Aesthetics and Analysis in Writing on Religion: Modern Fascinations

PART TWO: The Art of Writing on Religion

part two The Art of Writing on Religion This page intentionally left blank history of religions’ distinctive aesthetic, it seems to me, is determined by the two faces of the field seen in part 1—the appreciative and the analytical. For the art found in the most successful historians of religion plays on the tension between a romantic evocation of the human imagination and a rationally enlightened, scientifically true, analysis. Although that tension can produce engaging writing in any number of humanistic fields, in religious studies it often produces a distinctive sublime edge of its own. I begin, in chapter 3, by exploring the ways in which the historian of religion seems to work as a creative writer. Chapter 4 then looks at the analytic challenges presented by some different types of religious materials and the characteristic aesthetic strategies to which these lead. The classic examples of contemporary scholarship examined there will be further probed in chapter 5. There I reflect on the distinctive qualities of the experience evoked by exemplary religiohistorical work, on the dynamics of the “religiohistorical sublime.” 45 This page intentionally left blank ...