Wonder: From Emotion to Spirituality

Notes

notes Chapter 1 1 Friedrich Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers, trans. John Oman (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1958), 82. 2 Ibid., 79. 3 Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy, trans. John Harvey (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958), 36. 4 Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. John Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1961), 81. Freud also developed his argument concerning the role of guilt in religion in his somewhat obscure text Moses and Monotheism (New York: Knopf, 1939). His best explanation of how the emotions of helplessness, dependency, and fear give rise to religious belief is in The Future of an Illusion (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1961). 5 See John Corrigan, ‘‘History, Religion, and Emotion: A Historiographical Survey,’’ app. 1 in Business of the Heart: Religion and Emotion in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 269–80. Corrigan’s essay is one of the best overviews of scholarly inquiries into the relationship between religion and the emotions. His summary and bibliographical citations inform the next several pages of this chapter. See also John Corrigan, ed., Religion and Emotion: Approaches and Interpretations (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), and John Corrigan, Eric Crump, and John Kloos, Emotion and Religion: A Critical Assessment and Annotated Bibliography (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000). Another excellent discussion of emotion and a specific religious tradition (Buddhism) can be found in a special collection of articles, ‘‘Ethics and Emotions in South Asian Buddhism,’’ in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion 71 (September 2003). 6 See Peter N. Stearns and Carol Z. Stearns, ‘‘Emotionology: Clarifying the 160 notes to pages 6–10 History of Emotions and Emotional Standards,’’ American Historical Review 90 (October 1985): 813–36. 7 See the extended discussion of hatred in apocalyptic religious thought in Robert C. Fuller, Naming the Antichrist: The History of an American Obsession (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). 8 See such studies as Arjun Appadurai, ‘‘Topographies of the Self: Praise and Emotion in Hindu India,’’ in Language and the Politics of Emotion, ed. Catherine Lutz and Lila Abud-Lughod (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 92–112; Harvey Aronson, Love and Sympathy in Theravada Buddhism (Delhi: Motilal Barasidass, 1980); Krishna Sharma, Bhakti and the Bhakti Movement: A Study in the History of Ideas (New Delhi: Munshiram Manaharlal Publishers, 1987); June McDaniel, The Madness of the Saints: Ecstatic Religion in Bengal (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989); Andrew Rawlinson, ‘‘Love and Meditation in the Bhakti Tradition,’’ in The Saints: Studies in a Devotional Tradition of India, ed. Karine Schomer and W. H. McLeod (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 53–58; and Jean LeCler, Monks and Love in TwelfthCentury France: A Psychohistorical Essay (Oxford: University of Oxford Press, 1979). 9 C. Gispert-Sauch, Bliss in the Upanishads: An Analytical Study of the Origin and Growth of the Vedic Concept of Ananda (New Delhi: Orientalia Publishers, 1977). 10 Corrigan, Business of the Heart, 280. 11 This observation about the emotion of wonder comes from a talk that religious studies scholar Kelly Bulkeley gave at the November 2002 meeting of the American Academy of Religion titled ‘‘The Evolution of Wonder : Religious and Neuroscientific Perspectives.’’ 12 See Robert Plutchik, Emotions and Life: Perspectives from Psychology, Biology , and Evolution (Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association , 2003), 73. 13 René Descartes, The Passions of the Soul, trans. Stephen Voss (Indianapolis , Ind.: Hackett Publishing, 1989), 307. One of Descartes’s translators, Norman Kemp Smith, notes that Descartes used the French word l’admiration , for which ‘‘wonder’’ is the closest English equivalent; the only possible alternatives to ‘‘wonder’’ are the English words ‘‘surprise,’’ ‘‘interest ,’’ or ‘‘concern.’’ See Norman Kemp Smith, trans., Descartes’ Philosophical Writings (London: Macmillan, 1952), 306. 14 Descartes, Passions of the Soul. 15 The Natyashastra originally listed eight rasas (emotions); the ninth (shanta, or peace or serenity) was added in the eighth century c.e. and has been accepted as a basic emotion ever since. An excellent recent study of notes to pages 10–19 161 this topic can be found in Susan Schwartz, Rasa (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). Schwartz notes that, according to the Natyashastra , the very purpose of the arts is to o√er access to ‘‘devotion and wonder’’ (2). Additional insight into the role of emotions in traditional Indian aesthetics can be found in A. L. Basham, The Wonder That Was India (New...