10/30/2024 – What is "religion"? Phenomenology of Religion

Have you ever wondered what is “religion”? I’ve got your back because I’m a former community college professor of religion. We’re going to look at a number of lenses academic scholars of religion use to understand, interpret, and define religion, but… broken down into slightly easier-to-understand bits. Check this out. This is TenOnReligion.

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This is the fifth episode in a multi-episode series which I’m simply calling “What is Religion?” This is about understanding the academic field of religion including how it started and ways academic scholars of religion interpret, understand, and define religion. In the first four episodes we looked at some of the early stages of development, the anthropology of religion, the sociology of religion, and the psychology of religion. In this episode were going to get into the phenomenology of religion. In the final episode we’re going to talk about the comparison of religion. Today, we’re going to take a look at the phenomenology of religion through the lenses of three important figures: Edmund Husserl, Mircea Eliade, and Ninian Smart. Let’s get into it.

If you don’t know what phenomenology is, don’t worry, it’s not as hard to grasp as you think it is. Phenomenology is simply the philosophical study of phenomena, or appearances. Basically, the way we experience things and the meanings things have in our experience. The main figure who started this as a major discipline was Edmund Husserl in early 20th century Germany. One of his main concepts was “intentionality,” or how our consciousness is directed toward, or becomes conscious of, something. Our consciousness moves forward through time in both active and passive forms of synthesis each combining information in our brain to create meaning in the world. In active synthesis, our consciousness is actively thinking and combining information. In the passive form, the thinking happens more in the background. For example, when one learns to drive a car, one is actively paying attention to the road, signs, traffic signals, and how the vehicle operates, but after a long time of experiencing the driving process, one does this with less effort and can simultaneously carry on a conversation with other passengers while driving and pay less attention to the actual driving process. A similar example would be learning how to play a musical instrument. As one progresses in ability, one increasingly plays naturally with the result of slowly becoming more aware of other things around them.

However, because time is central for both active and passive synthesis, it is temporally constructed. The temporal structure of consciousness implies other factors like history, community, and cultural norms. These are all necessary for us to constitute, or construct, the world as we understand it. Later in his career, Husserl refers to this as the Umwelt, or lifeworld, possibly related to Wittgenstein’s “form of life.” (Wittgenstein is another famous philosopher born a few decades after Husserl.) The Umwelt, which literally translated means “environing-world,” provides categories within a common language which make sense of, and conceive of, the environment and world around us. Gadamer, the father of philosophical hermeneutics, would later draw upon Husserl and refer to this as a “horizon” in his famous book Truth and Method. The lifeworld essentially provides a mechanism by which members of any given group structures the world into objects. Even though some of these are related to a larger group of general spatiotemporal concepts of what it means to be human, others are more local or parochial in character, like religion. The key concept is that the lifeworld is based on intersubjective experiences which themselves are also temporal in nature. Groups create concepts specific to their own environments. You can already see how important this is for religion. This becomes more of a shared phenomenology and demonstrates that Husserl rejects a modern Descartes-like internalist tradition of consciousness. (Remember Descartes with his famous saying, “I think, therefore I am”?) But, if all objects are always and necessarily transcendent to everyone, then how could a shared community of understanding exist? Wouldn’t we just all be in our own bubbles? Not so because through Husserl’s rendering of the temporal structure of consciousness, this did not become an issue. Through the intersubjective experiences of others, we collectively create language to describe such shared experiences. These linguistic inventions of the community develop a lifeworld temporally, that is, through time, by which any and all objects and experiences can be viewed as meaningful to everyone in the community. Much later this would be referred to as our worldview, perhaps a word you’re more familiar with. Now, phenomenology as a subdiscipline of philosophy gets way more technical, but we don’t have to go there right now. I just wanted to give you a more high-level view so we can understand why and how phenomenology is important to understanding the category of what we call “religion.”

Let’s get into a major scholar in the phenomenology of religion, Mircea Eliade. He was a huge figure in the mid-20th century focusing on the history of what people have sensed as religious and the resulting behavior. He assumed that the sacred was a pregiven dimension of human experience with reality, and then went on to systematically describe all the variations of sacred human experiences. Eliade used the word “hierophanies” a lot, which simply means manifestations of the sacred. Some are local like a particular tree or river, and some are more universal like the concept of a cosmic tree which is common among ancient civilizations worldwide. Eliade places a large importance on the contrast between the sacred and the profane, which are two modes of being in the world. For example, a sacred stone remains a stone, and in the profane realm, nothing distinguishes it from all other stones. But to those for whom the stone is sacred, the reality is transformed into a supernatural reality. It then becomes a way of entering into a relationship with the cosmos, and, as a sign of transcendent reality, it becomes a symbol which abandons its material limits. This is why Eliade is classified under phenomenology of religion, because the phenomenon, or appearance to the humans’ senses, changes the meaning of objects as religious. The object simultaneously becomes something else, yet it continues to remain itself. Interesting, yes?

Eliade was influenced by an important book written by Rudolf Otto in 1917 titled, The Idea of the Holy. In this book, Otto did not look at God or even religion, but rather sought to analyze the various ways people understand the religious experience. Thus, Eliade sought to describe using examples from many archaic, or pre-600 BCE, cultures and societies all over the globe. This included sacred spaces and religious architecture; sacred time and religious festivals; sacred forms in nature such as the sky, earth, and agriculture; and sacred forms of human existence such as the human body being a house for the cosmos. In all of these archaic societies myths emerged which narrated sacred histories. They became the paradigm, or model, by which the cosmos and society are periodically regenerated, such as a new moon, or a new year celebration. The continued repetition of a paradigmatic act shows something to be fixed and enduring as represented by the divine world. This “other world” represented a superhuman transcendent plane of absolute reality which provided to humans absolute values capable of guiding and giving meaning to human existence. Mircea Eliade was a great writer and his books are quite interesting to read, but you have to be somewhat familiar with the way religion was practiced a long time ago to fully appreciate all of what he’s communicating. And now on to the next figure in our episode today.

Passing away in 2001, Ninian Smart was an equally important scholar in the academic study of religion. He taught that religion must not be pursued in the abstract but always had to be tied back to the way religions manifest themselves. This is why he is a key person in the phenomenology of religion. For him, phenomenology is the attitude of informed empathy because it brings out what religious acts mean to the actors. Phenomenology of religion is cross-cultural which means we both need to be sensitive in what terminology we use in describing religion, and also that there should be no assumption of the priority of one’s own tradition as the norm. Thus, as just mentioned, the informed empathy for those who practice a different tradition from our own. But by far the lasting legacy that Ninian Smart has left us is his development of seven dimensions of religion, which he described in his textbook-like work, The World’s Religions, and later through a more expansive detailing in his 1998 work, Dimensions of the Sacred: An Anatomy of the World’s Beliefs. I’m going to go through these, but as I do, think about his model of analyzing religion. Are these good categories? Is it too complex? Is something left out? We can talk about this later. Or maybe not really because I’m just on a video… Okay, that was nerdy.

Okay, these are Ninian Smart’s seven dimensions of religion, or as he later termed them, seven dimensions of the sacred, which he believed were categories people could use for the cross-cultural study of religion. First up, the doctrinal or philosophical dimension. This includes the philosophical framework for religions be it one of the many forms of theistic or non-theistic ways of interpreting religious worldviews. It also includes views of the universe, time and space, and other ideas such as concepts of the soul. For many traditions, all of the issues can become very complicated, but not all traditions, or sub-traditions emphasize the cerebral side of religion. There is more.

Second, the ritual dimension. A ritual in religion is simply a sacred action done by an individual or a group on a regular basis. This could be hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, or longer. It could be a regular mundane activity, but because it is done under the guise of religion or for a religious purpose, it becomes a sacred act. Religious rituals are of many kinds. Think meditation, prayer, pilgrimages, singing or chanting, baptisms, and many other forms of worship. Some of these might be rites of passage relating to conversion or other life events like marriage. Or something related to consecration or purification. As you can see, obviously there’s a lot of things going on in this category.

Third, the mythic or narrative dimension. But what is myth? Myths are stories and the idea of myth referring to something that was untrue came about in history when cultures clashed and “our” stories are true while “your” myths are not. But even though myths are stories, not all stories are necessarily myths. A myth is simply a story which has historical importance for a county, culture, or a religious group. Or, at least that’s the way Ninian Smart seems to use this term. In this mythic or narrative dimension, narratives are important to religions because they help to define groups, sacred entities, and sacred people in the tradition. Narratives can explain origins, show examples of how to live, and often provide authoritative teaching on any number of subjects. The one difficulty in this dimension is that many religious adherents mistake myths and narratives in their tradition for history. Religious narratives may contain historical content, but they themselves are not history because history is a more exact social science which is only demonstrated by evidence, the results of which are on a sliding scale of more or less probable. Religions are not like this. Narratives about the Prophet Muhammad, or Buddha, or Jesus, or Moses, or Krishna, and so forth are religious myths – again stories – whose main focus is their importance to establishing the tradition and not necessarily recording history in the way contemporary historians understand history. Okay, I hope you got all that. But the importance of the mythic or narrative dimension is to connect with the next dimension.

Fourth, the experiential and emotional dimension. Now this dimension also has a direct relation to the philosophical dimension because how one proceeds depends entirely on one’s view of the universe. For example, is the religious experience with an outside Other, like a god or gods? Or is the religious experience more mystical or contemplative experience of an inner non-Other? Or is it some combination of the two? It’s sort of like juxtaposing the philosophical principles of non-contradiction and identity. The principle of non-contradiction is A = non-A. The more I understand how I’m different from the Other, the more I understand myself. The principle of identity is A = A. The more I look deeply inside, the more I understand myself. The first tends to be more of a Western outlook and the second more of an Eastern outlook, but even that is probably stereotyping a little too much. Feelings and emotions are very much connected with religious adherents’ experience of religion because they connect people to the worship rituals and to the objects they worship as well as to the overall religious objectives or goals.

Fifth, the ethical and legal dimension. The first thing to mention here is that it is difficult to disentangle ethical requirements (what religions teach regarding how people should live their lives) from legal requirements (laws imposed by governments to regulate people’s behavior in society). The relationship between religion and government has a wide, varied, and complex history in many cultures. The Enlightenment and colonialism have altered the situation for many countries in the past 500 years. This dimension includes such things as dietary requirements, physical appearance and clothing, medical decisions, and sex or gender equality, among a large variety of other things relating to religious adherents’ behavior.

Sixth, the organization or social dimension. This dimension is about explaining the religious and spiritual leadership roles, and the social organizing or hierarchy of a tradition’s religious community. Think prophet, sage, guru, pastor, priest, imam, rabbi, monk, nun, hermit, theologian, teacher, shaman, and magician, and so on. Also, the development of the very labels we use to categorize religions – Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Confucianism, and many others. How did they develop and are they adequate?

Seventh and last, the material or artistic dimension. This dimension refers to objects representing the divine, architecture of religious places of worship, scriptures and other written materials, and art be it two-dimensional drawings and paintings or three-dimensional sculptures and statues. This dimension appeals directly to the human visual spectrum and so it doesn’t need a lot of explaining to understand what is included.

For Ninian Smart, the whole purpose of focusing on phenomenology of religion is to understand patterns of how religious individuals and groups have experienced religion. So, by identifying and comparing or contrasting traditions using these seven categories, or dimensions, one can gain a better understanding of what religions are and how they operate in people’s lives. Again, what do you think about this model of analyzing religion? Is it helpful? Or is it too complex? Either way it’s a popular method for people to understand religion better.

Today we were answering the question “What is religion?” through the lens of phenomenology using Edmund Husserl, Mircea Eliade, and Ninian Smart. So, what do you think about the phenomenology of religion? Which figure did you find the most interesting and why? Leave a comment below and let me know what you think. Next up, the comparison of religion. This is right in my wheelhouse so you know it’s going to be good. Until next time, stay curious. If you enjoyed this, support the channel in the link below as well as give me a Super Thanks. Please like and share this video and subscribe to this channel. This is TenOnReligion.