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CHAPTER THREE: William James Redraws the Map
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56 chapter three WilliamJamesRedrawstheMap In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, a new humanistic discipline devoted to the study of religion took shape in the United States. To be sure, the academic discipline did not stem a continuing current of popular interest, on which drifted a motley flotilla of oldfashioned , unscholarly texts.1 And while the university set a more professional standard, it could not agree on a name for the new studies. Many of the first scholars in this new discipline called their field ‘history of religions.’ ‘Science of religion’ also enjoyed some currency. In the course of the twentieth century, ‘science of religion’ largely fell out of use in North America, replaced by ‘religious studies ’ or even simply ‘religion.’ Another term in common use for the discipline was and is ‘comparative religion.’ I prefer this last label because it highlights the comparative method central to the field in its beginnings. The comparative method descended from philology, but the family tree is far too gnarled to trace in these pages.2 For our purposes, the origin of the comparative method matters less than the reason for adopting it. As we have seen, in the United States—unlikeEurope—thedisciplineofreligiousstudieswasborn from a felt need to measure Christianity against alternatives. Such comparison aimed either to make Christianity more persuasive to the ‘heathens’ or to perfect Christianity by locating the elements of a universal religion common to all peoples. American writers about non-European religions, from Hannah Adams onward, depended on European books for their information. As comparative religion William James Redraws the Map 57 began to infiltrate universities in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, American scholars looked to Europe for appropriately academic methodological models as well.3 Yet most of these same Americans were still driven by their indigenous motive for bothering to study religion in the first place. When exactly they got a proper discipline for studying it was never clear.4 No great event stands out to mark the birth of the academic study of religion. But the floodgates opened in the early 1870s—granted, floodgates in a tiny dam. James Freeman Clarke’s Ten Great Religions of 1871 was immediately followed by a Comparative History of Religions by Princeton Seminary’s James C. Moffat—the very Moffat who twenty years earlier had written so winsomely of “the midnight blackness of Hindooism.” His new book suffered from a badly split personality, a type of psychosis not unusual in the new discipline. Moffat designed the work as apologetics to show that “the essential principles inherent” in all religions lead not only to Christianity but, quite specifically, to Calvinist Christianity. At the same time, he knew a good deal of the European learned literature, such as Burnouf on Buddhism; and his handling of material was scholarly in tone, not overtly propagandistic or proselytizing.5 In the following year, as mentioned before , appeared the first volume of Samuel Johnson’s trilogy Oriental Religions, treating India. Then in 1873 the new Boston University created a “professor of comparative history of religion, comparative theology, and philosophy of religion,” apparently the first American professorship in the field.6 But the longest American tradition of instruction in nonEuropean religions belonged to Harvard’s Divinity School. As early as 1854 students heard lectures on comparative religion from James Freeman Clarke; and he returned in 1867 for a four-year stint. Charles Carroll Everett (1829–1900) succeeded him in 1872, lecturing on comparative religion from a more specifically Hegelian point [3.227.239.9] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 09:18 GMT) chapter three 58 of view but with equally Christian intent. Everett ended his career as dean of the Divinity School, and he was followed by Crawford Toy (1836–1919), primarily a Semitic philologist. The Divinity School officially got a professorship in the new field in 1904 when George F. Moore was named Frothingham Professor of the History of Religions.7 This instruction at Harvard explicitly formed part of training for the Christian ministry, and so did the rest of the earliest teaching of comparative religion in the United States. James C. Moffat taught church history in Princeton Theological Seminary. The professor of comparative history of religion, et cetera, et cetera, in Boston University was a Methodist minister, William Fairfield Warren (also the university’s president). Warren had studied in Germany, and he published serious books on ancient cosmologies. But he wrote from Christian presuppositions; he tilted toward Christian apologetics rather...