Aesthetics and Analysis in Writing on Religion: Modern Fascinations

PART ONE: Ambivalent Feelings

part one Ambivalent Feelings This page intentionally left blank 13 the feelings that interpretive writers on religion bear toward their subject are extremely diverse but rarely simple. The nature of their professional work seems to dictate some ambivalence. Certainly, if the stuff of religious traditions—creation myths, liturgical display, mystical journeys—did not somehow fascinate scholars, they would not study it; but without some degree of detachment in their studies, most would not also be drawn to the academy. The gamut of interpretive writers’ attitudes toward their material runs from a condescending scientific curiosity —sometimes scornful, often empathetic—to a personal engagement that may ideally enhance the scholar’s own religious experience. This book will focus on writers falling in the broad middle of this continuum. These are people who find that looking seriously at myths, rituals, and dynamics of institutions can lead to an understanding of important truths about the human condition. They themselves, however, take for granted some version of a modern Western worldview that is more or less secular—critically Marxist, liberally Christian, personally idiosyncratic, or perhaps not well thought through at all. Basically, these scholars like religion, but really—at some fundamental, taken-for-granted level— they believe in science. Much of the most compelling work in contemporary history of religions emerges, I think, from the creative predicament of these scholarsin -the-middle. The truths that they see in their material—often deep and wide-ranging but usually appearing in naturalistic tones—are personally meaningful to them and, they feel, worth conveying to others. Their professional success then depends in good part on their ability to present their privately meaningful visions publicly to an interested academic (and sometimes lay) community, in the process integrating their private understandings into a common store of collective knowledge. The ways in which they attempt to do so constitute the main subject of this study. Part 1 will set the scene by presenting a morphology of scholarly ambivalences about religion, situating the middle against the extremes. Chapter 1 highlights some hesitancies even in classically extreme detached and engaged stances. Chapter 2 focuses on two scholars from the 14 Ambivalent Feelings first half of the twentieth century, each of whom moved from one of these extremes toward a middle ground. Reflection on what their stances share—which, not surprisingly, highlights their appreciation of religiohistorical stuff—will suggest some of the principal lines of argument pursued through the rest of the book. ...