The Politics of Spirit: Phenomenology, Genealogy, Religion

4. Religion in Essence and Development: C. P. Tiele, Early Religionswissenschaft, and the Phenomenology of Religion

101 4 Religion in Essence and Development C. P. Tiele, Early Religionswissenschaft, and the Phenomenology of Religion Cornelius Petronus Tiele was one of the most important early practitioners of Religionswissenschaft. He is “a figure who deserves, in many respects, to be considered the founder of the science of religion.”1 As noted in chapter 1, he was the first scholar to hold a chair in History of Religions. He is also an important link between Hegel and the phenomenology of religion. While classic phenomenologists of religion would reject his notion of development, they would retain many of the structural features of his view of the history of religion. Furthermore, as discussed previously, both share a view of science as a combination of empirical (“historical”) elements and ideal elements , as well as its important correlative notion of the separation of Spirit (“consciousness”) from Nature. Tiele will articulate the latter in terms of his concepts of the essence of religion as unfolding through its development, a process for which he employs the “kernel/husk” metaphor in a quite literal and explicit way. The exposition of Tiele that follows will rely upon two major sources. One is his history of religion, Outlines of the History of Religion to the Spread of Universal Religions, of which Jonathan Z. Smith tells us: “This influential monograph appeared in Dutch in 1876, with two subsequent editions, and was rapidly translated into English in (1877), French (1880), German (1880), Danish (1884), and Swedish (1887)—with the English and German versions going through as many as five or six later editions.”2 It was, in fact, one of the first “world religions” textbooks and, as can be seen from its many translations and editions, played an important role in the dissemination of the idea of “religion” as being articulated by this intellectual tradition as well as a dissemination of the idea of Religionswissenschaft. The other main source used in this exposition is Tiele’s Elements of the Science of Religion. This is a two volume work delivered in 1896 102 THE POLITICS OF SPIRIT and 1898 as the Gifford Lectures.3 This work is divided into two parts: the first is “morphological,” and the second is “ontological.” By the morphological, Tiele means that part “which is concerned with the constant changes of form resulting from an ever-progressing evolution .”4 By the ontological, he means that part “which treats of the permanent elements in what is changing, the unalterable element in transient and ever-altering forms—in a word, the origin and the very nature and essence of religion.”5 The structure of Tiele’s science, then, corresponds very closely to Hegel’s Science of Wisdom: what he is looking for in historical instances of religion is the development of forms, forms that are forms of some underlying, unchanging being, viz. the essence of religion and forms that progressively culminate in “higher” and higher stages. The exposition that follows will focus on his view of the “development ” of religion and notion of the essence of religion, as these are correlative concepts. An analysis of his treatment of the history of religion will show how all of these issues coalesce into a concrete representation of “religion” as a mental, that is, “spiritual” (geistig) human reality, fundamentally structured by an opposition between spirit and nature. The Concept of “Entwicklung” (Development) The first volume of Tiele’s Elements of the Science of Religion is devoted entirely to the concept of “development” (Entwicklung in German, Ontkwikkeling in Dutch), a concept which he there refers to as an “indispensable working hypothesis.”6 In his articulation of the concept of development, Tiele makes two broad, definitional points, and the terms he uses to make these points are instructive: What do we imply when we speak of development? In the first place, we imply that the object undergoing development is a unity; that the changes we observe are not like those that proceed from the caprices of fickle man, as the clothes we wear change with the freaks of fashion; that the oak already potentially exists in the acorn, and the man in the child. The one does not merely succeed or supersede the other, but the one grows out of the other. . . . Development . . . is growth from a germ, in which lies latent everything that afterwards springs from it.7 103 RELIGION IN ESSENCE AND DEVELOPMENT As we have seen and shall see...