans recall the ancient

battle of the plantains and bananas to explain why the winners now grow upright while the losers

hang down their heads. In the same vein, a myth may connect suitable imaginary events to the lives

of legendary or historical figures; it may grow logically out of a play on words; or it may try,

through stories, to teach a moral lesson. In some cases— and here Tylor includes an idea of

Müller’s—myths arise under the influence of language, which has gender, and out of the natural

inclination to make analogies between human activities and processes in nature. If the noise of a

storm sounds like an angry human outburst and rainfall suggests tears of sorrow, it is easy to see

how, in myth, the great forces of the natural world lend themselves routinely to tales in which their

activities are made to look just like those of animals and human beings. Thus earthquakes are

attributed by the Scandinavians to the underground writhings of their god Loki, by the Greeks to the

struggles of Prometheus, and by Caribbean peoples to the dancing of Mother Earth. Though partly

works of the imagination, these personifications are just as clearly exercises in rational thought;

they are meant to be real explanations of how things happen. When primitives animate the sun,

moon, or stars, they honestly think of these objects as having personal characteristics.

THE ORIGIN OF RELIGION

Tylor’s comments on myth are important, for in his eyes they mark the path of inquiry that must

also be followed in searching for the origin of religion. He recognizes, of course, that we cannot

explain something unless we know what it is; so religion must first be defined. He further observes

that we

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cannot casually follow the natural impulse to describe religion simply as belief in God, though that

is what his mostly Christian readers might want to do. That approach would exclude a large portion

of the human race—people who are plainly religious but believe in more and other gods than do

Christians and Jews. He therefore proposes, as a more suitable place to start, his own minimal

definition: religion is “belief in spiritual beings.”11 This formula, which others, following Tylor,

have adopted as well, has the merit of being simple, straightforward, and suitably wide in scope. For

though we can find other similarities, Tylor feels the one characteristic shared by all religions, great

or small, ancient or modern, is the belief in spirits who think, act, and feel like human persons. The

essence of religion, like mythology, seems to be animism (from the Latin anima, meaning spirit)—

the belief in living, personal powers behind all things. Animism further is a very old form of

thought, which is found throughout the entire history of the human race. So, Tylor suggests, if we

truly wish to explain religion, the question we must answer is this: How and why did the human

race first come to believe that such things as spiritual beings actually exist?

Stating this question is easy; answering it is another matter. Devout people will want to say that

they believe in a spiritual being, such as God, because that being has actually spoken to them,

supernaturally, through the Bible or the Quran or some other scripture. For Tylor, however, as for

Müller, appeals to divine revelation are not acceptable. Such statements may be pleasing as personal

confessions, but they are not science. He insists that any account of how a human being, or the

whole human race, came to believe in spiritual beings must appeal only to natural causes, only to

considerations of the kind that scientists and historians would use in explaining an occurrence of

any sort, nonreligious as well as religious. We must presume, he says, that early peoples acquired

their first religious ideas through the same reasoning mechanisms they employed in all other aspects

of their lives. Like us, they undoubtedly observed the world at work and then tried to explain it.

What observations, then, did these primitives make? And what explanations did they choose? Tylor

at this point peers backward, deep into prehistoric times, to reconstruct the thoughts of the very first

human beings:

It seems as though thinking men, as yet at a low level of culture, were deeply impressed by two

groups of biological problems. In the first place, what is it

that makes a difference between a living body and a dead one; what causes

waking, sleep, trance, disease, death? In the second place, what are those

human shapes which appear in dreams and visions? Looking at these two groups

of phenomena, the ancient savage philosophers probably made their first step

by the obvious inference that every man has two things belonging to him, namely,

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a life and a phantom as being its image or second self; both, also, are perceived to be things

separable from the body.… The second step would seem also easy

for savages to make, seeing how extremely difficult civilized men have found

it to unmake. It is merely to combine the life and the phantom. … the result is

that well-known conception … the personal soul, or spirit.12

From their vivid encounters with both death and dreams, in other words, early peoples reasoned

first to a simple theory of their own lives: every human being is animated by a soul, or spiritual

principle. They thought of this soul as “a thin, unsubstantial human image, in its nature a sort of

vapour, film, or shadow; the cause of life and thought in the individual it animates.”13 From this

premise, they then reasoned, as we all do, by analogy and extension. If the concept of a soul

explains the movements, activities, and changes of the human person, why should it not also be

applied more widely to explain the rest of the natural world? Why should not plants and trees, the

rivers, winds, and animals, even the stars and planets also be moved by souls? Further, since souls

are separable from the objects they animate, why may there not also be, behind the visible scene of

nature, beings who do not even need to be connected to physical objects—why not spirits, pure and

simple? If there are souls in humans, could there not actually be such powerful beings as demons

and angels who have no necessary attachment to normal physical objects, though they certainly can

enter and “possess” them if they wish? Last, and above all, could there not perhaps be certain

supreme spirits, the beings we call gods?

Through this natural, almost childlike chain of reasoning, says Tylor, early humans arrived at their

first religious beliefs. Like their myths, their religious teachings arose from a rational effort to

explain how nature worked as it did. And from this perspective, all seemed quite clear: as souls

animate persons, so spirits must animate the world.

Tylor further argues that the value of this animistic theory to primitive peoples is apparent from the

great variety of early beliefs and customs it can readily explain. Doctrines of a future life provide an

example. In Oriental cultures there is widespread belief in reincarnation, while in religions of the

Western world, like Christianity and Islam, there are the doctrines of resurrection and immortality

of the soul. All of these can be understood, in animist terms, as ways of extending the life of the

soul beyond the time of death. Being separable from the flesh, the soul has an afterlife and destiny

of its own. Animism also explains why sacred objects and trinkets—things called “fetishes”—are

important to primitives. Such people are not “idol-worshippers,” as narrowminded Christian

missionaries used to describe them. They do not worship sticks and stones; they adore the “anima”

within, the spirit which—not wholly unlike the god of Christians themselves—gives the wood of

the stick

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or substance of the stone its life and power. Knowing the nature of animism, we can also make

sense of tribal medicine. When a man shakes uncontrollably with fever, he knows that he does not

make himself do this; he believes he is “possessed” by a demon within. To be cured, he needs not a

medicine but an exorcism. The evil spirit must be driven out of his body.

Throughout most of the entire second volume of Primitive Culture, Tylor provides detailed

demonstrations to show just how far-reaching was the doctrine of animism in the earlier centuries of

human civilization. He describes it as a system that spread worldwide, becoming the first “general

philosophy of man and nature” ever devised.14 Moreover, as it was absorbed by a tribe or clan or

culture, it spread into every aspect of daily life. If one asks why, across almost all cultures, the gods

have human personalities, the answer is that they are spirits modeled on the souls of human persons.

If we want to know why gifts are given to the dead at primitive funerals and why the services,

especially for great and powerful men, sometimes even include human sacrifice, animism gives the

answers. The gifts provide support for the soul in its new residence beyond the grave; the sacrifices

furnish the king or prince with the souls of servants to wait upon him in the realm of death, just as

they did in life. Why do the Indians of America talk to animals as they would to each other?

Because, like themselves, animals are owners of souls. Why does the water move, or the tree grow?

Because nature spirits inhabit them. Why does the medicine man fast or use drugs? To qualify

himself “for intercourse with the … ghosts, from whom he is to obtain direction in his craft.”15

In this systematic, sequential fashion, with scores of examples at his disposal, Tylor proceeds

through the whole range of primitive life, thought, and custom. At each point he shows how the

doctrine of animism makes sense of ideas and behaviors that otherwise would strike us as nothing

more than irrational and incomprehensible nonsense.

THE GROWTH OF RELIGIOUS THOUGHT

Tylor further explains that once these spiritual ideas acquired their grip on the minds of ancient

peoples, they did not remain in a fixed form. Like everything else in history, animism also follows a

pattern of growth and development. At first people think of individual spirits as small and specific,

associated with each tree, river, or animal they happen to see. Later on, their power begins to widen.

Gradually, in tribal thought, the spirit of one tree grows in power to become the spirit of the forest

or of trees in general. Over time, that same spirit also comes to be thought of as more and more

separable from the object it controls; it acquires its own identity and character. At this stage, when

people worship a goddess of the forest, they recognize that the

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woodlands are her home, but they know she can also leave this home if she wishes. Among the very

earliest Greeks, for example, Poseidon was at first simply the spirit of the “divine sea”; later he

acquired his trident, beard, and distinctive character, so that by the time of the poet Homer, he had

become a mighty and personal deity who could leave the sea and travel swiftly to Mount Olympus

when Zeus assembled the gods in council.

Interestingly, Tylor approaches this later growth of a belief in the personal gods of mythology much

the way Max Müller does, though he refuses to see it as arising from some unfortunate “disease of

language.” In the animistic view, the more complex polytheism that we see among the Greeks

belongs to an age of cultural progress rather than decline. In ancient Greece, from about the time of

Homer forward, a new era of civilization—Tylor calls it the “barbaric” stage— takes over from the

earlier “savage” stage. In the savage era, people hunted, gathered, lived in simple villages, and

never got beyond their first simple ideas of spirits. With the coming of the barbaric age, we find

agriculture, cities, and literacy—all the main elements of the great civilizations built by the

Babylonians, Greeks and Romans, the Aztecs, Hindus, and Chinese. In these “higher” cultures,

there are divisions of labor and complex structures of power and authority, and their religions show

the same characteristics. We find the spirits of local trees and rivers on one level, while above them

stand the much greater spirits of the wind, rain, and sun. The local spirit of the river can do nothing

about it if the god of the sun should decide to bake dry the streams that feed him or the goddess of

rain should choose to transform him into a raging flood. Just as a king and council of nobles rule

their subjects, so the sun (or heaven) as king and the earth as queen rule the natural world with the

wind, rain, and seasons as their powerful agents or advisers.

Such complex polytheistic systems are quite typical of the barbaric age. They reach their highest

form, however, when they are organized in such a way that one god, one supreme being, stands at

the top of the divine society. And gradually, by different paths, most civilizations do move to this

last, highest stage of animism—belief in one supreme divinity. Needless to say, Judaism and

Christianity are the leading examples of the last stage. They form the logical end to the process of

development that began centuries ago, in the dark mists of prehistory, when the man whom Tylor

calls the first “savage philosopher” concluded that souls just like his own must animate all of the

world around him.

THE DECLINE OF ANIMISM AND PROGRESS OF THOUGHT

In one sense, Tylor declares, the story of animism is an encouraging one. Religion can be seen to

have gradually evolved upward from the first primitive belief

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in the spirits of the trees and rocks to the later high plain of monotheism and ethics exhibited in the

Judaism and Christianity of the present day. Higher civilization seems to correlate with “higher

religions.” But that is not the whole of the story. A clear-eyed look at animism and its history in the

dry light of science actually suggests a less cheerful view. Whatever progress we find has been

severely limited, and for a simple reason. However great its spread and wide its appeal through

history, we cannot forget that animism at bottom is a grand mistake. As any thoughtful modern

inquirer knows, the world is not animated by invisible spirits. As any modern geologist can tell us,

rocks do not have phantoms within them. As any botanist can explain, plants are not moved to grow

by some secret anima in their stem. Science has shown that the real sun and sea owe nothing to the

adventures of Apollo and Poseidon, that plants grow by the reactions of chemicals within their

fibers, and that the wind and water are only names for powerful flows of molecules governed by

iron laws of cause and effect.

In its time, Tylor concedes, the animist explanation of things was reasonable enough. But the better

methods of today’s science show us that the reasoning of early peoples has always had its element

of unreason as well. Though they can think rationally, one must also remember that primitives think

rationally only as children do. Savages, Tylor reminds his readers, are

exceedingly ignorant as regards both physical and mental knowledge; want of

discipline makes their opinions crude and their action ineffective. … the

tyranny of tradition at every step imposes upon them. … much of what they

believe to be true, must be set down as false.16

It follows from this that whereas the course of reason once led people naturally toward the system

of animism, in the modern era, the age of science, that same course of reason ought now to lead

away from it. Intellectual progress in the present day must be measured by an opposite movement—

the retreat of animist theory from all of those very realms of life it was once thought to explain.

Gradually, but nonetheless certainly, Tylor concludes, the falsehoods of savage and barbaric

peoples must withdraw before the spreading truth of the sciences. In sphere after sphere of nature,

animist spirits and deities must now give way to modern science’s impersonal causes and effects. In

the modern era, religion’s growth, like that of its close friends magic and myth, “has been checked

by science, it is dying of weights and measures, of proportions and specimens.”17 Today we truly

understand our world only to the degree that we can pull ourselves away from animism’s powerful

but misguided embrace. A few of its ethical principles may linger as still useful, but its gods must

die and disappear.

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In the end, then, Tylor’s theory provides a mixed portrait of religion and its development. He argues

that as an effort of early peoples to understand the world, as a response to its mysteries and

uncertain events, animistic religion presents a natural parallel to science. Both are inspired by the

human search for understanding—the deep desire to know just how things work. But he insists that

religion is also earlier, more primitive, less skilled than science. For him, belief in spiritual beings

represents a natural stage in the evolution of human reason, but it is not the end stage, and it is

certainly no longer the most rational response to the world now that the program and methods of

empirical science have come our way. Like the other odd customs and superstitions people are

unwilling to part with, religion is now a “survival.” In that connection, the double mission of

ethnology, “the reformer’s science,” requires not only that it point the way of progress but that it

also take on “the harsher task” of clearing away the clutter of animism that still persists. Destined to

disappear, religion can only slow the progress of mind for those who persist, unwisely, in clinging

to its comforts. In the final analysis, says Tylor, animist ideas belong properly to the childhood of

the human race, not to its maturity. And having entered adulthood, we must put away childish

things.

At the close of this chapter, we will have to examine and assess this theory, along with the judgment

on the future of religion that follows from it. Before doing so, however, we must consider how these

ideas were adopted and further developed by the younger scholar James Frazer, who was to become

Tylor’s most famous and influential disciple.

J. G. Frazer

Early in his career, while still a promising young student in classics at Cambridge University, James

George Frazer became a “convert” to Tylor’s ideas and methods. Thereafter, he began to devote

immense effort to anthropological research, and, through the rest of his long life, he promoted his

own amplified version of the animistic theory. The centerpiece of Frazer’s many labors was The

Golden Bough (1890–1915), a monumental study of primitive customs and beliefs. As we shall see

in chapters to come, this important book has exercised a lasting influence on all subsequent thinking

about religion. More than that, in the early years of our century it left a large imprint on almost

every field of modern thought, from anthropology and history to literature, philosophy, sociology,

and even natural science.18

Like Tylor, Frazer came from a Protestant Christian family, but his was not a home of liberal,

affluent Quakers.19 Born on New Year’s Day, 1854, in Glasgow, Scotland, he was raised by stern

and devout Scottish Presbyterian

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parents. His father’s daily habit of reading the Bible in family worship left him steeped in its sacred

stories and permanently affected by the beautiful imagery and the stately rhythms of its language.

Of course, the truth of the Bible—as well as the Scotch Calvinist theology of his parents—was quite

another matter. Frazer rejected both. Early in life he took the stance of an atheist, or at least an

agnostic, in regard not only to Christian teachings but also to those of any other religious system.

For him, religion was to be always an interest but never a creed. During the years of his early

schooling, he much preferred to immerse himself in the non-Christian world of ancient Greek and

Roman civilization. He studied classical languages intensively, winning numerous prizes in Latin

and Greek at his high school and at Glasgow University and later earning a scholarship to Trinity

College, Cambridge. Eventually he became a fellow of Trinity, where he was to marry a very

protective spouse, remain childless, and live the quiet, private life of an English university don for

the rest of his days. If ever there was a man who fit the description of an “ivory tower” scholar, it

was James Frazer.

While at Cambridge, Frazer pursued his first interest, which was classical literature. He wrote on

the philosopher Plato and began to translate the writings of Pausanias, an ancient Greek traveler

from the second century A.D. who had compiled a rich record of Greek legends, folklore, and

popular customs. These were to prove very useful in Frazer’s later studies of primitive religion.

At just about the time he was starting his work on Pausanias, two unexpected encounters changed

the course of Frazer’s thought—as well as his career. While he was on a walking tour, a friend gave

him a copy of Primitive Culture. As he began to read, he was attracted at once to Tylor’s account of

animism and his demonstration of its importance to primitive thought. Just as importantly, Frazer

found his eyes suddenly opened to the possibilities created by anthropological research and the use

of the comparative method. The second encounter was not with a book but a person. In 1883, the

very same year that he came upon Tylor’s work, Frazer met William Robertson Smith (1846–

1894), a brilliant and controversial Scottish biblical scholar, who soon became his mentor and very

close friend.20 Intellectually, Smith was a perfect soulmate. Like Frazer, he was fascinated by the

way in which anthropology, through its study of the habits of modern tribal societies, could shed

light on an ancient subject, in his case the story of the ancient Israelites as told in the Bible. Ahead

of his time, Smith actually traveled to Arabia to observe the customs of desert communities and

apply them in his research. In particular, he felt that use of “totems” by these tribal peoples was

extremely important. Totem use was a practice associated with the tribal custom of dividing into

different clans, or kinship groups. Each of these clans commonly attached itself

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to a specific animal (or occasionally a plant), which it recognized as its totem and then accorded

worship as a kind of divinity. Totemism was also linked to exogamy, the practice of marrying only

“outside” the clan. If, within a large tribe, a man belonged, say, to the smaller clan of the bear, he

was obliged to marry only a woman from another clan (say, of the eagle or deer) and not from his

own totem group. In addition, because the totem was sacred, members of the clan were not allowed

to kill or eat their chosen animal except (Smith supposed, though there was no evidence) on certain

special occasions, when the rule might have been purposely broken, perhaps for some ceremonial

totem animal sacrifice. In The Religion of the Semites (1890), his most important book, Smith drew

on his observations in Arabia and on Tylor’s concept of evolutionary survivals to argue that ancient

Hebrew practices, especially their sacrifices, fit with uncanny precision into the same category of

tribal totemism that he observed in modern Arabia.

Frazer, for his part, was captivated by both the originality of Smith’s ideas and the intellectual

excitement that came through his personality in almost every scholarly conversation. In return,

Smith, who at this very moment was editing the Encyclopaedia Britannica, wisely used his new

position to encourage his friend. He asked Frazer to write for him the articles on the subjects of

“totem” and “taboo.” Frazer accepted, insisting however that Smith give him help. It was not long

before the work Frazer did to prepare these articles won him over permanently to the

anthropological perspective—and laid the groundwork for most of his later research. Soon the two

men were sharing research on primitive customs and beliefs, each relying on the other in almost

equal measure.

The Golden Bough

As he began his turn to anthropology, Frazer did not leave his classical studies behind. His aim was

still to read the Greeks and Romans, but with one eye also on anthropology, looking for traces of a

much older, more primitive world behind the cultivated poetry, drama, and philosophical writings

of the classical authors. Strongly affected by Tylor’s doctrine of survivals, he felt that classical

civilization could be seen with new clarity once one noticed the earlier primitive ideas and habits

that persisted within it. He was convinced that a blend of classics and anthropology, of the well

worn and the as yet untried, offered the prospect of a virtual revolution in understanding the ancient

world. And it was this perspective that guided him in the broad research project that was to become

The Golden Bough. The publication of this everexpanding book occupied Frazer for most of his

adult years and became his definitive statement on the origin and nature of religion. Over its life,

The Golden

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Bough grew to three editions and twelve thick volumes and required over twentyfive years of

Frazer’s long days in his study to bring to completion. It was first published in two volumes in

1890. A second, three-volume edition appeared in 1900. New installments were then added

regularly until it eventually reached its full length in 1915. By that time, what began as a book had

ended as an encyclopedia. Fortunately for us, in 1922 Frazer abridged The Golden Bough into one

very long single volume; in the discussion that follows, we shall take advantage of this helpful

shorter version.21

The Golden Bough begins like a good mystery. It offers a riddle, some tantalizing clues, and a

striking description of long-forgotten scenes and events. Frazer explains that along the Appian Way,

the ancient road that runs from Rome to the villages of central Italy, there is a small town named

Aricia; near it, in a wooded grove by a lake called Nemi, stands the ruin of a temple dedicated by

the Romans to Diana, goddess of the hunt, as well as of both fertility and childbirth. In the happy

days of the empire, this lakeside shrine with its woodland was both a country resort and a place of

pilgrimage. Citizens of Rome traveled often to the site, especially at midsummer, to celebrate a

yearly festival of fire. It was to all appearances a restful, civilized, and lovely place. But the woods

at the lakeshore also held a secret. The Roman poets told of a second god, Virbius, who was also

worshipped at the temple. He was sometimes identified with the young Greek hero Hippolytus,

who, according to other myths, had been murdered by one of the gods in a fit of anger, only to be

restored to life by Diana, who then chose to hide him here at her temple. Virbius was represented by

a very mysterious figure, a man who was understood actually to live in the woods and was said to

be both a priest and a king. He took it as his duty to keep constant watch not only over Diana’s

temple but also over a sacred tree that grew in the forest—an oak with a distinctive yellow branch,

or “golden bough.” The man bore the title Rex Nemorenis, Lake Nemi’s “King of the Wood.”

Though obviously a human being, this king was thought also to be a god; he was at once both the

divine lover of the goddess Diana and the animating spirit of the sacred oak tree around which he

stood guard.

Now strange as this King of the Wood himself may seem, the way in which he acquired his position

was still stranger. It came by way of a murder. Legend held that this priest-king had taken over the

wood by putting to death the previous one, and that he too would keep his power only as long as he

remained vigilant and strong, ready in a moment to defend his very life against other would-be

kings who might try to take his place and seize his power. To keep his life and rule, the king had

constantly to walk the temple woods, sword in hand, and wait for the approach of any would-be

assailant. Should his guard fail or his strength weaken, an intruder might at any moment break

through, duel

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the king to his death, and tear away the golden bough, which then entitled the victor to both the

sexual favors of the goddess Diana and the priestly rule of the woodland. On the victor also,

however, fell the same wearying burden of vigilant self-defense—the need to guard the oak without

rest and to search the forest for the threatening form of any new man who might approach, ready to

kill, and eager himself to become the next King of the Wood.

With an opening scene such as this, so haunted with mystery and hidden danger, curious readers

find it hard to resist following Frazer into the long pages of his narrative. But the reason for all of

this drama was not just Frazer’s wish to tell an unusual story. His purpose was rather to set the stage

for his study by unfolding a single, sharp contrast—one that discloses the outline of an earlier, more

brutal state of humanity lying just below the surface of the cultures we like to think of as civilized.

How, he asks, could there be a place as beautiful as the grove at Nemi, a temple and grounds so

loved by visitors for its peace and healing renewal, yet at the same time so steeped in a heritage of

savage brutality? How is it that a center given over to the comforts of religion could be the stage for

a ritual murder? That is a riddle we should very much like to see explained. In searching for

solutions, however, Frazer tells us that we will get nowhere if we keep only to the evidence

available from the days of classical Greek and Roman civilization. The pastimes of cultivated

Romans who visited Diana’s temple offer no clues to explain the shadowy, foreboding personage of

the King of the Wood. To account for such a figure, we must look elsewhere—into the deeper

prehistoric past, when savage ancestors of the Romans walked the very same woods and shores

centuries before Diana’s temple was ever built. If it should be that among these much earlier

peoples we can find an obscure custom or belief that continued down to Roman times, if we should

discover one of Tylor’s “survivals,” then we might very well have a way to identify the King of the

Wood and solve his deadly mystery. Doing so, however, requires a great deal of searching and

comparing, for prehistoric peoples have left us no documents. The only thing we can do, says

Frazer, is reach out everywhere into the folklore, legends, and practices of the most primitive

peoples we know to see if among them there can be found any old patterns or traditions into which

the Roman legends may fit. If only we can penetrate the system of primitive ideas that lies behind it,

the dark riddle of the King of the Wood and his murder can perhaps be understood. As Frazer

explains it, however, that task is not a simple one, for when we look closely, it turns out that

primitive thinking (and here he somewhat departs from Tylor) is in fact governed not by one but by

two quite different systems of ideas: the one is magic, the other religion. Understanding both of

these, and the connection between them, is the key that offers entry to the primitive mind.

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MAGIC AND RELIGION

Once introduced, the subjects of magic and religion become a central theme of The Golden Bough,

and though Frazer does finally return to it, the mystery of the King of the Wood recedes into the

background. A Study in Magic and Religion is in fact the subtitle given to the book in its second

edition. To appreciate the crucial importance of both these enterprises to primitive peoples, says

Frazer, we must notice a fundamental fact of early human life, whether lived in Diana’s woodland

or any other place on the globe. It centered on the struggle to survive. Hunters needed animals to

kill; farmers needed sun and suitable rains for their crops. Whenever natural circumstances did not

accommodate these needs, primitive peoples, being capable of thought, made every effort they

could to understand the world and change it. The very first of these efforts took the form of magic.

Frazer’s full name for it is “sympathetic magic,” since the primitive mind assumed that nature

works by sympathies, or influences. In words that closely resemble Tylor’s, he explains that

“savages” (like Tylor, he preferred this word for prehistorical peoples) always suppose that when

two things can in some way be mentally associated—when to the mind they appear

“sympathetic”—they must also be physically associated in the outside world. Mental connections

mirror physical ones. Going beyond Tylor, however, he finds in magic something more systematic,

and even “scientific,” than his mentor did. He points out that the main connections made by the

sympathetic magician are basically of two types: imitative, the magic that connects things on the

principle of similarity; and contagious, the magic of contact, which connects on the principle of

attachment. In the one case, we might say “like affects like,” in the other, “part affects part.” When

Russian peasants pour water through a screen in a time of drought, they imagine that because the

filtered falling water looks like a thundershower, sprinkling of this sort will actually force rain to

fall from the sky. When a voodoo priest pushes a pin through the heart of a doll decorated with the

fingernails and hair of his enemy, he imagines that merely by contact—by contagious

transmission—he can bring death to his victim.

Frazer explains that evidence of this magical thinking can be multiplied in countless examples

drawn from primitive life around the globe, and he himself supplies them in great number. When, as

traders report, the Pawnee Indians touched the blood of a sacrificed maiden to their field tools, they

did so because they firmly believed that, merely by contact, its lifegiving power would be

transferred to their seeds of maize. When drought strikes certain villages of India, the people dress

up a boy in nothing but leaves, name him the Rain King, and at each house sprinkle him with water,

all in the belief that this ritual will bring the rains, making green plants to grow again. When the

Indians

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of South America bury lighted sticks in the ground during an eclipse of the moon, they do so

because they believe the darkening of its fire will also put out all fires on earth, unless some, at

least, are hidden from its influence. In each of these cases, and many, many others that he cites,

Frazer shows how simple peoples everywhere assume that nature operates on the principles of

imitation and contact. Moreover, they think of these principles as constant, universal, and

unbreakable—as firm and certain as any modern scientific law of cause and effect. In India, when

the Brahmin priest makes his morning offering to the sun, he firmly believes it will not rise without

his ritual. So too in ancient Egypt, the Pharaoh, who represented the sun, routinely made a solemn

journey around the temple to ensure that the real sun would complete its daily journey as well.

Magic is thus built on the assumption that once a proper ritual or action is completed, its natural

effects must occur as prescribed. Moreover, the confidence placed in such rites shows that they

actually form a kind of science for primitive peoples. They offer certainty about the natural world

and control of its processes.

Frazer also goes beyond Tylor, who tends to speak of magical knowledge as its own reward, in

emphasizing the social power that accrues to people who have knowledge of the magical art. It is

not by accident, he observes, that in primitive cultures the person who can claim mastery of its

techniques—whether called a magician, medicine man, or witch doctor—almost always holds a

position of considerable prestige and power. Usually, in fact, the magician rises to the role of king,

since he best knows how to control the natural world for the good of the tribe or for the evil of its

enemies. Evidence from around the globe supports the conclusion that among tribal peoples,

nothing is more common than for the magician to be also the village chieftain or king.

The power that magical skills can confer on people in primitive societies ought not to blind us, says

Frazer, to the fact that it is also faced with a quite fundamental problem. It may look like science,

but it is a false science. Primitives can perhaps be deceived, but moderns are not. As every thinking

person today certainly knows, the laws of imitation and contact do not apply to the real world.

Magic cannot work because the primitive magician, for all his shrewd magical skill, is simply

wrong. In point of fact, the real world does not work according to the pattern of sympathies and

similarities he mistakenly applies to it. Over time, therefore, the more critical and thoughtful minds

in primitive communities draw the reasonable conclusion that magic is, at bottom, nonsense. The

magician can try to explain away failures or even take the blame himself, but the facts cry out

loudly that it is the system, not the man, that is mistaken. The general recognition of that error is for

Frazer a momentous development in the history of human thought, for as magic declines, it is

religion that comes to fill its place.

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Religion follows a path quite different from that of magic. Here we may recall that Tylor, after

defining religion as belief in spiritual beings, found it generally to resemble magic, both being built

upon the uncritical association of ideas. Frazer is perfectly content with Tylor’s definition of

religion, but he is more interested in the contrasts than the similarities it shows with magic. For him

the interesting thing about religion is precisely its rejection of the principles of magic. Instead of

magical laws of contact and imitation, religious people claim that the real powers behind the natural

world are not principles at all; they are personalities—the supernatural beings we call the gods.

Accordingly, when truly religious people want to control or change the course of nature, they do not

normally use magical spells but rather prayers and pleadings addressed to their favorite god or

goddess. Just as if they were dealing with another human person, they ask favors, plead for help,

call down revenge, and make vows of love, loyalty, or obedience. These things are crucially

important, for ultimately it is the personalities of the gods that control nature; it is their anger that

can start a storm, their favor that can save a life, their sudden shift of attitude that can calm a

troubled sea. For Frazer, wherever there is belief in these supernatural beings and wherever there

are human efforts to win their help by prayers or rituals, human thought has moved out of the realm

of magic and into that of religion.

In addition, and though it may not seem so at first, this turn to religion should be read as a sign of

progress. Religion actually improves on magic and marks an intellectual advance for the human

race. Why? For the simple reason that religious explanations are found to be better than magical

ones in describing the world as we actually experience it. Magic, we must recognize, asserts laws

that are impersonal, constant, and universal, If the rain ritual is done correctly, rain must actually

come; the rules of imitation and contact do not allow exceptions. Religion, on the other hand, is

quite different. It never claims, in the first place, to have iron-clad principles of explanation. To the

contrary, it confesses that the world is in the hands of the gods, who control nature’s forces for their

interests, not ours. Moreover, the gods are many, with different personalities and often competing

aims and agendas. We worship the gods, we pray and sacrifice to them in the hope that they will

bring rain, or give us children, or heal the sick, but we cannot force them to do these things.

Religion offers no guarantees. And yet as Frazer sees it, this very uncertainty is in its way

commendable. Is it not a fact that most of nature’s processes, great and small, do fall outside our

control? To offer prayers that sometimes are answered and sometimes are not, to ask favors that are

granted one day and denied the next—is not such a view of the world, which places all things under

the control of great and powerful beings beyond ourselves, very close to the facts of our existence

as we actually find them? Does it not actually fit far

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better than magic to life as we actually encounter it, filled with both its surprise pleasures and

unexpected misfortunes? Like the gods, the world sometimes gives us what we want—and

sometimes it does not.

MAGIC, RELIGION, AND THE DIVINITY OF KINGS

With the coming of religion, Frazer continues, there also appear certain related changes in society.

Gradually, the old magician-king gives way to the new priest-king, whose power lies in the new

religious type of thought—specifically, in his ability to communicate with the gods or, just as often,

in the fact that he possesses a kind of divinity himself. Divine kings are as natural to the age of

religion as magician-kings are to the age of magic, though we ought not to consider this transition

between the two periods to have been sharp or sudden. Frazer reminds us that cultures evolve

slowly and often unevenly through time. Even as they were gradually turning over the control of the

natural processes from the principles of magic to the personalities of the gods, primitive peoples

usually combined the two systems. Though they may have come to believe in gods, they still

reserved a place for magic; in fact, they often used magic on the gods, trying, as it were, to force

them to act favorably on human wishes and prayers. Frazer actually finds magic and religion to

have been mixed so often and in so many cultures around the world that, in the mountains of

evidence he supplies, he scarcely even tries to disentangle the two.

Examples of magic and religion in combination play a key role in some of Frazer’s most important

discussions. Ritual prostitution is an instance. Primitive people, he says, believe that if the sexual

encounter reproduces human life, a ritual act of intercourse performed in the house of the gods will,

by the law of imitation, actually compel the divine Sky Father and Earth Mother to do the same.

With that, the rains will come, and crops will grow for another season. Royal personages are seen in

a similar light. While many tribal societies think of their king in religious terms, as a god, they

conceive of his powers and his relation to the tribe as magical. As a deity, the king is regarded as

the very center of the world. His mere words become law. From his person an energy radiates

outward in all directions, so that any of his actions, or any change in his state of being, can affect

the whole balance of the natural order and the whole life of the tribe. At the same time, it should be

noted that this divine power is more magical than personal in nature—so thoroughly magical, in

fact, that even the king himself must bow to it. Frazer notes how some African peoples do not allow

the king to leave his house, because the mere movement of his body would affect the weather. In

ancient Ireland, kings were forbidden to be in a certain town at sunrise or in another on Wednesdays

or to sail their ships on certain Mondays—all for fear of the

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effects of their magical powers on specific places at specific times. The magical charge carried by

the person of the king also explains why monarchs are often surrounded by taboos—sacred

prohibitions meant as life preservers for souls. In some cases, the king may not be allowed to touch

certain persons or things because of the effect his powers may have on them; in others, persons

must avoid the king for just the opposite reason—because of the ill effects they may have on his use

of his powers. Even into recent times, the person of the emperor of Japan, the divine mikado, was

seen to be so filled with magical power that his feet were not allowed to touch the ground.

In more general terms, Frazer notes, primitive peoples often insist that because the king is a god,

measures must always be taken to preserve his divine energy, transferring it to a new person

whenever he shows signs of sickness, injury, or age. Nothing was more startling to Victorian

readers of The Golden Bough than the evidence it furnished to show that when, in some tribal

cultures, kings age or grow ill, they must be ritually put to death, so that their divine spirit can be

conveyed in full strength to a new ruler. Hardly less shocking were its demonstrations that to the

primitive mind, such executions are not immoral acts of cruelty; they are sacred acts of magical

necessity. This was true, moreover, even though the form of the ritual was subject to change. Since

many kings did not relish the prospect of being executed, often a slave or captive, an animal, an

image, or even a son was put forward as the king’s substitute. Indeed, Frazer at one point suggests

that the Jewish festival of Purim and the Christian remembrance of Christ’s crucifixion at Passover

both fall into the category of these royal substitutions. It is of interest, he notes, that both involve

the sacrifice of a kind of “pretend” king and both show a similar intent—to preserve by magical

transfer the power of the divine life.22

THE GODS OF VEGETATION

Of all the places where magic and religion converge, perhaps none is for Frazer more common than

the great, seasonal cults of vegetation and agriculture that are found so widely around the world.

Worship of vegetation gods like Osiris, Tammuz, Attis, and Adonis was widespread not only in the

ancient civilizations of Egypt, Greece, and Rome but almost everywhere that people began to

practice the arts of agriculture. These agrarian cults were steeped in symbols of sexuality and the

cycle of birth and death. Ancient Cyprus provides a typical instance. There the god Adonis was

routinely paired with the goddess Aphrodite/Astarte, whose rituals included prostitution and a

bizarre sexual law requiring all virgins to sleep with a complete stranger at the temple before their

marriage. Strange as it may seem, says Frazer, it was not perversion that inspired this practice but

the sacred rules of imitative magic.

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The purpose of the rite was to compel the gods also to mate, so that all of nature could be reborn.

Rituals of death and rebirth served a similar purpose. In the cult of Attis, the myth that recounted

the bloody death of the god had to be reenacted each year because it ensured the death of the crop at

harvest time; then each spring the god was to be ritually reborn, so the plants could once again

come to life and grow. As Frazer explains it, worshippers in these religions “thought that by

performing certain magical rites they could aid the god who was the principle of life, in his struggle

with the opposing principle of death. They imagined that they could recruit his failing energies and

even raise him from the dead.”23 When the rites were performed, all of nature could be expected to

benefit from the return of life and growth. In Egyptian traditions, the god Osiris clearly was a

personification of the grain; the story of how, after death, his mangled body was scattered across the

land offers a mythical counterpart to the process of planting, in which dead seeds are sown across

the fields, later to be reborn and rise as growing plants. For nearly all who participate in these

religious cults, the sacrifice of, say, some sacred animal identified with a deity, such as the bull of

Dionysus, is a magical way of pushing the gods, and consequently the crops, forward in their

natural cycle. Similarly, when among primitives an actual human king is sacrificed as a divinity,

that horrible ritual runs quite parallel to myths like those of Attis and Osiris, where the magic of

imitation is reinforced by the magic of contact. As in the myths, so in the ritual: the body of the

victim may be torn apart or burnt, while the flesh and blood, or bones and ashes, are spread on the

fields, releasing their magical power to fertilize the soil.

In additional volumes of his study, Frazer brings forward still other primitive customs that fit this

magical-religious pattern of thought, most notably those associated with the totem and the

scapegoat. Robertson Smith, as we saw, first called Frazer’s attention to the primitive practice of

totemism, and this practice was the focus of pioneering new research at the very time the second

edition of The Golden Bough was in preparation. Working among Australian aboriginal tribesmen,

two field investigators, Baldwin Spencer and F. J. Gillen, made the remarkable discovery that on

certain special occasions the sacred totem animal was indeed killed and eaten by its clan—just as

Robertson Smith had earlier guessed!24 The aborigines called the ritual of eating the intichiuma

ceremony. In it, says Frazer, we can see in perhaps their earliest form the rites of religious sacrifice

and the concept of the dying god. By killing the totem, primitives protect against the decline of

power in their animal god; by eating it, they take its divine energy into themselves. A similar

pattern is to be found in the custom of the tribal “scapegoat.” Anyone familiar with the Bible knows

how the scapegoat was used by the Hebrews, who each year chose an animal for the specific

purpose of being sent away

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from the community in a solemn ritual and left to wander until it died. Seen in the light of magical

principles, this practice arises from the belief that sins or illnesses can somehow be physically

driven out of the community by attaching them to an object like a stick or leaf and allowing them to

be carried on the animal’s back as it travels away. When placed in the context of totem practice and

royal executions, the underlying purpose of the ritual becomes apparent: since the animal represents

the divine, its banishment is another way of killing the tribal god.

TREE SPIRITS, FIRE FESTIVALS, AND THE MYTH OF BALDER

In explaining the role played by magical-religious ideas in the worship of vegetation gods, Frazer

draws most of his evidence from the ancient Mediterranean world. He was convinced, however, that

these ideas and practices could be found in the European countries as well. To prove this point, he

relied heavily on the work of a German student of folklore, Wilhelm Mannhardt (1831–1880), who

had gathered evidence of the archaic customs, rituals, and mythology of European peasants into

several important books.25 Among these, Frazer made special note of certain traditions observed by

the Celtic peoples of the British Isles and by the Nordic cultures of Scandinavia. In northern

Europe, the worship of tree spirits was prevalent; perhaps because of its great size, the oak tree in

particular was held sacred. Among the early Celts there were also dramatic fire festivals like the

great Beltane ceremony, which was celebrated every spring and fall and called for human images to

be thrown into its raging sacred flames. In Norse tradition, again, there was the tragic myth of

Balder, the beautiful young god killed by an arrow made of mistletoe, the only thing in all of nature

that could do him harm. As with Osiris in Egypt, Nordic mythology presented his death as an

immense tragedy, and at the funeral, when Balder’s body was burnt aboard his own ship in a huge

fire at the ocean’s edge, there was deep mourning in the assembly of the gods.

In general terms, these sagas and stories from the North provide still further evidence of magic and

religion in close association. But for Frazer they also serve a second purpose; they begin at last to

bring the long narrative of The Golden Bough to its end. With these stories in hand, he claims that

the riddle which began his story can at last be solved, though even at this point the path to the

solution is not a simple one. It follows a sequence of comparisons and connections too complicated

to trace in detail, so we shall have to be content with a short summary sketch.

If we look closely at the myths and rituals of the North, Frazer explains, it is clear that Virbius, the

king of Diana’s woodland, and the Norse god Balder, who also may have been once a real person,

are both human embodiments of

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the great tree spirit, the soul of the sacred oak. This is not surprising, for among primitives the spirit,

or soul, of an object can always exist in external form. The spirit of the tree need not remain in its

trunk; it can also exist, outside its wooden body, in these human forms. Conversely, the souls of

deities like Balder and Virbius are capable of traveling outside their quite human bodies as well;

when they do, they lodge, naturally enough as tree spirits, in the evergreen mistletoe, which grows

on the trunk of the oak even in the coldest winter. In this telltale clue, says Frazer, we have at last an

explanation for the golden bough said to grow from the tree at Nemi; it is simply a poetic name for

the mistletoe, which turns a definite shade of yellow when cut from its tree. Further, the action we

find in the Nordic myth, the shooting of the arrow at Balder, closely parallels that of the Roman

tale, where the bough is broken by the assailant and in the moment of challenge probably hurled

(just like Balder’s arrow) at the King of the Wood. Both stories thus seem to be describing the same

kind of act: an assault on the god in which his own soul (in the form of the mistletoe) is seized from

him and turned against his body to secure his death. The god is killed in order magically to take

from him his divine power.

If these parallels are valid, then at this point anthropology can step in to make the final connection.

It seems clear to Frazer that the tales of both Balder and Virbius alike must have originated in real

events: the prehistoric murder of a tribal king in order to transfer his divine powers as commanded

by the laws of early magic and religion. It is nothing less than the sacrificial murders of real human

kings from the deep past that lie behind the mortal figures of Balder and Lake Nemi’s King of the

Wood. The midsummer festivals of fire which the Romans so innocently enjoyed at Diana’s temple

only confirm the connection. It is no accident that these rites bear a striking resemblance to the

midsummer fire rituals found also in Scandinavia. In both there is the common fact of a fire

ceremony held at precisely the same time of year—and fueled probably by the sacred wood of

fallen oaks. In addition, there are, especially in the northern rites, those curious hints of a victim in

the fire: the ritual burning of Balder’s body and those human images thrown into the flames of the

Irish Beltane fires. Such clues tell us that however innocent on their surface, these ceremonies too

are survivals recalling the hideous sacrifice of human beings envisioned as dying gods. Frazer

intimates that in the earliest centuries of human life together, there were countless occasions when

fires such as these were solemnly lit to welcome the bodies of those unfortunate kings (or their

unhappy substitutes) who were human predecessors of Balder and Virbius—gods who had to be

slain so that the powers of nature would not weaken but be renewed.

From all of this, Frazer concludes, it should be indisputably clear that the earliest humans lived their

lives by a system of ideas that was rational enough

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for them but fearfully distant from our own. Behind the rites of Diana’s temple and the Roman

legend of the King of the Wood lies the grim ordeal of human sacrifice, the ceremonial murder of a

man thought to be a god.26 Barbaric to us, such actions were nonetheless rational in the ages that

knew them, for the laws of nature were seen to require nothing less than this ultimate sacrifice.

Better to kill the one than risk the death of all. To the primitive mind, it was the voice not of

revolution but of religion and reason that first uttered the cry: “The king is dead; long live the [new]

king.”27

CONCLUSION

Looking back on it when he had finished, Frazer described his book as a great “voyage of

discovery,” a journey backward in time to explore the mind of prehistoric humanity. A long voyage

it certainly was! Though he rarely left his study, his investigations had taken him—in thought at

least—to nearly every place, time, and culture known to the human race. No corner of undiscovered

humanity could escape the global reach of his discussions. He gathered information, seemingly,

from everyone and everywhere, and he had the great good fortune of being himself at the right place

and time to do so. Writing in Cambridge during the golden last decades of the British empire, he

was ideally positioned to gather stories from missionaries and soldiers, from traders and diplomats,

from travelers, scholars, and explorers who passed on personal observations from every odd and

lonely corner of the world. Through their letters, reports, and responses to Frazer’s own

questionnaire, these sources—some reliable, others less so—provided him with all that he could

need and, indeed, more even than he could want.28

This vast fund of information which Frazer had at his disposal gave him great confidence in the

scientific merits of his theory and, with it, his account of the origin of religion. In his view, worship

of the gods had arisen, as Tylor first suggested, in the earliest human attempts to explain the world,

and it was driven by the human desire to control the power of nature—to avoid its hazards and win

its favors. Magic was the first such attempt, and it failed. As it declined, belief in the gods arose,

subtly combined with it, and over the centuries moved more and more fully into its place. Religion

put its hopes in prayers and pleadings. But in the end, it too has been found wanting; its claims

about the gods have been found to hold no more truth than the laws of magic. Accordingly, says

Frazer, just as the age of magic was replaced by that of religion, so too the present era of belief in

the gods, one or many, must yield to the third and next era of human thought—the age of science,

which is now upon us. Like magic, religion must be assigned to the category of Tylor’s survivals.

Though it clings to life among backward peoples, as a kind of

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intellectual fossil, its time has passed. In its place has come science, a way of thought now very

much alive, which offers knowledge of the world that is both rational and faithful to facts. Like a

new and better magic, science abandons the belief in supernatural beings and once again tries to

explain the world by appealing to general and impersonal principles. In the present age, however,

these are no longer the secret sympathies of imitation and contact but the valid principles of

physical cause and effect. As religion fades, science inevitably assumes its place, for it is the

rationality of the present, and it knows the true laws of nature. For Frazer, it is magic without the

mistakes.

Analysis

If we stand back to observe the theories of Tylor and Frazer in broad outline, several key themes

come clearly into view:

1. Science and Anthropology

In terms of their method, Tylor and Frazer both regard themselves as scientific theorists of religion.

They assume from the outset that any explanation of religion which appeals to claims of miraculous

events or to some supernatural revelation must be ruled out. One thing they will not allow is a

theory which might claim, for example, that the reason the ancient Hebrews followed the Ten

Commandments is because they were actually revealed by God. Only natural explanations, theories

acceptable to religious and nonreligious people alike, can be seriously considered. Accordingly,

such scientific study requires the wide collection of facts, followed by comparison and

classification; only after that can one formulate a general theory that accounts for all the instances.

Both men feel they can do this best through their new sciences of ethnology and anthropology,

which gather samples of behavior from every culture in the world and thus seem ideally suited to

the purpose of framing something so broad as a general theory of religion. Not surprisingly, both

Primitive Culture and The Golden Bough are very large books, their pages crowded and bursting

with examples, instances, parallels, and variations, all meant to support the broad generalizations

that are central to the theories they advance.

2. Evolution and Origins

Tylor and Frazer both are committed to explaining religion primarily in terms of its prehistorical

origin, its beginning in ages long past and its gradual evolution to present form in the centuries

thereafter. They believe that the way

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to explain religion is to discover how it began, to observe it in its earliest, simplest form, and then to

follow the path from its beginnings to the present day. Further, they are convinced that, broadly

speaking, this origin is something we can actually discover, though not in any single event.29

Religion, they say, arose in a set of circumstances faced by all prehistoric peoples, who responded

in ways that, though mistaken, were the best their reason could manage, given the limitations of

their knowledge. Further, having arisen in the past, religion has seen its status, along with its claims

of truth and usefulness, change significantly over the long process of its intellectual evolution.

Through their own hard efforts, Tylor and Frazer contend, human beings have slowly improved

themselves by creating ever more civilized communities, by learning more about both the extent

and limits of their knowledge, and by treating each other with gradually greater measures of

decency, knowledge, and compassion. To be sure, religion—an agent of progress insofar as it once

took the mind of humanity a step beyond magic—has played its role in this great evolutionary

drama, but only for a time. With the arrival of science, that role now is ended.

3. Intellectualism and Individualism

Theorists today often refer to Tylor and Frazer as advocates of an “intellectualist” approach to

religion.30 By this they mean that both men think of religion as first of all a matter of beliefs, of

ideas that people develop to account for what they find in the world. Religion is not seen as in the

first instance about group needs, structures, or activities. On the contrary, it is thought to originate

in the mind of the individual “savage philosopher,” as Tylor calls him, the lone prehistoric thinker

who tries to solve the riddles of life and then passes on his interests and ideas to others. Religion

becomes communal or social only when an idea seen to be valid by one person comes gradually to

be shared by others. Religious groups, accordingly, are in the first instance always viewed as

collections of individuals who happen to share the same beliefs.

Critique

In the prime years of their influence, which came in the last decades of the Victorian era, Tylor and

Frazer won many disciples within anthropology and even more admirers outside of it—among them

people who enjoyed the fascinating application of their ideas to literature, art, history, philosophy,

and even popular opinion. To those who read them at the time, these two talented

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authors seemed capable of shedding new light on almost every feature of religion or society one

might want to address. Even so, there were a few, like Max Müller, who had serious doubts about

how far one could really go with the methods of anthropology and the principles of intellectual

evolutionism. As the years have passed, not only have the ranks of the skeptics grown; the severity

of their criticisms has increased as well. Ironically, the most serious doubts now surround precisely

those things we noticed above as the key elements of the intellectualist program. They include the

following:

1. Anthropological Method

Though both Tylor and Frazer were pioneers in using anthropological data, their methods in going

about this task have not worn well over time. Professional anthropologists in particular fairly cringe

at the way in which these Victorian anthropologists bring together supposedly similar customs of

different peoples in different times and places without the slightest regard for their original social

context.31 It is this method, for example, that allows Frazer to associate Celtic fire festivals with

Scandinavian ones, and then, because his argument needs it, to assume conveniently that a practice

found only in the former (tossing human images into the fires) must, at some point, have also

occurred in the latter. All the while, he also overlooks the fact that while the Nordic fires occur in

midsummer, as in the festival of Diana, the Celtic festival occurs only in the spring and fall. After a

close look at such loosely made connections, we find ourselves asking what, apart from the mere

coincidence that there is fire in each, allows Frazer to connect these festivals at all. Similar

stretchings occur throughout the argument of The Golden Bough, though less often in the pages of

Primitive Culture.

2. Evolutionism

The often casual approach to evidence which we find in both theories creates further problems in

connection with the doctrine of intellectual evolution, which both Tylor and Frazer assume as an

absolutely central element of their thinking. When Tylor finds an example of religious monotheism,

he assumes that it reflects a stage of thought later than polytheism. Yet the evidence brought

forward frequently does not show such a sequence because it is largely “timeless” in character.

Often it is impossible to tell whether, say, belief in one high god developed in earlier or later

centuries of a people’s history, or perhaps somewhere in between. When Frazer finds a report of

purely magical practices, for example, he naturally assumes that these are rooted in a historical era

that comes before the age of religion. But how does he know this? The

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evidence usually cannot tell him. Most of the time, as we have seen, his examples show magic and

religion existing together, as if both arose in the long single span of history that was half magical

and half religious at the same time. It is not surprising that Tylor and Frazer both found it difficult

to respond when other scholars of the time, most notably critics like Andrew Lang and Wilhelm

Schmidt, pointed out the uncomfortable fact that monotheism, supposedly the “higher” form of

religion, was more common in the simpler cultures of people who hunted and gathered food than in

the later, advanced communities of those who farmed and kept herds of domestic animals.

3. The Individual and the Social

Finally, as we shall see in the chapters immediately following, strong doubts have been raised about

the intellectualist individualism that Tylor and Frazer endorse. Is it really true that religious

behavior arises only, or chiefly, from intellectual motives, as the work of solitary thinkers seeking

explanations for life’s great riddles and mysteries? Is it really true that the social and ritual elements

of religion are purely secondary—always dependent upon the intellectual factor, which is

supposedly more fundamental? Moreover, if the origin of religion lies in ages and peoples far

beyond the reach of the historical record and must be creatively reconstructed from legends and

folkways, how can we ever prove such speculations? They involve so much guesswork as to seem

beyond either proof or disproof. It was this issue that led a theorist we shall meet later, E. E. Evans-

Pritchard, to say that most explanations of the sort given by Tylor and Frazer are “just so stories”—

imaginative reconstructions of what might have happened, but nothing more.32

However all of this stands, there is little doubt that, historically considered, the intellectualist

theories of Tylor and Frazer are of great importance. As we shall see in our later chapters, their

work has in many ways served as the starting point for most other theorists both in their time and in

ours. Their theories of animism and magic have come to represent a theoretical stance that rival

thinkers have felt free to reject, endorse, or revise, but never to ignore.

Notes

1. Abridged ed., p. 51; see n. 21 below.

2. The only full-length biography of Tylor is R. R. Marett, Tylor (London: Chapman and Hall,

1936). There is a short appreciation of Tylor’s life and work prepared in honor of his seventy-fifth

birthday by Andrew Lang, who regarded himself as more an associate and peer of Tylor than a

follower; see “Edward Burnett Tylor,” in Anthropological Essays Presented to Edward Burnett

Tylor (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1907), pp. 1–15.

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3. For Tylor’s associates, disciples, and influence on the study of folklore, see Richard M. Dorson,

The British Folklorists: A History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968); on Tylor’s work in

particular, see pp. 167–97.

4. On the influence of early evolutionary ideas on Tylor’s thought, see George W. Stocking, Jr.,

Victorian Anthropology (New York: Free Press, 1987), pp. 46–109, and Robert A. Segal, “Victorian

Anthropology,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 58, no. 3 (Fall 1990): 469–77.

5. Müller developed his views over a period of more than four decades from the late 1850s to the

end of the century. Among his most important works were the influential essay “Comparative

Mythology,” in the Oxford Magazine (1856), Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion: As

Illustrated by the Religions of India (1878), and the Gifford Lectures, published as Natural Religion

(1881). Müller’s subsequent series of Gifford lectures, which includes Physical Religion (1890),

Anthropological Religion (1892), and Theosophy, or Psychological Religion (1893), develops in

more detail the general themes of natural religion—deity, morality, and immortality— which are

laid out in the two earlier works. Articles that Müller published to the end of the century echo or

offer variations of themes developed in the books.

6. E. B. Tylor, Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy,

Religion, Language, Art, and Custom, 2 vols., 4th ed., rev. (London: John Murray, [1871], 1903), 1:

2.

7. Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, p. 162.

8. On the general doctrine of “survivals,” see Margaret T. Hogden, The Doctrine of Survivals: A

Chapter in the History of Scientific Method in the Study of Man (London: Allenson, 1936).

9. Primitive Culture, 1: 115–16; on the association of ideas, see J. W. Burrow, Evolution and

Society (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1970), pp. 248–51.

10. Primitive Culture, 1: 408.

11. Primitive Culture, 1: 424.

12. Primitive Culture, 1: 429.

13. Primitive Culture, 1: 429.

14. Primitive Culture, 2: 356.

15. Primitive Culture, 1: 414.

16. E. B. Tylor, “The Religion of Savages,” Fortnightly Review 6 (August 15, 1866): 86.

17. Primitive Culture, 1: 317.

18. For Frazer’s influence on historical studies and his role in the development of anthropology, see

Eric Sharpe, Comparative Religion: A History (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1975), pp. 87–

96; Brian Morris, Anthropological Studies of Religion (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University

Press, 1987), pp. 103–106; and Robert Ackerman, The Myth and Ritual School: J. G. Frazer and

the Cambridge Ritualists (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1991). On the relevance of his work

to issues in philosophy and science, especially questions of epistemology, see Ludwig Wittgenstein,

Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough, ed. Rush Rhees, tr. A. C. Miles, (Nottinghamshire, England:

Brynmill, 1979). The two most important studies of

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Frazer’s great influence on literature in the twentieth century are John B. Vickery, The Literary

Impact of The Golden Bough (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973), and the collection

of essays in Robert Fraser, ed., Sir James Frazer and the Literary Imagination: Essays in Affinity

and Influence (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990). An interesting study of The Golden Bough as

itself a work of literature more than science is Stanley Edgar Hyman, The Tangled Bank: Darwin,

Marx, Frazer & Freud as Imaginative Writers (New York: Athenaeum, 1974), pp. 233–91.

19. There is an excellent biography of Frazer by Robert Ackerman, J. G. Frazer: His Life and Work

(Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1987); see also The Macmillan Encyclopedia of

Religion, under “Frazer, James, G.”

20. On the encounter with Roberston Smith and his influence on Frazer, see Ackerman, J. G.

Frazer, pp. 53–69, and Robert Alun Jones, “Robertson Smith and James Frazer on Religion: Two

Traditions in British Social Anthropology,” in George W. Stocking, Jr., ed., Functionalism

Historicized: Essays on British Social Anthro pology, History of Anthropology, vol. 2 (Madison,

WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), pp. 31–58.

21. James George Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, abridged edition

(hereafter cited as Golden Bough), (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1924). It needs to be

pointed out that over the years of its composition, Frazer changed his views on a number of

important issues considered in The Golden Bough. Myth proved an especially troublesome topic, as

did totemism. On the latter, he wavered from one theory to another and had to accommodate new

information that kept coming in from ethnographic field studies. On the differences between The

Golden Bough’s three editions, see Ackerman, J. G. Frazer, pp. 95–100, 164–79, 236–57, and

Fraser, The Making of the Golden Bough, pp. 117–55, 156–202.

22. On this thesis, which was developed chiefly in the second edition, see Ackerman, J. G. Frazer,

pp. 167–69.

23. Golden Bough, p. 324.

24. On the work of Spencer and Gillen, see Ackerman, J. G. Frazer, pp. 154–57; also chapter 3 of

the present volume, where the research of Émile Durkheim is considered.

25. These were Die Korndämonen (Spirits of the Corn) (1868); Der Baumkultus der Germanen

(The Tree-Worship of the Germans) (1875); and Antike Wald- und Feldkulte (The Ancient Worship

of Forest and Field) (1875–77). On Mannhardt’s influence on British anthropology and the work of

Frazer, see Sharpe, Comparative Religion: A History, pp. 50–51.

26. For further analysis of human sacrifice in religion, see René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, tr.

Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977) and The Scapegoat, tr. Yvonne

Freccero (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986).

27. Golden Bough, p. 714.

28. For examples of Frazer’s correspondence and methods of research, see Fraser, The Making of

the Golden Bough, pp. 75–85, and throughout. On Frazer’s questionnaire and the critical comment

that he did not rely on it nearly as much as on the work of other scholars, see two articles by

Edmund Leach, “Golden Bough or Gilded Twig,”

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Daedalus 90 (1961): 371–99, especially p. 384, n. 4, and “On the ‘Founding Fathers’: Frazer and

Malinowski,” Encounter 25 (1965): 24–36.

29. On the scholarly search for the origins of religion, see the study by Tomoko Masuzawa, In

Search of Dreamtime: The Quest for the Origin of Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

1993).

30. On the intellectualism of Tylor and Frazer, see my “Max Müller, E. B. Tylor, and the

‘Intellectualist’ Origins of the Science of Religion,” International Journal of Comparative Religion,

1, no. 2 (June 1995): 69–83; for an assessment of recent attempts to restate the Tylorian position,

see Gillian Ross, “Neo-Tylorianism: A Reassessment,” Man, n.s. 6, no. 1 (March 1971): 105–16.

31. These criticisms have come from many quarters of modern anthropology, and they are the main

reason why Frazer’s views, especially, have been almost universally discarded. There is more

respect for Tylor. For an appreciation of his work and a criticism of the doctrine of “survivals,” see

Burrow, Evolution and Society, pp. 244–45. For a particularly stringent criticism of Frazer, see two

articles by Edmund Leach cited in n. 28 above.

32. E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Theories of Primitive Religion (Oxford, England: Clarendon Press,

1965). p. 25.

Suggestions for Further Reading

Ackerman, Robert. J. G. Frazer: His Life and Work. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University

Press, 1987. The definitive intellectual biography of Frazer.

Ackerman, Robert. The Myth and Ritual School: J. G. Frazer and the Cambridge Ritualists.

London: Routledge, 2002. Explores Frazer’s association with the famous and influential circle of

classical scholars at Cambridge University.

Burrow, J. W. Evolution and Society. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1970. A

close study of E. B. Tylor and other early Victorian anthropological thinkers who argued for a

pattern of evolutionary growth in both society and religion.

Clack, Brian R. Wittgenstein, Frazer and Religion. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England:

Palgrave Macmillan, 1999. Examines the influence of The Golden Bough on one of the most

important philosophers of the twentieth century.

Dorson, Richard M. The British Folklorists: A History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968.

Still the best study of the circle of learned amateurs whose work provided a context for the

researches of Tylor and Frazer and helped lay the foundations for modern scientific anthropology.

Fraser, Robert. The Making of the Golden Bough: The Origins and Growth of an Argument. New

York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990. Published on the centennial anniversary of the first printing of The

Golden Bough in 1890, this study examines ideas and influences that found their way into its pages

as well as the changes that occurred over the long interval of its composition.

Fraser, Robert, ed. Sir James Frazer and the Literary Imagination: Essays in Affinity and Influence.

New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990. A collection of essays also

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published on the centennial anniversary of The Golden Bough, it explores Frazer’s wide impact on

modern literature and other spheres of intellectual life.

Frazer, James George. Folklore in the Old Testament: Studies in Comparative Religion, Legend,

and Law. 3 vols. London: The Macmillan Company, 1918.

Frazer, James George. The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion. 3rd edition. 12 vols.

London: The Macmillan Company, 1911–1915.

Frazer, James George. Totemism and Exogamy: A Treatise on Certain Early Forms of Superstition

and Society. 4 vols. London: The Macmillan Company, 1910.

Horton, Robin. Patterns of Thought in Africa and the West: Essays on Magic, Religion, and

Science. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1993. A collection of illuminating

essays by the most well known current neo-Tylorian theorist.

Hyman, Stanley Edgar. The Tangled Bank: Darwin, Marx, Frazer & Freud as Imaginative Writers.

New York: Athenaeum, 1974. An interesting study of The Golden Bough as a contribution to

literature rather than science.

Lang, Andrew. “Edward Burnett Tylor.” In Anthropological Essays Presented to Edward Burnett

Tylor, edited by Andrew Lang. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1907, pp. 1–15. A short

appreciation of Tylor’s life and work by a brilliant contemporary of Tylor, who also wrote

extensively on the matter of explaining religion.

Leach, Edmund. “Golden Bough or Gilded Twig.” Daedalus 90 (1961): 371–99. A severe critique

of Frazer by a leading contemporary British anthropologist.

Marett, R. R. Tylor. London: Chapman and Hall, 1936. Though now dated, the only available

biography of Tylor. Marett was one of Tylor’s disciples and an important theorist of religion in his

own right.

Stocking, George W., Jr. Victorian Anthropology. New York: Free Press, 1987. A perceptive and

detailed study of the early British anthropologists in their nineteenth-century social and intellectual

context.

Tylor, E. B. Anahuac: Or Mexico and the Mexicans, Ancient and Modern. London: Longman,

Green, Longman, and Roberts, 1861.

Tylor, E. B. Anthropology: An Introduction to the Study of Man and Civilization. New York: D.

Appleton and Company, [1881] 1898.

Tylor, E. B. Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy,

Religion, Language, Art, and Custom. 4th ed., rev. 2 vols. London: John Murray, [1871] 1903.

Tylor, E. B. Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization.

3rd. ed., rev. New York: Henry Holt & Company, [1865] n.d.

Vickery, John B. The Literary Impact of The Golden Bough. Princeton: Princeton University Press,

1973. A study of the surprisingly wide and deep influence which Frazer’s book had on some of the

greatest writers of the early twentieth century, including, among others, T. S. Eliot and James Joyce.

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2

Religion and Personality:

Sigmund Freud

Religion would thus be the universal obsessional neurosis of humanity.

Freud, The Future of an Illusion1

Few thinkers in modern times have stirred more fierce debate than Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), the

psychologist from Vienna, Austria, who at the turn of our century shocked not only the field of

medicine but society at large with his startling new analyses of the human personality. To this day,

almost anyone who hears the name “Freud” associates it at once with two things: psychological

therapy and sex. That impression is not inaccurate as far as it goes, but it really does not go very far.

Freud was a most unusual man, driven by ceaseless curiosity, towering ambition, and a remarkably

wide range of intellectual interests. His original profession was medicine, especially brain research.

But the more he traveled on this path of specialized study, the more it branched into new and

different directions. His neurological inquiries soon widened into a more general interest in mental

illness and other puzzles of the mind. And before long he had proposed a provocative new theory of

the human personality. From this platform, he moved confidently ahead, searching out the

psychological dimension in almost every aspect of human life, from seemingly insignificant things

like dreams, jokes, and personal quirks to the deep, complex emotions that steer personal

relationships and shape social customs. Wherever he turned, he seemed able to find yet another

application of his ideas. They illuminated questions about the nature of the family and social life;

they offered clues to the explanation of mythology, folklore, and history; and they suggested new

interpretations of drama, literature, and art. To Freud and his followers, it sometimes seemed as if

he had found an explanatory golden key. Analysis of the psyche opened a door on the innermost

motives of human thought and action, from the stresses of the individual personality to the great

forces that drive and shape civilizations. It could uncover the smallest secret of a single, troubled

self and at the same time offer a new perspective on the

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great endeavors of human history, among them society, morals, philosophy, and—not least—

religion.

Background: Freud’s Life and Work

Freud was born in 1856 in Moravia, a part of central Europe which then belonged to the sprawling

Austro-Hungarian empire.2 His family was Jewish, and his father, a widowed merchant, already had

two grown sons when he chose to remarry. Freud was the first child born to his father’s much

younger second wife; he thus grew up in a complex extended family. His playmates as a child were

his own nephew and a niece, Pauline, a girl whom he liked to torment but to whom he was also

attracted. Looking back later on his childhood, Freud found this experience to be evidence of

ambivalence, a state of divided emotion, which appears as a key theme in his writings, especially

when he considers religion. Human beings, he believed, are often driven by contradictory feelings

of both love and aggression directed toward the same object or person.

While still a boy, Freud moved with his family to the capital of the empire, Vienna, where he was to

live and work almost all of his years. As a Jew, he found it impossible to develop any real love for

this predominantly Catholic city, but his family did become comfortable in it. For almost his entire

life, in fact, he would remain there, raising his own children to adulthood and leaving only in the

year before his death, when the coming of the Nazis to Austria forced him to take refuge in

England. Freud’s parents were conscious of their Jewish identity, observing Passover and giving the

children some synagogue instruction, but in other respects they were religiously indifferent. They

did not follow Jewish dietary laws, and they adapted to Christian holidays, such as Christmas.

In high school Freud was a gifted student who took courses in Greek, Latin, and Hebrew and

finished at the top of his class. Alongside German, his native language, he became fluent in both

French and English, then went on to teach himself Spanish and Italian. In 1873, when he was

seventeen, he became a medical student at the University of Vienna, where he began research in

anatomy and physiology. After graduating as a doctor of medicine in 1881, he began working in the

Vienna General Hospital, where he continued his brain research. A few years later, he married

Martha Bernays, who became a housewife, a mother to their six children, and a loyal companion

throughout their long married life.

During his earlier years of medical work, Freud encountered Josef Breuer, a man who had done

careful case studies of mental illness and soon became

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a close friend. In addition, in 1885 he visited Paris to study nervous disorders with Jean-Martin

Charcot, a famous French physician. This visit became a turning point, for it sparked Freud’s

permanent interest in the psychological study of the mind rather than purely physiological research

on the brain. After Paris, Freud returned to Vienna, continued his work with the mentally ill, and

published his first book, Studies on Hysteria (1895), which was written with his friend Breuer.

Significantly for Freud’s later work, the two authors described in this study a process of repression,

by which troubled people seem to force themselves to forget painful experiences in their lives.

Freud also reported success in treating neurosis—that is, the irrational behavior of these troubled

people—by using hypnotism or simply by engaging them in discussions of their illnesses. With one

patient in particular, a woman he called Anna O., he claimed success in curing her of hysteria by

working back through word associations to an event which was the cause of her problem. This use

of a conversational approach was a key step. Out of it Freud would develop a way of

investigating—and treating—the human mind, which he put at the center of all his work. He chose

to call it “psychoanalysis.”

As Freud envisioned it, the clinical practice of psychoanalysis consisted mainly of listening to a

patient, who at regular appointments was encouraged to feel comfortable saying whatever came to

mind, in whatever way it came, without any logical sequence or story line. Patients were to speak

simply by “free association” of ideas and memories. To many people (in Freud’s day and ours),

such a technique may seem little more than a waste of a good physician’s time. But Freud felt

differently; he found in psychoanalytic conversation an unexpected avenue into the most hidden

part of his patients’ personalities. He began also to analyze himself, making special note of the

things that came up when he was dreaming, and he asked his patients to do the same. Working in

this vein with patients over a full five years of practice and research, Freud listened, read, reflected,

and then drew conclusions that were put into a work entitled The Interpretation of Dreams (1900).

It was this epoch-making book, published on the very edge of the new century, which launched the

great “Freudian revolution” in modern thought. Among other things, this work outlined for the first

time Freud’s remarkable concept of “the unconscious”—a notion we will examine more closely in a

moment.

Though severely criticized by the medical establishment, Freud’s work nonetheless attracted a small

circle of interested followers. In 1902 he formed with these first associates and disciples a

professional organization that became the Vienna Psychological Society. Included in this circle, or

connected with its members, were several men who became famous alongside Freud: Otto Rank,

Karl Abraham, Alfred Adler, Carl Jung, Ernest Jones, and others. Several journals were established,

and psychoanalysis found itself gradually

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transformed from a method and a few creative ideas to a path-breaking new field of scholarly

investigation.

During this same interval and through the hardships of World War I, new ventures in

psychoanalytical theory began to flow steadily from Freud’s pen. In several extremely productive

years just after the turn of the century, he sought to explore the wider implications of

psychoanalytic thought, publishing such works as The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901)

and Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905). A number of journal articles appeared in the

decade before the war, including one on religion and neurosis and several others on primitive

religion.3 These latter efforts became the book Totem and Taboo (1913). In the following years,

while fighting raged elsewhere in Europe, he wrote further articles on the topics of the unconscious,

the basic human drives, and repression, while also completing his Introductory Lectures on

Psychoanalysis (1916–1917). As peace returned and his struggle to draw notice continued, he added

new works, among them Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), The Ego and the Id (1923), and The

Question of Lay Analysis (1926). All along, he energetically promoted the field of psychoanalytical

study by continuing to see patients, corresponding with colleagues in his inner circle, arranging

scholarly congresses, and supporting two academic journals which published new work in the field.

In the last two decades of his life, Freud added to his more specifically psychoanalytical studies

several controversial works on general subjects related to society, science, and religion. These

included The Future of an Illusion (1927) and Moses and Monotheism (1938), two books which,

along with the earlier Totem and Taboo, express his main ideas on religion. We will consider them

shortly.

Freudian Theory: Psychoanalysis

and the Unconscious

We can best understand Freud by beginning where he himself does—with the discoveries he reports

in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900).4 In this important book he begins by observing that human

dreams have always attracted curiosity, figuring widely in myth, literature, folklore, and magic.

Tylor, as we saw, thought that it was the experience of dreams which led primitive people to believe

in souls. Freud accepts these claims, but makes it clear that he is prepared to say more. He insists

that dreams are more significant than mere curiosity or even theories of the soul would ever lead us

to guess. Among other things, dreams show just how much more there is to the activity of the

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human mind than what appears on the surface of ordinary life. Everyone, Freud tells us, has at least

some grasp of everyday conscious thought; when we speak to a friend, write a check, play a game,

or read a book, we not only use our minds but know that we are doing so. Further, we all recognize

that beneath our surface awareness lie other ideas and concepts that seem best described as “pre-

conscious.” These are memories, ideas, or intentions that we are not aware of at the moment but can

easily recall when asked—things like the ages of our parents, what was served for dinner yesterday,

or where we intend to go on the weekend. Though not in a given moment aware of such things, the

mind can easily retrieve them when needed. In the experience of dreams, however, Freud contends

that we come upon something quite unlike either the conscious or pre-conscious level of mental

activity. We draw upon another layer, a different region, of mind that is deep, hidden, huge, and

strangely powerful. This is the realm of the unconscious. Like the great underside of an iceberg, this

deep sector of the self, though unrecognized, is enormously important. It is the source, first, of our

most basic physical urges, our desires for food and sexual activity. Second, bundled together with

these drives is a quite extraordinary assemblage of ideas, impressions, and emotions associated with

everything a person has ever experienced or done or wished to do, from the first days of life up to

the most recent minute. If we want an image of it, we might call this realm of the unconscious the

mind’s mysterious cellar, a dark storehouse necessary for life upstairs, but filled down below with a

jumble of half-formed urges that blend with images, impressions, and trace memories of past

experience. Up above, the conscious mind is unaware of these things, but they do exist, and they

exercise a powerful indirect influence on all that we think and do.

When he first wrote of it, Freud recognized, of course, that his idea of an unconscious mind was not

entirely new. “Everywhere I go,” he once said, “I find the poet has been there before me.” Since

antiquity, philosophers too had suggested such a hidden dimension of the mind, but their writings

were intuitive, not scientific. Though they perceived something mysterious that was deep in the self

and sensed its power, they had no way of explaining why such a thing should exist or how it might

work. Psychoanalysis, he felt, was very different. It possessed a rational method of finding out the

contents of this hidden realm and explaining what purpose it serves. Freud claimed that basic

biological drives, for example, are found there because they cannot be anywhere else; they are by

nature without consciousness. Images and emotions, on the other hand, sink down into it from the

conscious mind up above. They can be understood to come into the unconscious in two ways. Either

they drift in quietly as a kind of faint transcript of past experience,

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or they are forced down, as it were, for quite specific and unusual reasons. In the second instance

they have traveled down into hiding because of a complex sequence of events that has first taken

place up on the plane of conscious thought and action. Freud asserted the opinion that they have

been forced there by repression, the remarkable process he and Breuer managed to identify in their

intense conversations with distressed patients.5 Most of these people possessed a common

characteristic. Some earlier event or circumstance in their lives produced an emotional response so

powerful that it could not be expressed openly; it was therefore repressed, or pushed down into the

unconscious and out of mental view. On the surface, said Freud, an event repressed is an event

forgotten, but in fact it has not disappeared. Unconsciously it remains very much in the mind, only

to work itself back out in quite puzzling ways. Repressed thoughts and emotions release themselves

in forms of action no rational person would engage in: pointless movements, unfounded fears,

irrational attachments, obsessive personal rituals, and other strange behaviors Freud described with

the term “neurotic.” Victims of such neuroses, he insisted, could not be treated with medicines, but

they could be helped by psychoanalysis. A skilled therapist, he observed, can bring the repressed

thought up into consciousness, allow all of the neurotic emotions to be properly released, and

through this process bring the behavior to a level of awareness that allows it to be controlled.

In first framing these central concepts of repression and the unconscious, Freud relied heavily on his

early encounters with neurotic people, some of whom were suffering from serious personality

disorders. But the evidence he drew from dreams, which, of course, everyone experiences,

suggested to him that all human activity—normal as well as abnormal—could be shown to be

powerfully affected by the unconscious. Dreams indicated that to a degree, all persons are neurotic.

Freud chose to describe dreams as “wish fulfillments.” They are states of mind created by the fact

that we feel certain powerful drives— such as the craving for a sexual encounter—which are rooted

in the needs of the body. These drives naturally have no sense of time; they want satisfaction

immediately. And though we might like to accommodate them exactly as felt, the facts of normal

life usually make this impossible. In most waking hours, when the conscious mind is in control,

they must be repressed—driven down into the unconscious. And yet so powerful are these urges

and emotions that, as soon as we sleep, as soon as our consciousness fades, they begin to “leak out”

in the form of dreams—just as the mentally disturbed person’s repressions leak out in the form of

strange, neurotic behavior. For the psychoanalyst, then, the interpretation of a dream achieves a

purpose similar to that of an audience with a neurotic person; both offer pathways into the secret

corridors of the unconscious.

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Nor is this all. Freud came to believe that many things we do even in waking life are ruled by the

hidden energies of the unconscious. In further books like The Psychopathology of Everyday Life

(1901) and Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious (1905), he sought to show that such routine

happenings as jokes, slips of the tongue (the well-known “Freudian slip”), absentmindedness,

memory lapses, doodling, and even bodily quirks and gestures all originate in the unconscious.

Widening the circle still further, he pointed to the power of the unconscious in the achievements of

great artists, dramatists, and writers. In the light of psychoanalysis, the works of Leonardo da Vinci,

Michelangelo, Dostoyevsky, Sophocles, and Shakespeare all could be seen as shaped by forces

rising up from the unconscious.6

According to Freud, then, it is no accident that the familiar stories found in mythology and folklore

and the recurring themes of art, literature, and religion bear a strong resemblance to the subjects and

images that keep returning in human dreams. All testify to the secret, subterranean power of the

unconscious.

The Personality in Conflict

In his writings Freud traces so many different things to the unconscious that one may wonder

whether the idea is pushed to an unbalanced extreme. But he insists not. The unconscious, in his

view, is central to thought because it serves as the crucial link between what is physical and what is

mental in the human person. After all, there are no pure spirits in the human race. Every personality

must be rooted in a physical body, which is driven by certain basic biological instincts, or drives.

Hunger is instinctive and so is the sex drive; these physical impulses preserve both the self and the

species, the human individual and the race. Both operate on the “pleasure principle.” We feel a

need, and we feel pleasure when it is satisfied. It is an element of our very nature as physical beings

that we seek pleasure and turn away from whatever fails to provide it.

In themselves, then, the physical drives are simple things. They represent the instinct for pleasure.

Strains and tensions arise, however, because these drives are of different kinds: they can and do

come into conflict whenever they collide with each other or whenever they meet the unchangeable

set of facts that make up the outside world. If I see an apple when hungry, I eat it and satisfy the

pleasure principle in doing so. But should another person, also hungry, be holding the apple, then I

face a conflict. The facts of the situation force me to repress my drive. Since the risk of losing the

apple altogether is too great, I must, regretfully, agree to share it. In the face of reality or the

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claims of other drives, we cannot escape the fact that some drives on some occasions must be

repressed. And such repressions feed the unconscious.

Freud struggled long and hard to determine just what were the most basic human drives and to

describe how they operated. At first he thought there were only the “ego instinct,” represented by

hunger, and the libido (the Latin word for “desire”), which represented sexuality. Later on he spoke

of both of these as forms of one drive he called eros (the Greek for “love”) and suggested an

opposite drive, aggression, as the other. Later still, and without discarding the idea of aggression, he

settled upon eros as the drive to continue life and thanatos (the Greek for “death”) as the drive to

end it.

Whatever the labels, the fundamental thing about the drives is the idea of conflict, of struggle that

takes place both within the family of drives themselves and between the drives and the outside

world. This idea of an unavoidable competition at the center of the self is what led Freud to come

up with perhaps the best known of all his concepts—the threefold division of the human personality

into the ego (Latin for “I”), the superego (Latin for the “I above”), and the id (Latin for “it”).7 In

this scheme, the id is considered the earliest and most basic of the three elements. Rooted in the

early, animal stage of human evolution, it is unconscious and unaware of itself; it is where the raw,

physical drives of the body come to a form of mental expression in wishes—to eat, to kill, or to

engage in sex. At the other extreme, the top of the personality so to speak, lies the superego. It

represents a collection of influences which, from the moment of birth, begin to be imposed on the

personality by the outside world. These are the attitudes and expectations of society as framed first

by the family and then by larger groups, such as the tribe, the city, or the nation. Finally, suspended

in a position between the demands of society and the desires of the body, we find the third element

of the self—the ego, or “reality principle.” The ego might best be called the “choosing center” of

the human person. Its troublesome task is to perform a continual balancing act within. It must, on

the one hand, satisfy the desires of the id and, on the other, be ready to curb or deny them whenever

they clash with the hard facts of the physical world (like the fact that fire burns), or the social

restraints imposed by the superego.

As some have noticed, this sketch of the mind bears an interesting resemblance to that of Plato, the

Greek philosopher who explained the self on the analogy of a charioteer trying to control the

contending horses of reason and passion. Freud, too, suggests that the personality is the scene of a

continuing struggle to balance out powerful forces in conflict. There are the physical drives; there is

the immovable outer world; there is the weight of society’s demands; and there is the difficult task,

which falls heavily upon the ego, of finding a way to accommodate and balance all contenders.

“Action by the ego,” Freud writes, “is as it should be if it satisfies simultaneously the

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demands of the id, of the superego, and of reality—that is to say, if it can reconcile their demands

with one another.”8

Infantile Sexuality and the Oedipus Complex

Freud’s most fascinating application of this conflict model of the personality appears in his now

famous theories of infantile sexuality and the Oedipus complex. As most know, Freudian theory

places great importance on childhood, especially the earliest years of life—from birth to age six. If

he had merely claimed that this is the age when much of what he calls the superego is formed— that

is, the age when parents plant the rules of reality, family, and society in the child’s mind—Freud

would have pleased many and disturbed no one. That only confirms common sense. What he

actually puts forward, however, is a stunning idea that many people found not just wrong but

perverted. He boldly insists that early childhood, no less than adult life, is strongly shaped by the

sexual desires of the id. In Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), he argues that from the

moment of birth onward, physical, sexual urges govern much of the behavior of an infant child. In

the first eighteen months of life, there is an oral phase, in which sexual pleasure comes along with

nourishment from sucking at a mother’s breast; from that time up to age three, there is an anal

phase, when pleasure comes from control of excretion; from age three onward, the genital organs

assume importance. This phallic stage (from the Greek phallos, meaning “penis”), which includes

masturbation and sexual fantasies, reaches to the age of six, at which point a nonsexual stage of

latency sets in. This phase lasts until the early teens and the arrival of full adult sexual capacities.

As a person passes through this development, the earlier sexual stages do not completely disappear;

they are instead overlaid by the new ones. Accordingly, cases of abnormal behavior are best

understood as fixations, as the failure to move on to the next level of growth, or in other cases as

regressions, in which people move backward into earlier stages. A person obsessed with ordering

the trivial details of life, for example, might be described as suffering a fixation in the anal stage,

when behavior is excessively controloriented, and could conceivably even regress to the infantile

oral stage. This view of human development turns out to be especially important when Freud turns

to religion, for one of his main concerns is to find the place of religious belief in the sequence of

normal emotional growth. Does it belong to an adult stage of the personality’s development or to an

earlier phase? A great deal, obviously, hinges on the answer to this question. Moreover, when Freud

discusses the history of human civilizations, he likes very much to use the

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analogy of individual growth, as if he were talking about an individual person. This comparison

enjoyed wide acceptance in Freud’s day, and a version of it was captured in the famous aphorism of

his contemporary, the German biologist-philosopher Ernst Haeckel: “Ontogeny recapitulates

phylogeny.” (The development of the individual reenacts the evolution of the species.) Haeckel, of

course, sees the individual as the mirror of the group, while Freud finds the reflection to go the

other way. The important thing to notice, however, is that anyone who accepts Freud’s pattern will

be inclined to take one view of religion if it is seen as belonging to the childhood of the human race

and quite another if it is taken as a mark of adulthood, of civilization in its maturity.

Probably no one needs to be told that infantile sexuality—and its link to religion—is on clearest

display in what Freud calls the Oedipus complex. This well-known term comes from the celebrated

tragedy (which Freud translated as a schoolboy) by Sophocles, the great dramatist of ancient

Greece. It tells the story of King Oedipus, a proud, good man whose fate it was quite unknowingly

to kill his father and then marry his own mother. In a way that is remarkably parallel to the story of

Oedipus, Freud tells us, children in the phallic stage (between ages three and six) experience the

desire to displace one of their parents and become the lover of the other. The boy, discovering the

pleasure given him by his penis, wants to become the sexual partner of his mother, thereby taking

the place of his father, whom in a sense he “hates” as his rival. Sensing these feelings, the mother,

with supporting threats from the father, discourages her son from touching his sexual organ; there is

even the threat it could be cut off. The son, in turn, is genuinely frightened, and surmising from

girls’ lack of a penis that such a thing could actually happen to him, experiences a castration

complex—“the severest trauma of his young life.”9 The son therefore finds that he must submit to

his father, give up hope of possessing his mother, and get his satisfaction from sexual fantasies

instead. Still, he never entirely gives up his desire for his mother or ends his jealous rivalry with his

father. Young girls experience similar emotions but along a different path. They envy the male

penis, imagine they have the same organ, and at first seek a similar encounter with the mother, only

later to accept their feminine role and acknowledge the rightful authority of their father.

Even after the contemporary sexual revolution, Freud’s account of the Oedipus complex still comes

to many people as something of a shock. They find it inconceivable that the innocence of childhood

could be shaded by such powerful drives and dark emotions. But Freud is convinced of it. Even

more, he feels that the Oedipus complex is actually “the central experience of the years of

childhood, the greatest problem of early life, and the main source of later inadequacy.”10 Indeed,

oedipal conflicts are a problem for society as well as the individual. If this deep incestuous urge

were to be acted upon, it would

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be exceedingly damaging to the entire family unit, which is crucial to the child’s own survival. If

carried out, in other words, the urge toward incest would ultimately be destructive of both the self

and society, just as it certainly was for King Oedipus in the play. It follows, then, that already in the

earliest phase of life, a struggle arises in the child between the drive for sex and the need of a

family. In their very first years, all human beings begin to discover that unless they find a balance,

unless they can control their colliding desires, there can be neither a family nor society and hence

no framework of security for the self. Restraints must be placed on some of our urges, for without

them we cannot have a civilization, and without civilization we cannot survive.

Later Developments and Writings

In his mature years, Freud developed and refined his theories, looking always for new dimensions

and wider applications of his core ideas: the unconscious, the Oedipus complex, neurosis, and the

three-part framework of human personality. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), he revised his

earlier understanding of the basic drives, which to him centered on sex and selfpreservation—the

two urges that create and sustain life—by adding a different but equally basic drive that sought to

do just the opposite. This “death instinct” (thanatos) was the backward urge to restore the world to

its primal state, to the time when there was no life at all. Such a concept, he felt, was the only thing

that could account for the many instances of such behaviors as masochism and sadism, in which

people avoid pleasure and actually seek pain. In Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego

(1921), he expanded the concept of the libido, or sexual desire, to include the broader idea of

diffused emotional attachment, such as is found in a family. Then he applied it to explain how an

organized community like a church depends on personal attachments to a leader; in Christianity, for

example, devotion to the person of Christ and one’s fellow believers is what gives this huge, varied

community of people a sense of binding solidarity.

With the outbreak of World War I, Freud began to reflect at length on the themes of death, human

weakness, and the limits of civilization. In the difficult years between the two world wars, his

commitment to psychoanalysis remained strong, and he placed great faith in the progress of science.

Still, a general sense of melancholy, of pessimism about the plight of humanity began to come

forward. We find this attitude especially in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), where he

explores the unhappy conflict between our instinctive personal desires, most notably the power of

human aggression, and the strong restraints that society must place upon them if humanity is to

survive.

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Freud and Religion

Once he had developed the basic ideas of psychoanalysis, Freud found religion a most promising

subject of study.11 In childhood, of course, he had gained a basic acquaintance with the teachings of

Judaism. Although his family was largely non-religious, he knew well the stories and writings of

the Hebrew Bible. He also developed a useful working knowledge of Christianity, drawn partly

from the facts of life in staunchly Catholic Vienna and partly from his own wide reading in the

history and literature of Western civilization. Further, religious ideas, imagery, and parallels figured

prominently in the neuroses of some of his first patients. His personal stance, however, was one of

complete rejection of religious belief. The biographer who knew him best tells us bluntly that “he

went through life from beginning to end a natural atheist.”12 Freud found no reason to believe in

God and therefore saw no value or purpose in the rituals of religious life.

In light of this background, it is not surprising that Freud’s approach to religion, like that of Tylor

and Frazer, is quite the opposite of that taken by people who are themselves religious. In most cases

religious believers say that they believe as they do because God has spoken to them through the

Bible, because a divinity has touched their hearts, or because what their church or synagogue

teaches is the truth. Freud, by contrast, is quite sure that religious ideas do not come from a God or

gods, for gods do not exist; nor do such beliefs come from the sort of sound thinking about the

world that normally leads to truth. Like Tylor and Frazer, Freud is certain that religious beliefs are

erroneous; they are superstitions. At the same time, he notes that they are interesting superstitions,

which raise important questions about human nature: Why, if they are so obviously false, do so

many people persist in holding these beliefs, and with such deep conviction? If religion is not

rational, how do people acquire it? And why do they keep it? Tylor shows almost no interest in

these questions, and Frazer, though he does somewhat explore the attractions of magic, largely

ignores them as well. Freud, however, does consider them —and with good reason. In

psychoanalysis he claims to have found the answers.

In an early article published under the title “Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices” (1907), we

can find a first clue to Freud’s approach. In it he observes that there is a close resemblance between

the activities of religious people and the behaviors of his neurotic patients. Both, for example, place

great emphasis on doing things in a patterned, ceremonial fashion; both also feel guilty unless they

follow the rules of their rituals to perfection. In both cases too, the ceremonies are associated with

the repression of basic instincts: psychological neuroses usually arise from repression of the sex

drive; religion demands repression of selfishness, control of the ego-instinct. Thus,

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just as sexual repression results in an individual obsessional neurosis, religion, which is practiced

widely in the human race, seems to be “a universal obsessional neurosis.”13 This comparison

suggests a theme that is fundamental to almost everything Freud writes on religion. In his view,

religious behavior always resembles mental illness; accordingly, the concepts most suited to

explaining it are those that have been developed by psychoanalysis.

All three of the books Freud devotes to religion take this basic approach, but they do so in

distinctive ways. As it happens, all three are also fairly brief. So instead of choosing just one, we

can give some consideration to each of them, all the while noticing the pattern of psychoanalytic

explanation that is common throughout.

Totem and Taboo

Totem and Taboo (1913) is a book Freud regarded as one of his best. It presents a psychological

interpretation of the life of primitive peoples. It employs the concepts of psychoanalysis, but like

other books of the time, it is also influenced by evolutionary thinking—not just Darwin’s theory of

biological evolution but the general ideas of intellectual and social evolution as well. Freud accepts

the opinion of his age that it is not just our physical selves which are products of evolution; he also

adopts the idea, shared by Tylor and Frazer, that we have also evolved intellectually and observes

that over the ages our social institutions, like our animal species, have traced an unsteady but still

upward line of progress. Consequently, he argues, just as we find clues to the personality of

individual adults in their earlier character as children, so we find in the character of past cultures

important clues to the nature of civilization in the present. This past, moreover, includes not just our

civilized ancestors like the Greeks and Romans but—now that Darwin has shown the connection—

even prehistoric cultures and peoples, those communities of humans who first descended from their

animal ancestors.

With these premises in hand, Freud turns next to two practices of primitive peoples which strike

modern minds as especially strange: the use of animal “totems” and the custom of “taboo.” Tylor,

Frazer, and other anthropologists were fascinated by these customs, as we have noticed. In the first

case, a tribe or clan chooses to associate itself with a specific animal (or plant), which serves as its

sacred object, its “totem.” In the second, some person or thing is called “taboo” if a tribe wants to

declare it “off limits” or forbidden. According to the oldest and strongest known taboos, most early

societies seem to have strictly prohibited two things. First, there could be no incest; marriage must

always be “exogamous,” that is, outside the immediate family or clan. Among primitives there is

almost always what Freud calls a “horror of incest.” Second,

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there could be no killing or eating of the totem animal; except on certain rare ceremonial occasions,

when this rule was solemnly broken, eating the “totem” was also “taboo.” Third—and here Freud

goes beyond other theorists—there could be no point in making taboos, in publicly disallowing

these things, unless somehow, at some time, people actually wanted to do them. Evidently, these are

crimes that people did try to commit. But if so, why make them crimes in the first place? Why make

everyone miserable by creating rules that no one really wanted to keep?

Here in specific form we meet the kind of question that does not appear in the works of theorists

like Tylor and Frazer. From their intellectualist standpoint, human religious behavior is a conscious

endeavor; it represents an effort to use reason to understand the world while, at the same time, it

demonstrates a failure to reason correctly. Religious people try to be rational but do not succeed;

their rites of “taboo” and rituals of totemism cannot achieve what they suppose. But then the

question remains: If it is a mistake to believe in totems and taboos, why should anyone continue to

do so? Freud finds the answer in the unconscious. He claims that experience with neurotic patients

shows the personalities of both disturbed and normal people alike to be strongly marked by

ambivalence—by the clash of powerful opposing desires. They want to do certain things, and at the

same time they do not. Obsessively neurotic people, for example, will sometimes feel extreme grief

when a loved one, a father or mother, dies. Yet on probing the unconscious, we often find that it is

not love but guilt and hate that actually cause their emotion. We discover, says Freud, that the

neurotic person unconsciously wants the parent to die, yet—once the death has occurred—goes on

to feel intense guilt for having harbored such a terrible wish. To cope with the stress, the neurotic

may even project onto the dead person certain negative characteristics, so that the death wish will

seem justified. Now, remarkably enough, tribal peoples show just this trait, thinking of their dead

ancestors as demons, or “wicked spirits,” who deserve their hate. In their use of magic, too, they

imagine that the world is just an extension of their own selves. By thinking about the sound of

thunder and imitating it, they suppose they can make real rain.

More than anything else in primitive cultures, it is the practices of totemism and taboo that present

us with a particularly striking display of psychic ambivalence—one which opens a window on the

power of human emotions in the very earliest age of humanity. After all, says Freud, if Darwin is

right about our descent from the apes, we should think of the first human beings as living, like their

animal ancestors, in “primal hordes”—extended families of women and children dominated by one

powerful male. Within these groups there would have been loyalty, affection, and security against

danger; for the young males, however, there was also something else—frustration and

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envy. Though they feared and respected their father, they also sexually desired the females, all of

whom were his wives. Torn between their need for the security of the horde and their suppressed

sexual urges, they were at length driven to a fateful act. In a fearsome turn of events, which

undoubtedly occurred many times in different hordes, the sons banded together, murdered their

father and (since they were cannibals) consumed his body, even as they proceeded to take

possession of his wives. At first this primeval murder in the horde brought a sense of joy and

liberation, but grave second thoughts soon followed. The sons were overcome with guilt and

remorse. Wanting desperately to restore the master they had killed, they found in the totem animal a

“father substitute” and symbol; they agreed to worship it, and before it they then swore the oldest of

all taboos: “Thou shalt not kill the totem.” Over time, this rule was generalized to the entire clan

and became the universal commandment against all murder. “Thou shalt not kill” thus undoubtedly

became the first moral rule of the human race.

The same powerful feelings of remorse led quickly to the second taboo— the commandment against

incest. Regretting their act and recognizing at once that seizing the father’s wives would only create

new conflict among themselves, the sons agreed to a second commandment: “Thou shalt not take

thy father’s wives.” In order to live together, the sons had to agree to find any new wives only

“outside the clan.” Freud suggests that these prehistoric agreements of the brothers may, in fact,

have been the real events that lay behind the mythical “social contract” which philosophers have

often presented as the foundation of human society.

The case of the first taboo is more complicated than the second, and to explain it Freud draws on the

work of William Roberston Smith, the very same man who influenced Frazer and first suggested the

idea of the primitive “totem sacrifice.”14 Though normally the totem’s life was sacred, the newer

Australian research had shown that there were certain sacred occasions on which the pattern was

reversed. The totem animal then was killed and consumed by all in a ritual feast. From the

standpoint of psychoanalysis, says Freud, this too is highly significant. The totem sacrifice makes

sense only as a deeply emotional ceremony in which the community reenacts the primeval murder

of the first father, who, through death, has now become its god. In the ritual, the sons publicly

reaffirm their love for him and—quite unconsciously—also release the hate caused by the sexual

renunciation they now endure.

The totem sacrifice thus confirms that the original murder of the father— a crime committed,

fittingly, in the childhood of the human race—is nothing less than the acting out in history of the

powerful, double human emotions that converge in every male’s infancy to form the Oedipus

complex. The brothers’ assault upon their father is in essence the crime of Oedipus enacted

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thousands of years before Sophocles ever wrote his play! Out of jealous desire for their father’s

wives—a desire for their own mothers—the first sons committed a murder which was followed by a

great ritual of remorse and affection. To the human race, these extraordinary events have left a

legacy of profound emotional ambivalence. On the level of conscious activity, the members of the

tribe identify the animal in the totem sacrifice with their dead father and, by projection, give him the

status of divinity; they confess that they are all children and offer him their worship by eating the

totem flesh and chaining their sexual desire. On the deeper plane of the unconscious, however, they

express quite the opposite emotions, for the ritual by its very nature recreates their original deed of

rebellious murder and cannibalism, thereby releasing the frustration and hate that arise from the

ongoing denial of their oedipal urges.

Seen in this light, moreover, a modern sacrament like the Christian communion shows its true

character. Like the ancient totem ritual, it reenacts, and seeks to reverse, the original crime of

humanity. In the communion, the flesh and blood of Christ, God’s son (symbolizing the eldest

brother, leader of the rebellion), are eaten in remembrance of his crucifixion, a death suffered as

punishment for the “original sin” of the primeval rebellion. On behalf of his brothers, Christ atones

for their prehistoric crime. Yet the atonement is also reenactment. Since, in Christian theology, the

father and son are one, the sacrament of the son’s death is symbolically in the same moment the

sacrament of the father’s murder. Thus the communion secretly recalls oedipal hate as well as love.

Freud of course recognizes that a long process of evolution stands between the totem rites of early

cannibals and the communion meal of Christianity. He suggests that, over time, the totem animal

was reduced to a simple sacrificial gift. Its place was taken by others, first by animal-human deities,

later by the gods of polytheism, and finally by the father God of Christianity. But these are details.

Freud’s main concern, like Frazer’s, but now from the standpoint of emotions rather than intellect,

is to show the striking connection between present-day religion and the dark ceremonies of the

primitive past. If we want to find the origin of religion, he insists, we need look no further than

these grim events and deep psychological tensions. The birth of belief is to be found in the Oedipus

complex, in the powerful, divided emotions that led humanity to its first great crime, then turned a

murdered father into a god and promised sexual renunciation as a way to serve him. In Freud’s own

words, “Totemic religion arose from the filial sense of guilt, in an attempt to allay that feeling and

appease the father by deferred obedience to him. All later religions are seen to be attempts at

solving the same problem.”15

For Freud, then, the murder in the prehistoric herd is an event of momentous importance in the

history of human social life. In the powerful emotions

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it produced, we find the origin of religion. In the incest taboo—the agreement to protect the clan in

its aftermath—we can see the origin of morality and the social contract. Taken together, totem and

taboo thus form the very foundation of all that has come to be called civilization.

The Future of an Illusion

Totem and Taboo met with approval from Freud’s associates in psychoanalysis —and with outrage

from just about everyone else. Christian critics found the book particularly insulting. For his part,

Freud ignored most of the debate and turned to other interests. Not until fourteen years later did he

return to the subject of religion in The Future of an Illusion (1927), a book he chose to describe as a

continuation of the earlier study. In it he notes that while Totem and Taboo looks backward into the

prehistoric past, The Future of an Illusion considers religion in the present and looks ahead. It

centers not on an event hidden in prehistoric times but on the “manifest motives” of religion in all

places and times. In addition, the second book puts a focus less on rituals than on ideas and

beliefs—particularly belief in God.

Freud begins The Future of an Illusion with certain facts recognized by almost everyone. Human

life has arisen, or evolved, out of the natural world, an arena that is not necessarily friendly to our

enterprises. Though it has produced our species, nature constantly threatens also to destroy us,

whether through predators, disasters, disease, or physical decline. For protection, therefore, we have

from the first joined into clans and communities, thereby creating what we call civilization.

Through it we gain security, but at a price. As the events recounted in Totem and Taboo show us,

society can survive only if we bend our personal desires to its rules and restraints. We cannot just

kill when anger seizes us, take what we do not own, or satisfy sexual desires as we want. We must

restrain our instincts, compensating ourselves (though never enough) with other satisfactions we

can hope to find in, say, the joys of art and leisure or the ties of family, community, and nation. Yet

even with these sacrifices and comforts, civilization cannot fully protect us. In the face of disease

and death, we are all ultimately helpless. In the battle between nature and culture, nature’s laws of

decay and death will always finally win.

Freud next observes that none of us finds this unhappy truth easy to accept; it runs counter to all we

treasure most. We would rather face things as we did in the sunnier days of our childhood. Then

there was always a father to reassure us against the dangers of the storm and the darkness of the

night. Then there was always a voice of strength to say that all would be well in the end. As adults,

in fact, we all continue to crave that childhood security, though in reality we can no longer have it.

Or can we? The voice of religion,

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says Freud, makes us think that indeed we can. Following the childhood pattern, religious belief

projects onto the external world a God, who through his power dispels the terrors of nature, gives us

comfort in the face of death, and rewards us for accepting the moral restrictions imposed by

civilization. Religious belief claims that “over each one of us there watches a benevolent

providence which… will not suffer us to become a plaything of the overmighty and pitiless forces

of nature.”16 In the eyes of such faith, even death loses its sting, for we can be certain that our

immortal spirits will one day be released from our bodies and live on with God. In denying our

desires, therefore, we can be sure we are not just helping society; we are obeying the eternal laws of

a just and righteous Lord.

The best word we can use to describe such beliefs, Freud contends, is “illusion.” By this he means

something quite specific. An illusion for him is a belief whose main characteristic is that we very

much want it to be true. My belief that I am destined for greatness would be a case in point. It could

turn out someday to be true, but that is not why I hold it. I hold it because I strongly wish it to be

true. An illusion is not the same as a delusion, which is something I may also want to be true but

which everyone else knows is not, and perhaps never could be so. If I were to claim that I will one

day be 8 feet tall (which, being now fully grown, I most certainly will not), I would be holding to a

delusion. Rather shrewdly, Freud claims that he is not here calling belief in God as Father a

delusion; in fact, he insists otherwise: “To assess the truth-value of religious doctrines does not lie

within the scope of the present enquiry. It is enough for us that we have recognized them as being,

in their psychological nature, illusions.”17

Religious teachings, therefore, are not truths revealed by God, nor are they logical conclusions

based on scientifically confirmed evidence. They are, on the contrary, ideas whose main feature is

that we dearly want them to be true. They are “fulfillments of the oldest, strongest and most urgent

wishes of mankind. The secret of their strength lies in the strength of those wishes.”18

We should notice here that, though it may be helpful for some, for Freud himself this distinction

between “illusion” and “delusion” comes to very little. In his view, it hardly makes a difference

which term we use, because even if they cannot be absolutely proved to be such, religious beliefs

are in the end delusions; they are teachings we have no right to believe because they cannot pass the

test of the scientific method, which is the only way we have of reliably telling us what is true and

what is not. It is the habit of believers to draw on nothing more than personal feelings and

intuitions, and these are notorious for being often mistaken. Hence, we ought never to put our trust

in religion, even if its teachings can be shown to have provided certain services for humanity in the

past. Freud concedes that, at times, religious beliefs may have been of

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some small assistance in the growth of civilization. Certainly the early totem made a contribution

through its role in the denunciation of murder and incest, and later religion did its part when these

and similar crimes were discouraged by presenting them as offenses deserving of punishment in

Hell. But civilization is now mature and established. We would no more want to build today’s

society on such superstition and repression than we would want to force grown men and women to

obey the rules of behavior we lay down for children.

Religious teachings should be seen in this same light—as beliefs and rules suitable to the childhood

of the human race. In the earlier history of humanity, “the times of its ignorance and intellectual

weakness,” religion was inescapable, like an episode of neurosis that individuals pass through in

their childhood. However, when there is a failure to overcome the traumas and repressions of earlier

life and the neurosis persists into adulthood, then psychoanalysis knows that the personality is in

disorder. The same is true for the growth of civilization. Religion that persists into the present age

of human history can only be a sign of illness; to begin to leave it behind is the first signal of health.

In Freud’s words:

Religion would thus be the universal obsessional neurosis of humanity; like the obsessional

neuroses of children, it arose out of the Oedipus Complex, out of the relation to the father. If this

view is right, it is to be supposed that a turningaway from religion is bound to occur with the fatal

inevitability of a process of growth, and that we find ourselves at this very juncture in the middle of

that phase of development.19

Echoing Tylor, Freud concludes it is best “to view religious teachings … as neurotic relics, and we

may now argue that the time has probably come, as it does in an analytic treatment, for replacing

the effects of repression by the results of the rational operation of the intellect.”20 In short, as

humanity grows into adult life, it must discard religion and replace it with forms of thought suitable

to maturity. Mature people, Freud maintains, allow their lives to be guided by reason and by

science, not by superstition and faith.

An interesting feature of The Future of an Illusion is its dialogue format. Freud routinely stops

along the way of his discussion to answer the objections of an imaginary critic who takes the side of

religion. Among other things, this critic insists that it is wrong to talk of religion as arising merely

from our emotional needs, that religion ought to be believed on the basis of tradition, and—perhaps

most important—that if religion is discarded as the ground for morals, society will collapse into

violence and chaos. These criticisms are of course designed to strengthen Freud’s case, and in each

instance he offers a skillful and persuasive reply. In one of these objections, Freud is asked why

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he seems to have changed his theme since Totem and Taboo. That book was also about the origin of

religion, but its subject was totemism and the father-son relationship; this one talks mainly about

human helplessness. Has the theory now changed? Freud’s answer to this question is instructive if

not quite convincing. He explains that Totem and Taboo explored only one element, though it was

deeply concealed, of what goes into religion. That was the two-sided feeling of both love for and

fear of the father, who ruled the primeval horde. The present book, he says, explores “the other, less

deeply concealed part”—the realization of adults that in the face of nature’s crushing power, they

will always be as weak as children and in need of a loving Father to defend them. Freud does not

address the puzzling fact that while God is presented in the first book as a figure about whom

human beings have very mixed emotions, in the second He is the Father who only loves—and is

only loved in return. Still, whatever the motives, the result in Freud’s eyes is always the same. The

God whom people call upon in prayer is not a being who belongs to reality; he is an image, an

illusion projected outward from the self and onto the external world out of the deep need to

overcome our guilt or allay our fears.

Moses and Monotheism

Freud’s interest in religion did not end with The Future of an Illusion, even though it offers perhaps

the most important statement of his views. At the very end of his career, while struggling with the

cancer that eventually took his life and finding himself driven from Vienna by the Nazi takeover of

Austria, he returned to the subject for one final effort—writing this time on Judaism, his own

religious tradition. In a series of essays undertaken between 1934 and 1938, he focused his attention

on the figure of Moses, examining his foundational role in Jewish life and thought. These essays

were then brought together in a single volume and published in the year of his death under the title

Moses and Monotheism.

As in Totem and Taboo, so in this quite unusual book, Freud puts forward a set of startling new

claims about certain events in religious history—in particular Jewish history—and tries to show

how the concepts and comparisons drawn from psychoanalysis can help to explain them. In the

Bible, he observes, we learn that Moses is the great Hebrew prophet who inspired the people of

Israel by his leadership and shaped their lives by giving them the law of God. True enough perhaps,

but how do we know, Freud asks, that Moses was really a Hebrew? A close look at the texts gives

reason to believe that he was actually an Egyptian prince, a ruler and follower of the radical

Pharaoh Akhenaton, who tried to replace the many gods of ancient Egypt with

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a strict devotion to one and only one deity—the sun god Aten. Unlike the other cults, the worship of

Aten employed neither images nor superstitious rituals; it stressed a purely spiritual god of love and

goodness, who was also revered as the strong guardian of an eternal moral law. When Akhenaton

died, his new religion failed in Egypt, but not entirely. One of those who kept it alive was this same

man Moses, who adopted the Hebrew slaves as his people, united them behind the new faith, and

with great courage led them out of their captivity.

Initially those who followed Moses prospered under his leadership. Later on, however, buffeted by

their misfortunes in the desert, Moses’ chosen people rebelled against his leadership, renounced his

god, and put him to death. His monotheistic religion was then overlaid by a new cult dedicated to a

violent, volcano-deity named Yahweh, the god whom Israelites worshipped as they fought their

bloody battles to win the Land of Promise. Later, in writing their scriptures, Jewish scribes attached

the name of Moses also to the founder of this second faith, but this sleight of hand could not

disguise the differences between the new religion and the earlier monotheism of the original Moses,

their first and true spiritual leader. The new faith replaced the pure spirituality and morals of the old

with the rituals, superstitions, and bloody animal sacrifices we find in Israel during the age of the

great Hebrew kings. Degraded as it appears to us, says Freud, the new religion managed almost

completely to push out the old, leaving behind little more than a faint memory of the original Moses

and his faith.

Yet that is not where the story ends. Centuries later in the life of the community, and against all

probability, the people of Israel found themselves face to face with the great monotheistic prophets,

men seized with the mission to recover and revive the old faith of the tribe. These prophets—Amos,

Isaiah, and others—denounced the religion of sacrifices; they demanded worship of the one

universal God announced by the first Moses, and they called again for obedience to his stem moral

law. Their words thus marked a decisive turn that affected not just Jewish history but the entire

world. For it was out of the soil of this revived Jewish monotheism that Christianity would one day

rise to become a great world religion. From the time of the Hebrew prophets forward, faith in the

awesome, righteous God of Moses took its place as the immovable center of both Jewish and

Christian belief.

There is no question that this quite extraordinary retelling of Hebrew history as Freud sees it rests

on a number of adventurous connections and eye-opening historical conjectures that would trouble

both the historian and the biblical scholar. It is not easy to find in the Bible any clear proof that

Moses was an Egyptian, that he was murdered, that two persons were given his name, or that the

early Hebrews ever had two different religions. To Freud,

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however, all these problems are hardly a concern. Much more interesting to him is the mystery of

how, over many centuries, a true monotheism was somehow born, apparently died, and then came

back to life. How can it be, he asks, that the faith of the original Moses virtually disappeared from

the life of his people, only to revive centuries later in dramatic fashion and win back the hearts and

minds of the entire Jewish community? Theologians may be at a loss to answer such a question, but

psychoanalysis certainly is not. Freud asks us to suppose once again that a parallel can be found

between what happens psychologically to an individual person over the course of a life and what

happens in history, over a much longer time, to an entire community of people like the Jews. And

he restates his view that religion is best conceived along the lines of a neurosis. Those premises in

place, he proceeds to the following ingenious argument.

Psychoanalytic theory has clearly demonstrated that cases of personal neurosis follow a familiar

pattern. They start, often in early childhood, with a traumatic, disturbing event that is pushed out of

memory for a time. There follows a period of “latency,” when nothing shows; all seems normal.

Then at a later point—often at the onset of puberty or in early adulthood—the irrational behavior

which is the sign of neurosis suddenly makes its appearance. We find that there is a “return of the

repressed.” Now if these stages are indeed identifiable, Freud suggests that we can compare them

with the sequences discovered in the history of Judaism. And as we do, he adds, let us recall as well

the points made in the earlier books about ambivalent emotions, tribal murder, and religion as

childlike desire for the figure of a father. Do they not fit with an almost uncanny accuracy? The

message of monotheism spoke to the Jews’ natural human longing for a divine father. The powerful

personality of Moses, whom the people may even have identified with his God, recalled the

imposing figure of the first father in the primeval horde. His death in a desert rebellion was more

than a mere historical accident; it can be read as a reenactment of the primeval murder of the great

father, an event no less traumatic for the Jews than the first murder was for the sons and brothers in

the prehistoric human tribe. Fittingly, once the murder had been committed, the Hebrew

community, in an act of collective repression, sought to relieve its guilt by striving to erase the

entire memory of Moses—both the monotheism and the murder—from community life, thus

allowing the crude Yahweh religion of the second Moses to take its place. For the true Mosaic

religion, this was the period of its latency, a long period when it lay submerged and almost

forgotten in the Judaic communal mind. And yet the law of neurosis is clear: Whatever is repressed

must return. After centuries in eclipse, the pure and ancient creed of the founder made its powerful

return in the oracles of the prophets. Henceforth, pure monotheism, the religion of loving devotion

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to the Creator and Lord of the Covenant, became again the faith all Jews, who on those terms

rightfully and to the present day claim the honor of being his chosen people.

Significantly, Freud adds, even the role of Christianity as Judaism’s successor comes into clearer

focus once we read its history through the eyes of psychoanalysis. It is clear from the discussion in

Totem and Taboo that the revolt in the primeval horde had a two-sided emotional outcome: love and

fear. Judaism recalls the urge to idealize the Father, to make him into a loving God and repress the

guilt left behind by his murder. Christianity feels the same mix of affection and guilt but responds

by declaring the need for atonement. As framed by its chief thinker, the Jewish rabbi Paul, Christian

theology centers not on God the Father but on Christ the Son and his death—in other words, on God

who, in the form of the firstborn Son, goes to his death to atone for the original sin committed by

the first sons in the prehistoric horde.

Never modest in his claims, Freud here offers a psychoanalytic portrait of both Jewish and Christian

monotheism that few theologians or historians would dare attempt. Along the same bold lines of

analogy laid out in his earlier works, he argues that the appeal of these—and all—religions lies not

in the truth of their teachings about a god or a savior, their claims about miracles or a chosen

people, or their hopes of a life after death. These doctrines are empty because they lie beyond any

chance of proof. The concepts of psychoanalytic science, however, are very different. And they

show in ever so interesting ways that the real power of religions is to be found beyond their

doctrines, in the deep psychological needs they fill and the unconscious emotions they express.

Analysis

1. Psychology and Religion

In commenting on the twentieth century, the great English poet W. H. Auden once said, “We are all

Freudians now.” This remark pays tribute to the enormous influence that Freud’s ideas have had on

all spheres of thought in our time. The field of religion is no exception. Freud’s analysis of the

hidden forces within the human personality has compelled not just those concerned with the theory

of religion but almost everyone associated with its practice— theologians, clergy, counselors, and

teachers—to look beneath the surface of accepted doctrines and discover the deep, unnoticed

elements of personality that shape human religious faith and are in turn shaped by it. Interestingly,

though Freud himself takes a decidedly negative view of religious behavior, other leaders in

psychoanalysis—and even entire schools of thought in

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contemporary psychology—have been eager to adapt his insights to their own much more

sympathetic views. Among others, perhaps the most notable figure in this tradition has been the

Swiss psychologist Carl Jung (1875–1961), one of the most important men in the circle of Freud’s

earliest associates. For Jung, religion draws on a deep fund of images and ideas that belong

collectively to the human race and find expression in mythology, folklore, philosophy, and

literature. Religion, like these other endeavors, draws on the resources of this “collective

unconscious” not as a form of neurosis but as the healthy expression of true and deep humanity.

Others, such as contemporary ego psychologists and object relation theorists, have followed a

similar path, developing an entire field of studies in religion and personality and producing a rich

literature of theory and therapy. It seems to matter little on this account whether analysts share

Freud’s distaste for belief or Jung’s approval; both perspectives have contributed greatly to the

contemporary understanding of religion.

2. Freud’s Explanation of Religion

The importance of Freud’s theory of religion is closely connected to the context in which he wrote.

His views actually follow a line of thought developed early in the 1800s by Ludwig Feuerbach, a

German philosopher who gained fame in his day for a book called The Essence of Christianity

(1841). In this controversial study, he claimed that all of religion is just a psychological device by

which we attach our own hopes, virtues, and ideals to an imaginary supernatural being we call

“God” and in the process only diminish ourselves. Feuerbach, whom we shall meet again in this

book because his work made a strong impact on Karl Marx, might well be called the first modern

thinker to offer a purely “projectionist” explanation of religion. That is to say, he explains religion

by showing not what truth or rationality believers find in their ideas but rather what is the

psychological mechanism that creates religious beliefs, regardless of whether they are true or false,

rational or irrational. Though briefly popular, Feuerbach was not able to keep his following, and his

theory faded from view. Karl Marx developed it further, as we shall see, but he too was largely

ignored in his age. By Freud’s day, however, the time for just such a functional projectionist theory

was again ripe. And that was largely because of the work of Tylor and Frazer. As we saw in our last

chapter, both of these thinkers conclude that religion is something primarily “intellectual”; it is a

system of ideas once sincerely believed and now known to be mistaken and absurd. But again,

assuming all of this to be so, we must still try to explain how and why the human race has held so

firmly to this great collection of superstition and error through history and into the scientific

present. Why, if it is so absurd, do people insist upon religion? In the eyes of some, that is the

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puzzle that Freud, who knew well the work of these English anthropological writers, brilliantly

managed to solve. On his view, if we want to know why religion persists even when it has been

discredited by science or better philosophy, we need only turn to psychoanalysis, which tells us

quite clearly that the real and ultimate source of religion’s appeal is not the rational mind but the

unconscious. Religion arises from emotions and conflicts that originate early in childhood and lie

deep beneath the rational, normal surface of the personality. It is best seen as an obsessional

neurosis. Accordingly, we can no more suppose that believers would give up their faith because it

has been proved irrational than that a neurotic would give up continuous handwashing because

someone has pointed out that his hands are already quite clean. The normal causes we see on the

surface of things are not the real causes of the behavior.

Freud is quite prepared to push this functional account of religion as far as it can possibly go. He

does not just say that, among other things, religion seems to have certain psychological functions.

He asserts that religion arises only in response to deep emotional conflicts and weaknesses; he

insists that these are in fact its true and fundamental causes and, consequently, that once

psychoanalysis has scientifically resolved such problems, we can expect the illusion of religion

quite naturally to disappear from the human scene. Freud thus presents us with a particularly vivid

instance of an explanatory strategy that has had great influence in the twentieth century—the

approach theorists today describe as functionalist reductionism. In what he sees as a radical

unmasking of the real truth about religion, Freud claims not just to explain it but to explain it away.

In his view, religion in its entirety can be “reduced” to little more than a by-product of

psychological distress, to a collection of ideas and beliefs that, once their surface appearance has

been penetrated, turn out to be illusory wish fulfillments generated by the unconscious.

We do need to add here that Freud is not always consistent in his judgments; in some places he

seems not quite so exclusively committed to this psychological reductionism as in others. But in the

main, he furnishes us with a particularly clear and outspoken version of the reductionist approach,

which strongly insists that religion is never a reality on its own terms; it is always an appearance, an

expression of something else. It is not a genuine agent in human behavior or thought because its

fundamental character is always passive; its nature is to reflect other realities—more powerful and

more basic—that underlie it. Outspoken and influential as he has been, moreover, Freud is by no

means alone in pursuing this particularly aggressive functionalist strategy. As we shall see in the

chapters that immediately follow, the same kind of approach is evident in the work of two other

theorists whose views on religion have been of major importance to twentieth-century

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thought. We find versions of it both in the sociology of Émile Durkheim, Freud’s French

contemporary, and in the economic materialism of Karl Marx.

Critique

Any appraisal of Freud requires comment not only on his theory of religion but also on the larger

framework of psychoanalytic science that serves as its support. We have space here to raise just a

few pertinent questions about the first, then to note an ongoing, serious debate about the merits of

the second.

1. The Problem of Theistic and Nontheistic Religions

The first thing to observe is that Freud’s is not so much a theory of religion in general as it is a

theory of Judeo-Christian, or at least monotheistic, religion in particular. In all three of the works

we have examined, the ideas of the Oedipus complex and the need for a father image are so central

to the discussion that it is hard to see how the arguments could be applied to any form of religion

that is not monotheistic. Though he does mention them in a few places, religions that affirm many

gods, that propose mother gods, or that articulate a faith in divine powers which are not personal in

character fall almost entirely outside the reach of Freud’s thinking. Since he chooses not to consider

such religions, we cannot say for certain how Freud would have explained them had he made the

attempt. But even if we were to try, on his behalf, to extend his explanations to cover them, it is not

easy to see how this could be done. Much of his theory seems constructed specifically to account

for those religions that affirm one, and only one, all-powerful Father God. Others just do not fit.

2. The Problems of Analogy and History

Assuming we could find a way past the problem of monotheism, Freudian theory presents other

difficulties. Most notably, there is the troubling matter of his reasoning by analogy. For example, as

we have seen in Totem and Taboo and Moses and Monotheism, the argument of both books turns on

an extended comparison between the psychological growth of an individual and the historical

development of a large social group. The one takes place over a period of years, or sequence of

decades, that comprises the life of a single individual; the other takes place over the course of

centuries in the history of an entire community or even civilization. But in that case, what ground

do we have, logically, to assume any real similarity or clear connection between

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these two very different things? It may well be true that from childhood onward a neurotic person

passes through stages of early trauma, defense, latency, outbreak of neurosis, and return of the

repressed. But outside of pure coincidence and Freud’s ingenuity, what grounds do we have to think

that such a thing as the entire history of the Jews conforms to the pattern of development found in a

single disturbed human personality?

Again, by what logic do we conclude, as Freud does in Totem and Taboo, that the Christian rite of

communion is somehow created from the hidden communal memory of an oedipal murder that took

place thousands of years earlier in the first animal-like hordes of humans? We can perhaps

understand how an early trauma could stay with one person for the rest of his or her life. But how

can an ancient murder be unconsciously “remembered” by the whole human race? Freud, of course,

feels that there are such collective memories, but that is mainly because he relies on a version of

evolutionary theory, put forward by the French scientist Lamarck, which holds that an experience

acquired during one’s life can be biologically inherited by descendants. Unfortunately, in the

decades after Darwin, this version of evolution came under severe challenge from those who saw

far better grounds for concluding that natural selection was the key to the evolutionary process. It is

troubling to discover that Freud, who so often advertised his solemn commitment to science, rested

his analyses of religion so heavily on a form of evolutionism that other important scientists of his

day had given good reasons to reject.

A further point also needs notice here. Even if we were to grant everything Freud says about human

individuals in his analogical arguments, very large historical questions remain about their cultural

side. From almost their first encounters with Moses and Monotheism, scholars have found in the

biblical and archaeological evidence little support for Freud’s highly imaginative reconstruction of

the early history of the Jews. If anything, anthropologists have been even more skeptical about

Freud’s conjectures on the original human hordes and the murder of the first fathers. The plain fact

is that most of these events are simply lost in the fog of prehistory; reconstructing them requires a

great deal of pure guesswork. It is not a matter of uncertainty, as if some evidence supports Freud

and the rest does not; it is really a matter of ignorance and inaccessibility. About such matters we

often have little evidence of any kind to support a theory of the sort Freud advances.

3. The Problem of Circularity

As we saw in his very first essay on religion and at the core of the argument in The Future of an

Illusion, Freud argues that religion is very similar to a neurosis. Just as neurotic people believe and

do irrational things, so religious

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people also believe and do irrational things. The kind of obsessional neurosis discovered by

psychoanalysis appears mainly in individual persons. The kind of obsessional neurosis seen in

religion afflicts entire cultures; it is universal. Here again, however, we must inquire about Freud’s

curious uses of analogy, for context is crucial in explaining behavior. As a number even of critics

friendly to Freud have pointed out, a nun who spends hours at devotions moving her prayer beads

and a neurotic who spends hours counting the buttons on his shirt are both engaged in the same

form of behavior, but only one is mentally disturbed. For nuns it is normal, not neurotic, to pray.

Freud chooses to find unconscious motives for such action only because from the start he has

assumed that prayer is an abnormal behavior. But of course he cannot do that without claiming that

it arises not from rational motives but from irrational ones located in the unconscious—the very

thing he sets out to prove. To put the matter bluntly, some of Freud’s discussions wear the look of

arguments that are decidedly circular.

Furthermore, the idea of projection itself is open to some question. The mere fact that people project

things from their minds out onto the world is hardly proof that they are engaged in neurotic wish

fulfillment. The symbols of science and mathematics belong, strictly speaking, to numerical and

conceptual systems that we project upon the world not out of neurosis but simply because they help

us describe and understand that real world better. The obvious fact that every day these

“projections” of ourselves are successfully applied to real life shows that they do, in fact, reflect

something of the character of the world as we experience it. But if that is true for the conceptions of

mathematics and natural science, there is no reason why, in principle at least, we cannot allow that

certain religious projections might also be true and might originate not from neurosis but from a

reasonable and appropriate understanding of the real world as we perceive it.

4. Psychoanalysis as Science

We must finish this brief critique by raising finally the troublesome issue of psychoanalysis itself as

a form of science. Freud was trained in the natural sciences; he began his career with research on

the physiology of the brain. When he turned to psychoanalysis, he stressed from the beginning, and

in absolute terms, that its methods were those of science. Psychoanalysis was to be built on in-depth

consultations with patients, on the careful framing and testing of hypotheses, on the search for

general theories, and on the exchange of criticism in scholarly journals. In The Future of an Illusion

Freud proudly compared the slow, steady progress of sciences like psychoanalysis with the

backward dogmatism of religion. And today, certainly, the wide acceptance

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of psychoanalysis rests mainly on the common view that it is a science of the mind.

It is just this accepted view, however, that in recent decades has come under severe scientific attack.

Over the last twenty years especially, critics in many quarters have subjected the entire enterprise of

psychoanalysis—from Freud onward—to a rigorous and searching reassessment. Their common

verdict, which is not friendly, can be summarized in two sentences: Whatever his talents, Freud was

not a scientist. And whatever its claims, psychoanalysis is not a science. The weightiest charges

against the discipline have been leveled by an American philosopher of science, Adolf Grünbaum,

who argues that psychoanalysts regularly assume the very things they hope to prove in their work

with patients, that their techniques for gathering evidence are scientifically unsound, and that when

usable evidence is, in fact, brought forward, it does not support the elaborate Freudian conclusions

conventionally drawn from it. Grünbaum does not say that the field is unscientific in principle, but

he does state that it has yet to establish truly scientific methods for testing its claims.21 Others,

looking on from a different perspective, have joined in these criticisms, noticing that the principles

which form the core of the science—Freud’s theories of the personality and neurosis—are

constructed out of vague comparisons and misleading inferences, most of which cannot be either

proved or disproved because, again, there is simply no scientific way even to test them.22 Still other

observers have turned a severely critical eye upon Freud himself, only to find someone quite

different from the man his disciples presented to the world as a pioneering scientist, the spokesman

for truth in a world of Victorian repression. They point out that while his talents of imagination and

persuasion were certainly quite formidable, Freud was also a shrewd promoter of his own interests

as well as a man willing to bend evidence, ignore valid criticism, and even misuse people when

such actions served the purpose of his program.23

In the light of these criticisms, it must be said that the scientific future of psychoanalysis does not

look especially promising. Freud’s theory of religion is unlikely to fare better—unless (and that is

always a possibility) it is refitted to a new frame and placed on a less uncertain footing. At the same

time, it should be duly noted that psychoanalysis is only one strand of modern psychology. Clearly,

psychological research as a whole will continue to bear significantly on the ways and means of

explaining religion.

Notes

1. The Future of an Illusion, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psycho logical Works of

Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey with Anna Freud (London: Hogarth Press, 1961), 21: 43.

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2. The classic older biography of Freud, written by an Englishman who belonged to the circle of his

original followers, is Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, 3 vols. (New York: Basic

Books, 1953–1957). An authoritative recent biography is by Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for our Times

(New York: W. W. Norton, 1988). There are also numerous thematic and shorter biographical

studies.

3. “Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices,” in Standard Edition, 9: 116–27.

4. Much in this book was based on self-analysis, especially Freud’s interpretations of his own

dream experiences. See Gerald Levin, Sigmund Freud (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1975), p. 28.

5. Much has been written on Freud’s concept of repression. A good brief account of this idea and its

place in Freud’s thought can be found in Philip Rieff’s Freud: The Mind of the Moralist, 3rd ed.

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), pp. 37–44, 314–20.

6. Freud’s study Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood (1910) and his articles on “The

Moses of Michelangelo” (1914) and “Dostoyevsky and Parricide” (1928) continue to fascinate

historians of art and literature.

7. Freud first presented this formulation in The Ego and the Id in 1923.

8. See Freud, An Outline of Psychoanalysis, in Standard Edition, 23: 146.

9. Freud, An Outline of Psychoanalysis, in Standard Edition, 23: 190.

10. Freud, An Outline of Psychoanalysis, in Standard Edition, 23: 191.

11. Among a number of instructive works on Freud’s Jewish background and his religious opinions,

see Howard Littleton Philp, Freud and Religious Belief (New York: Pitman, 1956); G. Zillboorg,

Freud and Religion: A Restatement of an Old Controversy (Westminster, MD: Newman Press,

1958); Earl A. Grollman, Judaism in Sigmund Freud’s World (New York: Appleton-Century,

1965); Hans Küng, Freud and the Problem of God (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979);

Edwin R. Wallace IV, “Freud and Religion,” in Werner Muensterberger et al., eds., The

Psychoanalytic Study of Society, vol. 10 (Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press, 1984), pp. 113–61; and

Peter Gay, A Godless Jew: Freud, Atheism, and the Making of Psychoanalysis (New Haven, CT:

Yale University Press, 1987). Wallace and Gay also provide substantial recent bibliographies.

12. Jones, Life and Work of Freud, 3: 351.

13. Freud, “Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices” (1907), in Standard Edition, 9: 126; this

famous phrase, which heads this chapter, appears again in The Future of an Illusion.

14. Totem and Taboo, in Standard Edition, 13: 132–42.

15. Totem and Taboo, in Standard Edition, 13: 145.

16. Freud, The Future of an Illusion, in Standard Edition, 21: 19.

17. The Future of an Illusion, in Standard Edition, 21: 33.

18. The Future of an Illusion, in Standard Edition, 21: 30.

19. The Future of an Illusion, in Standard Edition, 21: 43.

20. The Future of an Illusion, in Standard Edition, 21: 44.

21. See his important work, The Foundations of Psychoanalysis (Berkeley, CA: University of

California Press, 1984).

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22. See especially Malcolm Macmillan, Freud Evaluated: The Completed Arc (New York: North

Holland, 1991).

23. On Freud’s literary talents, especially in the area of expository nonfiction, see Patrick J.

Mahony, Freud as a Writer (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987). The scientific

criticisms, along with appreciations, of Freud are put with special force in Frank Sulloway, Freud,

Biologist of the Mind: Beyond the Psychoanalytic Legend (New York: Basic Books, 1979); see also

Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, The Assault upon Truth: Freud’s Suppression of the Seduction Theory

(New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1984) and Frederick C. Crews, Skeptical Engagements

(New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). For summaries of these criticisms and the heated

debates they have elicited, see Paul Robinson, Freud and His Critics (Berkeley, CA: University of

California Press, 1993), and Frederick C. Crews, “The Unknown Freud,” New York Review of

Books 40, no. 19 (November 18, 1993): 55–66.

Suggestions for Further Reading

Bernstein, Richard J. Freud and the Legacy of Moses. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni versity Press,

1998. Reappraises Moses and Monotheism, claiming this much criticized book is Freud’s most

important because it offers a new conception of religion.

Crews, Frederick C. “The Unknown Freud.” New York Review of Books 40, no. 19 (November 18,

1993): 55–66. Questionings by a formerly Freudian literary theorist who has since become a stern

critic of psychoanalysis, its history, and its methods.

Freud, Sigmund. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud.

Translated under the editorship of James Strachey, in collab oration with Anna Freud. London:

Hogarth Press, 1953. The definitive collection of Freud’s works in English. Individual works are

available in many reprints and editions.

Gay, Peter. Freud: A Life for Our Times. New York: W. W. Norton, 1988. The most substantial and

authoritative recent biography by a distinguished intellectual historian.

Gay, Peter. A Godless Jew: Freud, Atheism, and the Making of Psychoanalysis. New Haven: Yale

University Press, 1987. A brief, insightful assessment of Freud’s perspective on religion.

Grünbaum, Adolf. The Foundations of Psychoanalysis. Berkeley: University of California Press,

1984.

Grünbaum, Adolf. Validation in the Clinical Theory of Psychoanalysis: A Study in the Philosophy

of Psychoanalysis. Madison, Connecticut: International Universities Press, 1993. Two important,

compelling studies by the philosopher who is the leading current critic of psychoanalysis as a

science.

Herzog, Patricia. Conscious and Unconscious: Freud’s Dynamic Distinction Reconsidered.

Madison, Connecticut: International Universities Press, 1991. An informative recent examination of

the central concepts in Freudian thought.

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Jones, Ernest. The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud. 3 vols. New York: Basic Books, 1953–1957.

Until recently the definitive biography of Freud, written by an English admirer who belonged to the

circle of his original associates and followers.

Kerr, John. A Most Dangerous Method: The Story of Jung, Freud, and Sabina Spielrein. New York:

Alfred A. Knopf, 1993. Raises questions, both moral and scientific, about certain aims and agendas

of Freud, Jung, and one of their early associates.

Küng, Hans. Freud and the Problem of God. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979. A

thoughtful analysis of Freud’s theological opinions by a distinguished modern Catholic theologian.

MacIntyre, Alasdair C. The Unconscious: A Conceptual Analysis. London: Routledge & Kegan

Paul, 1958. Now somewhat dated, but valuable as a clear, brief, and instructive study of the idea

that gave birth to psychoanalysis. Written by an influential English analytical philosopher.

Masson, Jeffrey Moussaieff. The Assault upon Truth: Freud’s Suppression of the Seduction Theory.

New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1984. A controversial exposé of Freud’s methods which

attempts to show how he mishandled one of his early patients in psychoanalysis.

Neu, Jerome, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Freud. New York: Cambridge University Press,

1991. Instructive essays on Freud by various scholars currently writing on his life and thought.

Palmer, Michael. Freud and Jung on Religion. London: Routledge, 1997. Explores the

fundamentally opposite appraisals of religion offered by the two founders of psychoanalysis.

Rieff, Philip. Freud: The Mind of the Moralist. 3rd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979.

A widely read and much appreciated study of Freud’s ideas in their biographical and cultural

context.

Rizzuto, Ana-Maria. Why Did Freud Reject God? A Psychodynamic Interpretation. New Haven:

Yale University Press, 1998. Argues that Freud’s childhood devel opment and family circumstances

made serious consideration of belief in God impossible for him.

Roazen, Paul. Encountering Freud: The Politics and Histories of Psychoanalysis. New Brunswick,

New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 1990. An exploration of the controversies surrounding the aims

of both Freud and his new field of study.

Roazen, Paul. Freud and His Followers. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1975. An instruc tive study

of the “first Freudians” and their intellectual agenda.

Robinson, Paul. Freud and His Critics. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Summarizes

and evaluates issues in the current heated debate over Freud and the validity of psychoanalysis as a

science.

Sulloway, Frank. Freud, Biologist of the Mind: Beyond the Psychoanalytic Legend. New York:

Basic Books, 1979. A comprehensive study by a scholar who, since this book, has gradually grown

more critical of Freud’s science.

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3

Society as Sacred:

Émile Durkheim

The idea of society is the soul of religion.

Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life1

In the very years during which Freud put forward his controversial views in Vienna, an equally

original thinker in France, Émile Durkheim, set to work on a theory of religion that was just as

revolutionary, though in quite a different way. If Freud is the first name that people associate with

modern psychology, then that of Durkheim—though less widely known—should be one of the first

that comes to mind at the mention of sociology. Durkheim championed the central importance of

society—of social structures, relationships, and institutions—in understanding human thought and

behavior. His distinct perspective consists in his determination to see almost every major enterprise

of human life—our laws and morality, labor and recreation, family and personality, science, art, and

above all religion—through the lens of their social dimension. Without a society to give them birth

and shape them, he claimed, none of these things could exist.

At a first glance, of course, a theorist who sounds this social theme hardly seems revolutionary. In

the present climate of thought, few discussions of any kind take place without some reference to the

“social environment.” Hardly a day passes without some comment on “social decay,” “social

engineering,” “social reform,” or “social context.” Less than a century ago, however, such language

would have been almost as rare as it is common now. “Society” was a word mostly associated with

upper-class manners and the dinner parties of the wealthy. The leading systems of thought were

quite individualistic, with a tendency to see any social arrangement—from a single family to a

village, a church, or an entire nation—as little more than a collection of separate persons who

happened to be brought together by a common location and shared interests. Durkheim’s view was

decidedly different. He went so far as to say that social facts are more fundamental than individual

ones—that they are, in

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their way, as real as physical objects, and that individuals are more often than not misunderstood

when the powerful imprint of society upon them is ignored or insufficiently noticed. Human beings,

after all, are never just individuals; they always belong to something—to parents or relatives, a

town or city, a race, a political party, an ethnic tradition, or some other group. In Durkheim’s view,

it is futile to think that we can really comprehend what a person is by appealing only to biological

instinct, individual psychology, or isolated selfinterest. We must explain individuals in and through

society, and we account for society in social terms.

In accord with this social premise, Durkheim insisted, very much like Freud, that his subject

required nothing less than a new scientific discipline to investigate it. This field he chose to call

“sociology,” even though he was not the first to use the word and was not himself very fond of it.

Simply put, sociology was to be the science of society. In a significant measure it is because of

Durkheim’s strong advocacy and guiding influence that social science holds such a prominent place

in modern life, whether we appeal to it in matters of government, economics, education, or in any

other forum of public discussion, from the university lecture room to the television talk show.

Today, our instinctively social view of the world is an index of just how thoroughly successful

Durkheim’s revolution in thought has turned out to be.2

Durkheim actually presents us with two parallels to Freud. Not only did both men feel the need to

promote special fields of study—psychology in the one case, and sociology in the other—but both

also found that their new perspectives led them unavoidably back to the very old question of

religious behavior and belief. Like Freud, Durkheim too was driven to ask: What is religion? Why

has it been so important and central in human affairs? What does it do for both the individual and

society? Freud, as we saw, thought he could not fully explain the individual personality without also

accounting for the appeal of religion. Durkheim felt precisely the same about society. In the course

of trying to understand “the social” in all of its hidden and powerful dimensions, he found himself

drawn steadily and repeatedly to “the religious.” For Durkheim, religion and society are inseparable

and—to each other— virtually indispensable.

Life and Career

Durkheim was born in 1858 in the town of Epinal, near Strasbourg in northeastern France.3 His

father was a rabbi, and as a young boy he was also strongly affected by a schoolteacher who was

Roman Catholic. These influences may have contributed something to his general interest in

religious endeavors, but

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they did not make him personally a believer. By the time he was a young man, he had become an

avowed agnostic.

In high school, Durkheim was a brilliant student, and at the age of twentyone (after failing on his

first two attempts), he was admitted to the demanding École Normale Supérieure, one of France’s

finest centers of learning, where he studied both history and philosophy. His experience there was

not a completely happy one, in part because he did not like the rigid way in which the programs of

study were designed. Yet his response at the time, which offers a clue to his temperament, was not

to withdraw or complain. He had too keen an appreciation for social order and structure to abandon

an institution just because he was personally unsuited to its rules. After finishing his program and

writing the two dissertations required of all students at the École Normale, he began teaching at

secondary schools in the vicinity of Paris. He also took a year to study in Germany with the noted

psychologist Wilhelm Wundt. In 1887 he married Louise Dreyfus, a woman who devoted herself

lifelong to his career and their two children. In the same year he became a professor at the

University of Bordeaux, which created a new chair of social science and education specifically for

his sociological research.

Over the next fifteen years, while working at Bordeaux, Durkheim diligently pursued his

sociological inquiries and developed his ideas. His first major book was The Division of Labor,

published in 1893. It was followed in 1895 by The Rules of Sociological Method, a theoretical work

which stirred a great deal of debate. He also published an important study, Suicide (1897), which

looked for the public, social factors behind what others of his day commonly regarded as a strictly

private act of despair. At about the same time, he established with other scholars L’Année

sociologique, a new academic journal which published articles and reviewed other writings from a

sociological perspective. This journal, which became famous throughout France and the world, did

as much as any of Durkheim’s own books to promote the discipline of sociology. Other talented

scholars were drawn to contribute their work to its pages and in the process developed Durkheim’s

perspective into an identifiable “school of thought.” Not surprisingly, on the strength of these

impressive achievements (and with the help of some political maneuvering in the government),

Durkheim was named a professor at the University of Paris. At the age of forty-four, he could boast

the supreme achievement of a French academic career.

At Paris, Durkheim passed through years of triumph and later of tragedy. Already in Bordeaux his

interests had begun to turn strongly toward an exploration of religion’s role in social life, but after

his move, new commitments and tasks slowed the progress of this research. Nonetheless, he kept to

his plan and a decade later published The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life

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(1912), his best-known and most important book. Durkheim’s chief claim to importance as a

theorist of religion—and his great influence on other thinkers—rests largely on this impressive

study, which we shall examine closely in this chapter. As its date reveals, however, The Elementary

Forms appeared just two years before Europe was shaken by World War I. This enormous

catastrophe fell hardest on Belgium and France, where much of the fighting took place, and it did

not fail also to leave its mark on Durkheim’s personal life, as it did on the lives of so many others.

Though he believed that scholars should preserve their scientific objectivity by avoiding comment

on current affairs, he made an exception during the war, speaking out fiercely for the cause of

France against Germany. Then, early in 1916, he learned that his only son, André, himself a

promising young scholar, had been killed on a military campaign in Serbia. Broken by grief,

Durkheim struggled to work and write, only to suffer a debilitating stroke some months later. His

own death came just over a year thereafter, in 1917, at the relatively young age of fifty-nine.

Ideas and Influences

Durkheim’s great interest in society was not some sudden creation of his own. As he would have

been the first to point out, a sequence of French thinkers before him had shown similar interests,

and his ideas could be seen as a development of theirs.4 One of his two dissertations had been

written on the Baron de Montesquieu, the French philosopher of the eighteenth century who

carefully observed and analyzed European culture and political institutions. Montesquieu’s work

showed that social structures could be examined in a critical scientific fashion. Durkheim also read

the writings of the Comte de Saint-Simon, a socialist thinker of the early 1800s who believed that

all private property should be given over to the state. And he was even more impressed by the most

famous French thinker of the early nineteenth century, August Comte (1798–1857), who proposed,

somewhat like Tylor and Frazer, a grand evolutionary pattern of civilization. In this scheme, earlier

stages of human thinking, governed first by theology and then by the abstract ideas of philosophers,

are eventually surpassed by the current age of “positive,” or scientific, thought, in which close study

only of observable facts provides the key to all knowledge. During this present epoch of science, a

new “religion of humanity” replaces the discredited religions and philosophies of the past. From

Comte, Durkheim took an appreciation of the human need for communal ties and a deep

commitment to scientific analysis of social phenomena, even though he committed himself only in a

quite vague and general way to the notion of evolutionary social progress.

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In addition to these earlier figures, we must not forget two of the most celebrated scholars in France

during Durkheim’s youth: the great biblical critic Ernest Renan, who took a keenly social interest in

both ancient Judaism and early Christianity; and an extraordinarily gifted classical historian who

was one of Durkheim’s own greatly admired university teachers at the École Normale. This was

Numa Denys Fustel de Coulanges, whose influential book The Ancient City (1864) was to become a

classic study of social life in the ancient world. In this fascinating work, Coulanges presented his

readers with a close social analysis of the Greek and Roman city-states, showing not only how

ordinary life was governed by deeply cherished traditions and rooted in conservative moral values

but also how thoroughly these traditions and values were saturated with the beliefs of classical

polytheistic religion.Durkheim built naturally upon the ideas of these thinkers in framing his own

perspective. But the circumstances of modern French life contributed something as well. As most

would know, by the later 1800s France and Europe had passed through two great revolutions. One

was economic: the industrial revolution; the other was political: the French Revolution and its

several successors. In Durkheim’s estimate, the joint impact of these two momentous developments

permanently changed the pattern of life in Western civilization. Europe had long relied for stability

on its agriculture, its well-defined social classes, its property-owning aristocracies and monarchies,

and the intimate community ties of its villages and towns, along with the overarching truths,

traditions, and structures of the Christian church. In the aftermath of the twin revolutions, these

fixtures of Western culture found themselves shaken as never before and altered in such a way as

never again to be the same. Around and within them, there began to grow up a truly new and

different kind of civilization, which saw its people moving to factories and cities, its wealth moving

from titled lords to enterprising merchants, its power shifting from the old privileged classes to

radical movements or popular causes, and its religion everywhere facing disputes, indifference, or

open disbelief. In specific terms, Durkheim noticed especially the following four trends, or patterns:

1. In place of Europe’s traditional social system, laced together as it was by ties of family,

community, and religious faith, a new “contractual” order was emerging, in which private

concerns and money-related interests seemed to predominate.

2. In the realm of morals and behavior, the sacred values once sanctioned by the church were now

challenged by newer ideals, which stressed reason over religious faith and a desire for a happiness

in this life over any hope of Heaven (or fear of Hell) in the life to come.

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3. In the sphere of politics, the emergence of the democratic masses at the bottom of society and a

powerful central state at the top had changed the nature of social control. Individuals were finding

themselves disconnected from their old moral teachers—the family, village, and church—and

were left to find what guidance they could from political parties, mass movements, and the state.

4. In the area of personal affairs, this new freedom of individuals released from their old frameworks

presented great opportunity and great risk. With it came the chance of greater prosperity and self-

realization but also the serious threat of loneliness and personal isolation.

Sociology and “the Social”

Looking over these momentous changes, Durkheim felt that there was only one way to approach

them—scientifically. Only a fully scientific sociology could help people comprehend the tremors of

an entire world that was moving beneath their feet. Accordingly, he laid down for his scholarly

investigations two fixed and fundamental principles: (1) that the nature of society is the most

suitable and promising subject for systematic investigation, especially at the present moment in

history, and (2) that all such “social facts” should be investigated by the most purely objective

scientific methods attainable.

The Nature of Society

In The Division of Labor, Durkheim’s first major book, he shows how easily one can go wrong by

ignoring the first of these principles. Social life, he explains, has shaped the most fundamental

features of human culture, but that is not how previous thinkers tended to see it. If they considered it

at all, they did so as a kind of afterthought. When they looked at the past, they proposed ideas like

the famous “social contract,” which held that society began when some individuals agreed to hand

power to another, stronger individual—the king—in return for his protection. When this primeval

agreement was sealed, society was born. Such stories offer an interesting exercise in imaginative

fiction, says Durkheim, but the real history of humanity was never so. Even in prehistoric times,

individuals were always born first into groups—into families, clans, tribes, nations—and raised in

that context. Their languages, habits, beliefs, and emotional responses—even the very concept they

had of their individual selves—always came from a social framework which was there to shape

them from the first moment they appeared in the world. Ancient contracts, for example, always had

to be sworn with a sacred religious oath, which showed

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that such agreements were not just a matter of convenience between the parties involved but were to

be enforced by the gods, for all of the community had an interest in the outcome. So too with the

concept of private property. It too is thought to have developed individually. Conventional thinking

holds that the idea of a person’s right to own an object or piece of ground arose because these things

could be seen as extensions of the individual self. But again, Durkheim claims the facts of history

show otherwise. The first possessions were not individual but communal in character, starting with

the sacred ground that early peoples regarded as belonging not to the priest or any other single

person but to the whole tribe. These common holdings provided the earliest ideas of property and

ownership. Only out of the notion of public rights to things owned or possessed by all—things

sacred to the whole clan—did cultures ever develop the idea of something that could be privately

possessed by one person alone or by some apart.

Social solidarity, then, has always been primary. Out of an underlying sense of the group have come

such basic structures of life as moral obligation and ownership of personal property. That having

been said, Durkheim observes that the main difference between ancient and modern societies

pertains to the ways in which they try to achieve their unity. Study of legal codes, for example,

shows that early communities tend to rely on “mechanical solidarity.” Good behavior is secured by

punishments (often severe) for anyone who breaks the moral code of the group. This is external

enforcement. In more modern times, on the other hand, a different pattern of “organic solidarity”

tends to take over. Because there is the division of labor, because different people can do different

things, the sense of moral commitment develops in another way. It comes not from the threat of

punishment but from the need that each person acquires for the work of the others. Here

enforcement must become internal. A wrong done by any one person must be seen as damaging to

the others on whom that person depends. Ancient societies also have a broad and strong “collective

conscience”; in them, there is uniform agreement as to what is right and what is wrong in almost all

matters of human conduct. Modern societies, by contrast, are marked by moral individualism; they

still need a foundation, a common moral basis, but because they allow for more individual diversity

and personal freedom, their collective conscience is smaller in scope. It is limited to a few

commands and obligations rather than many.

This last fact is especially significant because Durkheim believes firmly that morality, the

obligation of each to others and all to the standards of the group, is inseparable from religion.

Further, as we shall shortly see, both religion and morals are inseparable from a social framework.

We cannot have either without a social context, and as that changes, so must they. When, as has

happened especially in Western civilization, a society gives up the collective

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conscience it had in more primitive times and through division of labor replaces it with a morally

individualistic system like that of the present, we should not be surprised to see that religion and

morals have changed right along with the rest of the social order.

The Scientific Study of Society

The second of Durkheim’s two principles of inquiry is developed in The Rules of Sociological

Method (1895), where he explains how sociology must be pursued as an objective, independent

science. In France, many people knew the perceptive analyses of society carried out by

Montesquieu, Alexis de Tocqueville, and August Comte; these were admirable and insightful

narratives in the style of traditional historical study. When Durkheim, in contrast, insisted that his

“science” of society was really quite another thing, reasonable people naturally wondered: What

kind of other thing? How can there be a science of an abstraction like the social order, of something

we really cannot see or touch in the way a chemist or botanist can observe the visible, solid objects

of nature? Durkheim’s answer was to think of society in a manner similar to that of Tylor and the

British anthropologists when they spoke of “culture” but then to go even further. He insisted that

social facts, no less than stones or seashells, are real things, as solid in their way as physical objects

are in theirs. A society is not just a passing thought in someone’s head; it is an accumulated body of

facts—of language, laws, customs, ideas, values, traditions, techniques, and products—all of which

are connected to one another and exist in a manner quite “external” to individual human minds.

They are in the world before we individuals arrive; the moment we are born, they impose

themselves on us; as we grow through childhood, they mold us; in adulthood, they animate and

guide us; and, just as surely, in death they survive us. Moreover, it stands to reason that if there

indeed are such real and independent social facts surrounding us, then there ought to be a distinct

scientific discipline devoted to the study of them. We do not imagine that we can explain a living

organism only through physics or chemistry; we also need biology. In the same way, we cannot

explain society if we look only to biology and psychology or even economics. Society requires

sociology; other disciplines are not sufficient.

None of this means for Durkheim that the actual methods of sociological study will be dramatically

different from those of other sciences. The key to any science, physical or social, is the gathering of

evidence, followed by comparison, classification into groups, and finally the framing of general

principles, or “laws,” which can in some way be tested for their validity. In this connection,

sociology not only does what other sciences do but in some ways hopes even to do it better. For

example, Durkheim takes care to separate

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himself from the well-known comparative method as it was practiced by Tylor, Frazer, and the

other Victorian British anthropologists. We have seen how, in their searches for significant patterns,

they preferred to travel globally, choosing customs or ideas at will and placing them into a general

category, such as “imitative magic,” with little or no attention to context. Such determined

gathering of facts from the remotest ends and ages of the world does make for large, impressive

books like The Golden Bough, but in Durkheim’s view it is not science. It rests everything on

surface similarities and very little on substance. Sociology is much more cautious. It knows that

comparisons can be made, and general laws laid down, only when two societies are very closely

examined and can be seen to fit clearly into a common type.

Though we cannot here follow his account of sociology’s methods in detail, we can briefly take

note of at least some of the categories Durkheim puts into play in his approach to religion. Among

other things, he believes that we can determine, for any society, what is normal behavior and,

consequently, what is also pathological, or abnormal, behavior. This is certainly not a matter of

absolute values, of what is good or evil at all times and places. The normal is always determined

from within a group, never from outside of it. Suicide, for example, is more “normal” for some

societies, like Japan, than for others. Polygamy is more normal for primitive societies than for

modern ones. We must always judge the normal from within the social. In addition, whether normal

or not, the category of function in a society is for Durkheim also extremely important in explaining

behavior. And it must be kept separate from the idea of cause. The cause of an innercity religious

revival might be the spellbinding sermons of a storefront preacher, but the revival’s social func tion

may be something that goes entirely unnoticed by those who join it. From the sociologist’s

standpoint, the preacher’s success can be traced not to the number of sinners brought to conversion

but to something wholly unnoticed by those who are kneeling in prayer: the event as a whole has

restored a sense of community, of shared identity and purpose, to a neighborhood of otherwise poor,

isolated, even disillusioned individuals.

A good illustration of these categories can be found in Durkheim’s famous study Suicide (1895),

which was published not long after the Rules. After examining and closely comparing the suicide

rates in the major countries of Europe, he noticed that the figures were highest in Protestant

countries, lowest in Catholic ones, and fell in between for countries of mixed religious population.

In light of these ratios, it is possible to say that a certain kind of suicide, which Durkheim labels

“egoistic,” is more normal—that is, more typical—for Protestant countries than Catholic ones. We

cannot account for this circumstance, he says, directly from the differing religious belief systems

because both groups think suicide is wrong. Sociologically, however, there

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are certain definite and interesting differences. Protestant societies offer the individual greater

freedom of thought and life; in them, people are “on their own” before God. Catholics, by contrast,

belong to a more strongly integrated social community, where priests mediate between God and the

believer and ties within the parish are strong. It would seem, therefore, that the rate of suicide in a

community is inversely correlated to the degree of its social integration. The tighter the social ties,

the lower the rate of suicide. In addition, the distinction between cause and function is also relevant.

The specific causes of individual suicides vary in each person’s case, but functionally, egoistic

suicide in general can be read as the natural consequence of loosened social ties and constraints. A

similar pattern seems to hold for another kind of suicide—Durkheim called it “anomic” (from the

Greek anomia: “lawlessness”) to suggest a feeling of dislocation and aimlessness—which tends to

occur most in times of great economic and social instability. Clearly, to the trained sociologist the

phenomenon of suicide appears in a light very different from that which strikes the eye of the

ordinary observer.

Politics, Education, and Morals

Durkheim felt that his sociological perspective offered special insight into the nature of political

systems, education, morals, and especially religion. In the sphere of political philosophy he gave

lectures on socialism and communism, describing both as responses to the unsettlement of modern

life but rejecting their ideas of class struggle and their theories of a powerful state.5 In other

lectures, especially Professional Ethics and Civic Morals (published after his death) he recognized

that the state does need certain extensive powers, which can even be good for the lives of

individuals. At the same time he stressed the importance also of what he called “secondary,”

intermediate groups, such as local brotherhoods and professional associations, to help protect the

rights and well-being of individuals lest national governments become too strong. A key task of the

state is the promotion of moral values, which is why it must also play a central role in a society’s

system of education. Durkheim addressed this subject often, writing, among other works, a two-

volume history of education in France. As he describes it, the purpose of schools is not just to give

technical training in certain skills but also to pass along the values of self-discipline and community

welfare and to promote them over the selfish personal interests of individuals. Such instruction in

moral values is not a luxury or an option; it is vital to the health and harmonious operation of any

society. These opinions, which have had considerable influence on modern French educational

theory, are at least partly responsible for the

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wry observation that, on any given day, the minister of education in Paris knows precisely what

page in their textbooks all the children of France are reading. Against this backdrop, it is not

surprising to find that alongside his treatments of both politics and education, Durkheim also makes

the analysis of moral theory and legal traditions a key part of his program.6

The question of morals, as we have already noticed, is in Durkheim’s view impossible to answer

without at some point turning also to the question of religion. This he had done in the earlier years

of his career indirectly, through essays, articles, and reviews of the work of others. But he reserved

his complete and definitive discussion of religion for his last and most important book, The

Elementary Forms of Religious Life. It was published in 1912, after more than ten years of research

and reflection. Since it presents the heart of Durkheim’s theory of religion, we will consider its

arguments in some detail.

The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life

Perhaps the two most important things to notice about this lengthy, pioneering book are its title and

the way it begins. The Elementary Forms (1912) is concerned to find certain fundamentals—the

“basic elements,” as a nuclear physicist might say—out of which all of religion has been formed.

And it starts off in a fashion a nuclear physicist might well approve—by apparently setting aside all

the usual and customary ways of thinking about its subject. We may recall that Tylor and Frazer,

and Freud as well, were largely content with the conventional idea that religion is belief in

supernatural beings, such as a God or gods. Durkheim is not. From the start he claims that primitive

peoples normally do not really think of two different worlds, one supernatural and the other natural,

in the way that religious people living in developed cultures do. Moderns are heavily influenced by

the assumptions and natural laws of science; primitive people are not. They see all events—

miraculous and ordinary—as basically of the same kind. In addition, the concept of the gods itself is

a problem, since not all religious people believe in divine beings even if they do believe in the

supernatural. Certain Buddhists, for example, deny that there are gods, while other people routinely

observe rituals that have nothing to do with spirits or deities. It is obvious to Durkheim, then, that

the subject needs a new definition, and clearing away the old view is a necessary first step. But

where do we go after that?

Durkheim next observes that the thing which seems truly characteristic of religious beliefs and

rituals is not the element of the supernatural but the concept of the sacred, which is actually quite

different. Wherever we look, people who are religious do divide the things of their world into two

separate

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arenas, but they are not the natural and supernatural. Rather, they are the realms of the sacred and

the profane. Sacred things are always set apart as superior, powerful, forbidden to normal contact,

and deserving of great respect. Profane things are the opposite; they belong to the ordinary,

uneventful, and practical routine of everyday life. The overwhelming concern of religion is with the

first of these two sets of things. In Durkheim’s own words, “religion is a unified system of beliefs

and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden.”7 If we then ask

what is the purpose of these sacred things, that is answered in a second part of Durkheim’s

definition; these practices “unite into one moral community called a church, all those who adhere to

them.”8 The key words here are “community” and “church.” Sacred things always involve large

concerns: the interests and welfare of an entire group of people, not just one or a few. Profane

things, on the other hand, are little matters; they reflect the day-to-day business of each individual—

the smaller, private activities and endeavors of the immediate family and personal life.

Though it is tempting to do so, Durkheim warns us not to make the mistake of thinking that this

division between sacred and profane is a moral one—that the sacred is good and the profane evil.

That line of separation actually runs through the division between the sacred and the profane. The

sacred can be either good or evil, but the one thing it can never be is profane; the profane can be

either good or evil, but the one thing it can never be is sacred. The sacred arises especially in

connection with whatever may concern the community; the profane is more naturally the realm of

private and personal concerns.

This stress on the sacred as something communal leads Durkheim to another disagreement with his

predecessors, which centers on the puzzling question of magic. In Frazer’s opinion, as we saw,

magic and religion are cut from the same cloth; they try to do the same thing but in different ways.

Both try to explain the way the world works, so that it can be controlled for human benefit. The

human race first followed the rules of magic, and when that failed, it turned to religion as a better

form of thought. With this, too, Durkheim disagrees. For him, religion does not come along to

replace magic when it fails, because the two are not concerned with the same thing. Magic is an

exclusively private matter, which has little or nothing to do with the sacred and its concerns. The

magician, like a doctor, heals my sickness or puts a spell on your enemy; but this is a purely

personal issue. I may not even know that my magician is also helping you, because each of us is

going to him to satisfy separate and largely private needs. None of this is the case, however, with

the much greater matter of religion. Religious rituals and beliefs come into play whenever group

concerns are foremost in the mind; the sacred functions as the focal point of the claims that affect

the entire community. Accordingly, magic and religion can exist quite comfortably side by side; the

one is the place for the personal,

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the other the sphere of the social. A magician, as Durkheim puts it, has clients but no congregation.

“There is no church of magic.”9

These two points of disagreement—on the definition of religion and the nature of magic—lead on

to the third and most important of Durkheim’s quarrels with other theorists. In his view, they have

all misunderstood just what it is about religion that really needs to be explained.

Previous Theories: Naturism and Animism

Durkheim contends that a close look at the leading theories of the day will show a common theme

throughout: all claim that religion is simply a natural instinct of the human race; it is assumed that

in all cultures people have devised their systems of belief as quite logical responses to the world as

they encounter it. The most prominent of these theories are the naturism of Friedrich Max Müller,

whom we met in our introduction, and the animism of E. B. Tylor. Müller holds that people came to

believe in gods by trying to describe the great objects and events of nature—things like the sun, sky,

and storms. Tylor, as we have seen, holds that belief in gods developed out of the idea of the soul.

Now in framing these views, Durkheim observes, both of these thinkers have been exceedingly

ambitious. They have assumed that human society has gone through a long process of evolution,

and they have then tried to travel backward in time to imagine what the ideas and emotions of the

very first human beings would have been. But this is really an impossible enterprise. If we truly

want to be scientific about religion, we cannot rely on guesses about how people thought at the

dawn of history. We must try to look instead for “the everpresent causes” on which religion rests,

the things that at all times and places push people to believe and behave in religious ways. Instead

of making a grand guess about the distant past, Durkheim proposes that we look firsthand at a real

example of religion in action. And for this purpose, what better method could there be than to locate

the simplest society we know of and rely on someone who has actually observed it? A religion

linked to the simplest social system that exists might well be regarded as “the most elementary

religion we can possibly know.”10 And if we can explain this religion, we have a start on explaining

all religion. We will have in hand religion’s “elementary forms.”

Australian Tribal Religion: Totemism

It was Durkheim’s further conviction that on just this point—finding a specimen of a truly simple

civilization—recent researches provided a remarkable

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breakthrough. We have already noted how in the years just before and after the turn of the century,

Frazer took an interest in the work of Baldwin Spencer and F. J. Gillen, two field anthropologists

who had been able to observe closely certain primitive aborigine tribes in the remote hinterlands of

Australia. Their work—along with that of the German fieldworker Carl von Strehlow and others

who had made similar observations—furnished a detailed portrait of social life in these extremely

simple communities. And quite remarkably, it had also shown that the religion of these peoples was

none other than totemism, the very same thing that so captivated Robertson Smith, Frazer, Freud,

and other early anthropological inquirers.

Durkheim was no less fascinated than the others by this new Australian research, but he was also

convinced that none of these earlier theorists had grasped its full importance. None had really

appreciated how fundamental to primitive culture totemism really is. All recognized, for instance,

that tribal peoples divide themselves into different clans, each of which is identified with a separate

totem animal, plant, or other object. And all noticed that the totem itself, whether it be the bear or

the crow, the kangaroo or the tea tree, is considered sacred to the clan that claims it. But none had

detected the genuinely important thing: how totemism impressively illustrates the concepts of the

sacred and the profane.

In each of these primitive societies, Durkheim observes, animals other than the totem, which are

profane, can ordinarily be killed and eaten by the clan; the totem animal cannot. Because it is

sacred, it is absolutely forbidden to the clan—except on those select occasions when, as a part of

specially designated ceremonies, it is ritually sacrificed and eaten. In addition, the clan itself is

regarded as sacred because it is considered to be one with its totem. And perhaps most important,

the emblem, or logo, of the totem animal is always extremely important; it is not just sacred but the

very model, the perfect example, of a sacred thing. When the clan gathers together for its

ceremonies, it is always the totem symbol, carved into a piece of wood or rock, that holds center

stage. The totem is supremely sacred and communicates its sacred character to all around it.

Totem beliefs, moreover, are so fundamental to the life of these simple societies that everything of

importance is ultimately shaped by them. One can hardly find anything more basic than the very

categories of human thought and experience; among the aborigines, these are provided by totemism.

For example, totemic concepts govern their most basic perceptions of nature, so that not only

groups of people but the entire world of natural objects is divided into categories based on totem

clans, or clusters of clans, called phratries. One tribe, for example, places the sun in the clan of the

white cockatoo, while the moon and stars are assigned to the clan of its black counterpart. In

addition,

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natural objects are placed in a hierarchy of power, which could only have been devised on the basis

of the levels of authority which primitives experience first in the structures of the family and clan.

The concepts of the totem and the clan thus find their way into every significant aspect of tribal life.

There are even cases of individual totems—those which a clan member can choose as a sort of

personal friend—and sexual totems, which group people by gender. Both of these undoubtedly

derive from more basic and general clan totems and offer further proof of their central importance.

In casting about for explanations of totemism, earlier theorists have followed their own quite

predictable paths. Tylor, as we might have guessed, insists that the custom arises out of animism;

others have thought that it derives from nature worship; and still others, like Frazer, have claimed

that it is magical, or that it may have no connection at all to either religion or magic. Where all of

these theories go wrong is, for Durkheim, not hard to see. Each attempts to trace totemism to

something else that is supposedly earlier and more fundamental. But this is a crucial mistake.

Finding a form of religion older than totemism is quite impossible, for the simple reason that there

is none. Totemism, which appears in the very simplest societies, is itself the simplest, most basic,

and original form of religion; all other forms can only grow out of it. Totemism is not a product, not

a derivative of some more basic form of religion; it is itself the source from which all other kinds of

religious worship—whether it be of spirits, gods, animals, planets, or stars—ultimately arise.

It is true that at first glance totemism seems to be merely another of the usual religious types: a kind

of animal or plant worship and nothing more. But Durkheim insists that when we look at it in detail,

it turns out to be something considerably different. Followers of totem cults do not actually adore

the crow, the frog, or the white cockatoo; they commit to the worship “of an anonymous and

impersonal force, found in each of these beings but not to be confounded with any of them. No one

possesses it entirely and all participate in it.” If we want, we can of course speak loosely of a “god”

adored in the totem cult, but “it is an impersonal god, without name or history, immanent in the

world and diffused in an innumerable multitude of things.”11 Durkheim prefers that we speak more

accurately of something called “the totemic principle,” which stands at the center of all of the clan’s

beliefs and rituals. Behind the totem is an impersonal force that possesses enormous power, both

physical and moral, over the life of the clan. People respect it; they feel a moral obligation to

observe its ceremonies; and through it they feel tightly bound to each other in deep and abiding

loyalty.

Here we can see why Durkheim thinks it misleading, at least at the outset, for theorists to define

religion as belief in gods or supernatural beings. In his

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view, before we ever get to belief in gods, there is always this first and more basic thing, the sense

of a hidden, impersonal, and powerful force—the totemic principle—that is the original focus of the

clan’s worship. It is significant, moreover, that the evidence we find for this totemic principle is by

no means limited to Australia. Under different names, Durkheim claims to find it as well in other

tribal societies. Among the Melanesians, there is the similar concept of mana; and among various

American Indian tribes, we find the same principle described in such words as wakan, manitou, and

orenda, all of which convey the same idea of an all-pervading, impersonal force, a dominating

power, which is the real center of clan or tribe worship. It follows, then, that if we want to account

for religion, we must explain more than surface beliefs in the gods or spirits that people routinely

worship; we need to explain this more fundamental reality. We must show what this worship of “the

totemic principle” really is.

Society and the Totem

The totem is in the first instance a symbol. But a symbol of what? One answer, we can now see, is

the totemic priciple, the hidden force worshipped by the clan. At the same time—and here

Durkheim makes his pivotal turn—the totem is also the concrete, visible image of the clan. It is its

flag, its banner or logo, its very self in a symbol, just as one might say that the American eagle,

“Old Glory,” or “Uncle Sam” is a visible emblem of the United States. But if the totem “is at once

the symbol of the god and of the society, is that not because the god and the society are only one?”

“The god of the clan, the totemic principle, can therefore be nothing else than the clan itself,

personified and represented to the imagination under the visible form of the animal or vegetable

which serves as totem.”12 The totem, in brief, is simultaneously the symbol of both the god and the

clan, because both the god and the clan are really the same thing! In succinct form, devotion to a

god or gods is how primitive peoples express and reinforce their devotion to the clan.

It is true, of course, that in their rituals of worship, which are always communal, the members of

these aborigine clans themselves think they are worshipping some divinity, some animal or plant,

“out there” in the world, who can control the rain or make them prosper. But what is really

happening is something else, something that can best be grasped in terms of social function. Society

needs the commitment of the individual. It “cannot exist,” Durkheim observes, “except in and

through individual consciousness”; that is why the totem principle must somehow always “penetrate

and organize itself within us.”13 Moreover, we can know exactly when and how this occurs. It

happens on those awe-inspiring ceremonial occasions when the whole

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community assembles for its general rites of the clan or tribe. In these great and unforgettable

ceremonies, the worshippers seal their commitment to the clan. In their moments of great

excitement, in the wild emotional ecstasies of chanting and dancing, individuals manage to lose

themselves in the heaving mass of the crowd; they allow their private—that is, profane—selves to

sink into the great single self of the clan. In the middle of such throbbing assemblies, individuals

acquire sentiments and undertake actions they would never be capable of embracing on their own.

They leave behind what is most distinctively their own and merge their identities joyfully into the

common single self of the clan. In such ceremonies, they leave the everyday, the humdrum, the

selfish; they move instead into the domain of what is great and general. They enter the solemn

sphere of the sacred.

Durkheim vividly describes the sentiments that “bubble up” in the excitement of these group

ceremonies. They are ritual times, filled with energy, enthusiasm, joy, selfless commitment, and

complete security. “It is in the midst of these effervescent social environments and out of this

effervescence itself that the religious idea seems to be born.”14 At such moments the profane is left

behind; only the sacred exists.

The Implications of Totemism

Once Durkheim has made his key point—the idea that worship of the totem is nothing less than

worship of society itself, he feels that all other pieces in the puzzle of Australian society and

religion fall quite naturally into their appropriate places. The role of the totem symbol, for example,

now seems clear. Carved in wood or stone, it is a concrete object which conveys to each person the

fact that the clan, which claims the loyalty of all, is not just something imagined; it is a real thing,

which imposes itself on everyone’s life and thoughts. The totem symbol also conveys the idea that

society, like itself, is something fixed and permanent; it remains as a focus of inspiration long after

the excitement of the religious ceremonies is over. If we ask why animals and plants should be the

most common totems, that too is clear. The clan does not want as its symbol something distant and

vague; it needs an object that is specific, concrete, and near at hand, something closely tied to its

daily experience. If we ask how such primitive societies developed their systems of thought, their

ways of ordering and classifying the world, that can be seen clearly as well. The aim of totemism is

to notice the interconnectedness of things, the intricate web of ties that bind each person to the next

in the clan, the clan as a whole to the natural world, and different parts of the natural world to each

other. This urge to embrace and connect all things is so strong, in fact, that it enables primitive

totemism, simple as it is, to lay the groundwork for the

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intricately connected systems of language, logic, and science which develop in later stages of

civilization.

Properly understood, the totemic principle can account for all the rest of religion as well. Belief in

souls, or spirits, is a case in point. Totemism shows how such beliefs have developed. The idea of

the soul is really just the totemic principle implanted in each individual. Since the clan exists only

because individuals think about it in their minds, it is only natural for its members to think of the

totemic principle as somehow spreading itself into each one of them. As it distributes itself

throughout the clan, the fragment of it which each individual comes to possess becomes his or her

separate soul; it is “the clan within.”15

This “social” idea of the soul is quite enlightening, Durkheim adds, when we think of the age-old

religious (and philosophical) problem of its relation to the body. If the soul is, in effect, the clan

idealized and implanted within the self, then in that capacity its task is to represent to the individual

society’s demands and ideals. The soul is the conscience of the self, the voice of the clan within,

informing each of his or her personal obligation to the group. The body, on the other hand, naturally

asserts its own self-centered desires, which can and often do clash sharply with the demands and

restraints of social life. No wonder, then, that religion has always been suspicious of the desires of

the flesh! They satisfy the individual and are profane; religion asserts the claims of the social and is

therefore sacred.

The doctrine of the immortality of the soul is also a natural development from totemism. To speak

of the soul as immortal is for totem peoples only another way of saying that while individuals die,

the clan lives on. Ancestral spirits appear as fragments from the clan’s past that have survived into

the present. Interestingly, these spirits often associate themselves with living members of the clan in

a way that gives each person a kind of double soul: “one which is within us, or rather, which is us;

the other [in the form of the ancestral spirit], which is above us, and whose function it is to control

and assist the first one” in doing its duty to the clan. Over time, these guardian spirits begin to grow

in power and prestige. They become more important; their sphere of influence widens; and they

acquire “mythical personalities of a superior order.” In short, as the concept of the soul and its

immortality gradually arises out of the worship of the totemic principle, so, over time, the worship

of the gods emerges in its turn from the immortality of ancestral souls.

With the emergence of the gods from original totemism, Durkheim comes at last to the realm of

religion as it has been more traditionally understood. Even in Australia, he admits, clan religion has

developed to the point where it has numerous gods, most of whom are associated not with the

smaller clan

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ceremonies but with the larger tribal rites of initiation, which make young men and women full

members of adult society. The best way to understand these greater gods, in fact, is to think of them

as personifications of these wider tribal units. And the same is true for that other well-known

feature of primitive religion which is on exhibit in Australia: the belief in a high god who rules over

all. Modern scholars have been fascinated to find among early peoples a belief such as this, which is

so strikingly similar to the Jewish and Christian faith in a creator and moral ruler of the world. But

in Australia, says Durkheim, the idea of such a god is just a natural extension of the same thinking

that accounts for tribal gods. As contacts increased among tribes that lived in a certain region, and

as they exchanged ideas, they began to suppose that there was one ancestor of special importance

whom they all shared. That ancestor was the high god. His status is grand, but he comes into being

like all other gods—as a further extension of the original totemic principle. For whatever the level

we observe, the process that gives rise to belief in the gods has left us clear traces of its operation.

The gods grow out of the totemic principle as it filters gradually through the clan, first into souls,

next to ancestors who become clan spirits, and finally beyond them to the higher and highest of

gods.

Totemism and Ritual

The last part of the Elementary Forms turns from the matter of beliefs to take up the other side of

Australian religion: its ritual performances. Here we must note Durkheim’s earlier observation that

religious sentiments and emotions first arise not in private moments but in the great group

ceremonials of the clan. It follows from this that the beliefs found in totemism are not the most

important thing about it. Rituals are. In Durkheim’s view, the “cult” (from the Latin cultus:

“worship”), which consists of emotional group ceremonies held on certain set occasions, is the very

core of the clan’s life together. Whenever they occur and however they are performed, these cultic

acts of worship are the most important things the people of the clan ever undertake. They are

sacred; all else is profane. Their purpose is always to promote consciousness of the clan, to make

people feel a part of it, and to keep it in every way separate from the profane.

In totem practice, the cult breaks into two main forms, negative and positive, while a third type,

called “piacular” (from the Latin piaculum: “atonement”) plays a role of its own alongside the first

two. The rituals of the negative cult have one main task: keeping the sacred always quite separate

from the profane. They consist chiefly of prohibitions, or taboos. Taboos

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of location protect certain sacred places, usually rocks or caves. They are the source of the belief,

common in later religions, that a temple or church stands on holy ground or encloses a sacred space.

The sacred and the profane must also be kept from colliding in time. The negative cult therefore sets

aside certain holy days for sacred festivals; one of the most common taboos on such days is the

prohibition of any routine activities from profane life. Normal work and play are prohibited; only

rest or sacred activity is permitted, just as more developed religions like Judaism and Christianity

require on the Sabbath or Sunday. If such rules have often seemed inconvenient and annoying, no

one should be surprised, for that is what they are supposed to be. Their role is to press upon

everyone the need to deny the self, or even endure pain, for the sake of the group. Indeed, Durkheim

continues, that is precisely why almost all religions point with pride to certain people—“ascetics” as

they are commonly called—who make a point of extreme self-denial. Invariably such people are

highly respected. Their excessive pain and self-restraint, their refusal to enjoy sex, good food, or

other luxuries, is meant to serve as an ideal for everyone. They are models of what, to a lesser

degree, is required of everyone for the good of the clan. Without sacrifice of self, the clan can

neither prosper nor survive.

Normally, then, the sacred is off limits, and the point of the negative cult is to keep it so. When the

time and place are right, however, and the clan does move into the realm of the sacred, the means

for doing so are then provided by the rituals Durkheim describes as belonging to the positive cult.

For Australians, the central rite is the intichiuma, the ceremony which, as we may recall, Robertson

Smith, Frazer, and Freud found so uncannily similar to the Christian communion meal. At the

beginning of every rainy season, men of the clan start a sequence of ceremonies to promote the

growth of their totem. They begin with rituals done over certain sacred stones; a period of keen

religious excitement comes next; then amid a solemn ritual the totem creature itself is seized, killed,

and eaten in a sacred meal. Why is this done? asks Durkheim. It is, as Robertson Smith correctly

saw, the earliest form of the rite of sacrifice, which has assumed such a central place in so many

later religions. In worshipping the totem, each person publicly celebrates its existence and declares

that he or she will be loyal to it; in return, by eating the totem, each receives back from the god an

infusion of divine power and a renewal of the divine life in the soul. Durkheim describes it,

ingeniously, as a sacred exchange. In the intichiuma rite, the worshippers give life to their god, and

the god returns it to them.

On the level of appearances, there can of course be little doubt that the Australian intichiuma is a

strictly religious ritual—a transaction between the people of the clan and their god. Underneath,

however, and in reality, it is

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none other than the social renewal of the life of the clan. Beneath the surface of theology lies the

substrate of sociology. Durkheim explains it thus:

If the sacred principle is nothing more nor less than society transfigured and

personified, it should be possible to interpret the ritual in lay and social terms.

And, as a matter of fact, social life, just like the ritual, moves in a circle. On the

one hand, the individual gets from society the best part of himself, all that gives

him a distinct character and a special place among other beings, his intellectual

and moral culture…. But, on the other hand, society exists and lives only in

and through individuals. If the idea of society were extinguished in individual

minds and the beliefs, traditions and aspirations of the group were no longer

felt and shared by the individuals, society would die. We can say of it what we

just said of the divinity: it is real only in so far as it has a place in human con-

sciousness, and this place is whatever one we may give it. We now see the real

reason why the gods cannot do without their worshippers any more than these

can do without their gods; it is because society, of which the gods are only a

symbolic expression, cannot do without individuals any more than these can do

without society.16

In this important paragraph, we can see as clearly as anywhere else in The Elementary Forms the

thesis that stands at the heart of Durkheim’s theory. Religious beliefs and rituals are in the last

analysis symbolic expressions of social realities. Worship of the totem is really a statement of

loyalty to the clan. Eating the totem is really an affirmation and reinforcement of the group, a

symbolic way for each member to say that the clan always matters more than the individual selves it

comprises.

Totem rituals thus put us in a position to explain religious practice in the same way that totem ideas

can explain religious belief. The concept of society once again furnishes the key. The function of

religious rituals, which are more fundamental than beliefs, is to provide occasions where individuals

renew their commitment to the community, reminding themselves in the most solemn fashion that

they depend on the clan, just as it depends on them. Feast days and festivals exist to put society, the

community, back in the foreground of people’s minds, and to push personal, self-oriented concerns

back into a secondary place, where they belong.

Other rituals besides the intichiuma ceremony are included in the positive cult. There are, for

instance, imitative rituals of the sort which Frazer classified as a type of magic. In the rites of

certain clans, people mimic the cries of their totem birds, thinking that this will make them

reproduce and thrive. In other cases, there are what Durkheim calls “representative” rites, or rituals

of remembrance, in which one clan member simply recites the myth of a great ancestor to a group

of listeners, apparently just to provide entertainment and

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instruction. But even so, the underlying motive is social. Telling the story of an ancestor, after all, is

a way of binding the past members of the community to those alive in the present. And people come

to believe that certain rituals can make the totem magically reproduce precisely because of the

power those ceremonies have already demonstrated in bringing together the members of the clan. It

is the social force of rituals which leads to the thought that they have physical force as well.

Piacular Rites

In addition to both the positive and negative cult there are, finally, certain important rituals

Durkheim calls “piacular.” These are the clan’s rites of atonement and mourning, which always take

place after a death or some other tragic event. Tylor thought that primitive peoples held such rituals

in order to make peace with the spirits of the dead, who were angry that their life had ended. But

once again, Durkheim provides a social reason. In cultures where funeral mourners weep loudly and

beat themselves in despair, these acts are not just spontaneous outbursts. They are quite formal

gestures, required by custom from all clan members, even those who hardly knew the dead person.

And why? Because when someone dies, it is not just the immediate family that has been weakened;

the whole clan has lost a member, a portion of its strength. At such a time, it needs, through the cult,

to regroup, revive, and reaffirm itself. In the earliest ages, the rites performed—processions,

wailings, breast-beatings— were not even directed to any spirits or gods. Belief in these

supernatural beings actually developed later in time and only as a result of the ritual, just to give

people a better mental image as a focus for their action. Originally, there were no gods to command

a ritual; there was only the ritual, which over time itself created the gods.

Piacular rites, finally, show the double-sided power of the sacred, which can be dim and demonic as

well as bright and divine. Just as the positive cult is a celebration of the clan in the full vigor of its

joy and confidence, it falls to the piacular cult to carry it through its darker passages—the moments

of grief, catastrophe, fear, or uncertainty that can descend on a community at any place or time. An

example of Durkheim’s point can here be supplied from recent history. Few Americans who were

living in November 1963, when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, can ever forget the

overwhelming emotional impact on the nation of the elegant, somber funeral procession that moved

through the streets of the capital and was followed by the heartbreaking rites of burial at Arlington

National Cemetery. For those in every town and state who watched on television, it could well have

seemed that an entire nation was a single, grieving family. Durkheim’s concept of a piacular rite

well explains

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why this should have been so. Whatever the mood of society, the rites of religion will invariably

reflect and reinforce it.

Conclusion

Durkheim contends that if his analysis is correct, there is a great deal to be learned from the

primitive peoples of Australia. In the totemism of their tribes and clans, one finds on clear display

all of the truly “elementary forms” of the religious life: a separation between the sacred and the

profane; ideas of souls and spirits; the beginnings of mythical beings and great gods; and a full

assortment of rituals, including those of prohibition (taboo), celebration, imitation, remembrance,

and sorrow. With these building blocks in hand, it becomes possible to construct a theory that can

be applied throughout history and across cultures to explain religious behavior of any kind wherever

we may find it. Durkheim’s theory holds that no matter where we look for the determining causes of

religion—all religions—those causes invariably turn out to be social. Though harder to detect in the

great and dominant religions of the world, they are as unmistakably present in these complex

traditions as they are in the simplest totemism. East or West, ancient or modern, beliefs and rituals

always express a society’s needs—its constant call upon all members to think first of the group, to

sense its importance, feel its power, and sacrifice personal pleasures for its permanent well-being.

Religion’s role, accordingly, is not to make claims about “the outside world,” not to teach what it

thinks are truths about the creation of the world, the existence of a god, or a life after death. On all

of these subjects, which people once thought proper for faith, it has had to yield to science, a more

valid system of thought which, in fact, religion helped to create. Religion’s true purpose is not

intellectual but social. It serves as the carrier of social sentiments, providing symbols and rituals

that enable people to express the deep emotions which anchor them to their community. Insofar as it

does this, religion, or some substitute for it, will always be with us. For then it stands on its true

home ground, preserving and protecting the very “soul of society.”

Analysis

In following Durkheim’s approach to religion, we have naturally had to pass over certain details,

but the main outlines of his theory should now be fairly clear. From almost the moment it appeared,

The Elementary Forms stirred excitement, especially in France, where Durkheim had associates and

disciples

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who were already disposed to look at religion through sociological lenses. Even beyond France,

however, Durkheim’s originality was widely recognized. In Britain, the study of anthropology was

shaped by his influence, as was the new field of social psychology in the United States, where such

noteworthy spokesmen as G. H. Mead and C. H. Cooley adapted his ideas to their programs of

research. Durkheim’s imprint can also be seen in such leading studies of religion as W. Lloyd

Warner’s The Family of God (1959), which explores the power of Christian symbolism in American

communities, and contemporary sociologist Robert Bellah’s analyses of religion and society in both

the United States and Japan. Clearly, among those who work in the social sciences, Durkheim’s

thought continues to win new admirers and open fresh lines of inquiry.

Why all of this recognition? The answer to that question lies partly in the fact that Durkheim, like

Freud, is a very wide-ranging thinker. He finds in sociology a new way of understanding almost

every aspect of human behavior —not only religion, but science, philosophy, history, ethics,

education, politics, and psychology as well. In addition, where religion in particular is concerned,

his analyses open the way to a variety of new insights and applications. Among these, at least four

deserve notice here.

1. Society and Religion

As we have seen throughout this discussion, the core of Durkheim’s view lies in his claim that

“religion is something eminently social.”17 He insists that although as individuals all of us make

choices in our lives, we make them within a social framework that is a “given” for us from the day

of birth. “We speak a language that we did not make; we use instruments that we did not invent; we

invoke rights that we did not found; a treasury of knowledge is transmitted to each generation that it

did not gather itself.”18 Religion is in all cultures the most prized part of that social treasury. It

serves society by providing from infancy onward the ideas, rituals, and sentiments that guide the

life of every person within it. In the present circumstance, discussions of “social influence” on

religion, and vice versa, are so routine as to seem like common sense; everyone speaks in such

terms. But to see how distinctive this perspective is, we need only remind ourselves of how Tylor

wrote on religion just half a century before Durkheim. When he considers primitive religion, he

speaks only of a single “savage philosopher,” thinking his way all alone to the ideas of the soul and

the gods. Similarly for Freud. Though he does grasp the roles of family and society, his focus, too,

is primarily on the personality of the individual. Durkheim’s view, however, is decidedly different.

He is not the first or only thinker of his age to have glimpsed the power of

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“the social” in human life, but he is unique in understanding its full importance and in pushing it to

the forefront of study.

2. Scientific Method

Durkheim takes great pride in being scientific. Like earlier theorists, he wants to gather data,

compare it, classify it, and make generalizations, or laws, to explain it. In a limited way, he also

embraces social evolution. He assumes human societies do evolve from the elementary to the

complex. And he agrees that the best place to start is with cultures that are simple—with so-called

primitive peoples. He does not, of course, like the idea of some broad scheme of human progress.

He rejected this view for the most part when he met it in the philosophy of Comte. He also rejects

Frazer’s version, which presents the portrait of humanity marching steadily upward through the

ages of magic, religion, and science. Against the British anthropologists, he insists that we must not

use the comparative method to pick out customs and beliefs casually from around the world and

then arrange them, out of their contexts, into some predetermined scheme of historical progress.

That will not work. What he says we must do—and here The Elementary Forms serves as a

model—is center on a single society, examine it carefully, and attend to details. Only after that

close work has been done may theorists begin to make very limited comparisons with other

societies, and even then, only if they are societies of the same type. True science, he insists, works

slowly—from a few specimens carefully examined, not from many gathered in haste.

In the years after World War I, this important point of Durkheim’s method was taken very much to

heart in the field of anthropology, especially in Britain and America. In England, it was promoted

especially by the social theorist A. R. Radcliffe-Brown and by the field anthropologist Bronislaw

Malinowski, who wrote on religion and other features of primitive cultures in the South Pacific.

This principle of investigating one and only one society in depth before going on to comparisons is

now widely approved in social science. It seems to have put an end permanently to the grand

ambitions of Tylor, Frazer, and their associates from the older, Victorian era of anthropology.

3. Ritual and Belief

Durkheim also parts from the ways of Tylor and Frazer on the question of the relation between

religious ritual and belief. Their “intellectualist” approach holds that beliefs and ideas about the

world are the primary elements in the religious life. Religion’s practices—its customs and rituals—

are seen as secondary; they follow from the beliefs and depend upon them. On this view, as

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noted, the practice of those primitive peoples who bury servants along with their kings arises out of

the prior belief that, in the afterlife, the king’s soul will need the souls of servants to assist him. The

belief comes logically before the ritual; the idea can be said to cause the practice. In Durkheim’s

thinking, just the opposite view is put forward. For him the rituals of religion have priority; it is

they that are always basic and actually create the beliefs that accompany them. If there is anything

“eternal” about religion, he says, it is that a society always needs rites—ceremonial activities of

renewal and rededication. Through them, people are reminded that the group always matters more

than any of its single members. Beliefs, by contrast, are not so eternal. While the social function of

religious rituals has always remained constant, the intellectual content of religious beliefs has

always been changeable. Beliefs are the “speculative side” of religion. They may serve to separate

the Christian from the Jew and the Hindu, but in reality the particular ideas they assert make little

difference. Ideas always change from religion to religion and even from age to age in the same

religion. But the need for ceremonies always remains; they are the true source of social unity, and in

every society they are the real ties that bind. They disclose the true meaning of religion.

4. Functional Explanation

The matter of ritual takes us to the heart of Durkheim’s theory: the functional explanation of

religion. Durkheim, like Freud, sees himself as presenting not just a different theory but a theory

different in kind from those that came before him. In explaining religion, he thinks he can go

beneath the surface of things. Tylor and Frazer try to explain religion as it appears; they take more

or less at face value the beliefs that religious people hold and then ask how those beliefs explain

their lives and deeds. In this intellectualist approach, ideas and beliefs—Durkheim’s speculative

side of religion—are the key to explaining other cultures. For the follower of Tylor, a primitive

ritual makes sense once we know that the Indian rainmaker believes an imitation of thunder can

create a storm and send showers on his fields. The principle of imitative magic may be absurd to us,

but not to him; so it explains why he acts as strangely as he does. Like Freud, however, Durkheim

wants to ask another question. If we agree that these beliefs are absurd, then why do people hold

them? If such ideas are silly superstitions, they nonetheless do not die easily. Why do they survive?

For Durkheim, the answer to this riddle can be found only in one place: not in the content of the

beliefs, not in what they claim about gods or the world, but in their function—in what they do,

socially, for those who live by them. The true nature of religion is to be found not on its surface but

underneath.

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As the case of Australian totemism clearly shows, religion’s key value lies in the ceremonies

through which it inspires and renews the allegiance of individuals to the group. These rituals then

create, almost as an afterthought, the need for some sort of symbolism that takes the form of ideas

about ancestral souls and gods. Moreover, if a society truly needs such rites to survive and flourish,

it follows that there can never be a community without either a religion or something similar to fill

its place. So, even when the ideas of religion are thought by some to be false and absurd, religious

behavior can remain very much alive in the society it helps to support. Religious ideas can be

questioned, but religious rituals, or something very much like them, must endure. Society cannot

exist without ceremony; hence the persistence of religion.

Critique

Needless to say, Durkheim’s aggressively social approach presents us with a most original and

intriguing theory of religion. Unlike Tylorian animism, it claims to show how the roots of religious

behavior run much deeper than the purely intellectual need to understand how the world works. And

unlike Freudian personality theory, it appreciates in all its wide scope the powerful shaping

influence that social structures exert when people declare some things sacred and others profane.

Yet compelling as it appears in these respects, Durkheim’s ambitiously sociological theory displays

certain noticeable limitations in others. The very first reviewers of The Elementary Forms were

quick to notice some of these difficulties, and more recent critics have not hesitated to multiply the

complaints. The criticisms tend to cluster about three main issues: Durkheim’s assumptions about

the nature of religion, his Australian evidence, and his “reductionist” conclusions. We take them

here in turn.

1. Assumptions

With Durkheim, as with our other theorists, a great deal depends on what the Greek thinker

Archimedes called his pou sto, the place “where I stand” at the start of the argument. Consider in

this connection the definition of religion laid out in the opening pages of The Elementary Forms.

Religion, we are told, is rooted in the basic distinction all societies make between the sacred and the

profane. The main concern of religious rites is with the first, that is, with the sacred, which is to be

kept separate from the profane. Further, the sacred is always tied up with the great social events of

the clan, while the profane is the realm of private affairs. This root conception serves as the

foundation on which the full framework of Durkheim’s imposing theory is then erected.

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If we look at it very closely, however, surely the pivotal role of this definition in the theory creates

something of a problem. If, already at the start of the discussion, Durkheim envisions the sacred as

the social, is it not quite easy— rather too easy—to reach the conclusion that religion is nothing

more than the expression of social needs? The inquiry would seem to begin at the very place where

Durkheim wants to finish. The sacred is the social, he writes, and the religious is the sacred;

therefore, the religious is the social. To be sure, Durkheim is not the only theorist whose reasoning

tends toward a certain circularity; we have seen something of the same in Freud, and others too are

inclined to offer definitions that most easily accommodate the theory they hope to defend. But

Durkheim’s way of starting the analysis very near the place where it ought to end is, logically, a

cause for some concern.

This problem becomes even more troubling when we recall Durkheim’s own rather summary

dismissal of other definitions. He tells us, for instance, that we may not define religion as belief in

the realm of the supernatural because primitive peoples of the world, who are clearly religious, have

no such concept. For them, all events are the same; there is no supernatural realm separate from the

natural; there is only the sacred and social, which they separate from the profane and personal. But

more than a few scholars both in Durkheim’s day and since then have insisted—with evidence—

that this is just not so. Primitive peoples may not have exactly our concept of the supernatural, but

they do hold ideas about mystical or extraordinary kinds of events which are quite similar to our

modern conceptions. At the same time, interestingly enough, many of them do not in all cases

manage to separate the sacred from the profane, especially in the absolute way that Durkheim says

they must. Considerations such as these, which tend to count in favor of more traditional notions of

religion and against Durkheim’s conception, could perhaps be dismissed if the questions of the

supernatural and the sacred were minor matters. Unfortunately, they are not. Durkheim’s choice of

definitions is quite central to his entire strategy of explanation. It does not meet us at the fringes of

the theory, where adjustments could be made without loss. It stands out in front and at the center.

2. Evidence

Durkheim contends that the great merit of his study, unlike those of earlier theorists, is his

determination to study only one type of culture, the aborigine communities of Australia, and explain

religion in that context. He relies on the widely acclaimed ethnographical reports of Spencer and

Gillen, along with those of other firsthand observers, and he rests his theory squarely on the

evidence they provide. The scientific value of such an approach is clear and undisputed—but so is

its potential weakness. Should reason arise to

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question the value of these reports, or Durkheim’s readings of them, what would be left of his

theory, linked as closely as it is to this Australian evidence? Significantly, several of the very first

critics to comment on The Elementary Forms made this point in forcible terms. One, a sociologist

named Gaston Richard, who had earlier worked with Durkheim, carefully examined the Australian

reports and showed how, in a number of places, the evidence could be read to prove quite the

opposite of what Durkheim concludes. Richard also claimed, rather persuasively, that most of

Durkheim’s theory had been assembled before he ever looked at the Australian reports.19 Other

critics now question whether even the Australian reports themselves were completely accurate.20

Perhaps the harshest words on this subject were to come from Arnold van Gennep, the famed Dutch

anthropologist of Africa. In a strongly worded review written soon after The Elementary Forms

appeared, he wrote, “In ten years the whole of his analysis of the Australian material will be

completely rejected.” He then added that it was based on “the most unsound group of

ethnographical facts I have ever encountered.”21 These words have proven at least partly prophetic.

Today, much of the evidence and most of the interpretation of totemism that Durkheim makes a part

of his theory have come to be quite widely rejected.22

3. Reductionism

Just as psychological functionalism is the cornerstone of Freudian theory, sociological

functionalism is the key to Durkheim’s explanatory method. In a certain sense, of course, the value

of such an approach seems beyond question. Who can really doubt that, beneath the surface of

things, religious beliefs and rituals often accomplish social purposes that believers themselves may

be quite unaware of? Who would wish to deny that for devout Catholics, a requiem mass, which on

its face is a plea to God to save the souls of the dead from Hell, is, underneath that surface, also a

powerful ritual of group solidarity and renewal? Such socially functional readings of religion seem

so natural and appropriate that no one is any longer likely to dispute them.

But even if all agree in a general way that religion and society are thus functionally related or even

inseparable, we must still ask just how this relationship really works. In discussing this matter,

Durkheim almost always claims that society determines, while religion is the thing that is

determined. Society controls; religion reflects. In each Australian instance he considers, Durkheim

insists that society powerfully shapes religious ritual and belief, while religious beliefs never seem

able to do the reverse. In each instance we are reminded that social structure is always the reality,

while religion is merely an appearance. It seems at least reasonable to ask why this should have to

be

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so. It is one thing to say that alongside its other claims and purposes, religion also has a social

function; it is quite another to say that religion has only a social function. As we saw in the case of

Freud, “reductionism” is the theoretical term for this particularly aggressive form of functionalist

explanation. Freud explains religion as “nothing but” a surface appearance, a set of neurotic

symptoms produced by an underlying psychological trauma. Durkheim’s agenda is similar; he

accounts for religion as nothing but the surface foam—his own word actually is “effervescence”—

given off by an underlying social reality. He differs from Freud, of course, in that he is much more

reluctant to pass a negative judgment on religion from this perspective. Freud sees religion as a sign

of disease, a symptom of psychic aberration. Durkheim is not so sure; even when its beliefs are

mistaken, he thinks it may, for some societies, still be a hallmark of social health.

Despite that difference, Durkheim’s theory, like Freud’s, fits the mold of an aggressively

reductionist functionalism; his aim is to “reduce” religion to something other than what it appears to

be. Although functionalist explanations have proven their merits through the years, the question of

such reductionist versions of functionalism is a different matter—one that leaves present-day

theorists sharply divided. Some applaud such approaches, finding in reductionist theories the very

model of a strong scientific method.23 Others find them one-sided and fundamentally misleading.24

In that connection, it should not come as a surprise that most actual religious believers find the

reductionist theories of both Freud and Durkheim generally unacceptable. In the eyes of religious

faith, these approaches, though they may offer insight into aspects of belief, simply misunderstand

what religion at bottom is all about. Even at that, however, the views of Freud and Durkheim are

probably less offensive to religious ears than those expressed, well before theirs, in one of the most

militant and aggressive of all reductionist theories: that of the German socialist philosopher Karl

Marx. His unsparing and combative account of religion is the one we consider next.

Notes

1. Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, tr. Joseph Ward Swain (New

York: The Macmillan Company, 1915), p. 419.

2. Durkheim was, of course, not the only contributor to the “sociological revolution” in modern

thinking. On the matter of Durkheim’s influence, see Albert Salomon, “Some Aspects of the

Legacy of Durkheim,” in Kurt H. Wolff, ed., Essays on Sociology and Philosophy: Durkheim, et al.

with Appraisals of His Life and Thought (New York: Harper Torchbooks, [1960] 1964), pp. 247–

66.

3. The authoritative biography of Durkheim is Steven Lukes, Émile Durkheim, His Life and Work:

A Historical and Critical Study (New York: Harper & Row, 1972).

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An excellent study of Durkheim’s thought in depth is W. S. F. Pickering, Durkheim’s Sociology of

Religion: Themes and Theories (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984).

4. For Durkheim’s own appreciation of the French sociological tradition in which he stood, see his

“Sociology in France in the Nineteenth Century,” tr. by Mark Traugott, in Robert N. Bellah, ed.,

Émile Durkheim: Morality and Society: Selected Writings (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

1973), pp. 3–22.

5. On Durkheim as a political theorist, see Steve Fenton, Durkheim and Modern Sociology

(Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 81–115.

6. See Ernest Wallwork, Durkheim: Morality and Milieu (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University

Press, 1972).

7. Durkheim, Elementary Forms, p. 47. On the importance of this distinction, see Nisbet, The

Sociology of Émile Durkheim (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), pp. 172–76.

8. Durkheim, Elementary Forms, p. 47.

9. Durkheim, Elementary Forms, p. 44.

10. Durkheim, Elementary Forms, p. 168.

11. Durkheim, Elementary Forms, p. 188.

12. Durkheim, Elementary Forms, p. 206; on this crucial linkage between the clan, the totem, and

the totem symbol, with each as sacred, see Anthony Giddens, Émile Durkheim (New York: Viking

Press, 1978), p. 94.

13. Durkheim, Elementary Forms, p. 209.

14. Durkheim, Elementary Forms, pp. 218–19.

15. Durkheim, Elementary Forms, p. 249.

16. Durkheim, Elementary Forms, p. 347.

17. Durkheim, Elementary Forms, p. 10.

18. Durkheim, Elementary Forms, p. 212.

19. “Dogmatic Atheism in the Sociology of Religion,” in W. S. F. Pickering, ed., Durkheim on

Religion, tr. by Jacqueline Redding (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975), pp. 228–76; first

published in Revue d’histoire et de philosophie religieuse (1923).

20. W. E. H. Stanner, “Reflections on Durkheim and aboriginal Religion,” in Pickering, ed.,

Durkheim on Religion, pp. 277–303.

21. Arnold van Gennep, review of The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, in Pickering, ed.,

Durkheim on Religion, pp. 205–208; first published in Mercure de France (1913).

22. See in particular Stanner, “Reflections on Durkheim and aboriginal Religion,” and A. A.

Goldenweiser, review of The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, both in Pickering, ed.,

Durkheim on Religion, pp. 277–303, 209–27. Goldenweiser’s article was first published in

American Anthropologist (1915).

23. See, for example, the writings of Donald Wiebe, especially “The Failure of Nerve in the

Academic Study of Religion,” Studies in Religion 13 (1984): 401–22; also the following works by

Robert Segal: “In Defense of Reductionism,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 51

(March 1983): 97–124; Religion and the Social Sciences: Essays on the Confrontation (Atlanta:

Scholars Press, 1989); and Explaining and Interpreting Religion: Essays on the Issue, Toronto

Studies in Religion (New York: Peter Lang, 1992).

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24. Daniel L. Pals, “Is Religion a Sui Generis Phenomenon?” Journal of the American Academy of

Religion 55, 2 (1987): 260–82.

Suggestions for Further Reading

Allen, N. J., ed. On Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of Religious Life. London: Routledge, 1998. A

collection of instructive analytical essays reappraising the background, design, and influence of

Durkheim’s landmark study.

Bellah, Robert N., ed. Émile Durkheim: Morality and Society: Selected Writings. Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 1973. An instructive selection of Durkheim’s more important shorter

writings, chosen and introduced by a leading American sociologist of religion.

Durkheim, Émile. The Division of Labor in Society. Translated by G. Simpson. Glencoe, Ill.: The

Free Press, [1893] 1964.

Durkheim, Émile. The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. Translated by Joseph Ward Swain.

New York: The Macmillan Company, [1912] 1915.

Durkheim, Émile. The Rules of Sociological Method. Translated by S. A. Solovay and J. H.

Mueller. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, [1895] 1938.

Durkheim, Émile. Suicide: A Study in Sociology. Translated by J. A. Spaulding and G. Simpson.

London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, [1897] 1951.

Fenton, Steve, ed. Durkheim and Modern Sociology. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University

Press, 1984. Essays by recognized authorities who assess Durkheim’s role and influence in the

development of contemporary sociological research.

Giddens, Anthony. Émile Durkheim. New York: Viking Press, 1978. An insightful, brief study by a

leading contemporary sociological theorist.

Jones, Robert Alun. Émile Durkheim. Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1986. An

illuminating short study by a scholar familiar with Robertson Smith, Frazer, and other early

interpreters of religion.

Jones, Susan Stedman. Durkheim Reconsidered. Cambridge, England: Polity Press, 2001. A

reappraisal of Durkheim that seeks to clear away misconceptions and place his career and

achievement in the context of French society, politics, and culture of his time.

LaCapra, Dominick. Émile Durkheim: Sociologist and Philosopher. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell

University Press, 1972. A substantial account of the full range of Durkheim’s thought.

Lukes, Steven. Émile Durkheim, His Life and Work: A Historical and Critical Study. New York:

Harper & Row, 1972. The definitive recent examination of Durkheim’s life and thought.

Mestrovic, Stjepan G Émile Durkheim and the Reformation of Sociology. Totowa, N.J.: Rowman &

Littlefield, 1988. An assessment of Durkheim’s role in creating the modern field of sociological

inquiry.

Nisbet, Robert A. Émile Durkheim: With Selected Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall,

1965. A critical assessment with illuminating contributions from other authors on Durkheim’s most

important books and leading theories.

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Nisbet, Robert. The Sociology of Émile Durkheim. New York: Oxford University Press, 1974.

Excellent on the historical context of Durkheim’s work and on the social thinkers, especially in

France, who preceded Durkheim and influenced his thought.

Pickering, W. S. F., ed. Durkheim on Religion. Translated by Jacqueline Redding. London:

Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975. Presents selections from Durkheim’s original works on religion

along with selected reviews by other scholars, including some of the very earliest assessments of

The Elementary Forms.

Pickering, W. S. F. Durkheim’s Sociology of Religion: Themes and Theories. London: Routledge &

Kegan Paul, 1984. An excellent in-depth study of Durkheim on religion.

Wolff, Kurt H., ed. Essays on Sociology and Philosophy: Durkheim, et al., with Appraisals of His

Life and Thought. New York: Harper Torchbooks, [1960] 1964. Illuminating essays by different

authors on the origin, character, and influence of Durkheim’s thought.

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4

Religion as Alienation:

Karl Marx

Marx discovered… the simple fact… that mankind must first of all

eat, drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics,

science, art, religion.

Friedrich Engels, “Speech at the Graveside of Karl Marx”1

If the order of this book were strictly chronological, the theorist we take up in this chapter would

have appeared at the beginning, not here in the middle. Karl Marx (1818–1883), the German social

philosopher and guiding spirit of the movement that has come to be known as communism, had

lived much of his life before the other figures in our survey had even begun their work. His major

writings were completed well before Tylor published Primitive Culture in 1871, while Frazer’s

Golden Bough did not appear until some seven years after Marx’s death in 1883. It would be still

another twenty years before Freud and Durkheim developed their leading ideas. Nonetheless, it

makes sense to consider Marx here and not earlier in our survey. For though he wrote in the middle

years of the nineteenth century, his ideas gained little notice in his day beyond a small circle of his

own radical associates—and the suspicious eyes of public authorities. Only late in his life, after he

published Das Kapital2 (in English, Capital), the first volume of his huge critical study of

economics, did people in the mainstream of thought begin to pay close attention to his views. From

that point on, however, his influence did begin to grow enormously, as anyone now alive certainly

knows. In Russia, he won a convert in Vladimir Lenin, the major force behind the Russian

Revolution of 1917, which destroyed an empire and shocked the world. Later, in the 1940s, the

same shock went through China when another Marxist, Mao Tse-tung, led an army of poor peasants

to an equally shattering victory. As similar revolts unfolded around the world in lesser lands,

intellectuals in both Europe and America found themselves forced to grapple with Marx’s explosive

and all-embracing vision of society. Some have

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been strongly attracted, others thoroughly repelled. In the present circumstance, even after

communist systems have begun to collapse, all would readily agree on at least one thing: Marx’s

own century could ignore him, but ours cannot.3

About Marx, two things must be noticed from the very start. First, as the shaper of communism, he

presents us less with a theory of religion than a total system of thought that itself resembles a

religion. Though some have said the same even of Freud’s psychoanalysis, the impact of the

Marxist creed around the world has been far greater. For a time in our century, Marxist thought in

one form or other was the ruling philosophy of governments in many parts of the world, though—

since the great collapse of communism in Europe and the Soviet Union—just a few major outposts

remain. Marx’s writings are as sacred to some communists as is the Bible to the most sincere and

devout of Christians. Communism offers a system of doctrines with authorized interpretations. It

has its own ceremonies, sacred places, and sacred persons. It has missionaries who in the space of

one century have won (and now lost) millions of converts; and it has conducted persecutions more

fearsome even than those of the Middle Ages or Wars of Religion. Communism in essence claims

to present not just a broad theory of politics, society, and economics but a compelling total vision of

human life, complete with a philosophical stance on humanity’s place in the natural world, an

explanation of all that is past in history, and a prophecy of what is still to come.

Second, because Marx’s philosophy is so far-reaching, what he offers as a “theory” of traditional

religion makes up a rather small—and not necessarily central—part of his thinking. In this respect,

he is quite unlike Durkheim or Freud or our other theorists. The views he held were clear and

outspoken, as we shall shortly see; they have also had tremendous influence in the modern world,

especially in officially communist societies. But among all of Marx’s voluminous writings, it is

significant that not one addresses specifically or in systematic fashion the subject of religion.

Though he touches on it often enough in his many books, letters, and articles on other subjects, he

almost always does so in indirect fashion, commenting here on religion in general, there on

churches, sacraments, or clergy, and at other places on this belief or that practice. Consequently,

this chapter calls for a strategy slightly different from that which we followed in the others. Instead

of tracing the argument of a single book, as we could do with figures like Tylor and Durkheim, we

will have to reconstruct Marx’s view of religion mainly from certain early philosophical and social

writings, where he addresses the subject most explicitly, and from occasional comments he makes

in later books on politics and economics. With that exception out of the way, we can still keep to

our pattern. We shall look first at Marx’s life and intellectual background, next at the overall

framework

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of his thinking, and then at his view of religion. After that, we can devote the remaining space to

analysis and criticism.

Background: Marx’s Life, Activities, and Writings

Karl Marx was born on May 5, 1818, the second of eight children in the family of Heinrich Marx, a

Jewish lawyer who lived in the small and beautiful Rhineland city of Trier.4 During this time, when

Germany was not yet a single nation, Trier was under the control of Prussia, the most powerful of

many separate German states ruled by Christian noble families. Marx’s grandfathers on both sides

were rabbis, but because of Prussia’s anti-Jewish laws, his father had converted to Christianity, in

name at least, shortly before Marx was born. The father’s gentle personality contrasted sharply with

that of his son, who was intellectually gifted but also stubborn, blunt, and fiercely independent; he

rarely showed emotion. Though his high school record was unspectacular, Marx found an informal

mentor in a cultivated Prussian state official and family friend, Baron von Westphalen, who kindled

his early interest in literary classics. Marx later married the baron’s daughter Jenny, with whom he

was to have six children.

For a year Marx studied philosophy and law at the University of Bonn, where he did his share of

drinking and dueling. He was able to avoid military service on grounds of bad health. He did not

become a truly serious student until he transferred to the University of Berlin, where he adapted at

once to its thriving cultural life. The university was a great center of learning in a large city, which

was itself a gathering place for scholars, government officials, and serious intellectuals, some with

very radical ideas. Berlin and most other German universities were at the time dominated by the

towering influence of one man, the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich von Hegel (1770–1831).

Hegel’s system of thought is extremely important for understanding Marx, but it is not easy to

explain in simple terms. We will need to return to it later on. Here we can say, in a word, that Hegel

was an idealist, a thinker who solved the age-old philosophers’ question of matter and mind by

deciding that mental things—ideas, or concepts—are fundamental to the world, while material

things are always secondary; they are the physical expressions of an underlying universal spirit, or

absolute idea. Any thinker who wished to be taken seriously in Germany had to respond in some

fashion to this idealist system. Marx did so by placing himself in a circle of thinkers—known as the

Young Hegelians—who were not just disciples but also critics of their master. Also known as

Hegelians of the left wing, they claimed that though Hegel was right to see the problem of matter

and mind as fundamental, his solution

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was precisely the reverse of the truth. Matter is primary, while mind—the realm of concepts and

ideas so important to thinkers—is, in fact, just the reflection, like the color red in an apple, of a

world that is fundamentally material in nature. Marx defended this view with vigor. In 1841 he

completed a doctoral dissertation devoted—significantly—to two decidedly “materialist” ancient

Greek philosophers, Democritus and Epicurus.

This general principle, that what is fundamentally real about the world can be found in material

forces rather than mental concepts, became the philosophical anchor for all of Marx’s later thinking.

In particular, it underlies two themes that took center stage as his thought developed: (1) the

conviction that economic realities determine human behavior and (2) the thesis that human history

is the story of class struggle, the scene of a perpetual conflict in every society between those who

own things, usually the rich, and those who must work to survive, usually the poor.

Marx had hoped for a career as a university professor, but his association with the Young Hegelians

and his own increasingly radical ideas made that impossible. He turned therefore to journalism, first

writing for a German political newspaper, then moving to Paris, where he read the works of French

social and economic thinkers and began to develop his own theories in depth. This early period was,

in fact, the key phase of his career as a thinker. Over an interval of about seven years from 1843 to

1850, during which he moved from Paris over to Brussels, then back to Germany, Marx wrote a

cluster of his most important political essays and philosophical treatises. Among these were On the

Jewish Question (1843), Toward the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction (1843),

Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (1844), The Holy Family: Or a Critique of all Critiques

(1845), and others. In these writings he formulated his overarching materialist view of human

nature and destiny. In them he also framed his key ideas on history and society, on economics and

politics, on law, morals, philosophy, and religion. As for the general perspective he adopted, we can

take a clue from the motto on the masthead of one of the newspapers he edited: “The reckless

criticism of all that exists.”5

What Marx wrote in this period was truly decisive for the rest of his life, but he did not do it entirely

on his own. For at just this key moment he met and began a lifelong friendship with Friedrich

Engels, the son of a German factory owner. Living in England, where he observed the depressing

lives of factory workers, Engels, on his own, had developed materialist economic and social views

that closely resembled those of Marx. In 1845, Marx and Engels found their way to something that

rarely happens among intellectuals: a nearly perfect collaboration. They were men of like minds,

but with very different talents. Marx, the more original thinker, served as the philosopher

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and oracle, a man often obscure but also profound. Engels was the interpreter and communicator,

always able to express ideas in ways that were clear, direct, and persuasive. Over the years, they

visited factories together; they shared results of their studies; they criticized each other’s ideas; they

joined in writing for their common cause; and they combined to support and advise new political

parties. Together in 1848 they wrote the celebrated Communist Manifesto. Consequently, it is not

really Marx alone, but Marx and Engels jointly who are the fathers of “Marxism” as we know it

today. Together they promoted their message of materialism, class struggle, communism, and

revolution in a way that neither could have managed as effectively on his own.

Though ordinary people knew little about them, the “revolutionary” ideas of Marx and Engels were

no secret to authorities. When, in 1848, revolutions began to break out across Europe, Marx came

under immediate suspicion. Arrested and expelled from Belgium, he returned to Germany to take

part in the revolution that was beginning there and was again arrested but had the good fortune to be

acquitted of all charges in court. In 1849 he left the European continent for London. There he chose

to live for the rest of his life—in exile but emphatically not in retirement. Despite grinding poverty

and a family on the edge of starvation, he worked tirelessly on further studies in politics and

economics. Returning regularly to a favorite chair in the reading room of the British Museum

(where today a plaque marks his place), he wrote two works on French revolutionary politics, two

more on political economy, and several others on economic history and theory. Capital (1867) was

of course the most important of these studies. In it Marx assembles a wealth of factual data, subjects

it to social analysis, and adds his acute insight into political and social structures—all in order to

show how the facts of economic activity support his materialist view of history and point the way to

a revolutionary communist future.

During this time Marx also tried to remain active in what he regarded as the ongoing class struggle,

the battle of workers against their capitalist oppressors. He gave advice and assistance to socialist

parties in France and Germany. He was a leader in organizing the Workingmen’s International

Association (more simply, “the International”), whose aim was to represent the common interests of

the workers, regardless of their national home. All the while he continued his writing. Capital was

the first of three volumes on that subject. He continued work on two others, which were in

manuscript but not complete, and which were to be part of the great project he envisioned under the

general title Economics. His work habits were strange. Some days he would be drunk or asleep,

while on others he would work fanatically through the night and into the day despite a house full of

noisy children. He was fortunate to have almost limitless energy, and when he wished, he could

apply

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it with a mental discipline made of iron. Only during the last ten years of his life did his energies

abate, as illness began to take its toll. A timely inheritance and some financial help from Engels had

at least taken his family out of poverty. Although he continued to read and correspond with friends,

all of his major writing was by then behind him. His wife, Jenny, died in 1881, and two years later

he followed. With Engels at the graveside, he was buried in London—largely unmourned and

unnoticed in the land where he lived, studied, and wrote for the last thirty years of his life.

Marxism: Economics and the Theory of Class Struggle

Few thinkers have ever presented their main thesis in words as blunt or as disturbing as those of

Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto:

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.

Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and

journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition

to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight

that each time ended, either in a revolutionary re-constitution of society at large,

or in the common ruin of the contending classes.6

The message of these ringing sentences is unmistakably clear. If we wish to understand what

humanity and its history are all about, we must recognize what is truly fundamental. And what is

fundamental is the following: From their first emergence on earth human beings have been

motivated not by grand ideas but by very basic material concerns, the elementary needs of survival.

This is the first fact in the materialist view of history. Everyone needs food, clothing, and shelter.

Once these needs are met, others, like the drive for sex, join them. Reproduction then leads to

families and communities, which create still other material desires and demands. These can be met

only by developing what Marx calls a “mode of production.”7 The necessities and even comforts of

life must in some way be produced—by hunting and gathering foods, by fishing, growing grain, or

entering on some other labor. Moreover, because various people are involved in these activities in

different ways, they sooner or later fall into a division of labor; different people do different things.

Marx calls the ties or connections among those who divide their labor in this fashion “relations of

production.” I may be a boat maker; you may make nets to fish with. In the earliest, simplest form

of society, the kind which Marx calls primitive communist, both the boat and the net are commonly

owned by everyone in the village, where each shares all things as need may arise.

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For Marx this original tribal communism was in a sense the most natural of human organizations. It

allowed people to enjoy variety in their lives by participating in a healthy mix of meaningful work

and refreshing leisure. They belonged to the group but also knew the worth of their separate selves.

A fateful turn occurred, however, once the notion of private property was introduced, and its effects

are most markedly evident in the stage of history known as classical civilization. Here, Marx

explains, the relations of production are greatly changed. The maker of the boat claims it as his own

property, as does the maker of the net. They can deal with each other only by exchanging what they

have made—that is, by selling the products of their labor. And before long, by talent, crime, or good

fortune, some acquire more and better private property while others are left with little or nothing. In

addition, as the mode of production changes from hunting and gathering to the growing of grain,

those who happen to hold property find themselves in a position of tremendous advantage. They

own not just products but also the very means of production—the land on which crops are grown.

Since others do not, the landowners are masters; the rest must fall in as their dependents, assistants,

or even slaves. Private property and agriculture—two hallmarks of early civilization—thus help to

frame the central conflict of all humanity: the separation of classes by power and wealth, and with it

the beginnings of permanent social unrest. Later, in the medieval era, the mode of production

remains largely the same. It is agricultural, and the strains of class conflict continue unaltered. The

feudal lord and serf simply replace the ancient master and slave. Even among craftsmen, the master

artisan and his lowly apprentice reenact the old conflict between the Roman patrician and plebeian.

In the final, modern stage of development, this age-old conflict of classes persists, but it acquires a

new intensity and a darker coloring. Modern capitalism introduces a new mode of production:

commercial manufacturing; and with it comes also a profound change in the relations of production.

Owner and worker are still with us, but the conflict between them becomes more intense. By

introducing commercial activity and the profit motive on a large scale, capitalism produces great

wealth for some, for those whom Marx calls the bourgeoisie, or “middle class.” (By this term Marx

means what we would call today the affluent upper middle class, the owners and managers of

corporations.) Meanwhile workers, those whom Marx calls “the proletariat,” are left with almost

nothing; they must sell their precious daily labor to the owner-managers in return for wages on

which they simply subsist. This grim situation is made even worse because capitalism has also

become industrial. It has given birth to the factory, the place where workers spend long, exhausting

hours at machines that make objects in huge quantities and bring a fabulous return of wealth—of

course only to their owners. The spread of

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this industrial capitalism thus raises the conflict between classes to a fever pitch, ushering in its last

and most desperate phase—a period of proletarian misery so great that workers find their only hope

in revolution. They lash out, bitterly, in an attempt to overthrow by force the entire social and

economic order that oppresses them. Violence in this situation is to be expected, for the rich will

never give up what they have unless it is taken by force. Confrontation is, in fact, unavoidable, for it

is driven by deep historical forces that no one group, nation, or class can resist.

In such a world, it is quite clear that communism has a double mission. Part of its job is education:

it must explain these realities to people who cannot see them. The other part is action: it calls

proletarians everywhere to prepare for revolution. With the commanding voice of an ancient

Hebrew prophet, the Communist party denounces the state and the ruling class. It urges workers to

organize, to swim with history’s powerful current, to add their weight to its waves, and to throw

themselves forward till the day comes for them to crash down upon the edifice of capitalism,

shattering its frame and very foundation. Only then, only after this stormy surge of destruction, will

genuine freedom and peace return to the social order of humanity. To achieve this paradise, there

will first have to be a phase of transition, a preliminary interval marked by what Marx calls the

“dictatorship of the proletariat.” The poor, once powerless, will be truly in control. Their rule will

then gradually give way to the final phase of history, in which true human harmony arrives and the

evils of class division and private property cease any longer to exist.

Materialism, Alienation, and the Dialectic of History

In outlining his great scheme, Marx did not himself invent the concept of social classes or even

social struggle; he did feel, however, that he had discovered the connection between the social class

divisions and certain stages of economic development, and he believed that he alone had seen how,

in the future, this struggle would lead to revolution and the end of classes altogether. But if so,

where did he get these ideas? How did he reach the unusual notion of human history moving toward

a happy future, but only after passing through a sequence of oppositions marked by ever more bitter

and violent episodes of struggle?

To answer this question we must recall Marx’s early years in Berlin and, once more, the influence

of Hegel. We have already noticed Hegel’s idealism; he found material objects to be secondary

things. He spoke of ultimate reality as “the absolute spirit,” or “absolute idea”—what religious

people

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call God. In his system, this “absolute” is a being that constantly strives to become ever more

aware, more conscious, of itself. It does so by pouring itself into material forms and events, just as,

let us say, the mind of an architect might express itself in a beautiful building. But because the

actual never fully captures the ideal (as every dissatisfied architect knows), the material form is

always inadequate, or, in Hegel’s language, “alien” to spirit. Try as it may, material reality never

quite measures up to the absolute. So, each time an event occurs in the material world (Hegel called

it a “thesis”), spirit generates an opposed event (an “antithesis”), which tries to correct it. The

tension between these two is then resolved by yet a third event (the “synthesis”), which blends

elements of both, only to serve as the new thesis for yet another sequence of opposition and

resolution. Again, we should think of an architect who designs each new building as an

improvement on earlier efforts and does so by always combining the best elements of the previous

two attempts. For Hegel, all that happens in the world arises in the form of this great alternating

sequence, which he calls the “dialectic”—the “give and take”—of spirit in nature and history. In it,

the absolute alienates itself, unsatisfactorily, in one material form, then responds with another, and

finally combines and surpasses them both with still another. In addition, Hegel thought of this

alternation as happening not in little ways but in very large social patterns. In his scheme, an entire

culture, such as the civilization of classical Greece or that of Renaissance Europe, can serve as a

great, single expression of the absolute—a thesis which, after an interval calls forth as its antithesis

an opposing culture. In time, these two then merge into a third, richer and still higher form of

civilization, which can be called the synthesis. Thus the entire world unfolds through a great and

varied process of alternating movements and subtle interweavings that tie nature, history, and spirit

into a grand and unitary whole.

We noted above that Marx rejected Hegel’s idealism. But he did not reject either the concept of

alienation or the idea that history moves along by a vast process of conflict. On the contrary, he

folded both of these ideas into his materialism and put them at the very center of his own view of

the human story. History, he says, is indeed a great scene of conflict, and Hegel is right to see

“alienation” at the core of it. But he fails to see just how deeply alienation and historical progress

are rooted not in ideas but in the basic material realities of life. Like the theologians with their

Creator God, when Hegel speaks of alienation, he thinks chiefly of how the physical world never

lives up to the perfection of its spiritual source, the absolute idea, or mind. But in fact, Marx

counters, things are just the other way around. It is concrete, actual, working human beings who

create their own alienation, and precisely by attributing to others the very things that properly

belong to themselves. That is the real alienation and the true source of human unhappiness. In

religion, God is

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always being given the credit, the worship, that properly belongs to human beings. In philosophy,

Hegel gives his absolute spirit all the praise for what human sweat and toil actually accomplish.

Even in politics he makes this mistake; he sees government—the modern nation state—as a great

and recent expression of the absolute spirit, with the naturally conservative conclusion that human

beings must resign their individual interests and desires to those of a king or some ruling elite. But

why do people choose in the first place to give all this glory to God and all this power to kings? Not

because there really is a God or because there are people deserving to be called royal, but because

something is fundamentally wrong with human thinking—because at the very core of our being, we

suffer from self-alienation, a deep sense of inner separation from our natural human character as it

ought to be.

If we truly want to understand alienation, Marx continues, we must notice how singularly important

the everyday economic fact of labor is to everyone that lives. Labor is the free activity of human

beings as they generate and support their social lives over against the world of nature. It ought to be

rich, creative, varied, and satisfying—an expression of the whole personality. But unfortunately, it

is not. It has, in fact, become something apart, something alien to ourselves, partly because of the

evil notion of private property. As we noticed with the boatman and the net maker, alienation begins

once I think of the product of my labor as an object apart, as something other than the natural

expression of my personality for the benefit of a community. From that moment I am alienated from

the object of my production; it is something I can sell and another person can buy. I am also

alienated from my own self; rather than expressing my unique talents, my weaving of nets is just the

making of a commodity, something I can use to barter or buy other commodities. The net maker is

also further alienated from what Marx calls the “species-life” of humanity: dealing in a mere

product, I have nothing meaningfully human to show for my work. And finally, of course, I am

alienated from other individual people because my personality, the thing that is essentially human

about me, no longer engages yours; we just trade the objects each of us has made. In these multiple

forms of alienation we find the true misery of the human condition. And only when it is somehow

overcome can real human happiness eventually be recovered.

Exploitation of Labor: Capitalism and Surplus Value

The cure for this corrosive alienation cannot be applied without first finding the cause. And here it

is plain that however bad in itself, alienation has been made cruelly worse by the coming of modern

industrial capitalism. Marx tries

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to provide an explanation for all of this in the many pages of Capital. Though no short summary of

this long book can be fair to it, we can at least notice what Marx says in it about labor and value. He

explains that the value of something I make or want to buy is created by the amount of work that

goes into it. If it takes a day to make a pair of shoes and twenty days to make a precision clock, the

value, or cost, of the clock will be twenty times that of the shoes. The shoemaker who wants to buy

a clock will have to make at least twenty pairs in order to buy or barter for one. This sort of example

offers a fairly close approximation of how, in the past, economics actually tended to work—by even

exchange of value for value.

Unfortunately, Marx contends, capitalism and property ownership are all about profit rather than the

equal exchange of value; they are about trading and investing to come out ahead rather than coming

out even. And if we ask, “Where does this profit come from?” there can be only one answer. In

capitalism the very thing about the clock or shoes which gives them their worth— the quantity of

human labor they carry within them—is being under- valued. Of this sober truth there is abundant

evidence almost anywhere one looks. While workers must put into goods at least enough value to

earn wages that will support their families, modern machinery allows them to do this in the mere

fraction of a day. But they actually work a full day, or even (in the London Marx knew) much more

than a full day. In addition, entire families often worked for as many as ten, twelve, or more hours

at machines; yet they were extremely poor. What was happening? Each day, Marx claims, each of

these workers was creating an enormous amount of surplus value for the capitalist factory owner.

After working a short time to earn their wages, they continued to create value—surplus value—all

of which was taken directly from them and sold for profit by the factory owner. Surplus value, in

other words, is quite simply that which is left over after the workers’ wages (which they use to pay

for shelter, clothing, and food) are subtracted from the much greater value they daily produce in

their work. In each of the farms and factories of Marx’s Europe, therefore, one owner who

possessed fields or operated a plant was each day harvesting the surplus value created by hundreds

or thousands of workers, taking it as his profit and using it to build a country estate complete with

servants, foxes, and hounds. All the while, his workers were squeezed into cramped, dirty

apartments in the city center, befriended by boredom, disease, and virtual starvation.

Regrettably, Marx, asserts, this unjust circumstance is not just a matter of personal greed. Even if he

did not like foxes and hounds, the owner’s hand would still be forced by the brutal competition of

the capitalist market. To keep his company alive, he must take most of the surplus funds it generates

in order to invest in new, bigger factories that will exploit still more workers,

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so another factory owner does not begin to undersell and ruin him. Since he must keep his costs

down to compete, every capitalist tries to use better and bigger machines; and he tries to center

everything in one bigger and better company—into a trust or monopoly—so as to produce and sell

his products at ever lower prices. The effect of these actions on the worker is not hard to notice. His

life becomes ever more dismal as his position weakens in the brutally competitive marketplace. As

population grows and factories become more efficient, workers find that they themselves are a

surplus; there is always a “reserve” of unemployed proletarians reminding those who do have jobs

that they can be replaced—and more cheaply—at any moment.

To make matters worse, even the excess of workers is not the most serious problem. The fierce rule

of competition in capitalism, the drive to get greater production from workers, leads eventually to a

strange new dilemma—the “overproduction of capital.” Workers and machines make more products

than can actually be sold. Owners in that unfortunate circumstance then have no choice but to

reverse their path and reduce production, thereby bringing on periods of economic crisis marked by

layoffs, business downturns, and crippling unemployment. After such depressions, economics do

revive, but only to start the grim cycle of growth and decline all over again. It is hardly a surprise to

learn that over time, this numbing, vicious cycle drives the proletariat to desperation. Here is how

Marx describes the circumstance:

Within the capitalist system … all means for the development of production

transform themselves into means of domination over, and exploitation of, the

producers; they mutilate the laborer into a fragment of a man, degrade him to

the level of an appendage of a machine, destroy every remnant of charm in his

work and turn it into a hated toil; they estrange from him the intellectual poten-

tialities of the labor-process … they distort the conditions under which he

works, subject during the labor-process to a despotism the more hateful for its

meanness; they transform his life-time into working-time, and drag his wife and

child beneath the wheels of the Juggernaut of capital.8

In this way, the excesses and misfortunes of economic life fuel the fires of social conflict and lead

capitalism finally to its own self-destruction. Amid their awful degradation and economic misery,

says Marx, the proletarians discover something: They “have nothing to lose but their chains.” Out

of their fury, and with all the weight of history on their side, the workers are finally driven to plan,

to organize, and in the end to act against the entire capitalist system. When the time is right, they

can be expected to revolt. In that moment, the great day of reckoning for the capitalist world will at

last have arrived.

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Base and Superstructure

For Marx, then, the central drama of history is the struggle of classes, a conflict controlled from

below by the hard realities of economic life. In a world of private property, some—usually the

rich—own the means of production, while others—overwhelmingly the poor—do not. But even so,

economics is not all of existence. What about the types of activity that form the other dimensions of

our social life? What about politics and law? What about morality, the arts, literature, and various

other intellectual endeavors? And what about religion? Where do all of these fit in?

Marx has much to say on each of these topics, and his starting point for all of them is to make a

distinction between what he calls the “base” of society and its “superstructure.” Through all of

history, he insists, economic facts have formed the foundation of social life; they are the base that

generates the division of labor, the struggle of classes, and human alienation. By contrast, certain

other spheres of activity, the things that are so visible in daily life, belong to the superstructure.

They not only arise from the economic base but are in significant ways shaped by it. They are

created by the deep, hidden energies and emotions of the class struggle. The institutions we

associate with cultural life—family, government, the arts, most of philosophy, ethics, and

religion—must be understood as structures whose main role is to contain or provide a controlled

release for the deep, bitter tensions that arise from the clash between the powerful and powerless.

Consider the case of government. The role of the state is not hard to understand. Marx says it exists

in all ages to represent the wishes of the ruling class, the dominant group. In a capitalist society

built on the principle of private property, it therefore passes strict laws against theft, so that the

mother of a starving child can be jailed for stealing a loaf of bread even from a factory owner so

wealthy that he has enough food to feed a village. Government creates and pays a police force to

make sure that the laws are enforced; thieves must be caught and brought to trial. And it establishes

a judiciary to make certain that those laws are upheld; the accused must be convicted and sentenced

for her offense. Disintegration, the breakdown of law, is a constant threat to any society that, like

the capitalist order, is made up of just a few oppressors and so many who are oppressed. So the

presence of a strong state, one that will impose laws and crush any threat of deviation, is absolutely

essential.

Although the state uses force to achieve control, other authorities in the cultural superstructure

achieve the same end by using persuasion. In each age of the past, ethical leaders—theologians,

philosophers, and moralists—have helped to control the poor simply by preaching to them, by

telling them what

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is right and what is wrong. The particular virtues they promote depend, naturally, on the kind of

society they live in, for “the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas.”9 In the

Middle Ages, when farming was the chief means of production, all lands were owned by bishops of

the church or by feudal lords, who defended their property with armies of vassals and serfs sworn to

their service. Should we be surprised, then, that the moral code of the day stressed devotion to the

church, along with warrior virtues such as obedience, honor, and loyalty to one’s feudal master? In

modern industrial society, capitalist owners need a huge pool of movable workers, people with few

ties beyond their immediate family and no claim to social privilege or status. Should we be shocked,

then, that in the present era the moral watchwords are individual freedom and social equality?

Modern philosophers and theologians promote these new moral values because they serve the new

economy. Like their medieval counterparts, they claim that the morals they preach are eternal

truths, that they belong to a fixed order of nature, when in fact they are determined by the economic

realities of their own specific place and time. Nor are the creative arts really much different. For all

their talk of individualism and originality, writers and artists depend on the accepted ideas of the

age for their success, so even when they seem to protest, they in reality give unwitting, silent

approval to society under the oppressors’ control.

For historical support of these views, Marx often turns to the recent revolutions in modern Europe:

the English Civil War of the 1600s and especially the revolutions in France, which he studied all of

his life and discussed in no less than three separate works.10 On the surface, these great conflicts

seem to be purely matters of politics and religion; the underlying realities, however, look

considerably different. In seventeenth-century England, says Marx, it is capitalism that leads the

London merchants and middle-class gentry to challenge the political authority of the king, whose

power lay with established landowners. It is capitalism that leads the rising middle class to adopt a

new form of religion, Protestantism, which is much better suited to its interests in trade, investment,

and individual enterprise. And, we might add, it is capitalism that leads artists like Rembrandt and

Frans Hals to paint portraits of Dutch townsmen and their families instead of the saints and kings

whom we find in the frescoes of medieval churches. In France of 1789 it is the rising middle class

(the urban bourgeoisie) of professionals and bureaucrats who engineer the overthrow of the king

and lead the attack on the church in the name of human rights. Once the upheaval subsides,

economic interests again prevail as the same middle class unites to hold back the revolutionary

aspirations of the impoverished masses. In each case we can see that the superstructure of politics

and religion is really controlled by the economic base and the dynamics of class warfare.

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Marx has a special word for all of the intellectual activity that makes up this superstructure: The

endeavors of artists, politicians, and theologians all amount to “ideology.”11 Such people produce

systems of ideas and creative works of art which in their minds seem to spring from the desire for

truth or love of beauty. But in reality these products are mere expressions of class interest; they

reflect the hidden social need to justify things as they stand, the natural inclination of those who

benefit from injustice to show why the circumstance that creates it should remain unchanged. The

thinkers are always the servants of the rulers.

Critique of Religion

Mention of such things as ideology and superstructure brings us at last to the sphere of religion,

where by now Marx’s basic view should hardly come as a surprise. There are, in truth, few subjects

on which he is as brief or as blunt. Religion, he says, is pure illusion. Worse, it is an illusion with

most definitely evil consequences. It is the most extreme example of ideology, of a belief system

whose chief purpose is simply to provide reasons—excuses, really—for keeping things in society

just the way the oppressors like them. As a matter of fact, religion is so fully determined by

economics that it is pointless to consider any of its doctrines or beliefs on their own merits. These

doctrines differ from one religion to the next, to be sure, but because religion is always ideological,

the specific form it takes in one society or another is in the end largely dependent on one thing: the

shape of social life as determined by the material forces in control of it at any given place and time.

Marx asserts that belief in a god or gods is an unhappy by-product of the class struggle, something

that should not only be dismissed, but dismissed with scorn. In fact, no thinker considered in this

book—not even Freud—discusses religion in quite the same mood of sarcastic contempt as that of

Marx.

The settled hostility in this attitude undoubtedly has roots that go beyond mere intellectual

disagreement. Marx’s first steps toward a fierce rejection of religion were taken in his youth. Early

on, he made clear in absolute terms that he was an atheist. Whether the reasons for this original

stance were social, intellectual, purely personal, or some combination of several such factors is hard

to know. He may well have resented his father’s weakness in converting to Christianity just to save

his law practice, and certainly he had no love for the often anti-Semitic, militantly Christian ethos of

the Prussian communities. Yet his absolute repudiation of belief ran deeper than his denial of

Christianity. In the preface to his doctoral dissertation, he took as his own the motto of the Greek

hero Prometheus, “I hate all the gods,” adding as his

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reason that they “do not recognize man’s self-consciousness as the highest divinity.”12

A simple rejection of religion is one thing, of course; a full intellectual campaign to unmask its

falsehood is quite another. Marx did not begin to develop an explanatory account—what he called a

“critique”—of religion until the decade of the 1840s, which was, as noted, the decisive period in his

thinking and the time when he read the important writings of Ludwig Feuerbach, a man closely

associated with the Young Hegelians in Berlin. Feuerbach, like the others, was at first a disciple of

Hegel, but later he reversed course to become a stern critic of idealism. In 1841, he created a

sensation with an attack on orthodox religion called The Essence of Christianity. The furious debate

over this book was still going strong when he astonished German opinion with two other works that

proceeded to launch a parallel attack on the almost equally sacred system of Hegel.13 Predictably,

Feuerbach at once became a cult hero to the more radical students in the German universities.

Though he too wrote in the difficult philosophical language of his day, which spoke of

“consciousness” and “alienation,” Feuerbach’s basic point was not hard to grasp. Both Hegel and

Christian theology, he said, make the same error. Both talk about some alien being—about God or

the absolute—when what they are really talking about is humanity, and nothing more. Christian

theologians notice all of the personal qualities we most dearly admire—ideals like goodness,

beauty, truthfulness, wisdom, love, steadfastness, and strength of character—then proceed to strip

them from their human owners and project them onto the screen of heaven, where they are

worshipped—now in a form separate from ourselves—under the name of a supernatural being

called God. Hegel does the same thing. He notices abstract ideas like freedom, reason, and

goodness, then feels he must “objectify” them by claiming they are really expressions of the

absolute, of some ultimate spirit that supposedly operates as an invisible stage manager behind the

scenes of the world. But this too is mistaken. Concepts like “rationality” and “freedom” merely

describe features of our own natural human life. Christian theology and Hegelian philosophy are

thus both guilty of “alienating” our consciousness. They take what is properly human and assign it,

quite wrongly, to some alien being called the absolute or to God.

When he read these arguments of Feuerbach, Marx found himself completely convinced. In fact,

they merely expressed in greater detail the view that he had already begun to adopt. He hailed

Feuerbach as “the true conqueror of the old philosophy of Hegel” and described his books as “the

only writings since Hegel’s … which contain a real theoretical revolution.”14 And in his own

Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction, written a year after Feuerbach’s book, he

followed him almost to the letter: “Man, who looked

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for a superman in the fantastic reality of heaven … found nothing there but the reflexion of

himself.” He then added: “The basis of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does

not make man.”15

Persuasive as Feuerbach’s arguments were, Marx saw two places where they could be made still

stronger. First, if we ask why human beings refuse to take credit for their own accomplishments, if

we ask why they insist on calling themselves miserable sinners and offer instead all praise and glory

to God, Feuerbach really has no answer beyond an empty generality. He tends to say, in effect, that

is just the way people are; it is human nature to be alienated—unhappy with ourselves yet pleased

with God. This will not do for Marx. There is a real answer to the question of alienation, he insists,

and it fairly leaps out at us the moment we look at things from a materialist and economic

perspective.

Marx observes that there is a parallel between religious and socioeconomic activity. Both are

marked by alienation. Religion takes qualities—moral ideals—out of our natural human life and

gives them, unnaturally, to an imaginary and alien being we call God. Capitalist economies take

another expression of our natural humanity—our productive labor—and transform it just as

unnaturally into a material object, something that is bought, sold, and owned by others. In the one

case, we hand over a part of our selves—our virtue and sense of self-worth—to a wholly imaginary

being. In the other, we just as readily deliver our labor for nothing more than wages to get other

things that money will buy. As religion robs us of our human merits and gives them to God, so the

capitalist economy robs us of our labor, our true self-expression, and gives it, as a mere commodity,

into the hands of the those—the rich— who are able to buy it. Nor is this unhappy combination just

a coincidence. Religion, remember, is part of the superstructure of society. Economic realities form

its base. The alienation we see in religion is, in actuality, just the expression of our more basic

unhappiness, which is always economic. The surface alienation evident in religion is simply a

mirror image of the real and underlying alienation of humanity, which is economic and material.

In these terms it is easy to understand why for many people religion has such a powerful and lasting

appeal. Better than anything else in the social superstructure, it addresses the emotional needs of an

alienated, unhappy humanity. Here is how Marx puts it in the famous lines that, depending on the

reader, are now among the most widely hated or admired in all of his writing:

Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real [economic] distress

and the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed

creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless

situation. It is the opium of the people.

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The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required

for their real happiness. The demand to give up the illusion about its condition

is the demand to give up a condition which needs illusions.16

It is not clear how much Marx understood about opium use in his day, but he certainly knew that it

was a narcotic and hallucinogenic substance; it eased pain even as it created fantasies. And that, for

him, is precisely the role of religion in the life of the poor. Through it, the pain people suffer in a

world of cruel exploitation is eased by the fantasy of a supernatural world where all sorrows cease,

all oppression disappears. Are the poor without jewels? No matter; the gates of Heaven are inlaid

with pearl. Are the oppressed without money? The very streets of Heaven are paved with gold. Are

the poor jealous of the rich? They can read Jesus’ parable of poor Lazarus, who died and went to

father Abraham, while the soul of the rich man who ignored him in life traveled directly to Hades at

his death. To “fly away” one day and go home to live with God, as the old Negro spirituals declare,

is to enjoy in the next life a well-deserved consolation for all of the sufferings endured in this one.

From Marx’s standpoint, it is just this unreality, this leap into an imaginary world, which makes

religion such a wickedly comforting business. After all, if the truth is that there is neither a God nor

a supernatural world, being religious is no different from being addicted to a drug, like opium. It is

pure escapism. Worse, in terms of the struggle against exploitation in the world, it is also

fundamentally destructive. What energies will the poor ever put into changing their circumstance if

they are perfectly content with the thought of the next life? How will they organize, plan their

attack, and begin their revolt if their hope of heaven leaves them no more wish to change their life

than the “sigh of protest” we find in otherworldly rituals and ceremonies? Religion shifts their gaze

upward to God when it should really be turned downward to the injustice of their material, physical

situation.

It is in just this connection that Marx offers his other improvement on Feuerbach, whose major

problem is that, like most thinkers, he prefers restricting himself merely to the life of the mind; he is

a passive commentator on the human situation. He quite rightly observes that human beings are

alienated and therefore turn to religion. But mere observation is not enough. Feuerbach and other

intellectuals must be awakened to the fact that the purpose of analyzing the problem of religion is

not just to have a new subject for discussion; the purpose is to find an active strategy that will solve

the problem. This emphasis on action, in contrast to the purely theoretical concerns of so many

thinkers in his day (and ours), is a crucial point in Marx’s communist program. As he puts it in the

last of his famous Theses on

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Feuerbach, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however,

is to change it.”17

Escape, then, is the main thing religion offers the oppressed. For those who are not oppressed, for

those lucky enough to control the means of production, it offers something far better. Religion

provides the ideology, the system of ideas that they can call upon to remind the poor that all social

arrangements should stay just as they are. God wills that the owning rich and laboring poor remain

where they are, which is just where they belong. Religion’s role in history has been to offer a divine

justification for the status quo, for life just as we find it. “The social principles of Christianity,”

Marx insists,

justified the slavery of Antiquity, glorified the serfdom of the Middle Ages and

equally know, when necessary, how to defend the oppression of the proletariat,

although they make a pitiful face over it.

The social principles of Christianity preach the necessity of a ruling and an

oppressed class, and all they have for the latter is the pious wish [that] the

former will be charitable….

The social principles of Christianity declare all vile acts of the oppressors

against the oppressed to be either the just punishment of original sin and other

sins or trials that the Lord in his infinite wisdom imposes on those redeemed.

The social principles of Christianity preach cowardice, self-contempt, abase-

ment, submission, dejection.18

There is nothing half-hearted about Marx’s verdict on religion, as these scathing words clearly

show. For him, belief in God and in some heavenly salvation is not just an illusion; it is an illusion

that paralyzes and imprisons. It paralyzes workers by drawing off into fantasy the very motives of

anger and frustration they need to organize a revolt. Expectation of heaven makes them content with

earth. At the same time, religion also imprisons; it promotes oppression by presenting a system of

belief which declares that poverty and misery are facts of life which ordinary people must simply

accept and embrace.

It must be noted here that for all the force of Marx’s original words and judgments on these matters,

Marxism does exhibit variations in doctrine not unlike those found within a broad economic system

like capitalism or a religion like Christianity. Engels, for example, and the later Marxist historian

Karl Kautsky, in his Foundations of Christianity (1908), both saw that in certain respects the rise of

Christianity in the ancient world could be seen as the expression of a proletarian revolutionary

protest against privileged Roman oppressors. In recent decades of our own century, theologians in

Latin America have drawn on Marxist categories and analyses to frame a powerful movement of

protest against economic injustice known as “liberation theology.”

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While forms of Marxism that are more in sympathy with religion thus have come into existence, it

is unlikely that Marx himself would have thought much of them. He would have wondered why

anyone should even try such salvage efforts, for his own final verdict is as much dismissive as it is

contemptuous. In spite of his anger, it is significant that Marx does not try to make religion into

communism’s great public enemy, as religious people, conversely, often have done with

communism. And that is because in his view of things, religion, for all its evil doings, really does

not matter very much. Though it certainly aids the oppressors, there is no need to launch hysterical

crusades against it, for it is just not that important. It is merely the symptom of a disease, not the

disease itself. It belongs to society’s superstructure, not to its base. And the base is the real field of

battle for the oppressed. As Marx puts their plight in one of his characteristic reversals of phrase,

“The call to abandon their illusions about their condition is a call to abandon a condition which

requires illusions.”19

He is fully confident that, in time, the attack on those conditions will succeed. And when it does,

religion, like the state and everything else in the superstructure of oppression, will “wither away”

entirely on its own.

Analysis

Marx’s explanation of religion has had great influence in our century, in part because it is not just

another remote scholarly theory. It is tied to a philosophy of political action that, until recently, was

embraced by nearly a third of the contemporary world, including not only nations as great as the

Soviet Union and mainland China but many smaller ones as well. For countless people born in these

cultures, Marxism and its relentless critique of religion are the only philosophy of life they have

ever known. It is partly because of this political success, of course, that Marxism has had its equally

great impact on modern intellectual life. During most of this century, Marxist thinkers and theorists

have played a leading role in virtually every modern field of study outside the natural sciences.

Forty years ago, more than a few serious intellectuals were convinced that communism had caught

the flow of history’s irreversible tide. To them, its ultimate triumph was assured. In the last

astonishing decade, however, the world communist experiment has undergone an almost total

collapse. And the not surprising consequence is that, in the current moment, communism’s own

“ideology”—including its view of religion—stands in almost universal discredit. Marx himself,

however, might not have been as disturbed by all of this as we may suppose, for in his dialectical

view of history, today’s capitalist triumph can still be read as preface to its later

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collapse amid the great proletarian revolution of a more distant future. Nonetheless, the almost

blindly enthusiastic approval Marxist theory enjoyed in past decades has been replaced by an almost

equally emphatic rejection in the present.

Between these two extremes, objectivity about either Marx or his view of religion is difficult to

achieve.20 Perhaps the best that one can do, at least at the start, is to lay aside the issue of praise or

blame and try simply to be descriptive. In that regard, at least two elements in Marx’s theory that

distinguish it from others deserve our notice: (1) his strategy of functional explanation, which ends

in its own distinctive form of reductionism, and (2) his stress on the strong ties that link religion to

economics.

1. Functional Explanation and Reductionism

Although he began writing more than half a century before either of them, Marx’s general approach

to religion is similar in form to the functional explanations we have observed in both Freud and

Durkheim. What interests him is not so much the content of religious beliefs—not so much what

people actually say is true about God, Heaven, the Bible, or any other sacred writing or divine

entity—as the role these beliefs play in the social struggle. He agrees with Tylor and Frazer that the

main religious beliefs are, of course, absurd superstitions. But he also agrees with Freud and

Durkheim that we still have to explain why people hold to them. Like them, he insists that we find

the key to religion only when we discover what its function is, only when we discover what its

beliefs do for people either socially or psychologically or both. Marx’s stress on society puts his

view in one respect closer to Durkheim than to Freud, for Freud’s emphasis, as we saw, falls mainly

on the individual rather than the group. On his view, the neurotic needs of the individual personality

are the main cause of belief. Even so, the contrast is not a sharp one because Freud’s theory also has

social features, with the individual personality being shaped by the influences of the family and

community.

At the same time, Marx and Freud are closer together—and farther from Durkheim—on another

side of the issue. Since, for Durkheim, religion is in a very real sense simply the worship of society,

he thinks it impossible to imagine human social life without some set of either religious rituals or

their near equivalent. Marx and Freud, by contrast, believe no such thing. Both think religion

expresses a false need for individual security, and they are perfectly happy to predict the

disappearance of religion once the cause of its fantasies has been detected and removed. Freud

thinks people would be much better off without the neurotic illusions of faith, but he seems to

realize many

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will still cling to them. Marx goes further. He thinks people cannot be better off until they are

without them—that is, until revolution has done away with the exploitation and misery that have

created religion in the first place.

From this comparison, we can see that Marx’s explanation is not just functionalist but aggressively

reductionist as well. The tendency of his thinking throughout is to describe religion always as an

effect, an expression, a symptom of something more real and substantial that lies underneath it.

Even if he sometimes speaks of religious ideas as having some independence, his predominant

emphasis is always the other way. His strategy is identical to that of Freud and Durkheim in that

beneath the surface of religious beliefs and rituals, he is always seeking out the hidden cause of

these things, which is to be found in something else. For Freud, that something is a neurotic

psychological need; for Durkheim, it is society; for Marx, it is a reality beneath both of these—the

material facts of the class struggle and alienation.

2. Economics and Religion

Whatever our judgment on Marx’s reductionism, one thing is beyond debate. His emphasis on

economic realities has now made it impossible to understand religious life anywhere without

exploring its close ties to economic and social realities. In the century since his death, Marx’s

disciples have brought great insight to our understanding of relationships between the spiritual and

material dimensions of life. They have cast a whole new light on the connections between economic

needs, social classes, and religious beliefs, especially in the case of such pivotal events in history as

the Protestant Reformation, the English Civil War, the French Revolution, and similar social

upheavals of other times and places. In addition, they have produced provocative studies of the

connections between religion and such subjects as modern imperialism, colonialism, and slavery. In

this respect, whatever happens to Marxist political regimes, Marx’s materialist economic

perspective will no doubt endure and continue to bear fruit wherever theorists address the role of

religion in economic, social, and political affairs.

Critique

Marx’s economic reductionism offers a wealth of insight into the ties that bind religion to

socioeconomic life. Insight, however, is not persuasion. Insofar as Marx gives us a theory of

religion, how compelling is it? That question is an especially large one in this case, because Marx’s

judgment on religion is almost impossible to separate from the other aspects of his thought. We saw

this to

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some degree also in the case of Freud, whose conclusions about religion rest heavily on his claims

about psychology. In the same way, it is very hard to evaluate Marx’s theory of religion without at

the same time making judgments on his claims about economy, politics, and society. So, in the

following, we start with some critical comments on the role of religion as Marx sees it but then

move to the broader contours of his thinking on nature, history, and human social endeavor.

1. Christianity and Religion

If we focus specifically on the theory of religion as explained above, two problem areas in Marxist

thought require special notice. First, what Marx actually presents is not an account of religion in

general but an analysis of Christianity—and of similar faiths that stress belief in God and an

afterlife. In part, this may be due to the influence of Hegel, who saw Christianity as the highest

form of religion and felt that whatever he said about Christianity applied automatically to all

“lesser” religions as well. Feuerbach took this position, and Marx, as we saw, closely follows

Feuerbach’s analysis. But, more importantly, the main focus of Marx’s thinking is not so much

world civilization as the culture and economy of Western Europe, which is of course the historical

homeland of Christianity.

It is chiefly Christianity that Marx has in mind when he explains religion as an opium-like escape

for the poor from economic misery and oppression. We can, of course, imagine a similarly Marxist

explanation of, say, the Hindu doctrine of rebirth, which also offers people hope of a better next

life, or the teachings of certain Buddhists who stress the joys of sheer nothingness over the miseries

of the present world and life.21 But Marx’s thesis cannot be very well applied to certain primitive

tribal religions, which have almost no meaningful doctrine of an afterlife, or to the religions of

ancient Greece and Rome, which offered hope of an afterlife on terms just the opposite of Marx’s:

immortality for the great and powerful and a mere shadow existence for simple folk. Further,

according to Marx, the phenomenon of alienation— which creates religion—came about only as

human societies were introduced to the division of labor and private property. It would seem to

follow that there was a time in human history before all of these things when human beings needed

no religion and, in fact, had none. But while it is possible that in some deep prehistoric age this was

true, there is no historical evidence to support such an idea. Nor is there any evidence available

from modern tribal peoples, whose form of life often comes closest to Marx’s idea of an original

communism, that would show them to be without religion or even exhibit less of an inclination to it

than others.

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2. Religion, Reduction, and the Superstructure

Whether Christian or not, religion in Marx’s view is an ideology. Like the state, the arts, moral

discourse, and certain other intellectual endeavors, it belongs to the superstructure of society, and it

depends in a fundamental way on the economic base. Thus, if there is a change in economic life, a

change in religion must follow. The problem with this position as stated is that Marx explicates it in

an extremely elusive fashion. He insists that his own research is strictly scientific in nature, yet

when he reduces religion to economics and the class struggle, he does so in terms so broad and

variable that his theorems are exceedingly difficult to test in any systematically scientific fashion.

For example, we could agree with Marx’s view that the rise of capitalism at the end of the Middle

Ages caused a shift away from Catholicism and toward Protestantism. But then, what about more

specific, small-scale changes? Does the religious superstructure change with them as well? When,

in certain locations, we find evidence of capitalism earlier on, say in the medieval period, why are

there no developments of a Protestant sort in the social superstructure to reflect that change as well?

And why, after the rise of capitalism, do we find this new bourgeois economic system in some cities

and countries that clearly did not become Protestant? Throughout the later Middle Ages and early

modern era, certain of the Italian citystates moved toward capitalism, but they did not give up

Catholicism. Why? Moreover, even in those countries where Protestantism did arise, can we be sure

it was economics that changed the religion? Could it not be that the new religion actually changed

the economics? Two decades after Marx’s death, German sociologist Max Weber, whom we will

meet in our next chapter, framed an intriguing argument for just this point. We can consider it more

carefully later. At the very least, it suggests that few such historical connections are as clear or

certain as Marx supposes them to be. Moreover, outside the realm of religion as well, there are

countless specific cases in which ideas from the spheres of art, literature, and morals as well as from

politics and law have changed or shaped economics in important ways, rather than the reverse, as

Marx contends. Indeed, the whole formulation of the problem, which suggests that in these complex

cultural interactions one element —economics—must always be the cause while all of the others are

simply effects, is overly simplistic. Religion fits into society as part of an intricate network of

causes and effects which act and react on each other in complicated ways. To suggest, as Marx

does, that economics is always the agent in these transactions and that ideologies are always mere

expressions of it is to take a stance that does not square easily with the record of either culture or

economics as they have evolved even in the Western civilization Marx knows,

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quite apart from the paths of development that may have been followed in other societies.

3. Marxist Political Theory: A Contradiction

A theory is only as strong as its assumptions. Since Marxist thinking reduces religion to economics,

we cannot leave it without examining, at least briefly, the general theory of economy and society on

which it rests. This is, to be sure, no simple task. In both communist and noncommunist countries,

entire libraries are needed to hold all the interpretations and critiques of Marx and Marxism in its

multiple variations. What we can do, however, is point to at least two central difficulties that bear

strongly on the issue of religion and seem part of the very nature and fabric of Marxism. These are

not just charges hurled by political enemies but apparently congenital disabilities that Marxists

themselves, in candid moments, recognize the need to overcome.

The first is a fundamentally social and political problem, and to see it we must remember that Marx

recommends his system not just as a theory but as a course of real action. The working class—the

proletariat—is the great agent of revolution; it is the social group which, driven to desperation by its

universal misery, must one day rise up to destroy bourgeois capitalism. Its leaders, whether they be

the members of a communist party, self-styled revolutionary strongmen, or elected representatives,

embody the singular, uniform interest of “the people” as a whole. They and they alone speak and

act for the revolution. Moreover, because there can be only one such “collective will” of the people,

there is no place for disagreement about its purposes. Though it is elected, there can be only one

political party. Though they can do their work, there can be no such thing as “individual freedom”

for artists, scientists, and intellectuals, since the only purpose in any of these pursuits is to serve the

will of the proletariat. Though families exist, parents too must recognize that their children belong

ultimately to the state. Religion, of course, cannot be tolerated because it saps revolutionary

energies and demands an ultimate loyalty that should be given only to the cause of revolution.

If this is a fair portrait of Marx’s revolutionary social program, then it is very hard to see how it

could ever achieve the end of a perfectly classless, harmonious community which he sets for it.

Marx seems to assume that the workers in all of their millions will, on any important social issue,

have only one point of view—a stance determined fully by their miserable position as the oppressed

class. But why should this necessarily be so? At the outbreak of World War I, some communist

leaders expected that proletarians in each of the European nations involved would actually refuse to

fight their fellow workers in enemy lands. But this obviously did not happen: French, German,

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and British workers discovered that the ties of language, nation, and culture were stronger than any

class loyalty that might have gone beyond national borders.

Second, and more dangerously, Marxist theory seems to assume that some smaller group—some

elite, elected or otherwise—will, in fact, be making the important decisions in the name of the

workers, but apparently without any institution in the society that has a right to examine or question

that claim. If I as communist party leader say, “You must die because the cause of revolution

demands it,” the one question that no one—no artist, theologian, opposing politician, or ordinary

citizen—really has a protected right to ask me is: “Who are you to speak for the cause of

revolution?” Since I believe I speak for the party, the mere fact that someone questions me already

suggests that she or he is an enemy of the revolution. I must respond to such challenging questions

not with an answer or a persuasive argument but with force. The practical consequence of this

impossible situation, borne out in almost every modern communist state, is the dark turn toward

absolute rule by parties or dictators, along with the willing destruction of basic human rights. And

why not? Marx himself was never swayed by appeals to human rights, for, as he pointed out in the

case of the French Revolution, they are only bourgeois values—ideals imposed on all by the middle

class, the group which, in modern Western nations, happens now to hold the power. In other ages,

other masters did the teaching, but always it has been power, the “might” of wealth, that determined

the “right” of morals. Ironically, however, this unsparingly radical view of moral rights as relative

has grave consequences for the very workers whose interests Marx supposedly has at heart. Since it

places no independent moral restraints upon those people who, now in the name of the revolution,

have acquired power and clain to speak on its behalf, it leaves ordinary people just as open as

before to brutalization, though now under the new banner of revolution and their own (future) well-

being. All of which is troubling. There seems to be a contradiction at the very heart of Marxist

social theory, a paradox which some critics have perceptively described as the problem of

“totalitarian democracy.”22

4. Marxist Economic Theory: A Contradiction

Marx spent the latter portion of his life writing on economics in the several volumes of Capital and

other books. He regarded this as extremely important work, providing the solid foundation in

economic fact and theory for his doctrines of the class struggle and worker exploitation. In Capital,

as we have seen, he argues that human labor creates the only real value to be found in products and

that exploitation occurs when capitalists pay workers just

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enough to stay barely alive and then “steal” for themselves the remaining surplus value in the

products the workers have made. To Marxist theoreticians, this analysis seems fundamentally

correct. Others are not so sure.

Writing just over a decade after Marx’s death, Eugen Böhm-Bawerk, an Austrian economist,

discovered in Capital what he regarded as a “massive contradiction” between its theories of value

and the actual facts of capitalist life as we see it.23 In simple terms, he argued as follows: Marx

holds a labor theory of value; only workers (and never machines) create the value that goes into

their products. If that is so, it should be the case that very labor-intensive industries will always

create more value (that is, be more profitable) than others. They provide more surplus value for the

owner to steal. The actual facts of capitalism, however, show that regardless of the industries we

consider, their rate of return on investment—that is, their profit—is almost always just about the

same. It makes no difference whether they have a few workers running many machines or many

workers and few machines; the profit margin remains basically constant. Toward the end of the first

volume of Capital, Marx himself realized this problem and promised a solution later on. Ill health,

however, prevented him from ever fully addressing the issue, though he did what he could and in

later volumes actually moved away from his notion that value is defined entirely by the amount of

human labor in products. Nonetheless, as Böhm-Bawerk observes, this labor theory of value is

crucial to Marx’s further, and related, theory of surplus value; the one cannot be given up without

losing the other. But the theory of surplus value is nothing less than the pivot on which Marx’s

central claim of worker exploitation is made to turn. Without it, his fundamentally moral complaint

against capitalism seems to dissolve, with a problematic result for all that follows from it. But if

Marx’s theories of value must be given up (and it seems they must), it is hard to see what could

remain of the rest of the framework of Marxist economic theory. The doctrine of exploitation, the

thesis of class struggle, the claims about base and superstructure, and certainly also the theory of

religion as a dire, dismal symptom of alienation—all of these become difficult to defend and almost

impossible to apply. If Böhm-Bawerk is right, it would seem that the massive contradiction he

notices can hardly be dismissed as a side issue. On the contrary, his criticism suggests nothing so

much as a scene of dominoes tumbling one after the other in quick succession once the table

supporting them has been unexpectedly shaken. Later Marxists have worked hard to refute this

critique or revise Marx, but without notable success.

We thus end our encounter with Marx at a place apparently far removed from religion—in the

details of economic theory. From the materialist perspective, however, any distance we claim to see

between the two realms is mostly a matter of appearances and not reality. Marx, in fact, is certain of

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their connection. The key to religion, he confidently declares, is to be found in economics. He

follows what is to him a clear and direct path from religious belief down through alienation and

exploitation to the class struggle and from there to the root evils of private property and the theft of

surplus value. If this explanatory road shows turns and twists similar to those followed by

Durkheim and Freud, that should hardly surprise us. Like them, Marx is committed to the route of

reductionism, though for him it ends at a different destination—with class struggle and economic

alienation rather than the needs of society or the neurotic personality. In their differing ways, and

sometimes taken together, all three of these ambitious reductionist theories have had an enormous

impact on modern thought.24 Their tide of influence on interpreters of religion can be said to have

reached a crest in the decades of the 1960s and 1970s, and it has certainly not disappeared today.

Yet while they still have much to say, they certainly do not have the last or only word—as our next

chapter will show.

Notes

1. Friedrich Engels, “Speech at the Graveside of Karl Marx,” in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels:

Selected Works, tr. and ed. Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute, 2 vols. (Moscow 1951), 2: 153.

2. Marx’s major work in economic theory, Capital, was published in 1867 as the first of three

volumes to be printed by a German publisher in Hamburg; the initial edition was 1000 copies. Most

of volume 3 and much of volume 2 had already been written before the first volume appeared. Marx

continued his work on revisions of these volumes after 1867, but he never finished them.

3. For an appraisal of Marx from the long perspective of a century after his death, see Betty

Matthews, ed. Marx: A Hundred Years On (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1983); on the changing

critical estimate of his system, see Paul Thomas, “Critical Reception: Marx Then and Now,” in

Terrell Carver, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Marx (Cambridge, England: Cambridge

University Press, 1991), pp. 23–54.

4. There are, of course, numerous biographical studies of Marx. Among those of recent decades, the

most authoritative work in English is David McLellan, Karl Marx: His Life and Thought (New

York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1973). An earlier and classic intellectual biography that analyzes

the development of Marx’s thought in the context of the Europe of his day is Isaiah Berlin, Karl

Marx (New York: Time Inc., [1939] 1963).

5. Karl Marx, A Correspondence of 1843, in The Early Texts, ed. David McLellan (Oxford,

England: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 82.

6. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, in Selected Works (Moscow:

Foreign Languages Publishing House [1935] 1955), 1: 34.

7. A work that is especially helpful on such key concepts in Marxist theory as “mode of production”

and “relations of production,” is Terrell Carver, A Marx Dictionary (Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble

Books, 1987).

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8. Karl Marx, Capital, 3 vols., ed. Friedrich Engels (New York: International Publishers, 1967), 1:

645.

9. Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, Parts 1 and 3, ed. R. Pascal (New York: International

Publishers, 1947), p. 39.

10. The Class Struggles in France (1850); The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852); On

the Civil War in France (1871).

11. For the meaning of the term see, again, Carver, Marx Dictionary, under “ideology,” pp. 89–92.

12. Karl Marx, “Doctoral Dissertation,” in McLellan, Early Texts, p. 13; see also McLellan’s

comments in Karl Marx (1973), p. 37.

13. These were Preliminary Theses on the Reformation of Philosophy and Principles of the

Philosophy of the Future, both published in 1843.

14. Karl Marx, “Preface,” Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, in T. B. Bottomore, ed., Karl

Marx: Early Writings (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1964), p. 64.

15. Karl Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction,” in Karl

Marx and Friedrich Engels on Religion, introduced by Reinhold Niebuhr (New York: Schocken

Books, 1964), p. 41.

16. Marx, “Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” in Niebuhr, Marx and Engels on Religion, p.

42.

17. Karl Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach,” in Niebuhr, Marx and Engels on Religion, p. 72.

18. Karl Marx, “The Communism of the Paper Rheinischer Beobachter,” in Niebuhr, Marx and

Engels on Religion, pp. 83–84.

19. Marx, “Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” in Niebuhr, Marx and Engels on Religion, p.

42.

20. One of the most thorough recent expositions of Marx on religion, accompanied by a penetrating

analysis, can be found in Alistair Kee, Marx and the Failure of Liberation Theology (London: SCM

Press, 1990), particularly chapters 1–5.

21. Marx did briefly address this in several articles written while serving as a correspondent for the

New York Daily Tribune; see Trevor Ling, Karl Marx and Religion in Europe and India (New

York: Harper & Row, 1980), pp. 68–80.

22. On this point, see R. N. Carew Hunt, The Theory and Practice of Communism: An Introduction

(Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Pelican Books, [1950] 1963). A thorough study of this

problem both in the French revolution and in other radical revolutionary movements in the West is

J. L. Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1952).

23. Eugen Böhm-Bawerk, “Unresolved Contradiction in the Marxian Economic System” [1896], in

Shorter Classics of Eugen Böhm-Bawerk, tr. Alice Macdonald (South Holland, IL: Libertarian

Press, 1962).

24. See the study by J. Samuel Preus, Explaining Religion: Criticism and Theory from Bodin to

Freud (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987), which argues that the most convincing

scientific, naturalistic explanation of religion to date is to be found in a combination of the theories

of Durkheim and Freud.

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Suggestions for Further Reading

Arnold, N. Scott. Marx’s Radical Critique of Society: A Reconstruction and Critical Evaluation.

New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. A sophisticated, thorough, and detailed modern analysis

of Marx’s economic concepts and formulations.

Berlin, Isaiah. Karl Marx. New York: Time Inc., [1939] 1963. A classic intellectual biography

which analyzes the development of Marx’s thought in the context of European intellectual

traditions.

Böhm-Bawerk, Eugen. Karl Marx and the Close of His System. Edited by Paul M. Sweezy. London,

England: Merlin Press, [1896] 1974. Analyses by the foremost economic critic of Marxism.

Brzezinski, Zbigniew. The Grand Failure: The Birth and Death of Communism in the Twentieth

Century. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1989. One of the first appraisals of the collapse of

communism, written by the former national security advisor for President Jimmy Carter.

Carver, Terrell, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Marx. Cambridge, England: Cambridge

University Press, 1991. Instructive essays on the changing estimates of Marx, his political theories,

views of science, economic analyses, and other topics.

Carver, Terrell. A Marx Dictionary. Totowa, New Jersey: Barnes & Noble Books, 1987. A useful

reference work especially for key concepts in Marx’s thought.

Gottlieb, Roger S. Marxism, 1844–1990: Origins, Betrayal, Rebirth. London: Routledge, Chapman,

& Hall, Inc., 1992. An attempt by a sympathetic mind to rehabilitate Marxism in the aftermath of

the Soviet collapse.

Kee, Alistair. Marx and the Failure of Liberation Theology. London: SCM Press, 1990. A wide-

ranging recent critique of Marxism and the mostly Latin American theology that seeks to combine

Marxist theory with Christian belief.

Leff, Gordon. The Tyranny of Concepts: A Critique of Marxism. London: Merlin Press, 1961. An

older work, but still a searching philosophical analysis and criticism of Marxist ideology.

Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels on Religion. Introduced by

Reinhold Niebuhr. New York: Schocken Books, 1964.

McKown, Delos B. The Classical Marxist Critiques of Religion: Marx, Engels, Lenin, Kautsky. The

Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1975. An informative comparative study of differing critiques of religion

offered by major Marxist thinkers of the early twentieth century.

McLellan, David. Friedrich Engels. New York: Viking Press, 1977. A biography of Marx’s

collaborator and friend, with attention given to the relationship between the two men as well as their

differences amid affinities.

McLellan, David. Karl Marx. Modern Masters Series. Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England:

Penguin Books, 1976. A brief biographical account of Marx’s career, controversies, and ideas.

McLellan, David. Karl Marx: His Life and Thought. New York: Harper & Row, 1973. An

authoritative recent biography of Marx in English.

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McLellan, David. Marxism and Religion. New York: Harper & Row, 1987. One of the best

accounts of the subject in English, this analysis extends beyond Marx and his early followers to

recent Marxist theory.

McLellan, David. The Thought of Karl Marx: An Introduction. New York: Harper Torchbooks,

1971. By the same author, a study focused on Marx’s ideas, methods, and theory.

Plamenatz, John, Karl Marx’s Philosophy of Man. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1975. A

subtle, scholarly examination of the ideas and arguments at the core of Marx’s thought.

Rockmore, Tom. Marx After Marxism. Oxford, England: Blackwell Publishers, 2002. An attempt,

occasioned by the great collapse of 1989, to get behind thick layers of official Marxist dogma and

recover the thought of the real, historical Marx.

Talmon, J. L. The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy. Boston: Beacon Press, 1952. An important

study of absolutist style revolutionary movements during the French Revolution and afterward.

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5

A Source of Social Action:

Max Weber

Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun.

Clifford Geertz on the guiding theorem of Max Weber1

If we take Freud, Durkheim, and Marx together, one thing seems clear: Each develops a decidedly

functional view of religion. From their several perspectives, it is not enough to say that some

Hindus worship Shiva because they believe in his power or that a Muslim follows the Quran

because it holds truths revealed by God. They choose instead to show how these beliefs are

traceable to conditions or needs that lie deeper—below the surface of the mind’s assent. They

further believe that such functionalist approaches lead logically to reductionist conclusions. This is

not just a matter of explaining one aspect of religion while other theories explain other aspects. The

premise of such functionalism is that it has found what is basic and fundamental. Religion—all of

religion—can be fully accounted for by tracing it to a single underlying circumstance or elemental

cause: to humanity’s universal state of neurosis, to the universal claims of society on the individual,

or to the world dynamic of class struggle. Such explanations reach wide to sweep evidence from all

cases into the embrace of a single formula. That is the key to their appeal. But do such explanations

in fact yield the best result? What if the true story of religion is not quite so simply told? What if we

were to start instead from the stubborn complexity of religious behavior and ask whether such a

dense compound can be so easily distilled to a single substrate? What if these reductionist

explanations get to their stated goals just a little too easily?

At the turn of the last century no theorist was more intrigued by the baffling intricacy of human

behavior than the German social scientist Max Weber, a man who began his studies, like Marx a

half century earlier, at the University of Berlin, where his main interest was not in religion but in

economics and law. Though he is often paired with Durkheim as one of the twin founders of

modern sociology, the term “sociologist” does not do justice to the wide array

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of Weber’s intellectual interests. His mind was encyclopedic and absorbent, steeped in learning that

embraced not only law and economics but history, philosophy, art, religion, literature, and music.

As he read and wrote, he worked methodically to find connections and outline contexts. He traced

the links between politics, geography, and cultural history; explored the roots of class conflict;

described the features of social status groups; distinguished types of human action and forms of

social authority; examined the role of administrative institutions; and intuitively grasped the power

of religious behavior and belief in social life. Society, as he saw it, is best understood as a tapestry

of quite different but tightly interwoven strands of human activity, each strand twisting over and

under the next. The status of religion in this regard is equivalent to that of other human behaviors.

For Freud and Marx, it seems obvious that religion should always be dismissed as an effect and

never credited a cause. For Weber, there is nothing at all self-evident about such a notion. Different

forms of human social activity routinely converge and interact. Causal trains do not run on one-way

tracks; they often circle, and sometimes the route reverses. For Durkheim, Freud, and Marx,

religion is always the reflection, never the reality. In the sociology of Weber, that relationship is just

as often mutual, or even reversed. He takes it as his mission to follow a distinctively nonreductionist

trail of complexity in social causation. Religion is neither always cause nor always effect; it may be

either or both as only specific facts and changing circumstances ultimately determine.

Background: Family, Politics, and Scholarship

Karl Emil Maximilian “Max” Weber (1864–1920) was the oldest of eight children born to Max

(senior) and Helene Fallenstein Weber. Although the Weber family had long prospered as linen

manufacturers in the region of Westphalia, Max senior chose a career in law and became active in

government. While his first son was still a young child, he moved to Berlin, where he enjoyed a

long parliamentary career, serving first in the Prussian House of Deputies and later in the German

Reichstag as a member of the National Liberal party. Outgoing, self-assured, and supportive of the

empire’s “Iron Chancellor” Otto von Bismarck, he fit well into the social and political life of the

city, opening his home regularly to colleagues and friends. Helene, the daughter of a government

minister in Berlin, also came from wealth. Highly educated for a woman of her time, she was more

introspective than her husband and devoutly religious, with a strong social conscience keenly

attuned to the hardships of the poor.

These contrasting parental temperaments converged, somewhat uneasily, in the personality of their

son. Max junior shared his father’s active interest in

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politics and government but inherited his mother’s reflective demeanor, as well as her ethical

sensitivity and humanitarian idealism. To describe his early life as “cerebral” would be an

understatement.2 From early on, reading was as routine as breathing. At age thirteen, his idea of a

Christmas gift to his parents was a pair of essays: one on medieval German history, another on the

later Roman Empire. The Weber household made little distinction between learning and leisure.

Visits from Berlin’s political and intellectual elite were a regular occurrence. In rooms alive with

intersecting discussions of economics and society, politics, law and history (suitably spiced with

society gossip), Weber as a teen met some of the most glittering figures in a golden era of German

learning. The philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey, the eminent Roman classicist Theodore Mommsen, the

historian Heinrich von Treitschke, the theologian Ernst Troeltsch—all of these and others were not

just authors on a page; they were family friends he personally encountered.

Weber’s formal education was no less stellar. At preparatory school in Berlin, he took an interest in

philosophy and in both ancient and medieval history, reading widely in classical authors—Homer,

Herodotus, Virgil, and Cicero— while also working his way through all the works of Goethe,

mostly as a personal diversion from unexciting classwork. In 1882 he entered Heidelberg University

to study legal and economic history as well as philosophy and theology. He also joined a fraternity,

where, like Marx, he learned to duel and drink—both with more skill than wisdom, to judge by his

mother’s unhappy reports. After a year of combined study and military service in Strasbourg, where

he formed a friendship with the historian (also his uncle) Hermann Baumgarten, Weber returned to

further university work in Berlin. There, over the next eight years and while still living with his

parents, he pursued advanced studies in legal and economic history. In 1889 he took a doctoral

degree with a dissertation on medieval Italian trading companies; soon afterward, he completed his

work in law and took a position in the Berlin courts. In 1892 he earned his Habilitation, or license,

as a university lecturer with a study of agriculture and law in ancient Rome. At about this time he

also became engaged to Marianne Schnitger, a distant cousin; they were married a year later, just as

Weber was entering professional life.

With his marriage at age twenty-nine, Weber’s life story divides into a tale of two selves.

Professionally he had established himself as a scholar of exceptional promise; positions awaited

him in both government and the academy. He had become active in the Verein für Socialpolitik, or

Union for Social Policy, an organization of professional economists for whom he conducted an

important study of immigration and farm labor in eastern Germany. He also published an analysis

of the newly established German stock exchange.3 In 1895 he accepted a university appointment

(remarkable for a scholar of his age) as a

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full professor of political economy in Freiburg, and in the following year he accepted a similar post,

with even greater prestige, at the University of Heidelberg.

On a personal level, however, his life took a disturbing turn. The marriage to Marianne turned out to

be unusual, at least by normal measures of affection. Though he and his new wife were ideal

personal and intellectual companions, they chose, apparently by mutual consent, a marital

relationship that was to be not just childless but almost certainly also asexual. It is not clear just

why. Weber’s capacity for self-denial was well known, and it appears to have converged with

something similar in his wife—an apparent aversion to physical sexuality. The full truth of this

intimate matter is probably beyond discovery. (Marianne, who wrote the first biography of her

husband, had all personal papers burned after his death.4) But it doubtless set the stage for

emotional unsettlement, which was only further complicated by other tensions. Though he respected

both of his parents, Weber as an adult drew closer to his mother and felt a need to support her

against his father, who could be personally domineering. On the occasion of a fierce quarrel over

his mother’s right to visit her newly married son and daughter-in-law, now living away from Berlin,

Max junior took his mother’s side, angrily opposing his father. A few months later, before they

could reconcile, his father suddenly died of a heart attack. Whether or not feelings of guilt were

involved, Weber soon found himself slipping into serious emotional collapse. From 1897 to 1901

and even beyond, he struggled with episodes of paralyzing anxiety that left him by turns exhausted,

restless, sleepless, and unable to function in his role as a professor. After taking several leaves for

health reasons, he resigned his post at Heidelberg, effectively withdrawing from any professional

position.5 Not until 1918 did he bring himself again to accept an academic post, this time at the

University of Vienna. Less than two years later, he was stricken with pneumonia. Inadequately

treated, it took his life at the relatively young age of fifty-six, in the very prime of his intellectual

career.

Although the nervous disorder deflected him from his university duties, Weber over time managed

gradually to regain his capacity for scholarly labor. He coped well enough to travel in both Europe

and the United States, where he participated in conferences on social theory and policy. While no

longer in a professorial post, he was able by 1904 to accept an editorship (alongside economists

Werner Sombart and Edgar Jaffe) at an important scholarly journal, the Archiv für

Sozialwissenschaften und Sozialpolitik (Archive for Social Sciences and Social Policy). This step

was both emotionally therapeutic and intellectually opportune. Aided by family funds and (after

1907) by a comfortable inheritance, Weber began to work as a private scholar, pursuing a steady

program of research that grew more productive with each passing year, even amid the occasional

nervous relapse. He made the Archive the forum

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where much of his work, including most of his important research on religion, was published.

During sixteen remarkably productive years from the date of his editorship to the day of his death in

1920, he produced in its pages and elsewhere a steady stream of articles, critical reviews, and

extended essays of extraordinarily high quality. Not all were intellectual landmarks, but they

routinely advanced striking and original ideas, supported by close historical analysis and thorough

social research. The more important of these will claim our attention in a moment. Before turning to

them, however, we should attend to a preliminary matter that Weber held to be of paramount

importance: the methods employed in sociological research.

Three Tools of Sociological Inquiry: Verstehen,

Ideal-Types, and Values

Methods are to scholars what tools are to craftsmen. All need them; few give them much thought.

Weber, however, is one of those few. Amid the recovery from his illness, he wrote a number of

articles, including a first editorial essay for the Archive (1904), which centered on the main issue of

sociological method: How do we proceed when we try to explain human social actions? Weber

developed his answers to this question in several technical essays that outline three guiding

principles of social inquiry.6

Verstehen

Weber’s first and fundamental principle is best stated in the single word Verstehen, the German

term for “understanding.” He was not the first or only scholar of his time to stress this idea, the

hallmark of what would later be known as interpretive sociology, but he made it decidedly central

to his labors. On the surface, it is a notion easy enough to grasp. The principle of Verstehen

presumes that we cannot explain the actions of humans as we explain occurrences in nature. Natural

science centers on nonmental objects and processes; social science explains the mentally driven

activities of human beings. It is true that within nature, humans too can be called objects, but clearly

they are objects of a special kind. Unlike stones and trees, they are conscious; they assign meaning

to the things they do. Their behavior is guided not just by external forces such as gravity but by

internally held ideas such as the belief in freedom and inwardly experienced emotions such as the

feeling of love. This distinction may seem a matter of mere common sense, but applied to complex

social issues and institutions, it can become controversial.

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In Weber’s day, it sparked a scholarly debate so long and fierce that it acquired its own name: the

great Methodenstreit, or “dispute about methods.” At the center of the argument stood the great

success achieved in fields like chemistry and physics by framing universal laws of cause and effect.

Why, some asked, could not laws like these, with their wondrous applications in medicine and

industry, also be framed to explain human affairs? Economists were the first to make this case,

claiming some success in applying scientific “laws of the market” to human action. Similar views

soon sprouted elsewhere, suggesting that perhaps an entire natural science of all human behavior

could be created. Others sharply dissented. The philosopher Wilhelm Windelband asserted that

while science deals with processes that repeat themselves, allowing us to explain things

“nomothetically” (Greek for “making rules”), human actions are singular events, requiring

explanations that are “idiographic” (Greek for “uniquely descriptive”) in character. On this view,

there is a fundamental divide between Natur- or Gesetz-wissenschaft (“sciences of nature or of

laws”) and Geistes- or Kultur-wissenschaft (“sciences of the spirit or of human culture”). Wilhelm

Dilthey went even further, contending that we cannot really “explain” such things as human action

at all, at least in the scientific sense of the word “explain.” We must use Verstehen to “feel our way”

intuitively, one might say, into the minds of others. By acts of imagination rather than reason, we

re-create their thoughts in our own minds.

Weber participated in this spirited quarrel by taking a position somewhere in the middle. His views

leaned toward those of Dilthey, but not entirely. He acknowledged that human actions are different

from natural processes, so Dilthey was correct to highlight the understanding of meanings and

motives. But just as clearly, he found Dilthey mistaken in supposing that the process of Verstehen is

something purely intuitive, an exercise in the art of imagination. We cannot possibly re-create by

imagination the complicated mixture of ideas and motives that may have played in the mind of, say,

Socrates while on trial in ancient Athens, of Caesar as he took his army across the Rubicon, or of

Lincoln when he decided to free the southern slaves. The only thing we can do is proceed rationally,

just as natural scientists do. We describe a historical circumstance or set of conditions, and based on

that knowledge we envision a probable sequence of next events; looking at what actually did

happen, we try to isolate what it was that made one sequence occur when the others did not.

Verstehen is thus a form of science: a systematic, rational method of explaining human actions by

discerning the role of motives or meanings where they figure as causes.

To say Verstehen is a rational procedure is not to say that human beings always act in rational ways.

Weber was well aware that there are very different forms and degrees of rationality. In his later

landmark work Economy and

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Society, he observes that actions can be either instrumentally rational (seeking the means to achieve

a goal) or value-rational (seeking a goal as good in itself); they can also be affectual (driven purely

by emotions) or traditional (done purely out of habit).7 He systematically charts differing levels of

rational action, starting with behavior that is rightly rational and moving through grades of partial

and unconscious rationality and down even to the disordered motives of the mentally disturbed.8

Admittedly, he says, social science cannot achieve the certainty or predict with the confidence of

natural science, but it does nonetheless reach useful explanations of human behavior by detecting

the inner motives that govern outward actions.

Although Weber’s main interest is to explain social rather than personal behavior, his stress on the

inner motives of human actions has led others to describe his perspective as “methodological

individualism”—a term that is instructive. For him, social values or beliefs acquire reality only

insofar as they gain assent in the minds of individuals. Whenever he refers in abstract terms to a

moral value such as, say, physical courage, Weber reminds us to think of the specific individuals or

subgroups in a society whose leadership or influence makes them what he calls the “bearers” of

such an ideal. Ideas and values, in other words, have effects only because certain people embrace

them and induce others to follow their lead. This accent diverges from that of Durkheim, who tends

to think of society as an abstract entity, standing apart from its individual members and imposing

duties upon them from above. Weber is disposed instead to think of the community as a mixed

assemblage of individuals in which the many defer to the few, to those who by tradition, privilege,

or personality claim the authority to lead them. They are the custodians of cultural values; they

shape society as much as it shapes them and others.

Ideal-Types

Individuals may carry the ideals of society, but sociology does not center only on individuals. If it

did, it would be neither social nor scientific. Making valid statements about general classes of

things is the entire purpose of the endeavor. To clarify the role of these general categories in social

research, Weber employs another technical German term—Ideal-Typus. An ideal-type is a general

concept, but it is different from what is known as a generalization in natural science.

Generalizations identify a single trait or characteristic common to a group, as when we say, “All

kings have countries.” A country to rule is a kind of bare minimum qualification for a king. When

we create an idealtype of a king, however, we form almost the very opposite of a generalization.

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We frame a sort of purposeful exaggeration, or maximum outline, of what a ruler should be, adding

to the country he rules a large set of further attributes: royal birth, male gender, rule by “divine

right,” a queen, a palace with courtiers, a crown, nobles sworn to uphold it, and so on. No real-

world monarch, past or present, will possess all of these characteristics. Some may have more;

others, less, but that does not matter. The key is that the ideal-type furnishes a conceptual

framework into which all cases can be brought for analysis. With it, we can compare kings over

time and across locales. We can trace changes from one type of monarchy to another, and we can

make inferences about cause and effect, as in the French Revolution, when an assault on religion

demolished the idea that kings rule by “divine right.”

Almost everything we meet in social analysis can be fashioned into an ideal-type, and the formulas

can vary greatly in kind and scope. A concept like “revolution” is an obvious example from politics;

“democracy” might be another. So are the forms of rational action we noted earlier. Broad historical

concepts such as “Greek civilization” and “modern capitalism” and terms such as “Renaissance”

and “Impressionism” from the history of art can all serve the purpose, but so can quite specific

types comparable to “king,” such as “artisan” or “merchant.” The same is true in the realm of

religion for types like “priest,” “mysticism,” “church,” or “sect” or any similar conception that

supports the explanatory process.

One of Weber’s most celebrated ideal-typologies offers an apt illustration. In Economy and Society,

he singles out three main types of social authority: traditional, legal, and charismatic. All three

express what he calls “legitimate domination.” In the case of traditional authority, people

acknowledge a pattern of power that seems to have “always existed,” as in tribal societies where

rule of the elders has been accepted from time immemorial. Similar forms include “patriarchalism”

and “patrimonialism,” where a single person or family inherits power to rule. Conversely, the

authority most common to modern societies can be defined as legal, or rational. It finds purest

expression in the modern bureaucracy, which presumes consent among all to abide by a set of rules

consistently applied by trained, specialized, paid officials who work in a graded hierarchy and with

a sense of professional duty. Weber’s writings on bureaucratic authority have generated wide

discussion among analysts of public and corporate administration. He finds bureaucracy the most

rationally ordered form of authority, offering great efficiency, though often by suppressing

creativity. By contrast, the third of the types—charismatic domination—is the most dynamic, and it

holds special importance in the sphere of religion. It is on clear display in the prophets and sages of

world history, though it applies as well to warriors or to statesmen. In such cases, leadership is

acquired through a single characteristic: the compelling personal magnetism of one or a few

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individuals. The prophets of Israel, Gautama and his community of monks, Confucius and his

followers, Jesus and his apostles—all of these cases demonstrate the social impact of an exceptional

personality, the spiritual hero, the singular gifted person who alone can work miracles, deliver an

oracle, or energize disciples. When such a figure appears in a society, he or she can, on the sheer

strength of a claim to power, wisdom, or divinity, win a following and alter the course of

civilization. Charisma is the most compelling agent of change in society and history.

Abstractions like “bureaucracy” are not the only kind of ideal-type; historical processes qualify

also. One of Weber’s widely cited types defines the process of cultural “disenchantment,” by which

faith in the supernatural realm of magic and the gods, long anchored in a traditional society,

gradually dissolves under the pressure of systematic and rationalized patterns of thought. Another is

the “routinization” of charisma, the gradual transformation that occurs when, after a prophet’s

passing, the fiery intensity of his message begins to cool and fix itself into institutions if it is to

survive. Types like these, which depict historical developments, can naturally be blended with types

of other kinds to frame cause-and-effect explanations when social or cultural changes occur. An apt

illustration (though not one of Weber’s own) might be the process of Christianization of the ancient

Roman Empire. Around the year 100 C.E., the dominant religions of Rome were polytheistic; by

about 500 C.E., they had been almost entirely replaced by Christian monotheism. If we think of

polytheism and monotheism as differing ideal-types of religious belief, we can frame an explanation

of the change. Between the two pure ideal-types, we can locate a kind of bridge belief that figured

in the transition. Some converts, such as the Roman General Constantine, were superstitious and

opportunistic; he embraced “Christos” as the one god out of many most able to help his army in

battle. Neither his faith nor his monotheism was very pure, but the ideal-types of each enable us to

understand the form-in-between that drew the emperor and others along the path from pagan

polytheism to Christian monotheism. Here, as elsewhere, the explanatory benefit lies not so much in

the kind of ideal-type we use as in the service it provides in framing comparisons and explaining

actions.

Values

Weber’s third principle of inquiry addresses the issue of values. From early on he took the position

that social science, like other sciences, must be a value-free endeavor. Like others of his day, he

held that facts and values are quite separate things; confusing them is an error of the first order.

Every true scientist (natural or social) seeks a factual account of the real world as

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he experiences it, and personal value judgments should be kept out of the process. The purpose of

science is to describe things as they are, not to promote personal views on what ought to be. The

same distinction applies in the university classroom. The vocational duty of a professor requires that

personal value judgments not be mixed into classroom lectures. Students, after all, are “captives” of

a sort—subject to the instructor’s assessments of their work and too uninformed to offer persuasive

views of their own.

If this were all to be said on values, we could end here and move on. But almost always for Weber,

things are not as simple as they may seem. He recognizes that there are certain value-relevant

considerations no one can avoid. The basic decision even to become a social scientist expresses a

value choice. To choose sociology over, say, medicine or carpentry is a decision to place a career

value on social science rather than on health or construction. The choice of what to study within

sociology is the same. To make a study of class differences rather than suicide rates is to make a

value-relevant decision about the issue most in need of one’s attention. If we think about it

carefully, commitment to follow the principle of “value-freedom” is itself a value-conditioned

choice. In promising to explain reality as accurately as possible, without inserting personal opinions

into the accounts, we affirm the value that science places on factual truth over the value of our

personal or political interests.

Value choices appear also to affect social science more than natural science. Physicists and

mathematicians work with closed sets of concepts—like the axioms of algebra or theorems of

geometry—that remain fixed over time. Euclid in ancient Greece used the same postulates as those

applied by a geometry student in a modern high school. But it is not the same, says Weber, in open-

ended disciplines like social science, where new ideas, issues, and formulations continuously appear

as new observers bring in the perspectives of later ages and differing cultures. Further, as the

principle of Verstehen tells us, when we try to understand human activity, we must explain not just

certain actions but the meanings the actors attach to those actions. When we try to explain human

activities, we thus find ourselves negotiating between at least two sets of values: those of the people

whose social arrangements we are interpreting and those of the culture—our own—within which

we are working.

Consider, for example, the early years of the Industrial Revolution, when workers known as

Luddites (followers of the folk hero King Ludd) raided factories to destroy the new textile

machines, which had left them jobless and poor. They saw no future for laborers in a world ruled by

machines. A Marxist historian of the early 1900s, writing their story with an ear attuned to worker

exploitation, might well regard the Luddites as prophetic; they alone foresaw the coming final phase

of corrupt capitalism and worker enslavement. Today’s neo-liberal free-market historian, on the

other hand, is inclined to see them

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as sadly deluded souls, vandalizing the very technology that would spare their grandchildren long

hours of hard labor and make them prosperous, not poor. Certainly, Marxist and free-market

interpreters can both try to put personal views aside, but the questions they bring and explanations

they offer seem almost unavoidably shaded by value-relevant factors tied to the culture of their own

time and place.

This point is underscored by what we know of Weber’s own deepest convictions about society and

values. He had been influenced by Marx and by the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, both of whom

fiercely rejected any thought of universal moral values binding on all of humanity. Marx, as we saw

earlier, thinks that morals do nothing more than assert the interests of the powerful—the ruling

classes of an age. Nietzsche is just as skeptical, rejecting both the classic Judeo-Christian view that

God’s moral absolutes are revealed in the Bible and the Deist faith in certain universal laws of

nature. For Weber as for Nietzsche, individuals and cultures arbitrarily create their own values, and

no cosmic warrants apply, whether from God, Nature, or anything else that pretends to be eternal

and changeless.

Weber’s complex views on these questions have generated pages of commentary from later

theorists. Some say his views are contradictory; others say he failed to show how values affect

social more than natural science.9 Still others contend that “value-freedom” of any kind is a myth,

citing Weber himself as a proof of the point. When he joined the Union for Social Policy, he

strongly argued that its research must be strictly “value-free.” But the study of farming in East

Prussia that he did for the Union actually passed a severe judgment on the landowners, whose self-

centered practices encouraged Polish immigration and weakened German ethnic identity.10 Clearly,

that verdict— offered by an intense German nationalist—hardly qualifies as “value-free.”

Writings on Religion

Criticisms aside, Weber put his principles of method diligently to work as he turned to his main

program of social research. Its guiding theme, as we have seen, was the interweaving of economics

and society. Yet the closer he looked at this issue, the more it appeared that the role of religion in

that relationship was pivotal. This fact came to light decisively in the first of his major works, The

Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904–1905). It can be said to have become even more

central to his interests as time went on.11 Since we naturally cannot review everything Weber wrote,

we will here, as in our other chapters, center discussion on just a few signature texts. Among these,

The Protestant Ethic is an obvious first choice. Its title alone

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is recognized widely in everyday conversation. Quite apart from the agenda it set for so much of

Weber’s subsequent work, it remains his most famous and widely debated book. The second

work—less obvious, but no less important— is the blueprint he laid down for scientific study of

religion in a long section of Economy and Society. Later translated and published separately in

English as the Sociology of Religion, this analysis has become a standard reference for current

theorists of religion. It expounds some of Weber’s most suggestive typologies and conceptual

comparisons. Third and finally, we will need to take some notice—brief and inadequate,

admittedly—of an ambitious multipart series of studies Weber titled “The Economic Ethic of the

World Religions.” Less than half of that project was finished at his death, but the three books that

did appear offer a window on the full landscape of his thinking.

The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904–1905)12

Few scholarly books have made their authors more of an intellectual celebrity or led to a more

sustained and spirited discussion than this striking effort in cultural analysis, which Weber first

published as a pair of articles in the Archive just after becoming one of its new editors. Debate over

its famous argument, known almost everywhere as “the Weber thesis,” has continued for a full

century, with little reason to think it will not go on for another. At its core is a startlingly bold but

fundamentally simple thesis. Weber claims there is a close connection between religion, the rise of

economic capitalism, and the birth of modern civilization in Western Europe.

Weber begins by noticing, as had others, an odd fact of life in modern Germany: In proportion to

their numbers, Protestants were much better represented than Catholics among the class of business

leaders, capital investors, and skilled corporate managers. To account for this fact, some had

suggested that perhaps Catholics are just more spiritually inclined people, while Protestants tend to

be more materialistic. Such explanations, says Weber, will not satisfy anyone who intimately knows

Protestant attitudes, both past and present. If we look closely at their history, we see that the most

successful of these enterprising Protestant businessmen have often also been the most intensely

religious, keeping diaries that carefully recorded their daily efforts to follow the will of God in their

lives. If anything, we could better suppose that something in the religiosity itself of these

Protestants is what urged them toward serious enterprise in business. So inquiry can better begin

with Protestantism’s founders: Martin Luther in Germany and the French lawyer John Calvin in

Switzerland.

Though religiously revolutionary, Luther was socially and politically conservative. He did not

directly advance new ideas about business, but he did

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assert the equality of all people before God—a principle that entailed a quite unconventional view

of everyday human labor. In the Catholic culture of medieval Europe, the daily labor of ordinary

people received no special recognition; it was merely what people must do to eat and have shelter.

Specifically religious work of the kind undertaken by monks, nuns, and priests was another matter.

People who choose lives such as these do much more than everyday labor. They are specially called

by God to their duties. They take solemn vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. Their divinely

appointed vocation (from the Latin vocare, “to call”) assures them of exceptional rewards in

heaven. To Luther, this notion that some believers are more religious than others was unacceptable.

He insisted adamantly on the complete equality of all believers before God. The effect of his

teaching was to dissolve the Catholic concept of a special religious vocation simply by expanding it

to include everyone. In Weber’s words, Luther “secularized” the idea of vocation, thereby giving as

much importance to the everyday work of a peasant or tradesman as the Church had given to the

devotional exercises of the parish priest or cloistered nun. This idea—that even the humblest tasks

are solemn duties assigned by God himself—invested everyday work in the world, no less than

prayer in the convent or chapel, with real religious importance, a genuine spiritual value that it had

never before held. All work, not just religious work, was a calling from God; it should not just be

done but done well, as faithful service carried out (in the words of the great Puritan poet John

Milton) under “the great Taskmaster’s eye.”

Luther’s idea of a “secular calling” offers a start in understanding Protestant energy and success in

business, but only that. It does not explain how a particular kind of economic activity seems to have

predominated. Protestants chose a distinctive lifestyle marked not only by habits of discipline, thrift,

simplicity, and self-denial, but also by a systematic lifelong pattern of effort in enterprises designed

to earn a profit. Moreover, it is just this kind of endeavor, whose sole motive is the orderly and

incremental increase of wealth, that expresses the frame of mind we associate with the modern, and

uniquely Western, economic phenomenon we call capitalism. Is there, then, a connection? Weber

says emphatically “Yes.” But to explain it, to account for the distinctive ethic behind the spirit of

capitalism, he turned from Luther to the French lawyer John Calvin, the most cerebral of the

reformers.

Calvin was a brilliant theologian, the main architect of the Protestant doctrinal system. But it was he

especially who also stressed the dark teaching of predestination, which held that God, and God

alone, determines the eternal fate of all mankind, choosing some (“the elect”) to reach Heaven and

eternally condemning others (“the reprobate”) to Hell. Calvin was not the first to hold this view. St.

Paul, St. Augustine, Luther, and numbers of others taught

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the doctrine, but it was Calvin who made it a centerpiece of his system. He also found it a personal

source of deepest assurance. No matter the circumstance, he knew with certainty that he could never

be separated from the love of his God, whose divine decree could never be undone. For Calvin’s

followers, however, things were more unsettling. Not sharing his natural self-confidence, many

were subject to intense anguish about their eternal fate, which God alone determined. The deep

psychological effect of this anxiety, says Weber, cannot be underestimated. We need to realize that

the early Protestants occupied a unique time and place in Western history. Like medieval Catholics

before them, they lived in an intensely religious world, well before the modern era, with its

weakened sense of the supernatural. For them there was a fearsome reality in the prospect of an

eternity spent either in Heaven or in Hell. On the other hand, Protestants were no longer fully

medieval. They were disciples of reformers— again, Luther and Calvin—whose revolt had stripped

out of Catholicism its supporting web of “magical” beliefs and customs through which the Church

affirmed God’s presence and mediated his love and forgiveness to his people.

Here we should recall Weber’s ideal-type describing the disenchantment of the world. The medieval

church was a nursery of the supernatural. Relics, pilgrimages and indulgences, stained glass and

sculpture, the wonders of the martyrs and saints, priestly absolution declared in the confessional, the

miracle of the wafer and wine turned to Christ’s body and blood in the Mass—all of these formed a

vast supernatural support system that mediated God’s forgiveness and favors to the simplest

believer. To Luther and Calvin, conversely, this entire system was little more than a mass of satanic

superstition. They systematically reduced it to rubble. Consequently, the ordinary Protestant was

left without the usual mechanisms to reassure the soul or channel divine love to the heart. They felt

instead only the deep inner anxiety of the individual soul, alone in fear before a God who in

sovereign mystery decides the destiny of all. This keen personal anxiety was so troubling that

Calvinist pastors in later generations groped for a way to offer at least some reassurance. They

counseled their congregations to live in the world as true faith requires—soberly, frugally, and with

discipline, offering themselves up wholly to God through hard work as his servants in their worldly

tasks. If they so lived, they could be reasonably expected to prosper, and prosperity amid simplicity

could be taken as the sign of election.

This pastoral guidance, framed to reassure troubled religious souls, was momentously important.

Within it, says Weber, lay the psychological key to the economic future of Europe. For indirectly

(and quite without intention) it ushered in a profound change of attitude toward worldly effort and

the acquisition of wealth. Prior to the Reformation, in almost every place and age of Catholic

Christendom, any activity aimed at an increase of money or

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property stood under the shadow of moral disapproval. In the eyes of the Church, the pursuit of

riches was at best regarded as neutral, but more commonly as vile avarice, one of the seven deadly

sins. It was the poor whom Jesus loved; the rich he condemned. Both the Bible and the Church

strictly prohibited usury because a loan of money and its return with interest amounted to

exploitation of the poor by those who are rich. The Church’s discomfort with the pursuit of great

wealth by those not born into it could be read in its cathedral architecture. Why were cathedral walls

lined with chantries where prayers could be said for the souls of those who endowed them? So that

those who had committed themselves to the pursuit of wealth in this life could secure unceasing

prayers of forgiveness for the sin of avarice that had brought them their gold. In Catholic theology,

the poor always are near to the heart of God; the rich live under a shadow.

Among the theological disciples of Calvin, however, this moral framework was subjected to a most

remarkable reconstruction. The pursuit of wealth acquired an entirely new moral status: What was

once a vice now became a virtue. The clearest evidence of the change is apparent—in varying

degrees, of course—among the main branches of Protestantism in Europe of the early modern era.

Weber specifically cites the Puritans, Presbyterians, and Methodists in Britain and America, as well

as other Calvinist groups in Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and elsewhere. In these

communities we find aphorisms that urge thrift and self-discipline; diaries and autobiographies that

record entire lives lived in private struggles against softness and self-indulgence; and sermons that

strike the recurring themes of restraint and sober self-denial, discipline and hard work, thrift and

investment, the wise use of both time and money. It is a frame of mind aptly depicted in the adages

that Benjamin Franklin made popular across colonial America: “Time is money; sloth is sin.” “A

penny saved is a penny earned.” These homespun phrases distill the essence of the spirit of

capitalism, even as they mirror the moral reversal that produced it.

Weber’s chosen term for this new ethic was “inner-worldly asceticism”— self-denial within

everyday society rather than apart from it. The “otherworldly asceticism” of the medieval Church

idealized withdrawal from the world to the seclusion of the convent or monastery. The new ethic of

Protestantism was just as ascetic, just as self-denying, just as intense and lifelong as the sacred vow

of any medieval monk, but its execution was different. It required disciplined mastery of the self

within the arena of the everyday world. God’s call was not to a spiritual practice performed while in

hiding from the world but to a disciplined mastery of the world while active in it. That inner-

worldly asceticism is the Protestant ethic. As applied to economics, it is hard to mistake; it is the

spirit that drives all of modern capitalistic enterprise.

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As he unfolded this argument, Weber was careful to address certain objections and clarify points of

confusion. One obvious problem centers on the meaning of the term “capitalism.” If all we mean by

that concept is “striving to get rich,” then what is so special about the Protestant connection?

Oldfashioned greed certainly can be found anywhere in the world, long before Protestants came

along and far away from Europe.

Weber answers this point by making a distinction. Loosely speaking, capitalism can indeed mean

any effort to gain wealth; driven by greed or opportunism, it can even take criminal forms like

piracy or theft, and these, certainly, are things we find in all times and places. Long before the

Reformation, ancient merchants and conquerors practiced buccaneer capitalism, traveling “through

hell itself should it singe the sails” in order to get rich. But true capitalism, the economic ethic

created in Europe at the dawn of modern times, is something quite different. The merchant or

buccaneer seeks wealth for one purpose—to indulge it, to live in luxury and buy pleasures. The

principles that guided the Calvinist businessman in London or Rotterdam of the 1600s are virtually

the exact opposite. He earns money with the intent to save it, not to spend it. God calls him to a

serious, restrained life of self-denial, so he has no interest in luxuries or expensive personal

pleasures. His focus is on making a profit as a duty of his calling and a mark of divine election, not

on spending money in sinful self-gratification. It is true that this habit of saving leads to the creation

of even more wealth—what modern economists call new capital formation—because there is no

other place for it to go. But that comes not because of any vice in the heart of the Calvinist; it is, on

the contrary, a natural (if unintended) consequence of his virtues. Instead of spending, he saves,

reinvests, and thus increases his wealth. Modern capitalism, therefore, is not the everyday greed of

all people and places; it is a distinct and different phenomenon that first appeared in one place,

Western Europe, and for historical reasons quite specific to the faith and values of Protestantism.

Weber was clear also about another issue. This spirit of capitalism is the key thing, but not the only

thing, that makes up this unique modern form of economic activity. In framing the ideal-type that

guides his discussion, he lists other elements that define it: rational bookkeeping, separation of the

workplace from the home and of corporate from personal property, decisions based on careful

calculation, use of free (rather than slave) labor, dependence on mathematical and experimental

science, and reliance on a social structure shaped by the rule of law and orderly administration. All

of these elements belong to a wider pattern of “rationalization” in Western society, on which Weber

placed great importance. Although it is intimately tied to this larger process, it is clear nonetheless

that capitalism could not have appeared without the specific impulse that came from the Protestant

ethic. It is this idea that has led some to

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refer to Weber as the theorist who “stood Marx on his head.” Weber himself found that assessment

too simplistic. But it bears a kernel of truth—applicable as well, we might add, to the reductionism

of Freud and Durkheim. In the case of one of the most important socioeconomic revolutions in

world history, Weber concludes not that religion is a mere reflection of social structure or economic

forces, but precisely the reverse. For him, it is the new religious ideas and behaviors of

Protestantism that usher in a reversal of attitudes toward acquiring wealth, and from that reversal

has come the culture of commerce, markets, and capitalism that defines Western civilization as we

know it today.

Finally, Weber was careful to distinguish the original capitalism of the early modern centuries

(1550–1750) from capitalism of his own day and ours. Today Catholics as well as Protestants are

capitalists, and among Protestants, most have no awareness or even memory of the old religious

motives. The new ethic is now ingrained, and thrives purely on the power of its own economic

efficiency; once introduced to a culture, it drives out all rivals, as history has shown. Over the

centuries from 1500 to 2000, capitalism has traced a steady rise to dominance both in the West and

the world beyond it. Today it governs all economic practice, long after its original Protestant

coloring has faded.

From almost the moment it appeared, The Protestant Ethic sparked a vigorous intellectual debate

that has never really ended. It is quite alive today, a full century after the essays were first

published. Weber himself participated in the first phase of discussion, offering various responses

and clarifications to criticisms that appeared, mainly in Germany, over the next five years. By 1910,

however, he had run out of patience with the critics and turned from defending his ideas to

developing them.

Sociology of Religion

Weber’s Sociology of Religion is a more difficult text to summarize than The Protestant Ethic. It

does not so much assert a thesis as embark on an exploration. It moves far beyond Protestantism to

offer a broader set of interpretive categories—Weberian ideal-types—and applies them to the whole

spectrum of world religions from the vantage point of sociological analysis. Weber had written

most of this discussion by 1914, but it was not published on its own; he chose instead to include it

as a book-length chapter in Economy and Society, which was published after his death.13 The

exposition in these pages is at times densely tangled and makes multiple turns; it wanders on

occasion into intriguing side roads and sometimes loses its way. Here we will follow only its main

path, which travels through four general topic areas. It begins with the role of religious leaders and

then addresses the

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influence of social classes and groups; it turns next to the forms of religious belief and behavior,

and last explores the interaction of religion with other aspects of social life. Each of these topics

merits some comment here.

RELIGIOUS LEADERS: MAGICIAN, PRIEST, AND PROPHET

Magician.

Religion for Weber is rooted in special experiences, what he calls “ecstatic states,” that put people

beyond the realm of everyday activity and disclose to them another level of reality. Anyone may

have such an experience on occasion, but those who can manage it on a regular basis are naturally

regarded as having special talent in spirituality. They have “charisma” (a key term for Weber, as we

have seen); they possess a gift that gives them a claim to the role of religious leader. In early

societies, the magician was the person the tribe regarded as “permanently endowed with charisma.”

When the need arose, people called on the magician to cure illness, to make the hunt succeed, or to

assist the crops in their growth. Frazer, we may recall, spoke in a similar fashion, but Weber does

not see magic as a form of primitive science, different from religion. Magicians, he says, do not rely

only on impersonal principles of contact and imitation; they also engage the gods or spirits,

something Frazer reserved only for religion. Nor is there a sequence in which religion emerges after

magic fails. Magical interest in miracles and healings may be more common in earlier, simpler

cultures, but it can appear at any time, even in complex, modern religious systems, because it offers

things ordinary people need or want in everyday life.

Priest.

Magic tends to be an occasional thing, focused on immediate concerns; normally people call on the

magicians when the practical need arises. That is not the case with religious leaders who function as

priests. In general, we find a religious priesthood where there is some kind of permanent system of

worship at fixed times and places and associated with a definite religious community. If we

encounter the same ritual routine performed in a certain temple daily at dawn or weekly at dusk, we

normally find a specialized priesthood in charge. The priest, even in most primitive societies, is a

permanent, paid official. We can think of him as having charisma, like the magician, but it is

something derived from his office rather than from his personal magnetism. The priest’s

“professional” status is defined by the rites he controls and by the religious community of ordinary

people, the laity, he directs. In more complex societies, as we might expect, priests fit into Weber’s

category of bureaucratic domination. They are “professionals” in religion; they have assigned duties

and are arranged in ranks with differing

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levels of responsibility; they are conscious of their special status, dispensing religious guidance and

benefits to clients; and above all, they prize social and religious order. In ancient India, for example,

it was the community of priests that promoted Varuna and Mitra, the gods of cosmic law and order,

against Rudra, the chaotic god of storms.

This concern of priestly religious leaders with structure and stability is one source of a key

development in most civilizations: the emergence of the concept of a vast cosmic order that imposes

on human beings a universal ethic, or value system, leaving behind the narrow ethic of the primitive

village, in which good and evil are defined entirely by the interests of one’s own family or clan. The

precise concept of cosmic order can of course vary from one culture or civilization to the next, but

whatever the form, priests have often played a part in either shaping it or conveying it to a wide

community of followers.

Prophet.

The notions of cosmic order and a universal ethic bring us to the third ideal-type: the prophet.

Among those who become social leaders, says Weber, there is hardly a single type—statesman,

artist, intellectual, or conqueror—more consequential to the course of civilizations than the

commanding figure of the prophet. He is a person recognized as “a purely individual bearer of

charisma.”14 The prophet may appear at any time in a culture, acting on a powerful sense of

mission, to proclaim for all a comprehensive “religious doctrine or divine commandment.” A

prophet is not a magician, centered on securing everyday practical benefits—foretelling the future,

curing illness, changing the weather. He may have some magical appeal, but the center of his life is

his mission: He has been specially called by either the voice of God or a vision of Truth to proclaim

a life-altering message. He would find it absurd to be paid for his labors. His calling sustains him,

and he is content if need be to live in poverty, accepting only what people voluntarily give him to

subsist. A prophet is also unlike a priest. His authority is not derived from his religious office. It

anchors itself in the revolutionary power of his personality and his message. It is clear that most of

the great world religions trace their origin to a transforming prophetic figure whose charismatic life

and compelling message revolutionized the world of his day.

Historically, prophets have been of two main types. The “exemplary prophet”—the wise man who

teaches by his own powerful example—has predominated in the Far East. In India, Gautama the

Buddha belongs to this type, as do the teachers Lao-tzu and Confucius in China. Each offers a path

of wisdom and truth meant for all, even if only some have the full capacity

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to follow it. The “ethical prophet” has predominated in the Near East and in Western civilization.

Zoroaster in ancient Persia, the prophets of Israel, Jesus of Nazareth, and Muhammad in Arabia fall

within this distinctive type. Here too the prophets offer a universal ethic, reaching beyond self-

interest and the ties of family or tribe. But on an essential point they differ from the great Oriental

sages, who shared the worldviews of Asian civilizations that found the ultimate Reality of the

universe to be impersonal, as in the Chinese Tao, or “Way of Nature.” Western prophets embrace

monotheism. They present themselves not as wise men modeling the life of wisdom but as

instruments chosen by an almighty and personal God to proclaim his will. Their mission is to speak

as his oracles and to demand obedience to the universal ethic he imposes. They reject magic as a

useless exercise, addressed only to petty interests; they are suspicious also of priests, whose concern

with ritualized ceremonies and orderly administration tends to smother the vital flame of religion.

That holy fire is something found only in a deep inner commitment carried out in obedience to a

moral code; it is neither selfish nor tribal but is anchored in the sovereign universal will of the

world’s Creator and Lord.

Prophets, of course, are exceptional people—capable of living an entire life at the highest level of

personal commitment. The prophet’s followers, being normal human beings, are less likely to

possess such total dedication. So in any religious community, if it is to sustain itself over time, the

charisma of the founder must somehow be kept alive by successors. The ideal-type Weber frames

for this critically important process is, as noted, the “routinization” of charisma—the transformation

of the prophet’s inspirational gift into something permanent, something fixed in the bureaucracy of

an institution.15 After the death of Jesus, for example, it fell to the twelve apostles, then to the

Church fathers, and later to the priests and bishops of the Catholic Church to make his charisma

routine by molding it into institutional systems, by giving it fixed forms that would make it last. In

this way, the priestly bureaucracy, by nature opposed to the unpredictable inspirations of prophecy,

can become the prophet’s best ally after his death. Only a conservative bureaucratic system—

aimed at maintaining the prophet’s truth (now that it has won a following)— can frame his message

into a system of teaching and administration that will be able to guide an ever-enlarging

community, or “congregation” (Weber’s preferred term for this ideal-type), of followers through the

ages. This structural support comes at a price, of course, for bureaucracies tend to smother the fires

of the spirit. Reformers with charisma of another kind will on occasion need to challenge priestly

authority and restore the original vigor of the prophet’s message. Episodes of tension are thus to be

expected, for the vitality of the original message is always put at risk by the dead hand of

bureaucratic officialdom.

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SOCIAL CLASSES AND GROUPS

In speaking of the religious congregation, Weber calls attention to the key role of the laity—

ordinary people who hold no offices but form the vast majority of participants in any religious

community. Charisma, in prophetic or any other form, does not exist unless a community of

laypeople comes to recognize and reinforce it. So an appreciation of their role is essential. It is

important to grasp not only the place of social classes and groups in religious communities but

especially the role they play in responding to the demands of the great prophetic religions. Weber’s

dissent from Marx in this connection is significant. For Marx, one issue, the division of classes into

rich and poor, determines all others; for Weber, things again are considerably more complex. Social

groupings are formed not just by economic separation according to class but also by such things as

location (rural or urban), vocation (craftsman, farmer, or warrior), and, notably, social respect or

honor (status group). As we saw earlier, one element of bureaucracy as an idealtype is the claim of

respect made by those who belong to it: They are “professionals.” In Weber’s analyses,

intellectuals, or “literati,” who earn honor for their impressive learning or cultivation often acquire

distinctive status as a bureaucracy in the same manner as the elders in a tribal society.

Depending on the place and time, each of these varied social groups has a distinctive part to play in

the religious enterprise, and social science can discern certain typical patterns of action. Rural

peasants, for example, live close to nature and depend on the weather. Almost always, therefore,

they are drawn toward magical practices, looking for help in day-to-day life and labor. Even where

a great prophet has established an ethical type of congregational religion, peasants find themselves

subtly drawn back toward magic and miracles. Despite Confucius’ promotion of prophetic ethical

religion, magic has for centuries mattered most to the simple farmers of China. Despite the moral

precepts of the Sermon on the Mount, the Christian Church’s relics, the icons, and miracles of the

saints have long been the main interest of Europe’s rural classes: peasants, serfs, and day laborers.

Rarely do they give undivided loyalty to a prophetic faith; more often, they mix it with magic.16

As it happens, the privileged classes, protective of their advantages, have also shown resistance to

prophetic religion, though from other motives. Their sense of honor and prestige is easily affronted

by the demand that they change the course of their lives or ask forgiveness from a priest or some

other social inferior. Similarly, bureaucratic elites do not always welcome the prophet or his

message; they are disposed to find it irrational unless, as among China’s Confucian mandarins, it

can serve the useful purpose of taming the masses. Even so, prophetic religion does sometimes

show the power of breaking through

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such resistance. Especially among warrior nobles and knights, who must summon the courage to

face death, prophetic religion has been enlisted to give an ultimate meaning and purpose to warfare.

This was especially the case with Islam, where the warrior class became the main bearer of the

crusade mentality that has left its mark on most Muslim civilizations. The middle class, on the other

hand, shows considerable diversity in its religious responses. The “commercial patriciate,”

composed of wealthy upper-middle-class merchant families, normally shows little serious interest.

But a different response appears farther down the social scale among the artisans and craftsmen of

the cities, the heart of the populous lower middle classes. Among these industrious groups—

separated enough from nature to be freed of interests in magic and motivated strongly by an ethical

sense of fair reward for fair labor—prophetic religion has had its most powerful appeal. From its

earliest centuries, Christianity was known as the religion of the cities, not the countryside.

With the exception of Confucianism, prophetic religions have also developed into what can be

called “salvation religions.” They offer people a comprehensive program for achieving inner

spiritual resolution or final escape from life’s limitations and sorrows. This element is so central for

Weber that we need to revisit it again. For the moment, we should note that while a salvation

religion does not necessarily need to present some specific savior at its center, that is almost always

what in fact happens among the masses. The lower the social class, the more intense becomes the

need to frame a redemption story in which a god takes human form in order to bring deliverance to

the faithful. Thus, in later Buddhism the concept of a bodhisattva, a divinity who assists people in

the search for enlightenment, replaces the austere original practice of meditation, which leaves all of

humanity entirely on its own. Similarly in India, the savior cults of Rama and Krishna replace the

old and obscure Vedic rituals. Because ordinary people have traditionally found it hard to align

themselves with some abstract and impersonal cosmic order, or have feared intimacy with a

transcendent all-powerful God, most religions, both East and West, have also developed various

cults of the saints, heroes, or minor gods and goddesses to give people assistance in their spiritual

searches and struggles. (The two main exceptions seem to be Judaism and Protestantism, both of

which place an emphasis on self-reliant individual enterprise.)

The poor are drawn to savior cults in part by the hope of a future reward, righting life’s injustices

either in the immediate present or in a future life. Another motive, not unlike the hope of reward,

appears wherever there is a status group of elite intellectuals:

The intellectual seeks in various ways … to endow his life with pervasive mean-

ing. As intellectualism suppresses belief in magic, the world’s processes have

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become disenchanted, lose their magical significance, and henceforth simply

“are” and “happen” but no longer signify anything. As a consequence, there is

a growing demand that the world and the total pattern of life be subject to an

order that is significant and meaningful.17

Nearly everywhere among educated elites there is a deep yearning to find some true cosmic purpose

to human existence in the world as we encounter it. In Asia most notably, “all the great religious

doctrines … are creations of intellectuals,” and they tend to become the special possession only of

intellectuals.18 The West strongly resisted elitism of this kind. Christianity, though it certainly has

had an intellectual component, rejected the Gnostic teaching that true knowledge of God is the

exclusive preserve of an intellectual elite. The urban craftsmen and tradesmen, who were the main

bearers of Christian ideas and values in ancient Rome, declared their Gospel open to all classes,

groups, races, and nations.

BELIEF AND BEHAVIOR

Whatever the interests of intellectuals as a group, all of the world’s prophetic religions must deal

with one overriding intellectual problem—the mystery of evil or theodicy (in Greek, “justifying

God”). They need to explain how any idea of ultimate goodness can fit together with a day-to-day

world that is so deeply flawed and filled with suffering. With this challenging topic as the transition,

Weber turns to examine religious belief and behavior. His discussion is, again, difficult and

inaccessible in places, so we will follow just the main themes.

The responses that religions make to the problem of evil divide into three ideal-types. One formula

proposes that the problem will be solved either within this world at some future time when justice at

last will triumph (as held by early Judaism) or outside of this life in another realm or a future

existence when all will be made right (as held in later Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and other faiths).

Alternatively, one can say with the Book of Job and some of Islamic theology that God, or the

universe, is simply inexplicable; our moral reasoning can never fathom ultimate questions. Or one

can claim that there are two ultimate realities in the universe: either a good and an evil God, as the

ancient Zoroastrians held, or a realm of spirit that is pure and eternal and a realm of material things

that is subject to death and decay, as Hindu Brahmins have long maintained. Few religions offer

these choices in the pure forms of these ideal-types. Most tend to mix different elements from each

type in distinctive ways, and most (as we have noted) do so by offering as part of the solution a

comprehensive program of human salvation, a formula

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that describes how everyone can find final peace or deliverance either in this world or beyond it.

Weber thinks it possible also to divide these salvation programs into types—two in particular: The

first assumes the need for some kind of human effort; the other declares that human effort is

pointless and that salvation must come from the outside, as a gift from some extraordinary hero or

from a divine being who assumes human form to assist.

Salvation through Human Effort.

One of the oldest avenues to salvation is ritualized action. Performing a ceremony or achieving a

mental state, as in ancient Buddhist meditation, brings a person at that instant into enlightenment, or

near to a god. Since these moods are momentary, the emphasis more often centers on various good

works done over time. Credits are either tallied up at the end of life and weighed in the balance, as

the prophet Zoroaster taught, or seen as expressions of an “ethical total personality.”19 Across

almost all cultures, this pattern comes to clearest expression in certain exceptional people who

practice what Weber calls “virtuoso sanctification”; they seek to be supreme artists of the moral life.

In their differing ways, Buddhist and Christian monks, Pharisaic Jews, saints like St. Francis, Sufi

mystics in Islam, and Puritans driven by the Protestant ethic all exhibit this trait. They claim an

elevated status as spiritual athletes; disdaining “average morality,” they seek living perfection

instead.

Among these perfectionists, says Weber, we need to make some further distinctions, for not all

heroes are the same. The term “asceticism” best describes one type of perfectionist practice, while

“mysticism” better fits the other. The kind of strenuous ethical activity practiced by most Catholic

monks in the Western world illustrates ascetic perfectionism. They see themselves as “instruments

of God,” actively engaged in a spiritual struggle that demands all of their strength to overcome

weakness and resist temptation. Others, like the monks of earliest Buddhism, are just as

perfectionist but adopt instead a passive, contemplative spiritual posture, and they are better

described as practicing mysticism. They see themselves as vessels that receive spirituality rather

than as instruments that actively achieve it. Their mission is not, like that of most Western monks,

to embark on a program of spiritual striving but to contemplate, to achieve a quiet state of profound

peace, enjoying within themselves the serenity that arrives as the soul absorbs Truth or becomes

filled with the Divine.

There are, further, two settings in which each of these two forms of spiritual heroism can be

pursued: either within the world of daily life or in isolation from it. Though possible in theory,

passive spiritual perfection is difficult to achieve while actively living in the world, so the natural

preference of the mystic is to reject the world and seek escape to a place of isolation, such as the

forest retreat or the hermit’s cave that we find in the earliest forms of Buddhism.

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There one can be alone and claim the joy of nothingness or swim in the oceanic peace of the divine

being. Asceticism faces the same pair of options. It can either reject or embrace the everyday world

as the scene of its activities. Most medieval Christian monasteries housed monks who worked in a

place of isolation and saw themselves in ascetic terms, as spiritual heroes actively engaged in the

service of God. They were not passive mystics in the manner of Buddhist monks who begged for

their daily food. They cleared the forests, planted fields, and took the vow of St. Benedict that

required them both to pray and to work— ora et labora—as they built their spiritual communities

separated from the rest of society. The self-perfecting Calvinists who conducted their business in

cities like London and Amsterdam were equally ascetic and spiritual. But in their Protestant ethic

there was also a crucial difference. The arena for their heroic devotions was not the monastery; it

was out in the workplace of the everyday world. Like the medieval monk, the Puritan merchant

enlisted in a life of spiritual struggle and self-restraint, but it came to expression through an “inner-

worldly asceticism,” a program of disciplined spiritual living that he applied within the realm of

every day life and business. The social consequences of this behavior were momentous. In practical

effect, the Calvinist Protestant sought nothing less than “to transform the world in accord with his

ascetic ideals.”20 We can recall here for the purpose of comparison Durkheim’s picture of the

ascetic who by his example of self-denial serves as a model of how others too should give up selfish

desires for the sake of the society’s harmony and stability. Weber’s spiritual hero is different: The

worldly ascetic denies himself in the service of God, but the unintended effect of this act, in the case

of Protestantism at least, is not to preserve the existing social order but to overturn it through a

revolutionary change of attitudes toward both wealth and the labor that is expended to gain it.

For Weber, this distinction between asceticism and mysticism is of major cultural importance. It

highlights a central difference between religions of the East and the West. Typically, the Oriental-

Asian religious ideal is mystical contemplation, while the West throughout history has tended

toward activist asceticism. Even where mystics do appear in the West, they lean still toward a stress

on conduct—what people actually do with their lives. Weber offers a complex set of philosophical

and historical reasons for this circumstance, stressing especially a fact we noted earlier: Western

salvation religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) all affirm a transcendent all-powerful Creator God

who is wholly separate from the world that he has made, including humanity, which is a part of it.

God and his creatures cannot be merged. The mysticism of the East is different; it promises a

pathway of spiritual ascent by which humanity can, in the end, either merge with the divine or know

the joy of perfect escape from the world.

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Salvation as a Gift.

Weber gives less attention to the belief that salvation is a gift (the other of the two formulas that

religions apply to describe how salvation is secured), and we can spend less of our time on it as

well. Some voices in the salvation religions have insisted on the claim that humans can do utterly

nothing to win their own salvation. Ultimate peace comes only, and completely, from the outside. It

can arrive as an unmerited gift, earned for us by a divine Savior such as the Buddhist bodhisattva or

Christianity’s risen Christ. It can arrive as an act of “institutional grace,” such as the absolution

given the sinner by the priest in the Catholic confessional. Or, as in religions that affirm a God, it

may come as divine grace bestowed in response to a simple, heartfelt, and utterly personal faith of

the type seen in early Islam and some Protestant sects, such as German Pietism. Or, again, it may

come to certain people and not to others through a mysterious act of divine predestination, as in

later Islam and the austere Calvinist predestinarian doctrine of “divine decrees” enacted “before the

foundations of the earth.”

RELIGION AND OTHER SPHERES OF LIFE

The fourth and last set of topics Weber addresses in the Sociology of Religion is the interaction of

religion with certain other aspects of social life—namely, economics, politics, sexuality and the

arts. In the sphere of economics, he finds that the common rule of kindness to neighbors appears

almost universally as the doctrine of charity or alms—giving freely to help others in need. This

principle explains, among other things, the deep-seated distrust of usury in some religious

traditions. They have held that to loan money while expecting interest in return is a way of

exploiting, not helping, the poor. In keeping with its new ethic, however, Calvinism boldly

challenged this principle. It actually prohibited charitable giving to beggars because they often were

not truly in need, as were the disabled, widows, and orphans. Charity was not for those who can

answer God’s calling to work. Those who beg when they are able to earn clearly violate the law of

love by accepting what is not rightly theirs. Conversely, usury may be seen simply as a payment

from earnings generated by labor that could not have occurred without borrowed funds. Usury,

then, does not exploit poverty; it creates opportunity.

As for politics, sexuality, and the arts, Weber observes that religion has most commonly found itself

in a measure of tension, and then compromise, with each of these endeavors. Whenever prophetic

religions have stated a universal doctrine of salvation or love, they cannot help coming into conflict

with the state, which always puts first the interests of a political entity, whether that is a city,

territory, nation, or empire. Religion can seek to subdue the state to

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its interests, as in the early wars of Islam or the exploits of Cromwell’s Protestant army in England,

but most often it must pursue compromises, accepting or ignoring the independence of the political

order. The same holds true for sexuality and the arts. In the great religions with a salvation ethic,

both mysticism (which seeks to lose the self) and asceticism (which seeks to discipline it) are in

competition with the one human drive most able to distract from the goal of the former and break

the constraints of the latter. In general, therefore, religions distrust sexuality; women are assigned

secondary status, and marriage in all ethical systems is primarily a legal rather than an erotic or a

romantic institution. Artistic expression should, by contrast, have a natural affinity with religion

through the value it places on imagery and symbolism. But when art ceases being a craft in service

of a religious purpose and asserts aesthetic values independently, proposing that people can find

ultimate meaning through created beauty, a clash with religion is unavoidable.

“The Economic Ethic of the World’s Religions”

In its final pages, the Sociology of Religion does not really come to a close; it simply breaks off

midway through a new chapter (the rest of which survives in notes) that examines the great

religions of the world. Those pages can perhaps best be understood less as a conclusion to

Sociology of Religion than as the introduction to Weber’s last and most ambitious enterprise, also

left unfinished at the time of his death. He projected it as a series of studies that would include The

Protestant Ethic and continue through no less than eight volumes dealing comparatively in

sequence with the world’s major religions. There is no space in our pages to give this project the

full attention it deserves. We can at best offer a brief sketch of the parts that Weber did finish, along

with some observations on the general theme it was designed to explore. We will pass entirely over

two important and complex essays he included at the beginning and in the middle of the sequence.

Since the time of their translation, they have been read widely by English-speaking sociologists of

religion; here they can be left to more advanced inquiries.21

“The Economic Ethic” proposes to explore all of the “five religions, or religiously determined

systems of life-regulation which have known how to gather multitudes of confessors around

them.”22 Weber adds Judaism to this group because of its historical importance to two other

religions: Christianity and Islam. Of the volumes he planned, three—on Chinese religions, Indian

religions, and Judaism—were completed. The two on Asian systems were prepared during the years

of World War I, and the essays that made up the volume on Judaism were completed between 1917

and 1919. Weber’s first aim in these works was to return in much greater depth to the economic

question

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that he had first asked, and provisionally answered, in The Protestant Ethic: Why did capitalism, the

economic system that has transformed the world, arise in Europe and North America and only there

in the two centuries after the Reformation? The proper strategy for answering this question requires

a broad comparative enterprise, starting with civilizations of the Far East.

THE RELIGION OF CHINA (1916)23

From time immemorial, China has been predominantly an agricultural society ruled at the top by the

emperor, who controlled the river systems crucial to agriculture and transport, and managed at the

bottom by local village elders. The emperor asserted his authority through an elite class of public

administrators—the literate mandarins schooled in the great Confucian writings— who resided

mainly in the cities. Privileged and cultivated, they pursued an ethic of refinement and comfortable

“adjustment to the world” that shaped Chinese elite culture for two millennia, but without

comparable impact on the attitudes of the masses. In both city and countryside, ordinary life was

governed by ties of family and clan and by religious attachment to age-old magical rites and

ancestral spirits, which the elite made little effort to challenge or to change. China’s cities never

developed features of many cities in the West: self-government, charters of independence, legal

rights, guilds and fraternal societies. They remained patrimonial institutions that deferred to the

emperor and willingly accepted rule by the Confucian elite. The only protest against this

traditionalism came from the Taoists, followers of the teacher Lao-tzu, who urged a life of self-

denial and escape from the world. Lao-tzu called for retreat into the unspoiled forests, where the

spirit could attune itself to the Tao, the great and mysterious flow in all existing things. Taoists

sought a life of simplicity, but because they prized life so highly and took such keen interest in

techniques they believed could extend it, their doctrines often blended naturally with popular magic,

even reinforcing its grip on the masses. So although it formed a protest against the mandarins’

learning and elegant urban lifestyle, Taoism was no more disposed than Confucianism to promote a

universal ethic among the masses; on the contrary, the stress on quiet, selfless drift in the stream of

nature left Taoist teachers as much at ease as Confucians with a civilization shaped mainly by

peasant traditionalism.

This dominant posture of traditionalism and passivity meant that neither the folk traditions nor the

great philosophical systems of China furnished a religious incentive for people to seek profit in

business or trade. Despite certain early advances in mathematics and technology, China’s cultural

blend of traditionalism and patrimonialism discouraged the kind of rational impartiality (the refusal

to “play favorites” to help friends or family) in business dealings

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that is crucial to rational profit-oriented activity. More decisively, the indispensable element, the

spirit of capitalism, failed to appear. The elegant mandarin, proud of his Confucian learning,

thought mostly about his personal dignity, not about fulfillment of a special mission assigned to him

by God, as Luther had taught. As disciples of Confucius, the literate and cultivated elite showed no

inclination toward the asceticism that drove Calvinists to see themselves as instruments of God at

work in a divine calling. If one’s life is seen as already a polished and perfected achievement, there

is little point in striving to gain greater self-control or to prosper in the marketplace. Confucianism

did not seek mastery of the world through a life of disciplined self-denial; it was content with its

ethic of adjustment to the world as it was and had always been: traditional, stable, and unchanging.

THE RELIGION OF INDIA (1916–1917)24

In India, successive invasions and conquests had created divisions in the social order that appeared

in the system of caste, which was dominated by two elite groups. The Brahmins were a caste of

priests privileged alone to read the sacred texts of the Vedas; the Kashatryias, a warrior class, held

military and political power. Beneath these two groups, which claimed their status as an inherited

charisma (or family gift), lesser castes arranged themselves downward on a scale fixed by birth and

vocation. At the bottom were the very lowest of the slaves, literally “out-castes.” Rules against

marriage or even association at meals kept the lines of separation distinct, but the most powerful

support of the system was religious. Brahmin intellectuals, who were the main bearers of the ideas

that shaped Indian civilization, wrote caste divisions into the very script of the universe. They held

that all of life is subject to the cosmic law of samsara, or rebirth, which governs both nature and

society on the principle of karma, the cumulative weight of one’s spiritual (or unspiritual) deeds.

Those in the Brahmin caste, placed high, deserved their fortune as a reward for spiritual

achievement in an earlier existence; those placed low equally deserved theirs as a natural

consequence of prior lives too entangled in material attachments and sensual pleasures. This system

was intellectually persuasive, explaining with a kind of cold logic just why social differences that

seem unfair are not so; they are simply built into the framework of the world. But it was also deeply

disheartening. To the ordinary person, it promised one life after another lived on the great “wheel of

rebirth.” Human existence was defined chiefly by a continuous struggle to slip free from the coils of

rebirth and by mostly failed efforts to overcome the allurements of sexuality, luxury, and even

family.

This great world system, gray at best and grim at worst, colored the entire development of both

religion and society in India. Brahmin leaders, originally

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masters of the sacred chant, introduced ascetic practices of yoga and withdrawal to impose

discipline on the body’s urges and to cultivate a form of spirituality pure enough to give the soul

final release. The same motive of determined search for release gave rise to India’s two great

protest religions: Buddhism and Jainism. Both accepted in full the system of samsara, but they

broke the grip of caste by offering hope of escape to all who could either manage a Buddhist life of

total ascetic discipline and meditation or travel the Jain path of total respect for life in all its forms.

Still, for the ordinary masses, none of this was realistic. They were not spiritual athletes; they could

not hope to reach the heights of a virtuoso in spiritual performance. Because such self-denial was

unachievable for the great majority of people, they accepted second best, gaining merit by

supporting the community of monks. While the Brahmin, Buddhist, and Jain elite practiced spiritual

heroics, the great masses lived as religious stepchildren. On the surface of life, they could interest

themselves in the “garden of magic” that was filled with popular saviors and superstitions, but deep

within, at the level of ultimate questions, they were resigned to a fate that promised them little more

than seemingly endless discouraging new births on the ever-turning wheel of reincarnation.

All of this resignation left a visible imprint on economic life. As in China, capitalist enterprise in

India failed to take root, even though the prospects for it actually were quite favorable. There was a

system of arithmetic using zero and positional numbering; there were thriving centers of handicraft

and trade, as well as specialized laborers with guilds to support them; there were independent

merchants; and the system of taxation was not oppressive. But in contrast to Europe, society and the

economy remained overwhelmingly rural and traditional, so true capitalist enterprise did not

develop. It did not help that free, self-governing cities, which served as nurseries of capitalism in

the early modern West, also had failed to emerge. The main cause was caste, which prevented the

unification of different guilds and classes into a single community of citizens, all possessing equal

rights under an impartial legal and moral system that rejected any favoritism based on family or

class ties. Further, the problem of caste was in the end the problem of the Indian religious system

that served to anchor it. The classic teachings of Hinduism held, and still today hold, that there is in

the end no enduring, positive value we can assign to human activity, the physical world, and the

present life. The messages of the Brahmin elite and of prophets such as Buddha and Mahavira (the

founder of Jainism) were essentially the same: Spiritual joy comes only through withdrawal from

the world and release from its toils, cares, and even joys.

Such teachings differ sharply from those of the Jewish prophets, who offered a message received

directly from God, a divine revelation that disenchanted

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the world of its magical spells and spirits, demanding a life of obedience to the moral demands of a

sovereign Creator and Lord rather than ceremonies and sacrifices to please the spirits of the field or

village. India abounded with elite ascetics and mystics skilled in withdrawal from the world, but

again, as in China, there was no program that called for self-denying obedience to the will of God

through systematic engagement with the world, such as we see in the Puritan merchants of London

or the settlers in Massachusetts Bay. For all their other achievements, the civilizations of China and

India did not produce an equivalent of Europe’s Protestant ethic. And without it, neither the true

spirit nor the genuine practice of modern capitalism ever managed to arise.

ANCIENT JUDAISM (1917–1919)25

As he turned from Asia to the West, Weber planned his next volumes, which were to center on the

great Western religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Unfortunately, the first, on ancient

Judaism, was the only one he lived long enough (almost) to complete. It is a dense, thoughtful

work; we, again, cannot do it justice. But we can at least touch upon its central ideas.

As with China and India, Weber begins by offering a close review of the material circumstances in

which Judaism arose: the geography, politics, and culture of the ancient Near East. Even before the

age of kings, the Hebrew confederation of tribes had united around a shared faith in Yahweh, the

personal Lord of the covenant and Creator of the world. Out of all humanity he had chosen the Jews

as his children by contract. His favor was theirs for the taking; only their loyalty was expected in

return. All subsequent Jewish history was to be interpreted, by priest and prophet alike, in terms of

this sacred covenant, which was eventually to shape the theologies of both Christianity and Islam as

well.

The contract was shattered in the age of monarchy. The kings brought wealth to Jerusalem, but

along with their success came dynastic marriages to nonIsraelite princesses and the worship of

foreign gods of fertility. Resentment flared among the rural and traditional poor, bringing civil war

and eventually the destruction of the tribes in the North. In time the kingdom was reconstituted in

the South, and under King Josiah, prophets and teaching priests made the books of the law—the

Torah—rather than temple sacrifices the centerpiece of Jewish life. They called for a new

individualized religious faith: obedience to the precepts of the Torah out of a sense of personal

devotion to Yahweh, the covenant Lord, who was now conceived no longer only as Israel’s God but

as the God of all nations. This obedience consisted of more than just isolated good deeds. It was to

be a complete “ethic of commitment.” The prophets who proclaimed it—Amos, Hosea, Isaiah,

Jeremiah—demanded both purity

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of faith in Yahweh and social justice for the poor. Differing from the exemplary prophets of the

East, they made no personal claim for themselves of supreme wisdom or divinity. But in another

sense they asserted something far greater: the message of ethical monotheism. They proclaimed the

sovereign majesty of God and demanded total obedience to his will. More than almost anything

else, that message is what separates Judaism and its successor religions of the West from the

traditions of the East. Unlike the great Asian systems, Judaism and its disciple faiths insist that

salvation is not won through contemplation that leads the soul out of the everyday physical world; it

comes instead through faith and lifelong obedience that seek to achieve a divine purpose within that

world.

Equally important in this connection was prophetic opposition to the ways of magic, which was

widely tolerated among the masses in the Far East. As the prophets conceived him, Yahweh, the

Lord of creation, is utterly beyond manipulation by rituals and spells of the kind offered to the

Canaanite deities of fortune and fertility. Personal devotion and ethical obedience, not magic and

divination, are the things that please him. In place of mysterious forces and occult manipulations,

the prophets urged ordinary people to a life freed of magic, a path of action governed solely by

personal obedience to the Mosaic law. This new ethic of commitment was not reserved only to an

elite circle of specialists, as in Hinduism and Buddhism. It placed before all Jews the ideal of a

“total ethical personality,” of an entire individual life molded into habits of obedience to the Torah’s

commands. Through preaching from texts of the Old Testament, this ideal of an entire life lived in

service to God made its way ultimately into the ethic of modern Protestants as they pursued their

sacred vocations in the world.

As these paragraphs reveal, Weber keenly appreciated the historical significance of Judaism to both

religion and civilization in the Western world. There is, however, a troubling element in his

discussion. Although he treats Judaism no differently than he does Christianity or Buddhism and

although he fiercely opposed the mistreatment of Jews he saw in German universities, some of his

ideas on Judaism have been linked nonetheless to later German anti-Semitism. The issue arises

from his description of later Jews as a “pariah people” of the ancient Near East. After the exile in

Babylon, he claims, Jews gradually became a “community of outcasts,” partly of their own making.

They adopted a form of self-isolation in Christian Europe (similar to that of the outcastes in India)

by refusing either to intermarry or to associate with members of the wider Gentile community.

Inevitably, then, they found themselves disprivileged—the victims of suspicion, hatred, and

exploitation. Burdened further by an “ethic of resentment” against their oppressors, they embraced a

kind of dual morality, applying a high moral standard in all

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dealings with fellow Jews and a lower one for commerce with Gentiles. Jewish enterprise thus

became “pariah capitalism,” as illustrated in practices associated with usury. Because the Torah

prohibited them, interest-bearing loans could not be made to other Jews, yet they could be offered to

Gentiles. In part this divided ethic also helps explain why Protestantism, and not Judaism, is the real

parent of Western capitalism. Protestants demanded wholly neutral and rational standards of

conduct in commerce—a principle that was alien to the Jewish pariah ethic.

Some critics have vigorously attacked this “pariah” theory of Jewish identity, challenging Weber’s

evidence and noting how easily such words could later be conscripted to support Nazi racism—

barely more than a decade after they were written. Had he lived longer, we might well have had a

chance to read Weber’s responses to such critics and measure his words by the judgments he

himself would have been compelled to render as he witnessed the patriotism of his generation

descend into the fascism of the next. Sadly (though perhaps also mercifully), his early death in 1920

has left us no chance of discovering his response to that development. Nor can we know definitively

what his exceptional erudition might have offered in the remainder of “The Economic Ethic” had it

been brought to completion; certainly it would have made a suitable capstone to a career of

extraordinary scholarly achievement.

Analysis

1. Weber and Durkheim

Weber’s writings are notoriously difficult to summarize because he weaves such an abundance of

specific historical and sociological detail so seamlessly into his theoretical discussions. With him

the forest truly is hard to see for the trees. Even so, we can get some help with the broader picture if

we work comparatively, placing both his methods and his achievements over against those of

neighboring theorists, especially his nearest intellectual rivals, Durkheim and Marx. With respect to

Durkheim, we should notice that between him and Weber there is a clear similarity of interest

combined with a sharp difference in method. As noted, Durkheim and Weber were not just pioneers

in the field of social theory; they were also responsible for turning the focus of professional

sociology in its earliest years specifically toward the sociology of religion. Durkheim’s Elementary

Forms was pivotally important in placing religion at the center of social investigation and theory. In

the same

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way, Weber, though primarily interested in the economic aspects of social life, found himself ever

more drawn toward the central importance of religion to society. By the time of his death,

comparative study of civilizations, anchored in research on world religions, was the main focus of

his labors.

This shared interest in religion did not, however, carry over into agreement on the methods most

suitable to the inquiry. Durkheim’s agenda was to begin from a single case of religion in its near-

original state—among the Aborigines of Australia. From the complex network of primitive tribal

practices he broke out its most basic units—its “elementary” forms of ritual activity—and

proceeded to show how all of religion in other places and later times has evolved from those forms

in various new and different combinations. Weber, by contrast, starts not so much with a religious

community as a cultural problem: How did a new and revolutionary form of economic behavior

arise to transform Western civilization in the early centuries of the modern era? The search for an

answer to this question leads him to a religious change—the emergence of a new moral vision, the

formation of the “Protestant ethic,” which became, in due course, the animating spirit of modern

capitalism. Unlike Durkheim, Weber then proceeds (in works like the Sociology of Religion and

“The Economic Ethic of the World Religions”) to explore the widest possible range of cultures,

instances, practices, and beliefs. Also in contrast to Durkheim (and, for that matter, Tylor and

Frazer as well), he does not privilege primitive religion as containing the seed from which all later

institutions have grown. He thinks that at least as much (and indeed much more) can be learned

from the actual histories of the great world religions as from the field studies of anthropologists

centered on primitive tribes.

There is a further difference over the matter of cultural evolution. As we saw earlier, Durkheim,

because of his central focus on religion in its earliest forms, was somewhat inclined to think in

evolutionary terms. He could entertain the notion of religious institutions evolving over time along

a line of progress from the ancient to the modern, the simple to the complex. This was clearly not

the view of Weber. When he sets out to explain ideal-types, he is careful to notice how expressions

of those types may appear in one epoch, fade in the next, and return again thereafter, depending on

each new cultural or historical circumstance. He finds magic, for example, more common in earlier

societies but concedes its enduring appeal among the masses—the peasants and poor—in any

society. He notices too how it can revive in places where once it had faltered. Magic was probably

more widespread in medieval Christian Europe than it was a thousand years earlier in ancient

Judaism after the message of the prophets had taken effect. Accordingly, there is also for Weber no

such thing as a natural intellectual evolution of the kind Frazer imagines when he puts magic,

religion, and science into historically successive

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stages. Finally, and significantly, Weber departs from Durkheim’s functionalist reductionism. As

we have already seen in several connections, he does not believe that religious beliefs and practices

are mere reflections of a controlling and more fundamental social reality. Since Weber diverges

from Marx on this issue even more acutely than he does from Durkheim, we can turn to that

comparison in the paragraphs that follow.

2. Weber and Marx

When we compare Weber with Marx, there seems at first an obvious similarity. Both are

historically oriented social theorists who build arguments from close analyses of complex social and

historical relationships. They draw on encyclopedic understandings of culture and civilization, and

they energetically search out causes and effects. Marx, however, confines most of his historical

work to Western civilization, where, among other things, he finds decisive evidence that the

fantasies of religion arise from economic exploitation. Weber, on the other hand, attends to

religious activities worldwide, a strategy that makes him more cautious than Marx about advancing

for nearly all events only one form of explanation: class struggle born of economic oppression. The

great and complex differences in world religious systems suggest to him that interpreters may need

to draw on explanatory theorems that are not singular but diverse and complex. Unlike Marx,

Weber is disposed to explain a religious system like Taoism as arising from an intricate

convergence of ideas, circumstances, and events particular to ancient China and not as the effect of

some universal cause, like economic alienation, at work in all times and places.

It is just this sense of the great complexity in human endeavors that draws Weber back from

reductionist functionalism. As we have seen, Freud, Durkheim, and Marx readily assume that

religious actions and beliefs always trace to non-religious causes, whether psychological, social, or

socioeconomic. What sets Weber clearly apart from their approach is the conviction he articulates

in the principle of Verstehen: Human ideas, beliefs, and motives deserve to be counted as real and

independent causes of human action. An idea in the mind of one human agent (or shared by a group

of agents) is as much a real cause of human action as the application of heat to water is the real

cause of steam. Conscious thoughts affect human action at least as much as unconscious urges or

needs. When he unfolds the argument of The Protestant Ethic, Weber does not, like Marx, look first

to economic distress, tracing the theological doctrine of predestination to class conflict in Calvin’s

Geneva. His inquiry takes him in the very opposite direction, unearthing as the key cause of the

capitalist revolution not some material circumstance

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but a new form of economic behavior that followed logically from a new religious idea: The self-

constraining ethic of Protestantism was the animating spirit of capitalism. It is historically

significant that in the decades after 1900, as Freud, Durkheim, and the disciples of Marx were rising

toward the pinnacle of their intellectual influence, Weber steadfastly pressed home his dissenting

view. For him, meanings matter; the webs of significance that human beings spin do effectively

shape and change the material and social structures that lie beneath. In making this point, Weber

certainly was not given to overstatement. He appreciated in full the dense tangle of causes, events,

conditions, ideas, and motives that enter into all of human action, both individual and social. He

even makes a special note of this point in the introduction later added to The Protestant Ethic,

where he carefully observes that Calvinist worldly asceticism was by no means the only cause that

accounts for the rise of modern capitalism. Clearly, a complex array of factors converged at its

creation. He carefully notes that he has addressed

the side of the problem which is generally most difficult to grasp: the influence

of certain religious ideas on the development of an economic spirit, or the ethos

of an economic system. In this case we are dealing with the connection of the

spirit of modern economic life with the rational ethics of ascetic Protestantism.

Thus we treat here only one side of the causal chain.26

That “one side of the causal chain” was the powerful imprint of Protestant religious ideas on human

behavior. Certainly that factor was not the only cause, but just as certainly it was a cause, and

arguably the most important one. This firm but carefully modulated antireductionist stance, which

Weber maintained as a feature of his approach through all his later research, is a prime reason why

his analyses draw new appreciation (and of course new criticism) to the present day. Because social

endeavor is for him always complex, and explanation is almost never singular or simple, Weber on

principle refused membership in the club of reductionist theory. He could not join Marx or Freud or

Durkheim in diminishing the role of ideas, intentions, and beliefs while still remaining true to the

evidence that history and society presented to him.

Critique

Normally, it is no compliment to describe a theorist as someone whose work has been widely and

roundly criticized. The case of Max Weber, however, is

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a notable exception. As with Marx, the scale of the criticism Weber’s ideas have received is a sign

of their importance and influence. If the real merit of a theorist is measured by the commentary he

provokes, then Weber’s stature is secure. As noted earlier, The Protestant Ethic is still starting

arguments more than a century after its publication. Similarly spirited critical discussions center on

the concepts, distinctions, and connections advanced in Economy and Society, the Sociology of

Religion, and the separate studies of “The Economic Ethic of the World Religions.” The

controversy over Judaism as a pariah religion is just one example. Weber’s ideal-type of

“bureaucracy” is another. It has produced vigorous discussion among social psychologists, as well

as theorists of industrial organization and public administration. Economists and historians of

business still debate the definition of capitalism; others have disputed Weber’s ideas on power, on

law, and on political institutions, as well as his commentaries on the arts, eroticism, science, and

music. More recently, intellectual historians have focused on his discussions of “rationalization” in

human societies over the course of history. Some think this is actually the grand interpretive theme

that underlies Weber’s program, linking religion, economics, and society.27

With regard to religion, the stormiest debates have swirled, not surprisingly, around the famous

thesis advanced in The Protestant Ethic. Many critics accept that the concepts of both the Protestant

ethic and the unique spirit of capitalism are illuminating. Some, however, claim that Weber fails to

establish the connection he asserts. Others point to factors more important than religion that account

for the capitalist revolution. Still others contend that the economic behavior Weber thinks so new

and so distinctively Western can be found to have existed both long before the arrival of

Protestantism and well outside of Europe. These debates, which turn on sociological and historical

details, can be left for specialists to settle. But there are two other issues to address that bear more

directly on Weber’s general program both as a theorist of human action and an interpreter of

religion.

Consistency

The first is a criticism leveled primarily by disciples of Marx, though it could just as well have

come from the circle of Durkheim or of Freud. It applies well beyond The Protestant Ethic to the

whole spectrum of Weber’s work on religion, and it pits Weber against a formidable opponent—

himself. The issue is consistency. Weber, we have noticed, insists that religious ideas must be

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accorded an independent, causative place in the process of understanding human history and

society. In discussing Protestantism, for example, he considers the Calvinist concepts of “vocation”

and “worldly asceticism” to be compelling religious ideas that caused people to adopt a distinctively

new form of behavior we today identify as the cause of economic capitalism. But in other

discussions (and elsewhere even in that study), Weber’s practice appears to depart from his precept.

The Sociology of Religion offers an interesting example. When he discusses there the origin of

monotheism, he writes:

[T]he personal, transcendental and ethical god is a Near-Eastern concept. It cor-

responds so closely to that of an all-powerful mundane king with his rational

bureaucratic regime that a causal connection can scarcely be denied.28

He then adds that the model of the monarch who controlled the vital irrigation systems “was

probably a source of the conception of a god who had created the earth and man out of nothing, and

not procreated them, as was believed elsewhere.”29

This explanation of a crucially important religious idea—the sovereign Creator God—looks almost

as if it could have come from Marx. The discussion adduces a purely material economic

circumstance—a basic need for water provided by a mighty and distant monarch—as the

fundamental reality and turns the religious conception into a mere reflection of political power and

geography. To be sure, Weber can reply that he finds the desert king to be only a source, not the or

the only source, of the idea of God. But even so, the tenor of his exposition here certainly suggests

what Marx might have said: Religious ideas arise naturally as reflections of socioeconomic realities.

Weber’s correlations of certain class interests or status group concerns with specific religious ideas

proceed in similar fashion. He finds the Muslim notion of God a concept characteristic of the

“warrior nobility” of early Arabia, and he thinks the Hindu doctrine of samsara reflects the need of

an intellectual elite to offer a cosmic rationale for the birth of some to wealth and privilege while

others are fated to poverty and hardship.

This pattern of explanation occurs also in the studies that make up “The Economic Ethic of the

World Religions.” Before he turns attention to the religious beliefs and teachings of China or India

or ancient Judaism, Weber offers an exhaustive examination of the material, political, and

socioeconomic contexts in which the religions arose. In principle, he articulates an anti-reductionist

position, saying of India, for example, that the course of development in religious thought proceeds

independently of material circumstances and social influences. But in the actual process of

explanation, he is strongly disposed to treat those ideas as just the opposite: as inseparably

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bound to their historical framework and as naturally mirroring the specific social, cultural, and

economic settings in which they appear.

Social Science and Religion

Criticism of another kind attaches to Weber’s idea of a social science as applied to the subject of

religion. As we noticed in our discussion of his methods, Weber (no less than other theorists) is

keenly committed to developing accounts of religious activity that can claim to be scientific. The

whole purpose of devising the concepts he designates as ideal-types is to offer, as in all science,

some kind of generalized conceptual framework that can be applied uniformly across cultures. The

strategy is somewhat similar to that of Durkheim, who isolated a set of basic social components—

the elementary forms—that can be lifted from the religion of one time and place and applied

meaningfully to all others. For a genuinely historical sociologist like Weber, however, this strategy

is considerably more problematic. Historical precision, after all, is not the easy friend of scientific

generalization. Whatever the religious phenomenon—event, person, process—he addresses,

Weber’s habit is to bring to the issue the full array of his wide learning, often outlining an intricate

network of material circumstances, political influences, economic conditions, social forces, and

class or status group interests, as well as religious ideas and activities, in the course of his analyses.

All of this labor is instructive, at times even dazzling, in its effect. But there is a complication. The

aim of sociology as a science, presumably, is to find patterns and categories that can be applied

generally to most, or many, similar cases, yet that is the very thing that Weber’s delicately complex

historical descriptions make almost impossible for him, or anyone else interested in social scientific

theory, to do.

A specific instance will offer some help. In one section of his Religion of India, Weber explains the

beginnings of Buddhism. He describes it as the product of an urban aristocratic setting, not the

pastoral world of the Hindu Brahmins. It teaches reincarnation, as does Hinduism, but leaves out

any doctrines of the soul or Brahman-atman (the world soul). It is a salvation system, but only for

cultivated intellectuals. It shows none of the asceticism of the Jains. In almost every way, “it is the

polar opposite of Confucianism and of Islam.”30 It is an ethic that rejects both active conduct in the

world and ascetic exercises. Despite this fact, its monks gradually acquired permanent residences

and estates, becoming landowners and farm administrators like the Christian monks of the West.

Unlike the Western monks, however, Buddhist leaders had no real authority, and ordinary monks

were not formally attached to any one monastery. These and many other explanatory details are

carefully presented as the discussion proceeds.31 But the end result of this process is a

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kind of paradox. On the one hand, we have been given the historian’s dream—a remarkably rich,

detailed, and precise account of Buddhist life and culture in early centuries after Gautama; on the

other, we have (one could almost say) the sociologist’s nightmare—an economic, social, cultural,

and religious portrait of early Buddhism so carefully shaded, specific, and detailed that any attempt

to place it in a category, any effort to bring it under some general sociological pattern or draw from

it an analogy capable of explaining some religious community of another time or place, seems

futile. Weber’s cabinet of ideal-types does offer a useful set of tools to classify and compare, but

their applicability to specific historical events is limited. The historian’s task, certainly, is to explain

particulars, to trace events or actions to a convergence of causes and conditions that are wholly

specific to one time, place, and circumstance. Social science, by Weber’s own account, is not

history. Like natural science, it seeks theoretical constructs that have some kind of general

applicability to most (if not all) reasonably comparable cases. In his actual practice, however,

Weber seems unable to deliver this general applicability. Despite his best efforts to establish it as a

general science, Weber’s sociology, as he applies it, wears the look of good history rather than

genuine social science. It is useful, instructive, illuminating, and original, but it is not general, or

generally applicable, in the way that Weber the scientific sociologist presumably would want it to

be.

Present-day theorists working in Weber’s lineage do offer responses to these complaints, but here

we must leave them aside, with an invitation to further debate at another time in another place.

Whatever the residual misgivings critics may harbor, Weber’s contribution to the theory of religion

is most impressive. The keys to his achievement are to be found in the great range of his learning

and interests; in the precision of his concepts and subtlety of his analyses; in the firmness of his

resistance to reductionist functionalism as represented by Freud, Durkheim, and Marx; and, most

emphatically, in his keen appreciation of the deep complexity involved in the task of explaining

religious behavior.

Notes

1. Clifford Geertz, “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture,” in The

Interpretation of Culture: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973), p. 5.

2. A brief but detailed factual account of these early years and education is provided in Dirk Käsler,

Max Weber: An Introduction to His Life and Work, tr. Philippa Hurd (Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 1988), pp. 1–25.

3. Descriptions and discussions of these early studies can be found in Reinhard Bendix, Max

Weber: An Intellectual Portrait, 2nd ed., rev. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), pp.

13–48.

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4. Her richly anecdotal but also rather formal and protective memoir is Marianne (Schnitger)

Weber, Max Weber: A Biography, tr. Harry Zohn (London: John Wiley & Sons, 1975).

5. A noteworthy (if also controversial) attempt to provide a “psychohistorical” account of Weber’s

life and thought that pivots on his emotional collapse is Arthur Mitzman’s The Iron Cage (New

York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970).

6. English translations of these essays can be found in two collections: Edward A. Shils and Henry

A. Finch, Max Weber on the Methodology of the Social Sciences (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1949),

and Max Weber, Roscher and Knies: The Logical Problems of Historical Economics, ed. and tr.

Guy Oakes (New York: Free Press, 1975) A clear and very instructive recent study of Weber’s

ideas on method is found in Sven Eliaeson, Max Weber’s Methodologies: Interpretation and

Critique (Cambridge, England: Polity Press, 2002).

7. Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, ed. and tr. Guenther

Roth, Claus Wittich et al., 2 vols. (New York: Bedminster Press, 1968), 1: 24–25.

8. Fritz Ringer, Max Weber: An Intellectual Biography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

2004), p. 100.

9. On this issue, see especially the analysis of W. G. Runciman, A Critique of Max Weber’s

Philosophy of Social Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), pp. 33–78.

10. On this early sociological research for the Union, see Bendix, Max Weber, pp. 13–48.

11. This point is part of an important revisionist assessment of Weber’s achievement by Wolfgang

Schluchter, Rationalism, Religion, and Domination: A Weberian Perspective, tr. Neil Solomon

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). He argues that the center of Weber’s lifelong

interests is not to be found in Economy and Society, as most have thought, but in the unfinished

multivolume “Economic Ethic of the World Religions.”

12. The English translation of this study was first published in 1930 by Harvard sociologist Talcott

Parsons, who worked not with the original articles but with a revised German version that included

an introduction and other materials Weber added later. This revised edition was published in

German with other works by Weber’s wife, Marianne, after his death. See Talcott Parsons,

“Translator’s Preface,” in Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, tr. Talcott

Parsons (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1958), pp. ix–xi.

13. On the composition and publication of the Sociology of Religion, as well as its inclusion in

Economy and Society, see Sam Whimster, “Translator’s Note on Weber’s Economic Ethics of the

World Religions,” Max Weber Studies 3.1 (2002): 80 and n. 1; Max Weber, Economy and Society:

An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, ed. Günter Roth and Claus Wittich, 2 vols. (New York:

Bedminster Press, 1968), “Introduction,” pp. lix–lx, xciv–xcv.

14. Max Weber, Sociology of Religion, tr. Ephraim Fischoff (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963), p. 46.

15. Weber, Sociology of Religion, p. 60.

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16. Weber, Sociology of Religion, pp. 80, 82.

17. Weber, Sociology of Religion, p. 125.

18. Weber, Sociology of Religion, p. 120.

19. Weber, Sociology of Religion, p. 155.

20. Weber, Sociology of Religion, pp. 164–65.

21. They are found in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. and tr. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright

Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946) under the titles “The Social Psychology of the

World Religions,” pp. 267–301, and “Religious Rejections of the World and Their Directions,” pp.

323–59. There is a good recent analysis of the first of these in Whimster, “Translator’s Note,” pp.

75–98. The second is in part a more elaborated discussion of the asceticism-mysticism typology

discussed on pp. 172–73.

22. Gerth and Mills, From Max Weber, p. 267.

23. Weber, The Religion of China, tr. Hans Gerth (Glencoe, Illinois: The Free Press, 1951).

24. Weber, The Religion of India, tr. Hans Gerth and Don Martindale (Glencoe, Illinois: The Free

Press, 1958).

25. Weber, Ancient Judaism, tr. Hans Gerth and Don Martindale (Glencoe, Illinois: The Free Press,

1952).

26. Weber, Protestant Ethic, p. 27.

27. On this, again, see Schluchter, Rationalism, Religion, and Domination.

28. Weber, Sociology of Religion, pp. 56, 57.

29. Weber, Sociology of Religion, pp. 56, 57.

30. Weber, The Religion of India, p. 206.

31. Weber, The Religion of India, pp. 204–30.

Suggestions for Further Reading

Andreski, Stanislav. Max Weber’s Insights and Errors. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984.

A short, highly substantive analysis filled with penetrating observations on all aspects of Weber’s

thinking.

Bendix, Reinhard. Max Weber. 2nd ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978. A full-

length intellectual biography in English, widely read and cited by scholars in America.

Collins, Randall. Max Weber: A Skeleton Key. Beverly Hills, California: Sage Publications, 1986.

Useful as a very brief introduction to the whole of Weber’s life and scholarly career.

Eliaeson, Sven. Max Weber’s Methodologies. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002. A recent, thorough,

and clear assessment of Weber’s difficult writings on sociological method.

Freund, Julien. The Sociology of Max Weber. New York: Pantheon Books, 1968. An earlier study,

but lucidly written; one of the most readable of all introductions to Weber.

Honigsheim, Paul. On Max Weber. Translated by Joan Rytina. New York: Free Press, 1968. A

fascinating personal memoir by a student of Weber who knew him

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personally, rich with insightful anecdotes illuminating Weber’s life and intellectual associations.

Käsler, Dirk. Max Weber: An Introduction to His Life and Work. Translated by Philippa Hurd.

Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. An English translation of a thoroughly researched

newer German study; difficult in places, but important.

Kivisto, Peter, and William H. Swatos, Jr. Max Weber: A Bio-Bibliography. New York: Greenwood

Press, 1988. A comprehensive annotated guide to the entire literature on Max Weber in English;

contains nearly 1,000 entries. Indispensable for non-German readers.

Lehman, Hartmut, and Guenther Roth, eds. Weber’s Protestant Ethic: Origins, Evidence, Contexts.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Essays by a group of international experts

addressing multiple aspects of the “Weber thesis” controversy.

Max Weber Studies. Sheffield, England: Academic Press, 2002–. A new journal offering careful

studies, notes, and book reviews on all aspects of Weber’s life and career.

Mitzman, Arthur. The Iron Cage: An Historical Interpretation of Max Weber. New York: Alfred

Knopf, 1970. A provocative “psycho-history,” which seeks to understand Weber’s life in terms of

the tensions arising from his family relationships, his marital arrangement, and the effects of his

nervous collapse.

Mommsen, Wolfgang. Max Weber and German Politics: 1890–1920. Translated by M. S.

Steinberg. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. An important revisionist study by a major

German historian who centers on Weber’s politics and German nationalism.

Ringer, Fritz. Max Weber: An Intellectual Portrait. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.

The most recent account of Weber’s life and ideas in English, written by an accomplished historian

of universities and intellectual life in pre–World War I Germany.

Runciman, W. G. A Critique of Max Weber’s Philosophy of Social Science. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1972. A difficult but tightly reasoned critical analysis of Weber’s essays on

methodology.

Schluchter, Wolfgang. Rationalism, Religion, and Domination: A Weberian Perspective. Translated

by Neil Solomon. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989. A major reinterpretation of

Weber’s complete intellectual project, shifting emphasis from his work on economy and society to

his comparative studies of civilizations and world religions.

Turner, Stephen, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Weber. Cambridge, England: Cambridge

University Press, 2000. More than a dozen current essays on specific dimensions of Weber’s work

by leading authorities on his life and thought.

Weber, Marianne. Max Weber: A Biography. Translated by Harry Zohn. New York: John Wiley &

Sons, 1975. A long, rich, informative but also protective account of Weber’s life and thought,

written by his wife and published six years after his death.

Weber, Max. Ancient Judaism. Translated by Hans Gerth and Don Martindale. Glencoe, Illinois:

The Free Press, 1952.

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Weber, Max. Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology. Edited and translated by

Guenther Roth, Claus Wittich, et al., 2 vols. New York: Bedminster Press, 1968.

Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Translated by Talcott Parsons. New

York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1958.

Weber, Max. The Religion of China. Translated by Hans Gerth. Glencoe, Illinois: The Free Press,

1951.

Weber, Max. The Religion of India. Translated by Hans Gerth and Don Martindale. Glencoe,

Illinois: The Free Press, 1958.

Weber, Max. Sociology of Religion. Translated by Ephraim Fischoff. Boston: Beacon Press, 1963.

Wrong, Dennis, ed. Max Weber. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1970. Short, highly

informative essays on specific Weberian concepts contributed by

leading international authorities and complemented by the editor’s informative, wide-ranging

introduction.

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6

The Reality of the Sacred:

Mircea Eliade

My duty is to show the grandeur, sometimes naive, sometimes monstrous and tragic, of archaic

modes of being.

Mircea Eliade, Journal III: 1970–19781

For Max Weber, explanation is a kind of integration. Every human enterprise— past or present,

social or individual—presents itself to us as a meeting place of multiple causes and effects. In social

actions, this web of ideas, motives, conditions, and contexts is seamless. So whatever it is that we

wish to explain—a religious ritual, a political event, a cultural or social trend—we cannot privilege

one cause (or kind of cause) to the exclusion of all others. Religious behavior is undoubtedly

affected by economic conditions, but we cannot simply reduce all of religion only to economics, as

Marx contends. Religious belief clearly meets certain psychological and social needs, as Freud and

Durkheim maintain, but again, we cannot trace all belief in God only to neurosis, any more than we

can reduce all religious practice only to social commitments. Clearly, these underlying conditions

and circumstances are important, but so are human ideas, beliefs, and intentions. No one type of

causation can tell the whole story; each can tell only some of it.

Assuming this is so, perhaps we can go further. If it is true, as Weber claims, that ideas and beliefs

matter in framing explanations, perhaps they are actually what matters most. Perhaps religious

beliefs themselves are the “real and underlying” forces reductionists suppose they can find in

functional explanations. If a theorist like Marx can insist upon an exclusively economic explanation

of religion, can we not just as well advance an exclusively (or at least primarily) religious

explanation of religion? It is by no means absurd, after all, to suggest that the best way to explain

religion might just be the way religious people themselves explain it—by appealing first and

fundamentally to their own ideas, feelings, and beliefs. That, in essence, is the position taken by the

next of the

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theorists in our sequence, the influential Romanian (and later American) student of world religions

Mircea Eliade.

A genuinely multicultural scholar who spoke and wrote in several European languages, Eliade was

born and educated in Romania, studied and taught in Western Europe, and completed his career in

the United States. Although he had an array of intellectual interests and was also a talented writer of

fiction, he chose to devote his life to the comparative study of religion, a field which, in keeping

with European practice, he preferred to call “the history of religions.” As a young man he studied

for a time in India, then carried on further research at home in Romania and elsewhere in Europe.

For a time he held a university position in France. In the 1950s he moved to the United States,

where, as a professor at the University of Chicago, he played a pivotal role promoting the study of

religion in American universities. From the outset, Eliade developed his ideas in direct opposition to

reductionist theories, which in his view seriously misunderstood the role of religion in human life.

He advocated what he called a “humanistic” approach, and throughout his long career as a scholar

he held steadfastly to the thesis that religion must always be explained “on its own terms.” His

theory thus deserves our attention, not just on its own merits, but because it goes beyond Weber,

issuing an even bolder challenge to all reductionist rivals.

Background

Mircea Eliade was born in Bucharest on March 9, 1907, the son of an officer in the Romanian army.

As a boy he loved quiet places, science, stories, and writing. In his autobiography he reports how at

the age of eighteen he celebrated with friends the appearance of his one-hundredth published

article!2 Already at this young age, he was hired by a newspaper to write feature stories, opinion

columns, and book reviews. Also among his recollections is a memorable incident from early

childhood. He tells how one day at home, on entering an unused room of the house, he was startled

by sunlight filtering through green curtains in a way that gave the entire space an unearthly

emerald-golden glow. Dazzled and entranced, he felt as if he had been transported into an utterly

different, transcendent world. Later, in words identical to those he used in his accounts of religious

experience, he chose to describe his memory of this event as a profound “nostalgia”—a longing for

a beautiful space of otherworldly perfection.3 This theme of otherworldly ideals was to run through

his education as well. At the University of Bucharest and in Italy, he studied the mystical Platonist

thinkers of the Italian Renaissance. While doing this work, he discovered Hindu thought, with its

stress on spiritual union with the Supreme

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Soul beyond the world. Soon he was setting off for India to study with the noted sage and scholar

Surendranath Dasgupta. Arriving late in the year of 1928, Eliade enrolled at the University of

Calcutta and worked with Dasgupta in his home. On a somewhat less spiritual plane, he also began

an affair with his mentor’s daughter. An unpleasant separation from his teacher followed, and he

moved on to train in yoga with a guru in the Himalayas.

Looking back in later years, Eliade declared that this stay in India had a decisive impact on his life.

In particular, he says, he discovered three things: that life can be changed by what he called

“sacramental” experience; that sym bols are the key to any truly spiritual life; and, perhaps most

important, that much could be learned from India’s countryside, where there was a broad and

powerful heritage of folk religion—a deeply felt form of spiritual life that had been in existence

since time beyond memory. Simple peasants saw things sacred and eternal in the mystery of

agriculture; they viewed the world as “an unbroken cycle of life, death, and rebirth.” In addition,

this “archaic religion,” as he came to call it, was a perspective on life that seemed to be shared

across much of the world. It could be found to stretch from the villages of India to the rural corners

of his own Romania, from Europe and Scandinavia to East Asia, the Americas, and other locales

where primitive peoples tilled the soil as ancestors had taught them for generations. In India, he

wrote, he first discovered “cosmic religious feeling.”4

In 1931, after three years away, Eliade returned to Romania to complete his military service. He

continued to write, and in 1933, at the young age of twenty-six, he became a national celebrity by

publishing a prize-winning novel, Maitreyi (in English, Bengal Night), based on his romance with

Dasgupta’s daughter. This decade was eventful in other respects as well. His doctoral dissertation,

Yoga: An Essay on the Origins of Indian Mystical Theology (1936), was published in French, the

first of several works on the subject. On receiving his degree, Eliade began teaching at Bucharest as

an assistant to the influential philosopher Nae Ionesco, who was also a leading figure in a Romanian

nationalist organization known as the Legion of the Archangel Michael. Some members of this

group, whose violent, terrorist wing was known as the Iron Guard, saw their role in Romania as

similar to that of the Nazi party in Germany, and they showed some sympathy for Hitler. Eliade had

other friends as well in this circle, though for his part he seems to have preferred intellectual life,

editing a journal, writing, and arranging discussions of current issues and movements in literature,

philosophy, and art. About any other activities he was always reluctant to speak, describing himself

as a largely nonpolitical person.

During the years of World War II, Eliade was assigned by the Romanian government to a

diplomatic post in Lisbon, Portugal. When the fighting ended,

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he chose not to return to Romania and took up residence in Paris, where he was given a chance to

teach at the École des Hautes Études. There he completed research on two important books that set

the course for most of his later study and thought. Patterns in Comparative Religion (1949)

explored the role of symbols in religion, while The Myth of the Eternal Return (1949) investigated

the concepts of history and sacred time, as well as the differences between archaic religion and

modern thought. Both books were published in French. As his work progressed, Eliade drew further

inspiration from Carl Jung, the notable Swiss psychologist and Freud’s former associate, whom he

met in 1950 at Ascona, Switzerland, during a regular gathering of European intellectuals known as

the Eranos Conference. Until Jung’s death in 1960, Eliade visited him regularly, finding in this aged

scholar not just a supporter of his ideas on archaic religion but a kind of living exhibit of them as

well. Of their discussions, he wrote, “I felt I was listening to a Chinese sage or an East European

peasant, still rooted in Earth Mother yet close to Heaven at the same time.”5

The 1950s brought the last important change in Eliade’s scholarly career. After lecturing at the

University of Chicago, he accepted a professorship in its Divinity School; in 1962, he became one

of its Distinguished Service Professors. His position at Chicago, where he remained for the rest of

his life, enabled him to serve as mentor to a full generation of talented younger scholars who were

inspired by his example, even when, as was common, they proceeded to disagree with his views. He

chose to measure his own impact by citing a simple statistic. When he came to Chicago, there were

three significant professorships in the history of religions in the United States; twenty years later,

there were thirty, half of which were occupied by his students. On the intellectual journey from

Romania to India to Chicago, Eliade traced a career —and life—that saw many opposites converge:

East and West, tradition and modernity, mysticism and rationality, contemplation and criticism. He

continued his research and writing in retirement until his death of a stroke on April 22, 1986.

Eliade’s Starting Point: Two Axioms

Before considering Eliade’s theory in its particulars, we ought to notice the foundation on which it

stands. Two ideas especially serve as its axioms, or cornerstones; they are fundamental to

everything else. The first, which has come into view already, is his strong stand on reductionism.

Eliade believes adamantly in the independence, or “autonomy,” of religion, which for him cannot

be explained as the mere by-product of some other reality. “A religious phenomenon,” he insists,

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will only be recognized as such if it is grasped at its own level, that is to say,

if it is studied as something religious. To try to grasp the essence of such a

phenomenon by means of physiology, psychology, sociology, economics, lin-

guistics, art, or any other study is false; it misses the one unique and irreducible

element in it—the element of the sacred.6

In the language of the natural sciences, we might rephrase this to say that religion is not to be

construed as a “dependent variable,” the thing that always changes in any test or experiment. If

anything, it must be taken as the constant or the independent variable; other aspects of life—social,

psychological, economic—must be understood to depend upon it. As an element in human

behavior, religion functions as a cause rather than an effect.

The second axiom applies to method. If religion is, in fact, something independent, something that

cannot be explained purely through psychology or sociology, how, then, should we explain it?

Eliade answers that we must combine two separate angles of vision. Because students of religion

mostly study the past, their subject in one sense is simply history. Accordingly, like other historians,

they gather and order evidence, make generalizations, criticize them, and try to find causes or

consequences. In this respect, their discipline certainly is the history of religions. At the same time,

the study of religion cannot be just historical either. We understand religion only when we also

apply what Eliade calls “phenomenology” (from the Greek phenomenon, “an appearance”): the

comparative study of things in the form, or appearance, they present to us. Any science is partly

phenomenology. We know the color red in the spectrum because its appearance differs from that of

blue or violet. By the same measure, one way we know a religious form—a belief or a ritual—is by

comparing it with others. Eliade thus emphatically endorses the famous words of the philosopher

Goethe on language, which Max Müller had already adopted for the study of religion: “He who

knows one knows none.” Without comparison there can be no real science.

It is true that historians are suspicious of comparisons, especially when they are used to find

similarities. The skeptical mind of the scholar is always inclined to think that no two things are ever

quite the same; every time, every place is different from the next. Eliade disagrees. He thinks that

certain general forms, certain broad patterns of phenomena in religion, can be taken outside of their

original time and place to be compared with others. Times and places may differ, he would say, but

concepts are often the same. The mathematician Euclid was an ancient Greek, a man of his time; yet

we can study his geometry as if he had taught it just yesterday. The man may be historical, but his

theorems are timeless. The same would seem to apply to the concepts of religion. The worship of

Zeus is in one sense tied to a single time and place

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in history; it is a belief and practice belonging to ancient Greek religion. But if we notice that in the

Greek stories of the gods Zeus has a wife, that he lives on Mt. Olympus, and that he is more

powerful than other divine beings, it is not hard to see in him certain typical features of the “sky

god” as he appears in many different times and places around the world. Zeus may belong only to

the Greeks, but the phenomenon of the sky god does not. And because such gods appear in many

cultures, we can learn a great deal by tracing their patterns—by noticing those features they share

with one another and those they do not.With these axioms in hand, we can now turn to the main

elements of Eliade’s program, although here, as we found with Marx and Freud, we will need help

from more than one of his books. Eliade tends in all of his writings to explore the same major ideas

and patterns, but in no one of them does he offer a sort of single, grand exhibit of his theory, as

Frazer or Durkheim does. In addition, as a writer of fiction, he often seems to prefer the ways of the

novelist even in his scholarly works; he gives long, winding commentaries rather than precise

arguments. That being so, we can do best with his theory by keeping to a few central themes and

examining each through the one book that explains it best. We shall explore in sequence each of the

following:

1. Eliade’s concept of religion. This is most clearly outlined in The Sacred and the Profane (1957),

perhaps the best short introduction to his theory written for the general reader.

2. His understanding of symbolism and myth. This is best observed in Patterns in Comparative

Religion (1949), the work that sets the agenda for most of his later works.

3. His explanation of time and history as seen by both archaic and modern cultures. These themes

are discussed at length in The Myth of the Eternal Return (1949), perhaps the most original and

challenging of all Eliade’s books.

Eliade’s Concept of Religion: The Sacred and the Profane

The Sacred and the Profane (1957) is a short introductory work which makes clear that in seeking

to understand religion, the first move we make is probably the most important one. Eliade explains

that the historian must step out of modern civilization, which, after all, accounts for only a small

and recent fraction of all those human beings who have ever lived, and enter the world of “archaic

man.” Archaic people are those who have lived in prehistoric times or who live today in tribal

societies and rural folk cultures, places where work

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in the world of nature—hunting, fishing, and farming—is the daily routine. What we find

everywhere among such peoples is a life lived on two decidedly different planes: that of the sacred

and that of the profane. The profane is the realm of the everyday business—of things ordinary,

random, and largely unimportant. The sacred is just the opposite. It is the sphere of the supernatural,

of things extraordinary, memorable, and momentous. While the profane is vanishing and fragile,

full of shadows, the sacred is eternal, full of substance and reality. The profane is the arena of

human affairs, which are changeable and often chaotic; the sacred is the sphere of order and

perfection, the home of the ancestors, heroes, and gods. Wherever we look among archaic peoples,

religion starts from this fundamental separation.

For readers with a good memory, the first impression made by these words is likely to be one of

déjà vu. Eliade here seems to be repeating the very thing we heard from Durkheim concerning the

sacred and the profane. Nor should that come as a surprise. Eliade was educated in the French

intellectual tradition, where, largely because of Durkheim, this way of defining religion came to be

widely accepted. A closer look, however, will show that in fact there is a difference. As we saw

before, when Durkheim speaks of the sacred and profane, he is always thinking of society and its

needs. The sacred for him is the social—that which matters to the clan; the profane is the

opposite—that which matters only to the individual. For Durkheim, sacred symbols and rituals seem

to speak of the supernatural, but all of that is just the surface appearance of things. The purpose of

symbols is simply to make people aware of their social duties by symbolizing the clan as their totem

god. When, by contrast, Eliade speaks of the sacred, this clan worship clearly is not what he has in

mind. In his view, the concern of religion is with the supernatural, plain and simple; it centers on

the sacred in and of itself, not on the sacred merely as a way of depicting the social. Though he uses

Durkheim’s language and agrees that the term covers more than just personal gods, Eliade’s view of

religion is closer to that of Tylor and Frazer, who conceive of it first and foremost as belief in a

realm of supernatural beings.

Instead of Durkheim, Eliade asks us to think of another scholar as his guide: the German theologian

and historian of religion Rudolf Otto. In 1916 Otto published on this very subject a famous book

entitled The Idea of the Holy (in German, Das Heilige), where he too uses the concept of the sacred

but not as applying to society or social needs. He writes instead about a distinct and dramatic kind

of individual human experience. At one time or another in their lives, he writes, most people

encounter something truly extraordinary and overwhelming. They feel gripped by a reality that is

“wholly other” than themselves—something mysterious, awesome, powerful, and beautiful. That is

an experience of “the holy,” an encounter with the sacred. Using Latin terms,

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Otto calls it the mysterium which is both tremendum et fascinans, a mysterious something that both

frightens and fascinates at the same time. Another name he gives it is the sense of “the numinous”

(from the Latin numen: a “spirit” or “divine being”). When people have such an encounter, he says,

they invariably feel that they themselves are nothing, no more than “dust and ashes” as the Bible

puts it, while the sacred seems just the opposite: something overpoweringly great, substantial,

sublime, and truly real. Otto believes this aweinducing sense of the numinous is unique and

irreducible. It is unlike any other encounter with things beautiful or terrible, though they may

vaguely resemble it. In this thrilling experience that is unlike any other lies the emotional core of all

that we call religion.

Eliade’s concept of the sacred bears a strong resemblance to Otto’s. In an encounter with the sacred,

he says, people feel in touch with something otherworldly in character; they feel they have brushed

against a reality unlike all others they know, a dimension of existence that is alarmingly powerful,

strangely different, surpassingly real and enduring.

For primitives as for the man of all pre-modern societies, the sacred is equiv-

alent to a power, and in the last analysis, to reality. The sacred is saturated

with being. Sacred power means reality and at the same time enduringness and

efficacity…. Thus it is easy to understand that religious man deeply desires to

be, to participate in reality, to be saturated with power.7

Readers of a Judeo-Christian or a Muslim background naturally suppose that Eliade is referring here

to an encounter with God, but his idea of the sacred is much wider than that. It could mean the

realm of many gods, of the ancestors or immortals, or of what some Hindus call “Brahman,” the

Supreme Spirit beyond all personality. However the sacred is conceived, the role of religion is to

promote contact with it, to bring a person “out of his worldly Universe or historical situation, and

project him into a Universe different in quality, an entirely different world, transcendent and holy.”8

Further, the sense of the sacred is not an occasional thing, found only among certain people or at

certain times. In the secular societies of modern Western civilization, people display it in surprising,

unconscious ways, such as through dreams, nostalgias, and works of the imagination. Yet however

disguised, suppressed, or obscured, the intuition of the sacred remains a permanent feature of

human thought and activity. No human being is without it. When eyes are open to notice it, it can be

seen anywhere.

Among archaic peoples, Eliade continues, this idea of the sacred is more than just common; it is

regarded as absolutely crucial to their existence, shaping virtually every aspect of their lives. They

refer to it even when they think of something so basic as the time of day or the place where they

live.

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When the ancient Greeks thought of their daily routine, they turned naturally to the myth of

Phoebus Apollo, the god who each day drove the chariot of the sun across the sky. When they rose

at dawn, they assumed that the light would be with them because Phoebus was just then harnessing

his horses; they did their work while he traveled, knowing from him how much of the light had

passed and how much still remained; and when, at the end of the journey, he rested his horses, they

too could sleep and restore their strength for the next day’s dawn. While to us such mythological

tales are merely entertaining, to archaic peoples they mean a great deal more. They provide the very

framework within which they think, the values which they admire, and the models—Eliade

sometimes calls them “archetypes”—they choose to follow whenever they act. Such sacred patterns

govern all sorts of archaic activity, from the grand and ceremonial to the ordinary and even trivial.

In some ancient cultures, which had myths similar to the story of Phoebus, every chariot made for

human use had to be built on the model of the chariot driven by the god of the sun. In others, similar

rules applied. Among the early peoples in Scandinavia, for example, boats for day-to-day fishing

and transport could not be made in just any way; they had to follow a sacred model, that of the ship

on which the dead were placed for their funerals. Such rules existed because archaic peoples

insisted on the precept that the ways of the gods are best; divine models showed how life ought to

be lived.

In The Sacred and the Profane, Eliade draws upon numerous examples from a wide range of

cultures to show just how seriously such traditional peoples take the business of following the

patterns set by the gods. The authority of the sacred controls all. When they set up their villages, for

example, archaic clans do not choose just any convenient place to build. A village must be founded

at a place where there has been a “hierophany” (from the Greek hieros and phainein: “sacred

appearance”). Once it has been confirmed that this particular place has, in fact, been visited by the

sacred, perhaps in the form of a god or ancestor, the location receives a ritual blessing that

establishes it as the center point of a “world” (in Greek a cosmos: “place of order”). Around this

center, the community can then be built in such a way as to show it has a definite divinely ordered

structure; it is a sacred system. Because this constructed society extends outward from a ceremonial

center point, it stands clearly separate from the disorder of the desert, forest, or open plain that

normally surrounds it. Instead of a chaos, the village, built according to the blueprint given by the

gods, is a cosmos; in a world of danger and disorder, it is a scene of security and design.

In many cultures, this sacred center is marked with a pole, pillar, or some other vertical object that

plunges into the ground and rises up to the sky to join the three great regions of the universe:

heaven, earth, and the underworld. That is because this point, which may also be marked by a tree

or even a

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mountain, is regarded not just as the center of the village but as an axis mundi (in Latin:

“centerpost” and “world”); it is the very axle, the central pillar, around which the whole world is

seen to turn. If we remember the stories of the Bible, the tale of Jacob’s ladder clearly fits into this

pattern. The biblical patriarch Jacob, tired from his travels, chooses to sleep outdoors and lays down

a stone as a pillow. During the night, he dreams of a ladder extending from the place where he

sleeps all the way to heaven, while angels rise up and come down upon it. When he wakes, he is

afraid, for he has here encountered the sacred. “How dreadful is this place!” he says, “This is none

but the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.”9 Significantly, he then sets his nightstone

vertical, turning it from pillow to pillar, so that it will mirror the angelic ladder. For Jacob, this

special place is the axis mundi, the point where one finds the sacred pole that connects heaven to

earth, the holy place where the separate worlds of the sacred and the profane are joined.

In medieval Christianity and early Islam, in ancient Babylon and modern Java, among the Indians

of the American Northwest and the villages of Vedic India—almost everywhere we want to look—

we find this recurring pattern, says Eliade. Life orients itself around a sacred center, a vertical

“symbol of ascent” that links heaven to earth, the sacred to the profane. Around such sacred poles

or atop sacred mountains, great temples have always been built. And from them also the

surrounding world is divided into its different sectors, usually the four directions of the compass.

Just as the universe itself starts from a center and spreads out to four horizons, so, in Bali and parts

of Asia, villages must be built at a crossroads, so that they can reflect the four main sectors of the

world. In some tribal cultures, the ceremonial house in the village center is supported by four

columns, which represent the four main directions, while the roof of the house symbolizes the vault

of heaven, and an opening squarely in the center allows prayers to rise along the vertical sacred pole

directly to the gods.

In all of these shapes and ceremonies, which naturally vary in minor ways from one culture to the

next, the role of divine patterns, or models, is plainly evident. Eliade explains that the archaic

village, temple, or even house must be an imago mundi, a mirror image of the entire world as it was

first fashioned by divine action. When such places are built, the process of construction is just as

important as the structures themselves. Things must not only be a reflection of the sacred; they must

come into being in a sacred manner as well. And that is, again, because human structures and

activities must trace out the very process by which the gods brought the world itself into existence.

Archaic peoples thus place great significance on “cosmogonic” myths—their stories of how the

world first came into being, whether by divine command or by some struggle in which the gods

overcome chaos and defeat an evil

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monster. Whenever something new is begun—when a temple is built, a child is born, or new phase

of life is entered—that process must be a repetition of the creation, a reenactment of the original

deeds and struggles by which the gods brought the world into being. Eliade offers a fascinating

instance of this imitation of the gods from ancient India, where, before building a house, an

astronomer shows the masons exactly where they must lay the first stone: “This spot is supposed to

lie above the snake that supports the world. The master mason sharpens a stake and drives it into the

ground … in order to fix the snake’s head.” There the foundation stone is laid, at the point now

regarded as the exact center of the world. The act of piercing the snake is profoundly sacred because

it repeats the very work of the gods Indra and Soma as described in the sacred texts. These gods

were the first to strike the snake, who “symbolizes chaos, the formless, the unmanifested.” By

destroying it, they brought into existence an orderly world where once there was only a formless

confusion.10 So, when the bome is built, the work must exactly mirror the work of the gods.

Elsewhere, Eliade points to other examples of the same process. In many myths, for instance, the

dragon fills the role played by the snake in India; he is the great ocean monster, the symbol of

watery chaos, who rises from the dark fluid depths and must be subdued by a hero or a god before

an ordered system of nature, as well as a human civilization, can come into existence.

In Eliade’s view, this intense effort to imitate the gods is part of an even deeper desire that archaic

peoples have. They wish not only to mirror the realm of the sacred but somehow actually to be in it,

to live among the gods. A full discussion of this issue must be deferred till we come to The Myth of

the Eternal Return; for the moment we can simply note Eliade’s comment that all archaic peoples

have a sense of a “fall,” of a great tragic loss in human history. By this he does not mean just the

fall of humanity into sin as told in the biblical story of Adam and Eve, who disobeyed the command

of God and were punished accordingly. Archaic people know a fall in the sense of a profound

separation. They hold that from the first moment human beings become aware of their situation in

the world, they are seized by a feeling of absence, a sense of great distance from the place where

they ought to be and truly want to be—the realm of the sacred. Their most characteristic attitude, in

Eliade’s words, is a deep “nostalgia for Paradise,” a longing to be brought close to the gods, a desire

to return to the realm of the supernatural.

Archaic Religion: Symbol and Myth

It is one thing to sense or seek the realm of the sacred; it is quite another to find and describe it.

Although archaic peoples, like any others, attempt to express

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their longings and beliefs, the very nature of the sacred, which is something utterly different from

the profane, would seem to make this impossible. How can one describe that which is “wholly

other” than anything in normal experience? The answer, Eliade explains, lies in indirect expression:

The language of the sacred is to be found in symbols and in myth.

Symbols, we know, are rooted in the principle of likeness, or analogy. Certain things have a quality,

a shape, a character that strikes us as similar to something else. In the realm of religious experience,

certain things are seen to resemble or suggest the sacred; they give a clue to the supernatural. Myths

are also symbolic, but in a slightly more complicated way; they are symbols put into a narrative

form. A myth is not just one image or sign; it is a sequence of images put into the shape of a story.

It tells a tale of the gods, of the ancestors or heroes, and their world of the supernatural. That seems

clear enough. But just what is it that this indirect language actually tells us about the sacred? It is

said to be something real, but what kind of reality is it? What are its qualities, its characteristics?

These are questions that Eliade spent most of his life trying to answer in his many studies of

symbolism and myth. Our plan allows space to examine only the most important of these works,

Patterns in Comparative Religion, which was first published in 1949, while Eliade was working in

France.

Patterns is a book designed to explain and explore religious symbols on a very wide scale. It

examines the nature of symbolic thinking, showing what symbols are, how they work, and why

archaic peoples, especially, make use of them. It also shows, with the help of many examples, just

how systems of symbol and myth tend to follow certain constant, recurring patterns throughout the

world. Eliade contends that regardless of what locations we choose or where we turn in history,

certain common symbols, myths, and rituals keep turning up over and over again.

In observing how symbols work, says Eliade, the first thing to notice is that just about anything we

encounter in the world can serve as a symbol. Most of the things that make up ordinary life are

profane; they are just themselves, nothing more. But at the right moment anything profane can be

transformed into something more than itself—a marker or sign of that which is sacred. A tool, an

animal, a river, a raging fire, a star or stone, a cave, a blossoming flower, or a human being—

anything can become a sign of the sacred if people so discover or decide. Once recognized as such,

moreover, all symbolic objects acquire a double character: though in one sense they remain what

they always were, they also become something new, something other than themselves. In the shrine

known as Kaaba, for example, Muslims revere a sacred black stone. Though on one level that object

remains to this day just a stone, no faithful follower of Muhammad would ever recognize it as that.

From the instant of

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hierophany—from the moment, that is, when Muslims saw it as something touched by the sacred—

this profane object was transformed; it became no longer a mere stone but a holy object, an

imposing package, we might say, that carries the sacred within. Eliade calls this infusion of the

supernatural into natural objects the “dialectic of the sacred.” Though concrete, limited in shape,

and perhaps even movable from place to place, a sacred stone can—through another of its qualities,

its solidity—convey to the eyes of a believer features of the sacred that are precisely the opposite of

its limitations; it can suggest, as the sacred stone of the Kaaba does for Muslims, a God who is

immovable and beyond change, the almighty, infinite, and absolute Creator of the world. In

common logic, of course, such a combination of opposites strikes us as irrational. If the profane is

truly opposed to the sacred, how can it become its precise opposite? How can the natural also be the

supernatural? It can do so, says Eliade, because in such matters human reason is not in charge of the

transaction. Symbol and myth make their appeal to the imagination, which often thrives on the idea

of contradiction. They grip the complete person, the emotions, the will, and even subconscious

aspects of personality. And just as in the personality all sorts of colliding impulses are joined, just

as in dreams and fantasies all sorts of illogical things can happen, so in religious experience

opposites like the sacred and profane do converge. In an intuitive burst of discovery, the religious

imagination sees things otherwise ordinary and profane as more than themselves and turns them

into the sacred. The natural becomes supernatural.

It is interesting to notice that, like Max Müller, Eliade finds the main supplier of materials for

symbolism and myth to be the world of nature. To the archaic mind, the physical world is a

veritable storehouse of prospective images, clues, signs, and analogies. All that we see in the world

is part of a grand framework which the gods brought into existence at the beginning of time, and

everywhere in it, the sacred waits to shine through. In all of its beauty and ferocity, its complexity,

mystery, and variety, the natural world is continually opening windows to disclose the different

aspects of the supernatural— what Eliade calls “the modalities of the sacred.” This, by the way, is

what makes traditional cultures so rich in imaginative figures and symbols and their world so

wonderfully alive with folklore and legend, with creation accounts, flood stories, and epic tales of

heroes, monsters, and gods. As collections of symbols put in narrative form, all of these can be

broadly associated with myth. They are tales of the sacred, stories that bring the supernatural world

of divine life closer to the natural world of humanity.

Over the centuries, of course, human beings have generated countless new myths, symbols, and

variations of both. No scholar could hope to find them all. Nor is it necessary to try. Eliade thinks a

great deal can be learned just

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from the major symbolic patterns and systems, which are the only ones he chooses to trace out in

detail. It will repay our effort to notice a few of them.

Sky Symbolism: Sky Gods and Others

One of the most common elements of archaic cultures is belief in sky gods, divinities whose

character is suggested by the very nature of the wide heaven above the earth. The sky conveys a

sense of transcendence, of a span raised high above us, something infinite, sovereign, and eternal—

full of authority and reality. Fittingly, the sky god is often imagined in just this fashion. Like the

god Iho among the Maoris, he is “raised up”; like Olorun among the African Yoruba tribes, he is

“owner of the sky”; like the great god Ahura-Mazda in early Iran, he is the giver of all laws and

enforcer of moral order in the world. Because the heavens are high, these gods are, in fact, often

portrayed as almost too elevated and distant, too far away to care about mere human beings.

Australian myths tell the story of the withdrawal of the sky god, while in other primitive societies as

well, the god of the sky seems so far beyond human reach that other religious conceptions must

come in to replace him. Often these new conceptions are gods of the rain and storm, deities who are

more concrete and personal, more directly involved in human life because they specialize in one

task. Here the early Hindu god Rudra is an example. Virile and violent, surging with life, he was for

the villagers of ancient India the bringer of rain as well as the source of sexual energy. He and

others like him had female partners or entered sacred marriages; they stood at the center of lavish

ceremonies, which often included bloody sacrifices and orgies. Their imagery is exceedingly

powerful and their influence extremely widespread. In fact, says Eliade, in words that remind us of

Frazer, “this structure made up of the rainy sky, bull, and Great Goddess was one of the elements

that united all the protohistoric religions of Europe.”11

It is not hard to guess why such a change from sky to storm gods may have taken place. Eliade

explains that the appeal of rain and fertility gods was closely linked to one of the most important

events in all of early civilization —the discovery of agriculture. Plowing the soil, planting seeds,

and harvesting crops—all of these activities brought a new pattern of life, and with it an occasion

for new hierophanies and symbols of different kinds. In an agrarian world, the great “fecundators,”

the gods of storm and sex, conveyed the sacred with greater power and more vivid appearance than

the distant god of the sky.

“Son” gods, like Dionysos in Greece and Osiris in Egypt, also made their appearance in the age of

agriculture. Like storm gods, they were dynamic, but not in quite the same way. Their role was

rather to suffer and die. The

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so-called mystery religions, which were enormously popular in the ancient Mediterranean world,

centered especially on these deities, which in name were vegetation gods but figured more

prominently as dramatic, divine saviors. In these gods especially, Eliade discerns an important

psychological aspect of religious symbols. They not only tell us about the world and the sacred but

also show “the continuity between the structures of human existence and cosmic structures.”12 Their

myths do not just reflect the cycles of life and death in nature; they reenact as well the great

personal struggle that takes place in the life of each human individual: the drama of birth, life, and

death as well as the hope of rebirth or redemption. Eliade tells us that no symbol manages to bring

divine life so near to human as the figure of the savior-god, the divinity who “even shared

mankind’s sufferings, died and rose from the dead to redeem them.” Precisely because of his

marked “humanity,” this type of god plays a crucial role in the history of religion.13

Sun and Moon

Eliade notes that sun worship, which some earlier theorists (especially Max Müller) thought the

center of all mythology, is in fact very rare.14 Much more prominent and widespread are myths and

symbols associated with the everchanging moon. The moon moves through cycles; it grows,

becomes full, then for a time completely disappears. Its phases connect readily to other events, such

as the ebb and flow of the ocean tides, the coming and going of the rains, and, through these, to the

growth of plants and the fertility of the earth. Since it always returns to its beginnings, the moon

furnishes the archetypal image of ceaseless renewal. Eliade states that its dominant theme is “one of

rhythm carried out by a succession of contraries, of ‘becoming’ through a succession of opposing

modalities. It is a becoming … that cannot take place without drama.”15

Lunar symbolism also shows a remarkable power of expansion; it keeps reaching out to make new

connections. Besides waters and vegetation, the moon is often linked to death, the last phase of life;

to the snake, which regenerates itself by shedding its skin; and to woman, whose power to renew

life by giving birth arises from the “lunar” phases of the menstrual cycle. In fact, “the intuition of

the moon as the measure of rhythms, as the source of energy, of life, and of rebirth, has woven a

sort of web between the various levels of the universe, producing parallels, similarities, and unities

among vastly differing kinds of phenomena.”16 Because of a long linkage that takes the form moon-

rain-fertility-woman-serpent-death-periodic regeneration, a person can tap into the lunar network at

any one of its points. A simple rain ritual, for instance, or a serpent charm worn on the wrist, can

engage this entire system

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of cosmic associations, all of which play upon the fundamental theme of opposites that alternate and

converge.

Like the “son” gods, the moon has both a cosmic and a personal dimension. On the one level, it is

treasured “in what it reveals of the sacred, that is, in the power centred in it, in the inexhaustible life

and reality that it manifests.”17 On the other, it reminds us psychologically of the double nature of

our human condition: rooted in the realm of the profane, the place of shadows and death, we

nonetheless long for the sacred, the sphere of those things real and undying. In earlier ages, amid

disease and death, the hopes of archaic peoples for their own personal renewal and immortality

“gained confirmation from the fact of there being always a new moon.”18 The moon is in one sense

a display of dualisms: light and dark, full and empty, old and new, birth and death, male and female.

Yet by its alternations and changes, it also suggests the over coming of all dualisms, a key theme

also in many symbolisms of the sacred. Eliade here points to myths of androgyny, which suggest

that the first human beings, who lived close to the gods, were neither male nor female but a unity of

both sexes. This theme, moreover, is just one in a whole family of myths of reintegration. Common

throughout the human race, these stories express a powerful hope for the end of all opposites, the

dissolution of all separations, the return to the original unity of the sacred.

Water and Stones

In addition to great symbols like those of the sky and moon, the world of archaic peoples is rich as

well in lesser signs and images, which often link up with the more dominant ones. Water, for

example, everywhere expresses the shapeless, unformed nature of things before they were ordered

into a world by the gods. It starts the process of renewal. Neither the world nor the human self can

be reborn until each has first returned to chaos by plunging into the watery depths, thence to emerge

as a new creation. In ritual initiations and in most rites of purification, water is the agent that

cleanses and erases all, taking us back to the unformed, the primeval, the “clean slate,” where a new

beginning can be made.

The symbolism of stones, by contrast, suggests the opposite. Unlike water, the substance of stones

is hard, rugged, and unchanging. To the primitive person, “rock shows … something that transcends

the precariousness of his humanity; an absolute mode of being. Its strength, its motionlessness, its

size … indicate the presence of something that fascinates, terrifies, attracts, and threatens, all at

once.”19 If we put these words into the Latin fascinans and tremendum, we actually have Rudolf

Otto’s very words for the sacred. A normal stone would hardly attract our notice; a sacred stone

generates awe and fear.

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Other Symbols: Earth and Fertility, Vegetation and Agriculture

The symbolisms of life, growth, and fertility have played a very large role in the religion of archaic

peoples, both before and after the dawn of agriculture. Of the many patterns Eliade considers at

length in this category, we can notice just a few.

A very early image is that of the earth as sacred mother, the source of all living things. The sacred

marriage of the divine sky father and earth mother is found in many mythologies, from the South

Pacific to Africa, the Mediterranean, and the Americas. The sky fertilizes the earth with rain, and

the earth produces grains and grass. With the coming of agriculture and closer human involvement

in cultivation of plants and grains, the earlier symbol of the earth as mother is often overlaid by that

of the great goddess—once again, a more dynamic, emotional divinity who, like the “son” gods

considered above, personally lives out the fate of the crops in her own life cycle of birth, sexual

encounter, fertility, and death.

More widespread than that of either the earth mother or the goddess, however, is the symbolism of

trees. Sacred trees can be found “in the history of every religion, in popular tradition the world over,

in primitive metaphysics and mysticism, to say nothing of iconography and popular art.”20 Some,

like the cosmic tree Yggdrasil in Norse mythology, combine the symbolism of the axis mundi, the

world’s centerpost, with a second theme, the tree as the sacred source of life. As great vertical

objects that are also alive, such trees represent “the very life of the entire world as it endlessly

renews itself.” Further, since trees live a long time, the life within them is considered inexhaustible;

they become a focus of human hopes for immortality. Frazer, we should remember, found the soul,

the source of life, to be closely associated with both the mistletoe and tree worship in northern

Europe. And in the many ancient myths of a tree of life, we read of a hero who must pass a test,

much as Adam and Eve faced and failed the divine test of the forbidden tree in the Garden of Eden.

By defeating a dragon or resisting temptation, the great man wins the prize of immortality. Trees

tell us that the sacred is the fount of all life, the one true reality, and to those who can pass the test,

the giver of immortality.

Eliade reminds us that to appreciate vegetation myths we must recall how primitive people lived in

ongoing fear that at some point the powers of the natural world would weaken and begin to run out.

For the archaic mind, all things—whether plant, animal, or human—are energized through “the

same closed circuit of the substance of life,” which passes from one level or creature to another.21

When planted, the grains that die at harvest give their life to the next year’s crop. When harvested,

ground into flour, and baked, they transfer their life to humanity, for they then become the force of

life in the bread that

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is eaten at meals. This tight connection shows why in so many legends we read of a murdered

human being who is changed into a tree, or of plants that spring directly from the blood of a slain

god or hero. When the power of life leaves one living thing, it must move to another; when it runs

down, it must be recharged. Always there is an ebb and flow, a fading and renewal. For archaic

peoples, “the real is not only what is indefinitely the same, but also what becomes in organic but

cyclic forms.”22 The sacred is not only durable like a stone; it is charged with life, like a plant. It is a

power that perpetually renews things, not only in physical terms, as food renews the body, but

spiritually as well. The personal, human message of vegetation symbolism is the promise of life

eternal. As a plant is reborn after it dies, so a woman or man may be one day redeemed from death

and reborn to immortality. From this, Eliade notes, we can also see the importance of ritual activity

in coming into contact with the sacred. Rites of initiation, purification, and redemption are activities

which, by their very gestures and procedures, recreate the great origin of all renewals— the creation

of the world itself as it arises out of chaos and is given its form through the powerful commands or

mighty struggles of the gods.

The Structure and Character of Symbols

From fertility and vegetation Eliade turns next to the symbolisms of space and of time. The first of

these we have already noted above, and the second will come our way shortly. So we can pass over

them here to observe something else. Although most of the discussion in Patterns is taken up with

individual symbols and myths from around the world, Eliade takes time along the way to consider

two broad features of all symbolic thinking. One is the structural, or systemlike, character of most

symbolism and mythology; the other is the matter of ranking symbols—placing some above others

in value.

Throughout his discussion, Eliade explains that symbols and myths rarely exist in isolation. It is

their nature always to be part of larger symbol systems; they “connect up” with other images, or

other myths, to form a pattern. The thought world of archaic peoples is thus filled with associations,

linkages, and repetitions that keep extending the sense of the sacred, if possible, to almost every

dimension of life—from the noblest occasions and ceremonies to the simplest daily task. A pair of

examples may help to illustrate this process. In a first appearance of the sacred—an original

hierophany—a religious person finds, let us say, a vision of the one true God in the sun, as did the

Egyptian Pharaoh Akhenaton. (Freud, we may recall, thought Akhenaton was the religious genius

who inspired Jewish monotheism.) Soon the round solar disk is declared the symbol of the divine. It

is carved into walls, worn as jewelry, and required on flags at palace ceremonies. These gestures

naturally expand

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the occasions for thinking about the sun; they “sacralize” places, people, and events quite beyond

the occasion or place of the first sacred encounter. In time, still more connections may be made. The

sun is personified, and the stories of the sun and its adventures come to expression in myth.

Akhenaton or his followers may claim that because it “defeats” the night, the sun is the lord of

battle; or they may see in each morning’s sunrise a sign of personal renewal and immortality.

Because of its warmth, the sun can be tied to the return of vegetation each spring; it can be

connected with plants, like the sunflower, or substances, like gold, that resemble its shape or

possess its color. With each of these new connections, the sacred reaches out to capture a new

aspect of life.

Another vivid example of this systematic extension is the cycle of lunar myths and symbols noted

above. From its center in the phases of the moon, this symbolic system continually spreads out its

net to convey a sense of the sacred to many other dimensions of life: the waters and rains, fertility

and woman, serpents and human redemption, even shells and spirals and bolts of lightning. There

may be no formal rule of logic that compels people to connect lunar phases with spiral shells; yet

intuitively and imaginatively, there is a certain “logic of symbols” that makes the connections.

Symbols always lead naturally to other symbols and to myths in such a way as to create a

framework, a world that is a complete, connected system, rather than a chaotic jumble.

In addition to noticing their systemic character, a second general issue Eliade alludes to is that of

comparing symbols and myths. Are some symbols perhaps better in character than others? Can we

rank myths on a scale of value? And if so, what standard would we use? In Patterns, he does not

address these questions as directly as one would like, but it is plain that he does in fact feel some

images and myths to be superior to others. The main standard he applies seems to be that of their

scale or size. The “bigger” the symbol, the more complete and universal it is, the better it conveys

the true nature of the sacred. Here again, a specific example may help. If the people of a primitive

village encounter something supernatural in a nearby tree, that can be called a hierophany; the tree

manifests the sacred. If, in the course of time, however, the council of elders should rethink this

symbolism and decide that this sacred tree is in fact the cosmic tree, the center of the world, that too

is a hierophany, but of a higher order. It is a better representation of the sacred because it is wider in

extent, grander in scale than the original sacred tree. By means of the elders’ decision, then, the first

sighting of the sacred in the local tree is “revalorized” (as Eliade likes to say) into a far more

impressive image of the sacred than it originally was. The new symbolism of the world tree

surpasses the old symbol of the simple village hierophany.

Again, one type of hierophany is a theophany (from the Greek theos, “deity”): the appearance of a

god. A theophany can occur in something as simple as

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a stone. At the same time, drawing on his own tradition of Romanian Orthodoxy, Eliade points out

that Christianity finds God to be incarnate in the man Jesus of Nazareth. This human theophany is

superior to the stone theophany, not—as missionaries once would have said—because Christianity

is true and other religions false, but because a human person, possessing intelligence and emotions,

is by nature a richer, fuller being than an animal or stone. Thus, as a symbol, the figure of Christ,

the God-man, captures more of the fullness and reality of the sacred. In addition, Christians make

universal claims about the incarnation; they say that never has there been or will there be a

theophany as final or as world-embracing. Christ is to other theophanies as the great cosmic tree is

to the village tree—a wider, grander, and consequently better image of the divine. As the human

form of the all-powerful Creator, he better conveys the full extent of the sacred than, say, the Greek

god Pan, who is pictured only as god of the pastures and forests.

These concepts of replacement and “revalorization” of symbols play an important role in Eliade’s

theory. They show that he is interested in examining not just the timeless forms of religion but also

their historical changes. In his view, human beings throughout time have been continually at work

restating their perceptions of the sacred in original ways, fashioning new myths, discovering fresh

symbols, and rearranging them into wider or different systems. Accordingly, the mission of the

“history” of religions is first to discover symbols, myths, rituals, and their systems, then to trace

them through the human past as they have been changed and interchanged from one age or place to

the next. After that—and just as importantly—the more phenomenological side enters in. The

historian seeks to compare and contrast these materials to determine their different levels and types

of significance as carriers of the sacred. And he observes how, in different ages and places,

symbols, myths, and rituals are perpetually subject to change. Through history, they are constantly

being created, revised, discarded, and created again. Were he an evolutionary thinker, we might find

Eliade claiming that all these changes are improvements, that each new myth or symbol is

progressively better than the last. But that is not really his view. He believes the natural logic of

symbols and myths pushes them always to become more universal, to shed the particulars of a

single time and place and approximate ever more closely to a universal archetype, as when a local

goddess acquires more and more of the features of the archetypal great goddess of fertility. In the

actual circumstances of human experience, symbols decay and degenerate as well. History presents

occasions when cultures move counter to the logic of the sacred—say, by losing or corrupting a

great world creation myth or by replacing more universal symbols with less universal ones, as when

the smaller storm god replaces the earlier sovereign sky god. When that happens, certain new

dimensions of the sacred

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may be discovered, but others are lost. Then again, while that is happening in one culture, in

another the figure of the sky god might reappear. The natural tendency of symbols and myths is to

grow, to spread out their significance in new associations; but in different times and places there are

also variations that “flow simply from differences in the mythological creativity of the various

societies, or even from a chance of history.”23

Throughout the ages, then, archaic and other peoples have enjoyed a certain freedom of imagination

in selecting sacred symbols and myths. Eliade notes that there seems scarcely a single natural object

that has not at some time or other become a symbol or figured in a myth. And yet, for all of this

creativity, religious imagery has never been purely random or chaotic. The point of Patterns is to

show just the opposite: that regardless of place, time, or culture, archaic peoples have shown a

remarkable constancy in returning to the same types of symbol, the same themes in their myths, and

the same universalizing logic in both. The closer we look at the historical specifies of religion, the

more clearly we see its ever-recurring, ever-expanding patterns.

History and Sacred Time

It should be clear from all of this that to the scholar inquiring about the symbolism of the sacred, the

human historical record is of key importance. It shows us how different people have recognized the

sacred through, say, a holy mountain in China or a holy river like the Ganges in India. Archaic

believers themselves, however, find their situation in history to be quite another matter. For them,

the events of ordinary profane life, the daily round of labor and struggle, are things they desperately

wish to escape. They would rather be out of history and in the perfect realm of the sacred. Eliade’s

term for this desire, as we noted earlier, is the “nostalgia for Paradise.” It is a concept central to his

theory. Though he refers to it in many places, he explains it best in the third of the three texts we

have taken as our guides. This is The Myth of the Eternal Return: Or, Cosmos and History, which

he first published along with Patterns in 1949.

Eliade considered this book one of his most significant, and even his critics have tended to agree. In

it, he sets out a strong thesis: that the one theme which dominates the thought of all archaic peoples

is the drive to abolish history—all of history—and return to that point beyond time when the world

began. The desire to go back to beginnings, he argues, is the deepest longing, the most insistent and

heartfelt ache in the soul of all archaic peoples. A constant theme of archaic ritual and myth is the

wish “to live in the world as it came from the Creator’s hands, fresh, pure, and strong.”24 This is

why, as we

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noted earlier, myths of creation play such a central role in so many archaic societies. It is also why

so many rituals are associated with acts of creation. We have not said much about rituals so far, but

Eliade does find them important, especially in association with creation accounts. Usually they

involve a reenactment of what the gods did in illo tempore (Latin for “in that time”)—at the

moment when the world came into being. Every New Year’s festival, every myth of rebirth or

reintegration, every rite of initiation is a return to beginnings, an opportunity to start the world over

again. When, in archaic festivals of the New Year, a scapegoat is sent out and purifications are done

to rid the community of demons, diseases, and sins, this is not just a rite of transition from one year

to the next but “also the abolition of the past year and of past time.” It is an attempt “to restore—if

only momentarily—mythical and primordial time, ‘pure’ time, the time of the ‘instant’ of the

Creation.”25 In India, coronations follow patterns set at the beginning of the world. And in sacrifices

as well, “there is an implicit abolition of profane time, of duration, of ‘history.’”26

Eliade thinks it important to notice the motives that inspire this myth of return. He explains that

archaic peoples, like all others, are deeply affected not only by the mysteries of suffering and death

but also by concerns about living without any purpose or meaning. They long for significance,

permanence, beauty, and perfection as well as escape from their sorrows. Life’s minor irritations

and inconveniences are not the problem; they can be borne by anyone. But the idea that the human

adventure as a whole might be merely a pointless exercise, an empty spectacle with death as its

end—that is a prospect no archaic people can endure. Eliade calls this experience “the terror of

history,” and it explains why people have been drawn so powerfully to myth, especially the myth of

eternal return. Because ordinary life is not significant, because real meaning can never be found

within history, archaic peoples choose instead to take their stand outside of it. In the face of life’s

drab, empty routine and daily irritations, they seek to overcome all in a defiant gesture of denial;

through symbol and myth, they reach back to the world’s primal state of perfection, to a moment

when life starts over from its origin, full of promise and hope. “The primitive, by conferring a cyclic

direction upon time, annuls its irreversibility. Everything begins over again at its commencement

every instant.”27

This “terror of history” has been felt not only by archaic peoples but also by the great civilizations

of the ancient world, where a cyclical view of time was predominant. In India, for example, the

oldest teachings held that human beings were destined to live without hope in a world that passed

through immense cycles of decay and decline until it was finally destroyed and again remade. The

reaction to this deeply pessimistic view eventually came in the form of the classic Eastern version

of eternal return—the doctrine of rebirth,

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or reincarnation. We find it chiefly in the famous Hindu Upanishads as well as in the teachings of

Gautama the Buddha and Mahavira, the founder of Jainism. Seeing humanity as hopelessly

enslaved by these endless cycles of nature, these teachers insisted that a path could be found to a

purely spiritual release from history’s triviality and terrors. They announced that the soul, or true

self, could free itself from the body, which is its main tie to history, by struggling patiently through

a long series of rebirths until finally a purely spiritual escape was achieved. In different ways, all

offered meaning through the doctrine of moksha, the soul’s final release from nature and history.

Elsewhere, the doctrine of return appeared in other forms. Among certain Greeks and the followers

of the great prophet Zoroaster in ancient Persia, it was expressed in the belief that human history

consists only of a single cycle, which has come out of eternity and will one day end forever in fire

or some other great catastrophe. Against this backdrop of finality, Zoroaster’s followers found

liberation by way of the last judgment and the reward of Heaven that came to all who had remained

faithful to Ahura-Mazda, the great god of goodness and light. The pattern of these religions is thus

quite clear. Though culturally more advanced than archaic peoples, the great civilizations of the

Mediterranean and Near East, no less than those of India and Southeast Asia, faced the very same

problem of history and labored just as strenuously to chart a path of escape.

The Revolt against Archaic Religion: Judaism and Christianity

Almost everywhere in archaic and civilized ancient cultures, then, the problem of history was

central, and the solution, the escape, was found in some form of the myth of eternal return. The

pattern is so widespread, says Eliade, that only in one place—among the Hebrews of ancient

Palestine—can something different be found. It is in ancient Israel that, for the first time on the

world scene, a new religious outlook makes its appearance. While not entirely rejecting the idea of a

mythical return to beginnings, Judaism proclaims that the sacred can be found in history as well as

outside of it. With this, the whole equation of archaic religion is significantly altered. In Judaism,

and later in Christianity, which derives from it, the idea of the pointless cycles of nature is pushed

into the background, while human events come to center stage, where they take shape along the line

of a meaningful story—a history—with the sacred, in the form of the God of Israel, a participant in

its scenes. In place of endless, purposeless world cycles, Judaism asserts a meaningful sequence of

sacred historical events. This striking innovation was fashioned chiefly by the great prophets of

Israel—Amos, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and others. When disasters fell on their people, they presented

these troubles not as miseries to be escaped but as punishments to be endured—in history—because

they came from the

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very hand of God. In their oracles and speeches, says Eliade, the prophets affirmed the idea

that historical events have a value in themselves, insofar as they are determined by the will of God.

This God of the Jewish people is no longer an Oriental divinity, creator of archetypal gestures, but a

personality who ceaselessly intervenes in history, who reveals his will through events (invasions,

sieges, battles, and so on). Historical facts thus become “situations” of man in respect to God, and

as such they acquire a religious value that nothing had previously been able to confer upon them.28

That the encounter of a people with this personal God of history is something quite new can be seen

also from the famous biblical story of the patriarch Abraham, who prepares to kill his son as an

offering to God. If Judaism were an archaic religion, says Eliade, this fearsome act would be an

instance of human sacrifice, a killing of the firstborn to renew the sacred power of life in the gods.

Within Judaism, however, the event has a quite different character. Abraham’s encounter is a very

personal transaction in history with a God who asks him for his son simply as a sign of his faith.

This God does not need sacrifices to renew his divine powers (and indeed he does spare Isaac, the

son), but what he does require from his people is a heart loyal enough to make that ultimate

sacrifice if asked. Christianity inherits this same perspective. The sequence of events that make up

the life and death of Jesus forms a singular and historic instance, a decisive moment which,

occurring once only, serves as the basis for a personal relationship of forgiveness and trust between

Christian believers and their God. In celebrating the life, crucifixion, and resurrection of Christ, the

Christian faithful do not engage in a ritual of seasonal rebirth; they do not act out an eternal return

to beginnings. They remember a specific and final historical event, one that requires from them an

equally singular and final decision of personal faith.

Of course, this new historical religion did not win an instant victory over the older, archaic

attitudes, which are deeply rooted in human psychology. The tremendous attraction that fertility

religions like the cult of Baal had for ordinary people in ancient Israel is proof of this in the case of

Judaism. In Christian cultures also, archaic seasonal ceremonies of rebirth do survive and blend in

with the more purely historical elements. And both traditions have been routinely susceptible to

messianic movements. These passionate groups, which expect a return of God’s chosen one, a

catastrophe at the world’s end, and the coming of a perfect world, bear again the marks of the

archaic mind; they tolerate history, but only because they believe “that, one day or another, it will

cease.”29 In consequence, both sides of the Judeo-Christian tradition

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have unfolded amid some considerable tension and compromise. They have found the sacred both

within history and outside of it.

The Revolt against All Religion: Modern Historicism

The Judeo-Christian turn to historical religion is for Eliade an event of momentous importance. It

marks the beginning of a shift away from archaic attitudes, a first revolt against the myth of eternal

return. Yet it is not the world’s only great religious transformation. A second revolution, one of

equal or even greater proportions, has only recently begun to take shape in the very center of

Western civilization, especially modern Europe and America. Over the last few centuries, Eliade

explains, we have once again seen something quite new in human history: the wide acceptance of

philosophies that deny the existence and value of the sacred altogether. Advocates of these views

claim that it makes no difference where we locate the sacred, whether in history or beyond it, for the

simple reason that human beings do not need it. The truth, they say, is that there are no gods, there

are no “sacred archetypes” which can show us how to live or what ultimate purpose to live for. We

must learn to live without the sacred altogether. There is no such thing.

We can put aside for a moment the question of whether this modern, totally unsacred view of the

world is good or bad. Eliade’s first concern is to show where it came from. He thinks, interestingly,

that the door to this second revolution was in fact opened by the very same shift of ideas that

created the first: the coming of Judeo-Christian historical religion. This seems puzzling at first sight,

but for Eliade the sequence is clear. It comes into focus the moment we place everything within the

original context of archaic religion and the myth of eternal return. We must remember that to the

first archaic peoples, the world of nature was of pivotal importance. It was able at any instant to

come alive with the sacred. Symbolism clothed it in the supernatural; legend and myth sang of the

gods behind the storm and rain. Clues and hints of the sacred could be found in a tree, a stone, or

the path of a bird in flight. Nature was the garment of the divine. This was not to be the case,

however, in Judaism and Christianity. The prophets of Israel and writers of the New Testament

pushed nature into the background and brought history up to the front of the stage. The seasons,

storms, and trees were “desacralized,” for the God of Israel and of Christian faith chose to reveal

himself chiefly in the twists and turns of dramatic human events—in the Hebrews’ escape from

Egypt, in the battle of Jericho, or in the birth, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. To be sure,

nature still had a part to play, but only in a supporting role. Israel’s prophets still saw the great wind

that parted the Red Sea as a sign of the sacred, but—in the light of their historical perspective—they

read it quite differently. For them

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it disclosed the divine not because it was a wondrous natural event—as archaic peoples would have

said—but because it contributed to God’s purposes. It delivered his people from the hands of their

enemies.

As Eliade sees it, this change of religious sensibility is a significant one, not only on its own terms,

but because of the momentous consequences that follow from it. For gradually, and almost

imperceptibly, this original move from religions of nature to religions of history laid the

groundwork in the present era for a further shift—from the newer religions of history to

philosophies of history and society that discard religion altogether. Through the long passage of

centuries, and especially in Western civilization, the removal of the divine from nature has slowly

opened the way for entire societies to adopt a style of thought that only a few isolated individuals

ever seriously considered until the coming of the modern era. That style is secularity: the removal

of all reference to the sacred from human thought and action. Eliade explains that in stating the

logic behind their move entirely away from religion, secular thinkers can argue as follows: If

biblical religions like Judaism and Christianity made one great change in the world’s religious

consciousness, does that not license us to make another if we should so wish? If the prophets felt

they had a right to take the sacred out of nature and find it only in history, why can we not follow

their own example and dismiss it from nature and history alike? There is, in short, nothing

indispensable about the idea of the sacred. For Eliade, this is the form of reasoning at work in nearly

all of the secular, nonreligious philosophies that have come upon the world with such powerful

appeal during the last three centuries of modern times. We might call them the unwelcome

stepchildren of Judaism and Christianity.

Eliade describes these secular creeds as forms of “historicism,” a type of thought that recognizes

only things ordinary and profane while denying any reference at all to things supernatural and

sacred. Historicists hold that if we want significance, if we want some sense of a larger purpose in

life, we obviously cannot find it in the archaic way—by escaping history through some doctrine of

eternal return. But neither can we find it in the Judeo-Christian way—by claiming that there is in

history some great plan or purpose of God. We can find it only in ourselves.

Examples of this historicist thinking can be found in any number of modern systems and thinkers,

among them several we have already met in our chapters. Eliade notes the developmentalism of the

German philosopher Hegel, the communism of Karl Marx, and the perspectives of twentiethcentury

fascism and existentialism. Modern capitalism might be included as well. What all of these systems

share is the fundamental belief that if human beings want meaning and significance in their lives,

they must create it entirely on their own—in the profane realm of history and without assistance

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from ideas about the sacred. This can be done in different ways, of course. Fascists and Marxists

believe that even without gods or the sacred, history is still “going somewhere.” It will end in the

triumph of a nation or race or in the victory of the proletariat. Existentialists tend to think that

history as a whole has no central purpose; it is “going nowhere,” so only the private lives and

choices of individuals matter. The capitalist entrepreneur may make a similar choice by finding

purpose only in money and other material goods. For such people, only personal freedom or

achievement matters, and they can even argue that they are better off than archaic peoples, who do

not have freedom because their lives must always conform to patterns provided by the gods.

In the contemporary world, these nonreligious philosophies have been extremely attractive, winning

followers not only in Western civilization but around the world. Eliade, however, has serious doubts

about all of them. Is it really the case, he asks, that they offer a greater degree of meaning and

purpose than archaic religion or Judeo-Christian faith? Is the modern fascist, who must obey every

command of his leader, really more free than the archaic woman, performing her household ritual of

renewal? Does the life of the communist, bound absolutely to the cause of the party, really have

more significance than that of the archaic tribesman or medieval monk? Is the existentialist

philosopher, whose prized individual freedom could be destroyed in a moment if a brutal army were

to march through his streets, truly more content and fulfilled than the archaic villager who

celebrates the seasonal feast of fertility, hoping thereby to bring life to his crops each spring?

The Return of Archaic Religion

Despite his misgivings, Eliade does not carry on an extended argument with these modern

philosophies. He merely voices his doubts as to whether they can ever be truly satisfying to the

human personality. And he tries, by contrast, to show how, in hidden ways, archaic thinking has

persisted right up to the present day. He notes, for example, that creative artists like T. S. Eliot and

James Joyce display in their works a remarkable attachment to forms of the myth of eternal return.

Athletic events, the great public spectacles of our time, show similar affinities; they generate intense

emotions and center on a single “concentrated” game time, very much like the sacred moments of

primitive ritual. The dramas of theater, television, and film play out life in a compressed interval of

“sacred” time that is wholly different from normal hours and days. The images and stories of

popular culture resemble archaic myths, creating character archetypes on which ordinary people

pattern their lives: “the political or the military hero, the hapless lover; or the cynic, the nihilist, the

melancholy poet.” These and others play for us the same roles filled for archaic

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people by the heroes and gods of myth. Even the modern habit of reading can be seen as a

replacement for the oral traditions remembered and recited by primitive peoples; it mirrors the

archaic desire to create an “escape time,” free from the pressures of daily life.

Finally and quite apart from its disguised modern versions, Eliade observes that even in its original

form, the archaic nostalgia for paradise has never fully disappeared. Christianity, we have seen, is

committed to finding the sacred only in history. Yet among the Christian peasants of Romania and

other central European lands, one finds a remarkable blend in which archaic habits of mind virtually

sweep aside the residue of history in the church’s creeds. In this “cosmic Christianity,” it is

accepted that Jesus of Nazareth was a man in history, but that fact virtually disappears from view

once it is taken up into the peasants’ image of Christ as the great lord of nature, the eternal divinity

who in sacred folklore continues to visit his people on the earth, just as the high god does in the

myths of other archaic cultures. Significantly, the liturgies and ceremonies of this cosmic

Christianity tend to celebrate not the historical Jesus, but the eternal Christ who renews the powers

of nature and returns humanity to the time of beginnings. To its followers, this archaic faith offers a

depth of meaning that the historical perspective inherited from Judaism can never provide.

It is worth noticing that this cosmic Christianity with which Eliade concludes The Eternal Return

bears a marked resemblance to the peasant religion he found so strongly appealing when he first

encountered it in the villages of India as a young man. He is always careful not to make any open

endorsements, but it seems clear that in the end his own strong sympathies lie nearest to this sort of

cosmic folk religion and the satisfactions offered by the archaic frame of mind.

Analysis

Eliade pursues a program of inquiry that dissents, more sharply than that of Weber, from the

functionalist reductionism of Freud, Durkheim, and Marx. At the same time, his interest in

comparisons on a global scale and his commitment to explaining religion “on its own terms” recall

the intellectualist perspective of the Victorian anthropologists Tylor and Frazer. Three of the

elements in this theoretical agenda call for more particular comment.

1. Critique of Reductionism

From the outset Eliade announces his strong dissent from the reductionist approaches favored in his

day and still attractive in ours. In opposition to Freud,

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Durkheim, and Marx, he strongly asserts the independence of religious ideas and activities. Like

Weber, he accepts that psychology, society, economics, and other forces have their effects on

religion, but he refuses to see their influence as determining or even dominant. Religion, he insists,

can be understood only if we try to see it from the standpoint of the believer. Like Roman law,

which we can grasp only through Roman values, or Egyptian architecture, which we must see

through Egyptian eyes, religious behaviors, ideas, and institutions must be seen in the light of the

religious perspective, the view of the sacred, that inspires them. In the case of archaic peoples

especially, clearly it is not profane life—social, economic, or otherwise—that controls the sacred; it

is the sacred that controls and shapes every aspect of the profane.

2. Global Comparativism

Another main feature of Eliade’s theory is its broad and ambitious design. He is of course not the

only theorist to try to assemble data from a wide variety of sources, places, and times, but he is

certainly more ambitious in this regard than most. He takes very seriously his double mission to be

both a good historian and a good phenomenologist, and he strives for a genuinely comprehensive

understanding of religion in all its forms. The research that lies behind his analyses is far reaching

in extent, The three central texts on which we have focused here represent just a part of his labors,

which include not only his several books on Indian yoga but studies as well of Australian religions,

European folk traditions, and Asian shamans, or prophet-mystics. Other works focus on alchemy,

initiation rituals, and witchcraft; on dreams, myths, and the occult; on symbolism in the arts; on

methods of studying religion, and on a variety of other related topics. Even in retirement, he

continued to work on a full-scale History of Religious Ideas, which was almost complete at his

death. This wideranging global interest has won Eliade admirers, especially among some of his

students in America. Skeptical critics, on the other hand, wonder whether the problem is that it is far

too global, and perhaps therefore superficial. In tones that hardly suggest a compliment, some see

his approach as “Frazerian,” as a retreat to the doubtful aims and methods of The Golden Bough.30

3. Contemporary Philosophical Engagement

Third and last, as we saw in his comments on what he calls modern “historicist” philosophies,

Eliade does not regard himself as a detached scholar, solely interested in the obscure customs of

people from distant ages. Though his professional life is taken up with scholarship, ancient texts,

and archaic ideas, he sees himself as very much a man engaged with the ideas and

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culture of his own time, a theorist who draws from his knowledge of the past to address important

philosophical issues that confront society in the present. He is quite frank, for example, in arguing

that scholars and intellectuals of the modern era have greatly underestimated the psychological

merits of archaic thinking, which has sustained human endeavors for so much of the history of

civilization. While, again, some greatly admire this “philosophical” side of Eliade, there are others

who say it damages any claim he may have to scientific objectivity. There is undoubtedly more to

be said on this matter, but as it stands, it has already taken us into the final task of this chapter,

which is to turn from Eliade’s theory itself to the main complaints of his critics.

Critique

Eliade’s theory of religion is greatly admired in some quarters and strongly contested in others. This