Religious Studies and Comparative Methodology: The Case for Reciprocal Illumination

8. Reciprocal Illumination and the Phenomenological Method

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Reciprocal Illumination and the Phenomenological Method The phenomenological method has become as significant a factor in the study of religion as the historical,1 and is sometimes described as its thematic counterpart.2 It is a method difficult to define and has sometimes been called an approach rather than a method.3 Thus, it might be helpful to distinguish between the phenomenological approach and the phenomenological method in the study of religion. It may then be said that, while as an approach it wishes “to combine complete accuracy of scholarship with complete sympathy of treatment to ensure complete understanding of the religious beliefs and practices of other human beings,”4 as a method its aspiration is somewhat more precise. Here the key word is structure,5 not to be confused with its esoteric Straussian usage. In the phenomenology of religion it denotes the manner in which the phenomenologist comes to understand a given religious phenomenon by identifying the structure of his or her experience of it. The phenomenon is immediately experienced: “[S]tructure is certainly experienced but not immediately; it is indeed constructed, but not logically, causally and abstractly. Structure is reality significantly organized.”6 G. van der Leeuw packs the suitcase perhaps a little too tightly, but packs it well when he goes on to say: The appearance, to continue, subsists as an image. It possesses backgrounds and associated planes; it is “related” to other entities that appear, either by similarity, by contrast, or by a 86 Religious Studies and Comparative Methodology hundred nuances that can arise here: conditions, peripheral or central position, competition, distance, etc. These relationships, however, are always perceptible relationships, “structural connections ”: they are never factual relationships nor causal connections . They do not, of course, exclude the latter, but neither do they enunciate anything about them, they are valid only within the structural relations. Such a relation, finally, whether it concerns a person, a historical situation or a religion, is called a type, or an ideal type.7 As this condensed (and some might uncharitably say, dense) passage suggests, phenomenology may not be everyone’s cup of tea. Yet, though the debate on the definition of the phenomenological method shows every sign of continuing in scholarly circles, three features of the method can be confidently identified; and each is enshrined in a term: epoche, eidos, and type. Epoche consists in suspending any value judgments about the phenomenon under observation; eidos consists of seeking the essence of the phenomenon in its manifestation; and type consists in understanding this essence through a typology. To illustrate : one looks at a savior figure such as Dionysus; one sees the essence in his manifestation both as representing the saving act in nature and history—in the young god’s form as kouros, life renews itself, but “visionary feelings” also attached themselves to the “old kouros form of Dionysus,” so that “from the periodic epiphany of the saviour there developed the historic event of the god of ecstasy’s entry, overcoming the resistance of a prosaic and suspicious people.”8 And this figure of Dionysus belongs to the “type” of savior myth constituted of (a) Birth, Epiphany, (b) Deed of Salvation, and (c) Resurrection: Parousia. Its analysis discloses the following structural element: that the “saviour, whose being is not of this world—for just as he ‘returns,’ so also he has existed from the beginning (pre-existence)—is born when the time is ‘fulfilled.’ It is this fatefulness of the time of salvation that links the periodic form of the savior with the historic.”9 The method of reciprocal illumination does not mediate its understanding of comparable religious phenomena through a “type” but compares them and their structures directly; it is open on the issue of whether the essence of the phenomenon is disclosed through the manifestation or underlies it, and while it does suspend value judgments , it does not suspend the comparison of such judgments or acts embodying them if such comparison is illuminating. Thus type, eidos, and epoche (to list them in reverse) play their role in reciprocal illumination , but in a manner that may differ from their role in the phenom- 87 Reciprocal Illumination and the Phenomenological Method enology of religion. To illustrate the difference with reference to epoche, it will acknowledge the illuminatory force of the contrast that the same “general principle of respect for parents may produce a stringent ban on parricide in...