Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age by Robert Bellah (review)

In the first sentence of the preface to his study of Religion in Human Evolution Robert Bellah acknowledges that this ‘‘is a large book about a large subject’’ (ix). There are 606 pages of text, 106 pages of notes, and a 32-page index, along with a 16-page preface, all directed to understanding ‘‘what evolution as a whole means’’ (xiii). He insists that this involves getting us ‘‘into large issues, which almost inevitably become issues of ultimate meaning that overlap with religion’’ (xiii). Contrary to the pronouncements of atheist evolutionists, Bellah believes evolution leaves space for worlds of meaning and purpose to evolve, and his objective in this book is to determine ‘‘how religion creates those other worlds and how those worlds interact with the world of daily life (xvii). Thus he asks ‘‘what our deep past can tell us about the kind of life human beings have imagined was worth living’’ (xxiv) that is still relevant today. His answer is that many different forms of life worth living—beyond that of empirical everyday existence—emerged in human history, the best of which was finally (even if not fully) achieved in what Karl Jaspers called the Axial Age (800–200 bce). During this period, Bellah, following Jaspers, argues that human civilization achieved a philosophical vision of society based on a clear perception of Being and of higher than everyday truths (579). This vision, Plato’s theoria for example, Bellah maintains, provided an insight into reality that called—and still calls—‘‘the whole empirical world . . . into question’’ (591). Subsequent ages may have elaborated these ‘‘axial insights,’’ but, he argues, Homo sapiens has not outgrown them, and he insists that it is important to recognize this, because we are today in ‘‘a crisis of incoherence’’ and therefore need ‘‘to integrate in new ways the dimensions we have had since the axial age’’ (xix). To understand the role of ‘‘religion in human evolution,’’ or ‘‘religious evolution,’’ as Bellah variously refers to these historical developments, we must recognize that religion is embedded in a deep cosmological and biological history that provided Homo sapiens with distinctive physical, psychological, and cognitive capacities not fully shared by any other species.

This, in brief, is the essence of Bellah’s view of the nature and value of religion and its role in human society. Bellah, however, downplays the importance of argument in support of his view about the transcendent reality of religion as enacted in ritual and described in myth, claiming that he ‘‘cannot imagine making an argument about symbolic forms and their enactment without illustrating them’’ (xvii). Nevertheless, an implicit—but weak—argument in favour of that position, I suggest, can be found in chapters 1 and 2, the introduction to chapter 6, and the conclusion of the book. And it is a vague awareness of the impossibility of making his case for the existence of a transcendent ‘‘religious reality, that I think drives Bellah, in a Geertzian fashion, to seeking thick descriptions of the evolutionary phases in the emergence and evolution (development?) of religion in the hope that the reader might ‘‘actually experience what living in those worlds might be like’’ (xvii).

Much of the implicit argument in chapter 1, ‘‘Religion and Reality,’’ is given over to looking ‘‘at human development as the acquisition of a series of capacities, all of which have contributed to the formation of religion’’ (44) and is based on Alfred Schutz’s notion of ‘‘multiple realities’’ in which dreams, games, play, theatre, and religion, for example, create meaning for the individual and society through symbolic transcendence of the world of daily life. Such transcendence, he claims, can be experienced/represented in four ways: by unitive experience, enactive representation, symbolic representation, and conceptual representation. Bellah also draws heavily in this regard on Merlin Donald’s view of the stages of human cognitive and cultural evolution involving an expansion of consciousness from...