Religions, Comparative Study of

RELIGIONS, COMPARATIVE STUDY OF. - Many scholars, especially over the past century, believe that only an in-depth comparison of all religions can lead to convincing conclusions regarding the problems that impose themselves in our time. Hence the two parts of this entry.

A. HISTORY OF COMPARATIVE STUDIES.

XVIII. - VI. The advent of rationalism. - VII. Evolutionism in the 19th century. - VIII. The great discoveries. - IX. The impetus given to comparative studies.

I. BEFORE THE CHRISTIAN ERA

The need for comparisons made itself felt as soon as different peoples, each with its own beliefs and rites, came into contact with one another. The most ancient documents, especially those of China, Egypt and India, as well as the study of the more backward civilizations, called "primitive," allow us to glimpse which solutions were generally adopted. It seems that fairly large groups, whether out of attachment to the traditions of their ancestors, or out of racial pride, or out of pride in possessing texts as sacred as the Vedas, despised foreign cults, only later to adopt from them in particular the most promising magical formulas. After wars, on the one hand the vanquished bowed to the demands of the victors, and on the other the victors tolerated or adopted those among the ideas, myths and practices of the vanquished that most attracted them.

What could the first philosophers of India, for example the authors of the very ancient Upanishads, and, perhaps under their influence, Lao-tze (6th century B.C.) in China, think of these amalgams? Both the one and the others proclaim pantheism: a single, eternal substance; the rest is nothing but illusion. Mahāvīra, founder of Jainism, and Sakyamuni, founder of Buddhism (6th century B.C.), exclude abstruse speculations about God and the gods; atheists in this respect, they concern themselves solely with offering a rule of life suited to ensuring liberation and nirvāna; but the popular imagination does not take long to deify them and to transform their doctrine into an unbridled polytheism.

On their arrival in Greece and Italy, the Indo-Europeans had discovered many cults different from their own: Aegean, Pelasgian, Thracian, Etruscan, etc. From the 6th century B.C. the accounts of Hecataeus of Miletus, in the 5th century those of Charon of Lampsacus, of Xanthus of Lydia, of Hellanicus of Lesbos and above all those of Herodotus, the "father of history," revealed to them the cults of Asia Minor, of Persia, of Assyria-Babylonia, of Egypt. Theogonies and cosmologies so disparate invited the search for a somewhat coherent solution. Herodotus already proposed assimilating, from country to country, the gods that had identical attributions. For their part, the philosophers traced things back to their origin. For the Ionians everything derives from water (Thales), from indeterminate matter (Anaximander), from air (Anaximenes), from fire (Heraclitus): peoples, according to these pantheists, have deified the forces of nature. Pythagoras (6th century B.C.) is struck by the harmony of the cosmos; its principle is therefore Unity; but this Unity, the supreme Zeus, seems for him to be fire, the origin of the celestial bodies, through which its action extends to the whole of nature. Also in the 6th century Xenophanes and Parmenides, and in the 5th century Zeno of Elea, profess that God is one, is the immutable substratum of everything. Anaxagoras (d. 428 B.C.) and Socrates, his disciple, proclaim that he is intelligence; and Plato (429-347) and Aristotle (384-322) echo them. For Aristotle, however, this Prime Mover, existing for himself, does not intervene in the world; therefore there is no Providence. Still in the 6th century Epicurus and Euhemerus, with less labor of speculation, go further; according to the first, taking an interest in the things of this earth would disturb the happiness of the gods; therefore mortals, for their part, must not take an interest in them; according to the second, the gods are simply men who lived on earth; but, being illustrious personages, admiration and gratitude have raised them to the highest honors. Pyrrho inaugurates skepticism. A little later, the founder of Stoicism, Zeno (d. 264 B.C.) and his disciples, pantheists and materialists, at least in the sense that they cannot conceive of spirits and souls except as a subtler matter, direct all their activity toward the reform of practical life. Drawing inspiration at once from Plato and from Zeno, Antiochus of Ascalon (124-79 B.C.)?

declares himself in favor of eclecticism. Preoccupations with historical criticism appear only in Polybius (ca. 210-125 B.C.) and more markedly in Strabo (66-25 B.C.). The compilations of Alexander of Miletus (end of the 1st century B.C.) on India, Assyria, Egypt, Asia Minor, Judea, bear scarcely a trace of it.

Unanimous in condemning the fantasy of popular beliefs and the obscenity of mythology, scholars and philosophers nonetheless regard faith in the gods as justified by universal consent and declare themselves, each in his own way, in favor of a hierarchical polytheism. The Stoics, especially, making use of an allegorizing exegesis, strive to give the myths a more or less profound meaning and regard as identical, on the basis of the analogy of their character and their functions, the gods of different peoples (theocrasia).

At the end of this period, in a work that displays considerable research, the Roman Varro (116-27 B.C.), taking up a thesis formulated by the pontiff M. Scaevola and probably by his teacher Panaetius, distinguishes three kinds of theology: the first "mythical," overflowing with fictions; the second "physical," characterized by the naturist speculations of the philosophical schools; the last "civil," that is, the one sanctioned by the legislation of each country. He assimilates to the Jupiter of the Stoic pantheon the ineffable God of Jewish monotheism and declares that in the end it is indifferent whether one designates the divinity by one name or another, provided one agrees on its essence and on certain essential duties. The Stoic Seneca (2-66 A.D.) will say shortly afterward: "He honors the divinity who conceives of it as is fitting... Do you wish to render the gods propitious to you? Be honest. To imitate them is to render them sufficient worship," that is, to imitate them not in the brawls and obscenities that mythology attributes to them, but in their wisdom and in the regularity demonstrated by the course of the stars and by the Fatum, by the Destiny that imposes itself even on Jupiter himself.

The comparison of religions therefore greatly preoccupied minds in those distant times; yet one sees at once to what conclusions it led: the common people confuse myths and rites together; the more reflective minds combine speculations of every origin in their own way. Allegorical interpretation allows them the broadest tolerance and even participation in the traditional cults; separated from the crowd by their personal philosophy, they rejoin it through their practice.

II. FROM THE 1ST CENTURY TO THE MID-3RD CENTURY

Christianity, with a rigor unexpected in every respect, poses the problem in new terms.

Having appealed to Caesar, the apostle Paul is brought to Rome, where he preaches freely for two years (Acts 25:12; 28:30-31). Peter goes there spontaneously, because Rome is the center of the world as then known. From as early as 64 the converts are so numerous that Nero, according to Tacitus, has a multitudinem ingentem of them burned alive, "not so much for the fire [of the city, of which the tyrant makes them responsible] as for reason of their hatred of the human race," odio generis humani (Annals, XV, 44), that is, for their refusal to associate themselves with cults condemned by their faith. The same historian characterizes in these terms the influx of religions into the city: there gather there from every place all that is atrocious and repugnant, "quo cuncta undique atrocia aut pudenda confluunt celebranturque" (ibid.).

There are tolerated, in fact, from 204 B.C., the cult of Cybele and of Attis, likewise that of Isis, proscribed in 58, 53, 50, 48 B.C.; A.D. 19); those of the Syrian Baals; that of Mithra, which would constitute for a certain time the most dangerous rival of Christianity. In the 2nd century there arrive the Gnostic sects of Marcion (v.), Basilides (v.), Valentinus (v.), Bardesanes (v.), etc., most of which to a few crumbs of the Gospel join the most arbitrary speculations (v. GNOSIS) and even the worst license (v. CARPOCRATES). No less is the confusion in the various parts of the Empire. With the official cults, especially that of the emperors, are mingled the national cults and the survivals of aboriginal cults.

For their part, the scholars make known the results of their researches: Herennius Philo, a decided Euhemerist, in his Phoenician History, Phlegon of Tralles in his Olympiads and in his Marvelous Facts; Pausanias, the most deserving, in his Description of Greece, the pseudo-Apollodorus in his Library. The philosophers of earlier ages, more or less transformed under the influence of Platonic ideas, each find their adherents. To bewildered souls Hermetism offers solutions apparently more certain: the fruit of mystical experiences and of divine revelations. In the 2nd century it had great vogue (v. HERMETIC, BOOKS; HERMETISM).

At bottom, in this epoch religious faith is almost universal; and it derives from common notions, κοιναί ενοιαί, according to the Stoics; from concepts relatively innate, more exactly connatural, σιμωτοί, according to the doxographers; from anticipations, προληψις, according to the Epicureans. Still more: the idea of a supreme god, transcendent, ineffable, principle of order, had imposed itself on a great number of minds. The traditional gods are considered either as manifestations of his diverse perfections or as powers, δυνάμεις, or as his intermediaries between heaven and earth, δεύτεροι θεοί; below them stand the genii or demons, δαίμονες. For their part, Stoics, like Seneca, Neopythagoreans, like Maximus of Tyre, Hermetists, like Apuleius, teach that God takes different names according to the different manifestations of his action in the universe (divine polyonymy). These theses, together with the purification of the principles of morality, make it possible to evade some of the graver objections of the Christians. They furthermore authorize adapting oneself to the reigning cults. One may, in fact, see devotees have themselves initiated, for greater safety, each into several Oriental cults, and the same pontiffs accumulate in themselves the highest functions of them.

Now the disciples of Christ, faithful to his charge: "Teach them to observe all that I have commanded you" (Mt. 28:20) and to that of St. Paul "One only God, one only Faith, one only Baptism" (Eph. 4:5) could certainly not accept such syncretism and such tolerance. Their first writers, Justin, Tatian, Irenaeus, Hippolytus, set about refuting the Jews, demonstrating to them the fulfillment of the messianic prophecies, and the Gnostics, denouncing the arbitrariness, or rather the incoherence, of their speculations and their opposition to the Gospel. Justin, moreover, addresses himself directly to the emperors. Only we, he says, are capable of justifying our faith even before the learned, and this with a rigorous demonstration, μόνοι μετά ἀποδείξεως (Apol., I, 20). As for the analogies that bring Judaism, the divinely authorized precursor of Christianity, close to the other religions, he explains it on the one hand (and it is a very debatable solution) by plagiarisms committed by the philosophers from the sacred books of the Hebrews and by a cunning imitation of the demons (thesis of plagiarism) and on the other (and it is a more perspicacious solution) by a divine tolerance, altogether provisional, of imperfect elements, with the aim of facilitating the acceptance of what is essential (theory of condescension, συγχατάβασις) or, finally, by superficially accommodating the Stoic theory of the "seminal reasons" (λόγοι σπερματικοί) by means of "seeds of the Word" bestowed on souls of good will.

Soon the pagan polemic flares up through the rhetorician Fronto, the Neopythagorean Celsus, the sophist Philostratus. Celsus, the "Voltaire" of the 2nd century, in his True Discourse (Ἀληθής λόγος), harsh and very well documented, unfolds against Christianity almost all the objections of modern rationalism and comparatism. Philostratus, at the instigation of the syncretist court of the Severi, publishes his Life of Apollonius (v.) of Tyana, himself also a thaumaturge, he says, and a perfect type of piety. To respond to these attacks, Minucius Felix, Tertullian, St. Cyprian, and, a little later, Arnobius, Commodianus, Lactantius, Firmicus Maternus, take up many of the theses of St. Justin. To each of these authors are owed precious pieces of information on the pagan religions. More erudite and more profound, they show a manifest care to indicate among the doctrines of their adversaries the sound elements, the two Alexandrian doctors, Clement (140/50-before 216) in his Stromata and above all Origen (ca. 182-ca. 251). The latter, in his Contra Celsum, one may say, clearly develops most of the principles that must regulate truly critical comparisons, and thus finds himself at ease in demonstrating the superiority of Christianity.

III. MANICHAEAN AND NEOPLATONIC CONTROVERSIES

Toward the middle of the 3rd century two new religions make their appearance: the one, Manichaeism (v.), dualist in imitation of Persian Mazdeism, amalgamating ideas of every origin; the other, on the contrary, Neoplatonism (v.), monist, representing the most powerful effort of pagan thought.

The doctrine of Mani (215/6 - ca. 276/7) spread as far as China on one side and on the other as far as Africa. Long seduced by it, St. Augustine afterward fought it with all his vigor. To him above all was due the knowledge of it, down to the unexpected discoveries of these last years. To the philosophy of Plotinus (204-70), on the other hand, although rejecting its pantheism, its secondary gods, emanations of the supreme One, its tolerance of the ancient cults and the magical practices to which in some respect it brought a return of favor, neither Augustine nor the Alexandrians were sparing in praise: St. Athanasius (d. 373) and St. Cyril (d. 444), nor the great Syrian scholar Eusebius of Caesarea (d. ca. 340), nor the Antiochenes: St. John Chrysostom (d. 407) and Theodoret (d. 457); nor the Cappadocians: St. Basil (d. 379), St. Gregory of Nyssa (d. 394) his brother, and St. Gregory of Nazianzus (d. 390). That, however, between the two philosophies and the two mentalities there also subsisted radical differences is shown by manifest proof in the fact that the last and most ardent adversaries of Christianity: Porphyry, Iamblichus, Hierocles, the emperor Julian the Apostate, Sallustius, Libanius, arose precisely from among the Neoplatonists.

In 313 the Edict of Milan proclaims the freedom of all cults. From 361 to 363 Julian the Apostate makes himself the apologist of paganism, the theologian of the supreme god, the Sun, and persecutes the Christians. In 410 Rome is devastated by Alaric and his barbarians. Greco-Roman civilization seems on the point of perishing forever. The pagans attribute the cause to the wrath of the abandoned gods. To answer them, St. Augustine publishes from 412 to 426 the 22 books De civitate Dei, where he demonstrates the impotence of paganism to ensure the prosperity of nations and eternal happiness. Then, with a greater breadth than Irenaeus, Eusebius and Gregory of Nazianzus had used, he sets forth the conduct of Providence in the education of humanity and its condescension toward rites that the law of Christ was afterward to abolish. The work is therefore a powerful sketch of a theology of history.

IV. THE MIDDLE AGES

For several centuries the Church had to devote itself to the civilizing and the conversion of the Barbarians, whose invasions, following one after another, convulsed the Western world. The councils vie with one another in condemning the tenacious survivals of their superstitions.

Some missionaries describe, but without arousing great interest, the usages and customs of the peoples of the north. Nevertheless, from the 7th century onward, the great religious controversies are reawakened, first within Islam, through the rapid multiplication of sects deriving from divergent interpretations of the Qur'an, then on account of the polemics engaged at the same time both against the "polytheistic" cults, including Christianity "that adores the Trinity," and against the Jews. Abū 'l-Ma'ālī published in 1092 an Exposition of the Religions, Abū 'l-Hasan al-Aš'arī (d. 935) a kind of Summa against the Gentiles, more deserving of merit; Ibn Hazm (994-1064) a treatise of notable erudition and penetration: Book of Decisive Resolutions concerning Religions, Sects and Schools. Ibn Rušd (1126-98) or Averroes (v.) sets himself up as a disciple of Aristotle. With the subtlety and boldness of his theses, later propagated in particular by Siger (v.) of Brabant, he provokes among Christian thinkers one of the most serious crises. He induces them, in fact, to interpret the formulas of the faith as pure metaphors, to appraise them according to their degree of practical utility, to hold that they can be true according to faith and false according to philosophy (a thesis known as that of double truth), that all religions have only a relative value and that a necessary evolution must bring about their periodic return (V. AVERROËS; AVERROISM).

Similar needs had impelled the Jewish doctors, especially Sa'adhjâh (d. 942) and Judah Halevi, around 1140, to compose comparative treatises. Maimonides (v.), a disciple of the Arab philosopher Avempace (d. 1138), became acquainted, toward the end of his life, with the writings of Averroes, and, while not renouncing the divine personality nor the possibility of miracle and of Revelation, accepted several of his solutions. In erudition and vigor of thought he surpasses all his predecessors.

In contact with the Muslims, St. John Damascene (ca. 675-749) had already drafted in his Fount of Knowledge a very remarkable sketch of comparative theology. The writings of Averroes and of Maimonides compel Western doctors to deeper studies. To these devote themselves William of Auvergne (d. 1249), Vincent of Beauvais (d. 1264), Roger Bacon (1214-1294), St. Albert the Great (1193-1280) and above all St. Thomas Aquinas (1226-74) in his Summa theologica and Summa contra gentiles with unsurpassed mastery of the subject. Moreover, the Averroist crisis brings about a considerable progress in religious philosophy.

At the same time the demands of the apostolate compel the study of Arabic and of the Oriental languages; on the other hand the missionary expeditions of Ascelin, of Simon of St. Quentin, of John of Piano del Carpine (v.), of Benedict of Poland, William of Rubruck, John of Montecorvino (v.) and, a little later, those of Odoric of Pordenone, Jordan of Séverac, Riccoldo of Monte Croce, and the travel narratives of Marco Polo (v.), confidant of the emperor of China for 17 years, broaden the horizons immeasurably and cause information of the highest interest to flow toward the West.

V. FROM THE RENAISSANCE TO THE RATIONALISM OF THE 18TH CENTURY

From the 13th to the 16th century, philosophy and theology still produced admirable doctors. Many, however, lingered over idle questions; their syllogistic method became ever more arid and their Latin, stuffed with technical terms, ever more barbarous. Now, after the capture of Constantinople by the Turks (1453), many Greek exiles revealed to the West the masterpieces of their poets, orators and philosophers; a form of culture more attentive to art seduced minds: Marsilio Ficino (v.) published Plotinus (v.), the pseudo Iamblichus, Hermes Trismegistus, Proclus (v.), a Theologia platonica, a Confirmation of Christian dogmas by means of the doctrine of Socrates. Other scholars rejected the exegesis of Aristotle presented by Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas and aligned themselves with that of Averroes. Some clearly professed the thesis of the "two truths." Greco-Roman mythology formed the subject of numerous treatises; the allegorizing exegesis of the Stoics, accepted without criticism, made it possible to discover sublime speculations. Marsilio Ficino, Erasmus, Muziano, for example, went so far as to exalt pagan thinkers as inspired by God and often superior to Christian philosophers. Muziano (K. Muth), Bonaventure des Périers, Jean Bodin (v.) insinuated in more or less veiled terms the equivalence of all religions. In short, Humanism, favored at first by several popes, developed little by little against the Roman faith.

Although they proceeded from different causes, Lutheranism and Calvinism took advantage of these circumstances and also of the degeneration of morals and the abuses that had crept into the Church. The bitter struggle that they undertook against it produced at least some happy result. Their claim to regulate faith according to Scripture alone obliged their partisans and adversaries to a deeper study of the original languages and of the sacred texts: the beginning of biblical criticism and archaeology. The appeal to the pure Gospel, stripped of every addition and superfetation, provoked the appearance of a new science: the history of dogmas. In this respect, the Magdeburg Centuries of Matthias Flacius Illyricus, 8 vols. in folio (1559-74), which study century by century the state of Christian beliefs, the celebrated Controversies of Card. Bellarmine (1st ed., 2 vols. in folio, 1581-83) and the Ecclesiastical Annals of Card. Baronio (12 vols., in folio, 1588-1607), which answer the Centuriators, mark capital dates (v. BARONIO; ROBERTO BELLARMINO; CENTURIATORI).

To justify the abandonment of certain doctrines or certain practices, it was enough for the Reformed to present them as survivals or infiltrations of paganism: whence the thesis of "pagan-papism" and its accusations of mariolatry, staurolatry, papolatry, etc., upheld in a multitude of writings. It is true that the spirit of polemic had a greater part in them than that of criticism, but at least they stimulated the study of religions.

On the other hand, whether it was a question of Judaism or of Christianity, a dogmatic prejudice, namely the radical corruption of human nature on account of original sin, drove the Protestant scholars G. Vossius, S. Bochart, Th. Gale to take up the thesis of plagiarism: everything sound in the pagans had to be the fruit of a borrowing derived from the chosen people. The bishop of Avranches, D. Huet (v.), an admirer of Bochart, and the Oratorian L. Thomassin (v.) were wrong to follow them; whereas the Benedictine dom Calmet (v.) and the Jesuit Fr. Lescalopier refused to do so energetically. J. Spencer (v.) in his work De legibus Hebraeorum ritualibus (1685) developed for his part in a very judicious manner the thesis of "condescension": Jahweh would have authorized "rites made venerable by their antiquity and by the usage of the nations, because in them he saw so many tolerable trifles or things suited to prefigure some mystery." The same conceptions in J. Marsham, W. Warburton and, with a more refined critical sense, in dom Calmet.

At the beginnings of their secession, the Churches derived from the "Reformation" still professed, with few exceptions (v. SOCINIANI), the dogmas of the Trinity, of the divinity of Jesus Christ, of his atoning sacrifice, of his necessary mediation, and maintained a large part of his morality. It is therefore no wonder to see many of their scholars applying themselves to demonstrate the transcendence of Christianity: L. Vives (1543), Duplessy-Mornay ([v.] 1579), Ed. Brerewood (1614), H. Grotius (1622), J. Hoornebeck (1653), J. H. Ursin (1663), J. Kromayer (1670). The same, naturally, was done among Catholics by the canon Jovet (1676) and the Dominican V. Gotti (v.) in a more developed and more learned work.

Meanwhile, in the footsteps of Ferdinand Cortés, of Pizarro, of Soto, of Jacques Cartier and of Champlain, many ardent missionaries won to the Roman faith important regions of the two Americas. The Relations de la Nouvelle-France, the Lettres édifiantes et curieuses of the Jesuits of Canada, for example, the reports of explorers published in various collections of travels, brought to a Europe filled with wonder a rich treasure of information. One cites, at least, as an almost perfect model of scientific rigor, L'Histoire générale des choses de la Nouvelle-Espagne by the Franciscan Bernardino de Sahagún (v.). The later work of the Jesuit J. Fr. Lafitau (v.), Moeurs des sauvages américains comparés aux moeurs des premiers temps (1724), compared the rites of the Indians to the mysteries of Bacchus, of Cybele, of Isis. For this reason some modern ethnologists hail him as the initiator of the "anthropological method." From the Far East came, among many others, the precious reports of Fr. M. Ricci (v.) and Fr. N. Trigault (v.); a little later the Mémoires concernant l'histoire, les sciences, les moeurs des Chinois, translations of the sacred texts, the King, and commentaries of great value. Likewise from India came important studies on Hinduism. In 1730-32 the Jesuit J. Calmette (v.)

discovered the four Vedas; his confrere, Fr. Pons, in 1738, and the celebrated Carmelite Paolino di S. Bartolomeo (J. Ph. Verdin) in 1790 sent to Europe the first Sanskrit grammars. Fr. G. L. Coeurdoux pointed out the affinities of Sanskrit with the European idioms (1767) and thus prepared the advent of comparative philology.

The painful controversies that would divide the missionaries in China and in India, and the part taken in them in the West by incompetent enthusiasts, will be dealt with elsewhere (v. RITI, QUESTIONE dei).

VI. THE ADVENT OF RATIONALISM

The free examination of Scripture, as Luther and Calvin initiated it, was not precisely rationalism; indeed, they gave it a mystical character, attributing the interpretation of the Scriptures to a divine illumination, to the "testimony of the Holy Spirit" in the soul of the believer, as Calvin said. It was not free, because this grace, according to them, was received passively. Neither of them, moreover, conceived or tolerated that this grace could lead to any interpretation other than their own. Nevertheless, the point of arrival was inevitable, because every controversy had necessarily to be regulated according to rational exigencies, and every "formula of concord" had to consecrate a reduction of the evidences of faith in favor of rational evidences. Furthermore, the method followed in the polemics against "pagan-papism" was convenient, but equally dangerous. It was enough, in fact, to show (something that at first had not been thought of) that more or less close analogies brought together not only practices and superstitions, but the very Christian dogmas and pagan beliefs: the analogy proved the derivation. Thus the pastor Souverain, in his book Le platonisme dévoilé (1700), immediately translated and then exploited by the "deists" and the "philosophes," derived the dogma of the Trinity from Neoplatonic speculations. Paganism had claimed oracles and miracles in its favor; many writers, with the same ease, drew from them arguments against all revelation.

In this way is largely explained the rise of English deism with Herbert of Cherbury, M. Tindal (v.), D. Hume (v.), T. Hobbes (v.), J. Locke (v.), J. Toland (v.), H. Bolingbroke (v.); of French philosophism with Voltaire (v.), d'Alembert (v.), Diderot (v.), d'Holbach (v.), N. A. Boulanger (v.), Ch. Fr. Dupuis (v.), author of the Origine de tous les cultes (1745); of the German Aufklärung (v. ILLUMINISMO) with J. Ch. Wolff, J. S. Semler, H. S. Reimarus, G. E. Lessing (v.), J. G. Eichhorn, H. Paulus, etc.

Responses of unequal value could not be lacking. Impressive lists can be found in the two eminent bibliographers: J. A. Fabricius, Delectus argumentorum... adversus atheos... (Hamburg 1725) and J. G. Walch, Bibliotheca theologica selecta (Jena 1757). The abbés Banier, Foucher, de Tressant, explaining mythology by means of history, grant ample space to the theses of Euhemerus. Other scholars: J. Leland, D. Waterland, J. Bryant, P. Guérin du Rocher, exploit the theory of "plagiarism." Still others, among whom G. B. Vico (v.) stands out in his Scienza nuova (1725 and 1730) and A. Court de Gébelin, in his Monde primitif comparé avec le monde moderne (1773-82), exploit with a certain complacency allegorizing exegesis. In these last two writers a new theory makes its appearance: the formation of the most archaic religions would have to be explained by the infantile mentality, given, as Vico notes, the state of savagery into which humanity had plunged after the flood. D. Hume is led to analogous conceptions by his "associationism" and by his manner of conceiving "the progress of human thought." According to him, the original form of religion would have been polytheism. This is also the opinion of Rousseau (v.). Inspired by the philosophy of Hume, and yet claiming to rely not on mere possibilities but on facts, President Charles de Brosses (v.), in 1757, sided with universal "fetishism": "I call in general by this name, he says, every religion that has as its object the worship of animals or of inanimate beings" (cf. Du culte des dieux fétiches, Paris 1760, p. 61). Despite the imprecision of this definition, the thesis was successful and was exploited especially by the Germans Chr. Meiners and Chr. G. Heyne. The abbé Bergier, in two works that demonstrate the notable attention paid to travel accounts and to the reports of missionaries: L'origine des dieux du paganisme (Paris 1767) and Traité historique et dogmatique de la vraie religion (ibid. 1780), attributes to childlike peoples a kind of animism; but he keeps away from any exclusive solution. So too does, in his Historia critica philosophiae a mundi incunabulis (2nd ed., 6 vols., Leipzig 1767), the admirable scholar J. Brucker. Both of these authors can be considered the most conscientious and prudent writers on sacred matters of that period.

The many publications, dictionaries or general histories of religion, of diverse inspirations, prove the interest that these questions aroused at the time. The most considerable is that of J. Fr. Bernard: Cérémonies et coutumes de tous les peuples du monde (7 vols. in-fol., Amsterdam 1723-37; with several supplements and various editions and translations). The abbés Banier and Lemaserier gave an edition of it purged of the attacks against the Roman Church (7 vols., in-fol., Paris 1741).

On the whole it can be said that the study of the classical religions has remained more or less stationary, while the knowledge of those of the New World, of Africa, of the Indies and of the Far East has made considerable progress. There remain, however, still to be found strictly scientific methods, which the polemical spirit has helped to hinder in their expansion, but which can nevertheless be seen sketched in the works of Frs. R. J. de Tournemine and A. Gaubil, of N. Fréret, J. de Guignes, Chr. G. Heyne, J. J. Brucker and in the abbé Bergier.

VII. EVOLUTIONISM IN THE 19TH CENTURY

From the end of the 18th century many minds, weary of the controversies among the Christian Churches and of the assaults of rationalism, strove to seek for their faith a basis different from speculative reason and believed they found it in intimate experience and in feeling. This led them to reduce the religion of Christ to what they deemed most attractive in it, and to find its more or less exact equivalent in all the others. Thus did G. E. Lessing (v.), J. J. Rousseau (v.), Fr. H. Jacobi (v.), and the romantic J. G. von Herder (v.), each in his own manner, formulating in advance the principle of "Christianity without dogmas." To Herder's speculations those of Benjamin Constant (v.), Edgar Quinet, and Chr. von Bunsen (v.) are in large part linked.

Aiming likewise to withdraw faith in God from the attacks of unbelievers, E. Kant (v.) undertook to demonstrate the incompetence of speculative reason to know things in themselves and then to justify, among Christian beliefs, those he held by means of practical reason: the imperatives of the moral law. But then, if this faculty has an absolute value, one may conclude that it is itself the Absolute and creates its own object. Thus one ends in idealism. Hence, though distinguished by many nuances, the systems of Fichte (v.) and Schelling (v.); hence the pantheism of Hegel (v.). With complete assurance this philosopher describes the evolution of God himself, of the religions of nature up to that of "spiritual individuality or free subjectivity." The depth of some of his opinions and the power of his synthesis won him admirers; among the most recent: G. Gentile (v.) and B. Croce (v. FILOSOFIA DELLO SPIRITO), neo-idealists. On the other hand, his excessive intellectualism provoked against him the widely divergent reactions of dialectical materialism with C. Marx (v.) and of existentialism with J. Kirkegaard (v.); in any case he contributed to lending credit to the idea of evolution.

An admirer of Schelling (v.), Schleiermacher (v.) sees the common origin of religions in the absolute feeling of dependence (das schlechthinische Abhängigkeitsgefühl), deriving from a certain experience of the Universe or of God. According to him, from this derive both the religion of Christ and those of the pagans. Christian theology must limit itself to analyzing the experiences of believers, then to coordinating into a system the content in this or that period of time. In his Christliche Lehre he strives to attain the Christian dogmas; and his disciples, "orthodox," "theologians of the golden mean," and "liberals," likewise attempt it with more or less zeal and success. J. Fr. Fries (v.) and G. de Wette prefer to speak of "presentiments," expressing themselves then in symbols more or less stimulating to piety, a solution adopted in our own day by the French symbolo-fideists, A. Sabatier, E. Ménégoz, and by numerous modernists (v. MODERNISMO).

At the same time, ardent Catholics likewise attempted to secure the faith against the audacities and fantasies of individual sense. In the footsteps of the viscount de Bonald (v.) 1754-1840 they appealed to "tradition," the only means, according to them, of arriving at certainty, a tradition guaranteed from the origin of time by the authority of the Revealer. Among the protagonists of these theses one may mention only: F. de Lamennais (v.), the abbot Bautain (v.), A. Bonnety (v.); in Italy: G. Brunati and Fr. Ventura (v.). They themselves and their partisans, in order to establish the universality and continuity of religious traditions, rummaged as best they could in the annals of peoples. But the Roman Church could not tolerate that reason be despised to that point and from 1834 condemned their principles (v. TRADIZIONALISMO).

Indeed, the annals of peoples began to be known more widely in the West. Anquetil Duperron (v.) in 1762 deposited in Paris 180 Zend, Pehlevi, Persian and Sanskrit manuscripts; in 1771 he published the first translation of the Zend-Avesta and in 1833-35 the commentary on the Yasna. The key to Iranian studies was by now found. In 1816 Fr. Bopp, taking up the researches of Fr. Coeur-doux and of William Jones, definitively established the kinship of all the Indo-European idioms: comparative linguistics was thus founded and the way opened to the critical comparison of a whole series of mythologies and religions. E. Bournouf (1801-52), Chr. Lassen, Abel de Rémusat, relying on a great many texts, inaugurated the study of Buddhism and its sects. In 1822, Champollion (v.) succeeded in deciphering the hieroglyphs, and Egypt began to reveal the secrets of its distant past. Alexander von Humboldt (v.) and Lord Kingsborough wrested its [secrets] from Mexico. Nieyrup, P. E. Müller, the brothers Grimm (v.), J. J. von Görres, Monc, Augustin and Amédée Thierry exhumed and learned to interpret the Irish, Swedish, Finnic, Russian, Norman and Gallic traditions.

But correctly interpreting archaic documents is one of the most delicate tasks. Proof of this is the failure of the Catholic traditionalists; nor did the Heidelberg school succeed any better, because under the influence of romanticism and of the theses of Fries and of G. de Wette it returns to allegorizing exegesis and sees nothing but symbols on every side. J. J. von Görres (v.) publishes his Mythengeschichte der asiatischen Welt (1810), F. Creuser (v.) his Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Völker (1810-12), enlarged in successive editions, translated and reworked by D. Guigniaut, Religions de l'antiquité (1825-51). With no less erudition and greater critical sense K. W. Solger, C. H. Welcker, L. Preller, and Otfried Müller in particular succeed happily in checking the exaggerated enthusiasm.

In 1830-42 A. Comte (v.) publishes his Cours de philosophie positive and in 1851-54 his Système de politique positive. The structure of his works reveals a mathematician; his theses show the ideal of a mind wholly freed from religious preoccupations. He takes up again the transformism of Lamarck (v.), but then claims to discover in history a normal evolution: the "sociological law," or "law of the three states." Humanity would have passed from the "theological state," characterized by mythologies, to the "metaphysical state," in which it took pleasure in abstractions, to emerge in the "positive state." In this last state it renounces concern for the Absolute in order to interest itself in what is determined, real, certain, useful and relative.

The author of Social Statics (1850) and of the System of synthetic Philosophy (10 vols., London 1860-96), Herbert Spencer, depends largely on Comte; but he separates from him on many points. He is led to evolution by the study of geology and biology. According to him, the action of the environment brings about everywhere, in organic or living matter, progressive differentiations up to reaching a more or less stable state of equilibrium, followed by a more or less complete process of dissolution and by new adaptations. The thesis of a continuous cultural progress, in its most absolute form, seems to him untenable; very probably frequent regressions have occurred. Very rudimentary in its beginnings, religion perfects itself to the extent that the mind comes better to grasp the insufficiency of the crude symbols that temporarily sufficed for it before. Its historical forms all have a relative value; the purest is the one that corresponds to the concept of the "Unknowable." By thus granting, against positivism, some satisfaction to religious feeling, and by giving a large place to the idea of evolution, Spencer assured his theories a success without equal.

The discoveries presented in 1841 by Boucher de Perthes in his De l'industrie primitive had set minds on the same path. In 1859 Darwin (v.), who hails Spencer as a precursor, published his Origin of Species. From that moment the prehistory of man and that of religion gripped public opinion. Anthropologists were led to conclude that the more simian human fossils are, the more archaic they are. Gradually they came to recognize that it is first necessary to prove that they truly possess some specific trait of man and then to determine their age by historical criteria, that is, by the age of the geological strata in which they were found (v. EVOLUTION; CULTURAL EVOLUTIONISM).

VIII. THE GREAT DISCOVERIES

Little by little, from the 19th century to our own day, the excavations undertaken by tireless researchers and, in other cases, chance finds, have brought information of the highest value concerning a good number of religions.

Such were, among others, the excavations conducted from the middle of the 19th century at Halicarnassus, Cnidus, Ephesus, Delphi, Eleusis, Delos, Olympia, etc. In 1861, H. Mouhot discovered the monuments of Cambodia. In 1879, Max Müller was able to launch the magnificent collection of the Sacred books of the East (50 vols., Oxford 1879-1910). In 1887, Tell el-'Amärnah offers us the correspondence addressed to the Egyptian monarchs Amenophis III (1415-1380 B.C.) and Amenophis IV (1380-62 B.C.). The excavations of Susa, directed by J. de Morgan (1894-92g.), reveal the remains of seven superimposed cities and the precious Code of Hammurapi (v.). In 1896, H. Winkler discovers at Boghazköy the royal archives of the Hittites (Hetei). In 1898, the first publication of the papyri of Oxyrhynchus in the Fayyum. In 1900, A. J. Evans discovers in Crete the labyrinth of Minos and the ancient vestiges of Aegean civilization. From 1899 to 1900, the missions of A. Stein, A. Grünwedel, A. von Le Coq discover treasures in Chinese Turkestan; arriving last, P. Pelliot was still able to acquire 2000 manuscripts and 30,000 bundles of Chinese prints. In 1919, other important discoveries at Byblos, in 1922-23 at Dura-Europos, in the Fayyum. Beginning in 1922, in the Indus valley, at Mohenjo-Daro, Harappa, Chan-hou-Daro, a civilization hitherto unknown emerges from the ground, one that goes back to the 4th millennium B.C. In 1929 begin the discoveries of Râs-Samrah in Phoenicia; in 1931, those of Medinet-Madhi again in the Fayyum; in 1941 those of Tura near Cairo; in 1946-47 those of Nağ-Hammâdî in Upper Egypt; in 1947 that of the Judaean desert (on these last cf. J. Lambert, in Nouve revue théol., 73 [1951], pp. 385-98).

All these successive discoveries throw a new light on the religions of the Assyro-Babylonians, the Elamites, the Hittites, the Phoenicians, the Egyptians, the evolution of Buddhism, the speculations of pre-Christian Judaism, of numerous Gnostic sects and of Manichaeism. Some of these discoveries give us back patristic texts; others, in particular the papyri acquired in Upper Egypt (1930-31) by A. Chester Beatty (v.), texts of the Old and New Testaments, which come to confirm the authenticity of the books accepted by the Church.

IX. LO SIANGIO IMPRESSO AGLI STUDI COMPARATIVI

The use of the comparative method, so fruitful in linguistics through the work of Bopp, in biology and anatomy especially through the work of Harvey and K. E. Baer (v.), the teachers of Spencer, and in a quite particular way the ardor and talent of Fr. Max Müller (v.), brought about, on the other hand, from the middle of the 19th century, a notable change: the study of religions too became definitively comparative. In 1849 Müller published his memoir crowned by the Institut de France: On the comparative study of the indo-european languages; in 1856, Essay on comparative mythology; in 1873, Introduction to the science of religion. Foundations of official chairs and of lectures, creations of museums, publications of specialized journals, of encyclopedias and of manuals follow one another at an ever more rapid pace. A glance at the various schools will give at least an idea of the theses upheld from time to time and of the technical advances gradually achieved.

a) Philological school. — « Instead of making mythology arise from the weakness of the intelligence and the poverty of language, wrote Müller, one will give a truer idea of it by explaining it by means of the wisdom of the spirit and the richness of language ». For him and for a whole group of scholars, mythology would be a « disease of language »; the multiplicity of words expressing identical phenomena would have led to the plurality of the gods: nomina numina. But which phenomena gave rise, in time, to these misunderstandings? According to Ad. Kuhn and C. V. Müllenhoff, rain, storm, lightning; according to Max Müller and W. Cox, the rising and setting of the sun (the worshipper treats practically as a single god the one to whom he turns occasionally: henotheism), according to J. W. E. Mannhardt, the phases of vegetation, according to Ch. Ploix, the sky in its aspects; according to P. W. Forchhammer, aquatic phenomena... Such notable disagreement betrays the arbitrary in these constructions. The progress of comparative philology ended by discrediting it (cf. C. de Cara, Errori mitologici del prof. A. de Gubernatis, Prato 1883; id., Esame del sistema filologico e mitologico, ivi 1884; O. Gruppe, Die griech. Culte und Mythen, Leipzig 1887, pp. 72-184; L. von Schröder, Arische Religion, 2 vols., ivi 1914-16; W. Schmidt, Manuale di storia comparata delle religioni, Italian trans., 4th ed., Brescia 1949, pp. 23-39).

b) Anthropological school. — For their part the evolutionist ethnologists began to interrogate the most ancient civilizations and attempted through them to ascend to the first forms of religion and from there to its first connections. H. Spencer came out in favor of the cult of ancestors or manism (v.); Ed. B. Tylor in his Primitive culture (2 vols., London 1871; 5th ed., reworked, ivi 1813), which had considerable success, came out in favor of animism (v.); J. M. Guyau for a panentelic preanimism, imagining will everywhere; J. H. King, H. Th. Preuss, R. R. Marett, A. Vierkandt, E. S. Hartland, for a dynamistic or magical preanimism (v. MAGIA); R. Otto, ascending even beyond the more or less intellectual notions, assigns as the origin of religion the vague impression of the « sacred » or the « numinous »: Das Heilige (Breslau 1917; 22nd ed. ivi 1932). In reality, even the most fervent collectors of facts belonging to this school classified and classified again as psychologists the manifestations of religious life.

c) Panbabylonist school. — For this very reason, E. Siecke, J. Hüsing, H. Lehmann, H. Winkler, A. Jeremias, sought to rely on historical proofs. Recent discoveries revealed to them the wide influence of Assyria-Babylonia on neighboring peoples and the naturist sense of a great part of its myths. The first gods, they concluded, were the stars as much for Israel as for the whole earth. Hence the name « panbabylonists », coined by their adversaries and on the other hand accepted by the school (cf. A. Jeremias, Die Panbabilonisten, 2nd ed., Leipzig 1907, p. 3; id., Das Alte Testament im Lichte des Alten Orients, ivi 1904; 3rd ed., reworked, ivi 1916). Such an exaggeration could only have an ephemeral vogue. The authoritative criticisms of F. X. Kugler (v.), of H. Gressmann, of G. Maspero and of other Assyriologists succeeded in halting it.

d) Historical schools. — Meanwhile a more judicious criticism never ceased to grow among ethnologists. In France A. de Quatrefages (1810-92), the most courteous and perhaps the most competent of Darwin's adversaries, insisted very reasonably on the part played by migrations, on the geographical distribution of civilizations, as a means of determining the epoch, etc. But this precursor remained almost without posterity. In England, W. Rivers (1864-1922), following his research among the Melanesians (The history of Melanesian Society, 2 vols., Cambridge 1914) resolutely adopted the principle of the Cambridge jurist, Fr. W. Maitland (1850-1906): « Ethnology will either become history or it will be nothing » (cf. History and ethnology, London 1922, p. 295). A. Lang (1844-1912), at first a fervent disciple of Tylor, had the courage to proceed to a counter-inquiry and discovered among the most backward populations supreme beings, creators, legislators of moral order: The making of religion, London 1898. It is easy to guess the polemics aroused by this work. In Germany, Fr. Ratzel, L. Frobenius, B. Ankermann, Fr. Grübner, W. Foy, concluding, rightly, overall concordances between more or less distant civilizations to relations of kinship and to migrations, applied themselves to determining the areas of diffusion of each of them (Kulturkreise) and subsequently, according to the indications furnished by race, language, the economic regime, etc., to determining the chronological order of their appearance: the historical-cultural method (cf. Fr. Grübner, Methode der Ethnologie, Heidelberg 1911). The Vienna school with the Fathers W. Schmidt, W. Koppers, P. Schebesta, M. Schulien, M. Gusinde, P. Schumacher, G. van Bulk, established this method, but reworking it; and it took up especially, in the most fruitful manner, A. Lang's research on the « great gods ». Relying on their part on Fr. Boas, eminent American ethnologists, A. A. Goldenveiser, A. M. Tozer, J. R. Swanton, A. L. Kroeber, P. Radin, less favorable to the explanation of cultural concordances deduced from migrations, nevertheless react against rigid or unilinear evolutionism, « this solemn non-sense ». Thus one of them, R. H. Lowie, calls it, Primitive society, London 1921, p. 428 (v. ETNOLOGIA).

e) The progressive explanation of critical principles, following the example of E. Bernheim (Lehrbuch der histor. Methode, Leipzig 1889; 6th ed. ivi 1908) and the sensational discoveries already noted, obtained no less happy results for the religions of the more evolved peoples. The manuals cited in the bibliography will give proof of this for each of them, particularly those of A. Bertholet - Ed. Lehmann, of M. Gorce-R. Mörtier, of P. Tacchi-Venturi, of F. König. As for the erudition expended by W. Bousset (v.), H. Gunkel and other representatives of the Religionsgeschichtliche Schule to prove the derivation of the fundamental dogmas of Christianity from paganism, v. SINCRETISMO.

f) Psychologists. — The evolutionist ethnologists, as has been seen, classified as psychologists the religious phenomena from the most rudimentary to the most intellectual. W. Wundt (v.), too inclined, like Comte, to despise the individual and to condemn introspection, referred to myths, the expression, according to him, of collective experiences. L. Lévy-Bruhl (v.) introduced the idea of a primitive mentality that is not alogical or illogical, therefore entirely different from the ours, but only partially dissimilar in this sense: "pre-logical." Received with great favor by the sociologist disciples of E. Durkheim, this solution was not retracted, but loyally attenuated by its author at the end of his career. Proverbs, riddles, the tales recorded by missionaries and the analysis of primitive techniques — to say nothing of the discoveries concerning the great gods — should have brought him back to that point much earlier (cf. Bull. de la Soc. franç. de philos., 18 [1923], pp. 17-48).

Rationalists such as J. Simon, La religion naturelle, Paris 1856; A. Franck, Philosophie et religion, ibid. 1867; E. Vacherot, La religion, ibid. 1869, gave more scope to the intellect. They were naturally inclined to demand, like the latter, that philosophy should supplant religion. The progress of anti-intellectualism, especially amid liberal Protestantism (v.) and of symbolo-fideism, inaugurated by Fries (v.) and by de Vette, tended, on the contrary, to relegate religion to the domain of feeling and by this very fact called for recourse to experimental psychology. The history of this discipline and its investigations into the subconscious and the unconscious will be summarized elsewhere (v. PSICOLOGIA); here we shall deal, only later on, with its application to religious phenomena. One may nevertheless mention even now, for a better synthetic view, the reactions of O. Külpe, of K. Girgensohn and of W. Grühn (Würzburg school) and that of numerous Catholics: G. Wunderle, A. Gemelli, J. Maréchal, M. Penido, etc.

g) Sociologists. — The history of modern sociology too will be set out separately (v. SOCIOLOGIA). We shall note further on how it can make a notable contribution to the comparative study of religions.

Comte's positivism, much more the fruit of speculation than of history, ended by substituting the cult of humanity for the cult of God. Proceeding instead by means of highly detailed monographs, yet limited to the Ouvriers européens (3rd ed., 6 vols., Tours 1877-79), Fr. Le Play (1806-82) was led to acknowledge on the one hand the very strong influence of economic conditions (to which C. Marx and Fr. V. Engels were to attribute an exclusive role) and on the other the social importance of moral and religious conceptions. His school survived him only a short time. A whole group of German scholars, founders of Völkerpsychologie, returned to Comte. The most illustrious of them, W. Wundt (v.), while accepting religion, foresees for the future a church free from every rule of faith, "eine konfessionsfreie Kirche." His inquiry has been pushed as far as the primitive peoples and his erudition is immense; yet his interpretation of the facts is so contestable that a Protestant theologian, E. W. Mayer, described his work as: "a richly illustrated novel."

E. Durkheim (1858-1917) nevertheless took up a large part of the ideas of Wundt and his school, carrying them even further. Thus he makes totemism (v.) the linchpin of his system and arrives at this discovery: the real object of religion, from its origins to our own day, is society. On the other hand, the flaw in his method is quite clear, because he formulates these rules: "Social facts must be considered as things," "the determining cause of a social fact must be sought among antecedent social facts and not among the states of individual consciousness" (Les règles de la méthode sociologique, 5th ed., Paris 1895, p. 20 ff.; 135 f.). These rules already foreshadow the conclusions. Contradicted by ethnologists and by the most qualified foreign sociologists, Durkheim nevertheless found numerous partisans in France: H. Hubert, G. Belot, A. Fauconnet, G. Bouglé, etc.; and until recent years he imposed himself in a certain way upon secular teaching. But the period of blind admiration seems to be over. Nor are the present consequences of Marxism and its "dialectical materialism" very well suited to revive such ideas. On the question of dogmas and on that of religious authority, even more than on that of divine worship, sociologists and psychologists remain deeply divided, as they are, and because they are, on the gravest problems of philosophy. We shall return to this subject further on.

2. General introduction

a) E. Burnouf, La science des r., Paris 1872; M. Müller, Intro. to the science of r., London 1873; A. Réville, Prologomines à l'histoire des r., Paris 1881; 4th ed. ibid. 1886; M. Vernes, L'histoire des r., Son esprit, sa méthode, ibid. 1887; S. H. Kellogg, The genesis and growth of r., London 1892; A. Menzies, History of r., ibid. 1895; 4th ed. ibid. 1914; C. P. Tiele, Elements of the science of r., 2 vols., Edinburgh-London 1897-99; id., Inleiding tot de godsdienstwetenschap, Amsterdam 1897-99, trans. by G. Gehrich, Einleitung..., Gotha 1899-1901; M. Jastrow, The study of r., London 1901; C. H. Toy, Intro. to the hist. of r., ibid. 1913, 2nd ed. 1921; R. Dussau, Intro. à l'hist. des r., Paris 1914; N. Sederblom, Einführung in die Religionsgeschichte, Leipzig 1920; 2nd ed. ibid. 1928; R. Beth, Einführung in die vergleichende Religionsgeschichte, Leipzig 1920; A. G. Widger, The comparative study of r., London 1923; b) Catholics: P. de Broglie, Problemes et conclusions de l'hist. des r., Paris 1885; 4th ed. ibid. 1904; trans. by A. Piocchi, Problemi, etc., Siena 1906; A. Anwander, Einführung in die Religionsgeschichte, Munich 1930; trans. with appendix by U. A. Padovani, Introduzione..., Brescia 1932; W. Schmidt, Handbuch (cited); K. L. Bellon, Inleiding tot de vergelijkende godsdienstwetenschap, Antwerp-Nijmegen 1932; 3rd ed. Brussels 1949; id., Inleiding tot de godsdienstgeschiedenis, Antwerp 1935; L. Allevi, Religione e religioni, 2nd ed., Turin 1948.

3. General history of religions

Manuals: a) C. P. Tiele, Geschiedenis van den Godsdienst, Amsterdam 1876; trans. by M. Vernes, Manuel de l'hist. des religions, Paris 1880 and 1885; by N. Sederblom, Kompendium der Religionsgeschichte, 4th ed., revised, Breslau 1912; 5th ed. ibid. 1920; revised ed., Geschiedenis... tot op Alexander der Groote, 2 vols., Amsterdam 1891-1902; trans. by G. Gehrich, Geschichte... bis Alexander, Gotha 1893-1903; by Aschernbrödel, Le religioni del mondo, Rome 1908; by W. Gerswant, Manuel d'hist. des r., Paris 1925; P. D. Chantepie de la Saussaye, Lehrbuch der Religionsgeschichte, Freiburg-Leipzig 1887-89; 2nd and 3rd ed., revised, 1897 and 1905; English trans. London 1891; trans. of the 2nd ed., Paris 1904 (cf. infra); 3rd ed., entirely redone under the direction of A. Bertholet and E. Lehmann, 2 vols., Tübingen 1924-25 (of great value); C. von Orelli, Allgemeine Religionsgeschichte, Bonn 1899; 2nd ed. ibid. 1911-13; S. Reinach, Cultes, mythes et religions, 4 vols., Paris 1904-12; id., Orpheus, Hist. générale des r., Paris 1909; 43rd thousand, 1933; trans. and ed. by A. Mahler, English by F. Simmonds; Italian by A. Della Torre, Orpheus, 2 vols., Palermo 1912; severely judged by the most qualified specialists, refuted especially by Msgr. P. Battifol, Orpheus et l'Evangile, Paris 1910, 3rd ed., ibid. 1912, by M.-J. Lagrange, Quelques remarques sur l'Orpheus, ibid. 1910 (Revue bibl., 7 [1910], pp. 129-41), by A. Vaccari, L'Orpheus de S. Reinach (in Civ. Catt., 1911, 1, pp. 34, 331, 384); G. Moore, History of religions, 2 vols., Edinburgh 1914-20; trans. by G. La Piana, Bari 1922; J. A. Montgomery, Religions of the past and present (in collaboration), Philadelphia-London 1918 and 1924; C. Clemen, Die nichtchristl. Kulturreligionen in ihrem gegenwärtigen Zustand, Leipzig 1921; J. Leipoldt, Handbuch der Religionswissenschaft, in collaboration, 9 fascicles, Berlin 1922; R. E. Hume, The world's living religions, New York 1924; revised ed., ibid. 1926; C. Clemen, Die Religionen der Erde, in collaboration, with F. Babinger, L. Baeck, etc., Munich 1927; 2nd ed. ibid. 1949; trans. by J. Marty, Les religion du monde, Paris 1930; G. van der Leeuw, Die godsdiensten der Wereld, 2 vols., Amsterdam 1940-41; vol. II, 2nd ed., 1948 (in collaboration); Collection Mana, separate highly erudite monographs by J. Vandier, R. Dussau, Ed. Dhorne, etc., Paris 1944 ff.; M. Gorce, R. Mortier, etc., Histoire générale des r., 5 vols., Paris 1944-51, of value, richly illustrated. b) Catholic: J. Bricout, Où en est l'histoire des r.?, 2 vols., Paris 1911-12 (in collaboration); J. Huby, Christus, ibid. 1912 (in collaboration), 3rd ed., revised and enlarged, ibid. 1916; 38th thousand 1947; N. Turchi, Manuale di storia delle r., Turin 1912; 2nd ed. ibid. 1922 (without Judaism and Christianity); id., Saggi di storia delle r., Foligno 1924; id., Le r. del mondo, 2nd ed. Rome 1951 (in collaboration); C. C. Martindale, Lectures on the hist. of r., 5 vols., London 1910-11 (in collaboration); Ant. Anwander, Die Religionen der Menschheit,

Freiburg im Br. 1927, 2nd ed. ibid. 1950 (non-Christian religions); E. C. Messenger, Studies in comparative r., London 1933-34 (in collaboration); P. Tacchi Venturi, Storia delle r., 2 vols., Turin 1934-36 (in collaboration); 3rd ed. redone, 2 vols., ibid. 1949 (of great value); G. Bardy, Les r. non chrétiennes, Paris-Tournai 1949 (erudite summary); K. L. Bellon, Christus, Handboek voor de geschiedenis der godsdiensten, Utrecht-Brussels 1950 (ed. redone by J. Huby, in collaboration); B. A. G. Vroklage, Die godsdiensten der menscheid, Ruremonde 1950 (in collaboration); Fr. König, Christus und die R. der Erde, 3 vols., Vienna 1951 (in collaboration, of great value). For primitive peoples, v. ETNOLOGIA.

B. DIVISION AND METHODS OF COMPARATIVE STUDIES

I. THREE STAGES: EMPIRICAL SCIENCES, PHILOSOPHY, THEOLOGY

1. Necessary distinctions

The outstanding diversity of conclusions to which so many divergent philosophies lead and the impossibility of hoping, under such conditions, that scholars will ever one day reach agreement, have made the necessity increasingly felt of clearly distinguishing the empirical sciences from those that are governed by considerations of a different order. Empirical sciences: the general or comparative history of religions (Religionsgeschichte), phenomenology, psychology, the science of religions (Religionswissenschaft); beyond these: the philosophy of religion, comparative theology, the latter based on principles held to be revealed.

In practice, this rigorous division of labor is among the most difficult to observe. Even esteemed authors, who nevertheless recognize its soundness, fail to maintain it (cf. M. Penido, La conscience religieuse, Paris 1936, ch. 7, pp. 18-27). The only legitimate conclusion seems to be this: the more one realizes this difficulty, the more one should strive to overcome it, since, after all, only what is effectively and solidly proven can win support and advance science.

a) A preliminary question, of capital importance, is: which phenomena must be considered religious? If one answers: those that are distinguished from the "profane" order by their character as somehow "holy" or "sacred," it remains to define the "sacred." If, on the other hand, one can find no other equivalent than "the unusual," "the inexplicable," "the extraordinary," one is led to consider as religious phenomena and acts that in fact derive now from religion, now from a reserved or secret science (white magic), employed without any thought of reverence toward superior beings, now from witchcraft (black magic) in relation to more or less perverse beings, often considered as rivals of God or of the gods, now finally from what various religions regarded as exaggerations or condemnable abuses (superstition). If, moreover, one posits as the characteristic of the religious attitude "the search for a more intense or richer life, in short, the search for a superiority, whether one aspires to make use of it or wishes to invoke it," one exposes oneself to analogous confusions.

Some fifty definitions have been proposed (cf. J. H. Leuba, La psychologie des phénomènes religieux, French trans., Paris 1914, p. 597 ff.). The following one, not philosophical (or real), but nominal (corresponding to the most general usage), seems to escape every well-founded criticism: in the objective sense, which particularly interests the historian, the term "religion" expresses a set of beliefs and practices concerning an objective reality, or at least conceived as such, unique or collective, but, in some measure, supreme, and in some way personal, a reality on which man, in one manner or another, recognizes himself as dependent and whose favor he aims to win; - in the subjective sense, which particularly interests the psychologist, the term "religion" expresses the manner of thinking, feeling, acting, that is, the mentality that corresponds to the beliefs and conduct just mentioned (cf. H. Pinard, L'étude comparée des religions, II, 3rd ed., ibid. 1929, pp. 2-6).

b) As for the value of the empirical sciences, since they profess to adhere to phenomena alone and therefore to ignore, as a methodological principle, the deep nature of beings in general, of the human soul, of God or of the gods, it is clear that they cannot pronounce either on the character — whether preternatural (or miraculous) or supernatural (or properly divine) — of certain facts, nor formulate judgments of value or of transcendence, nor present any of their conclusions as normative, except in the case where they succeed in establishing the morbid or pathological character of certain manifestations or certain practices.

2. Subjective conditions

That in this kind of research impartiality, the absence of confessional rivalry, etc., are required, there is no need to insist. Furthermore, a certain competence is indispensable and consequently a minimum of personal experience. It has been claimed that it is no more necessary to be religious in order to study religions than it is necessary to be mad in order to study mental alienation (B. Leroy, in Revue de l'hist. des religions, 50 [1909], p. 202; J. H. Leuba, op. cit., pp. 325-26). Likewise, no aesthetic sense would be necessary in order to set oneself up as an art critic! The justification attempted by J. H. Leuba, according to which the sentiments of religion — peace, confidence, abandonment, love, moral obligation — are familiar to everyone, serves no purpose, because, for example, materialists prove themselves fully insensitive to religious motives; others, like certain existentialists, show themselves incapable of understanding the total sacrifice of self that the canonized mystics of the Church have been able to accomplish in favor of the Infinite of beauty and goodness. "The ideal condition," adds the same author, following in the footsteps of Renan (Études d'hist. religieuse, 4th ed., Paris 1859, pp. 6-7), "would be to have lived, in good faith, through religious experiences and then to have been liberated from them." This is true, if the subject passes from error to truth; but not in the contrary case, that is, if the subject is the victim of an illusion or guilty of a defection that he will attempt to justify per fas et nefas.

3. Essential procedures

a) Essential, evidently, is the historical method. Phenomena that are apparently identical — beliefs, rites, experiences — can be notably different, if they are not autochthonous and consequently do not proceed from the same causes, or if, more or less belatedly, they have come to insert themselves into heterogeneous complexes, adapting to them and therefore more or less transforming themselves. It will be said that one adopts only what one already possesses at least in germ, as a tendency, as an imprecise apperception, etc. This is true, but all instincts are present in germ in the human soul, from the noblest to the basest, and the satisfaction of some or others, whether through a pure borrowing or through adaptation, can lead now to a normal development, now to an alteration of the patrimony and of the original character of each cult. Only the historical method can discern these nuances and make it possible to rely on scientifically established facts. The processes of this method will be set out shortly.

b) The second method, the comparative, may be said to constitute first of all a process of invention. Once history has been duly consulted, once the complete inventory of a religion has been made, by comparing the different stages of its evolution (internal comparison), one will observe variations that demand an explanation; passing on to other cults (external comparison), one will notice gaps, differences, anomalies. Thus invited to resume the investigations, one will often discover what the isolated analysis of each complex had not revealed. In this way, short of wishing to reduce all cults to a single type, one can begin to study one particular cult in depth. This is "the sample procedure," recommended, following Max Müller, by G. Foucart (Histoire des religions et méthode comparative, 2nd ed., reworked, Paris 1912). On the contrary, one absolutely cannot, as E. Goblet d'Alviella advised, "supplement the insufficiency of the information concerning the continuous history of a belief or an institution, among a race or a society, with facts borrowed from other environments and other times" (Croyances, rites, institutions, II, ibid. 1911, p. 192). Such integrations manifestly presuppose a priori the uniformity of evolutions.

Comparison, moreover, opens the way to explanations: identical phenomena illuminate one another as to their meaning, their origin and their scope; more or less dissimilar phenomena help one to understand the modes of transition from one series to another, or else oblige one to acknowledge quite interesting exceptions.

Similarities, in fact, may derive: a) from simple chance encounters, that is, from the independent exploitation of the most natural symbolism, with purposes, however, that are distinct: water purifies; the Hindus purify themselves of their faults in the waters of the Ganges; John the Precursor baptized in the waters of the Jordan as a sign of penance (Mt. 3:5-6); the first Apostles baptized everywhere in the name of Jesus as a sign of regeneration (Acts 8:34-38); the same rite, but a different spirit (v. BATTESIMO, II, coll. 1003-45). Pure chance encounters are also those that derive from the almost obligatory evocation of general themes: origin of things, center of the world, distinction of the three regions — heaven, earth, hell — cardinal points, etc.; both religion and magic make use of them. b) As for relations of kinship, the mere multiplicity of agreements does not prove them at all, when it is explained either by the identity of economic-social conditions (in which case one discovers only characteristic types or "structures"), or by convergence or parallel evolution of a similar patrimony; kinship, on the other hand, manifests itself when very detailed agreements are maintained in different fields: racial characteristics, languages, techniques, etc. c) In other cases one will have to arrive at admitting the diffusion of ideas, of practices, in short, of borrowings, reserving the right to distinguish between simple borrowings and borrowings with "acculturation" or more or less profound adaptation. d) Similarities may finally derive from reciprocal or common influences, for example, a general movement of ideas that leads to the development of certain doctrines or certain rites dependent on the original patrimony, sometimes even in order to defend it better (v. SINCRITISMO).

In short, if it is to be critical and effective, the comparison of religious phenomena must be neither superficial (in every phenomenon, especially the idea, the spirit that inspires it, the end at which it aims modify its meaning and its effects), nor limited (a discordant trait can give the secret of the origins, reveal a preoccupation with adaptation, explain an evolution or different consequences), nor partial, evidently, by reporting only the traits favorable to a preconceived thesis. Otherwise, whatever the erudition displayed, it will remain what it has too often been in the past: a method of confusion. On the contrary, phenomena, once they have been duly analyzed and classified, can be used with the same profit as, in every experimental inquiry, the Baconian tables "of presence, of absence, of concomitant variation and of residues," which make it possible to discern the true causes and the true laws.

II. HISTORY

The custom has prevailed of reserving the study of primitive peoples for ethnology (v.), leaving the study of the great cultures to the history of religions. It would truly be a childish error to trust their mythologies. In reality, myths are, among all religious elements, the least stable, by reason of the imagination of individuals, of magicians, of poets and of the popular masses. Often, even in the Christian centuries, myths were invented to explain formulas or symbols that had become enigmatic. Typical cases: the legends of St. Nicholas, of St. Dionysius, of other "cephalophorous" martyrs (v. MARTYRIUM AND MARTYR), of Pope Joan (v.); whence the "iconographic" method applied to cases of the same kind.

The value of a synthesis depends on the preliminary analyses. The general procedure recommended by the masters is therefore investigation by means of monographs on this or that deity, this or that sanctuary, this or that epoch.

Very often, when it is a question of theological or cosmogonic myths, of prodigies performed by the founders of religions or by their disciples, the mere examination of the accounts (internal criticism), one might say their foolishness, suffices to fix one's judgment: thus for the miracles performed by the Buddha, who moreover never appealed to God or to gods; thus too for those of Muhammad who, according to the Koran, presented this book as more than sufficient proof of his mission. The miracles of Christ are of quite another kind (cf. the proofs adduced, after many others, by Fr. Pinard de la Boullaye, in Il taumaturgo ed il profeta, Italian trans., Turin 1932, pp. 87-125).

The appeal to testimonies closest to the facts (external criticism) habitually remains necessary. Certain and sure is the principle: testis unus, testis nullus; a single witness, save for exceptional guarantees, proves nothing. Certainty is acquired only through the convergence of independent testimonies. Convergence, it is said, and not concordance (Übereinstimmung). The latter term may suggest that a complete agreement is required and that its probative force results from the accumulation of mere probabilities. "Convergence," on the other hand, means, despite divergences that are explained by the diversity of points of view, of interests, of editorial procedures, the leading to substantially identical assertions: an agreement whose sufficient reason lies entirely in the reality of the fact in question. "Precisely the points of concordance of these divergent assertions are those that constitute scientifically proven facts" (C. Langlois-C. Seignobos, Introduction aux études historiques, Paris 1899, p. 173). To the written testimonies, to the fragments of texts with which an ingenious critic can construct any "house of cards," one must also add their context, that is, the pledges of sincerity offered by the lives of the witnesses, the convictions, the reforms determined by their publications or by their preaching, etc.

Convergence may also be found, especially, when it is a question of relations between the two archaic or primitive cultures, as the "culture-historical" method does (v. ETHNOLOGY, coll. 713-14), by means of indications discovered in independent fields: agreement of myths, of names of gods or of genii, of different terms (philological method, particularly in vogue after Max Müller); agreement of place names, of clan names, of tribe names (topology and toponymy); technical peculiarities; all, however, subject to the reservations set out above.

It is well to insist once again on the importance of details, at least in many cases: a name, a date recorded on a single coin, among so many similar coins, worn away by the years, can bring a definitive solution; as can a detail of a rite or of a myth, such as the number 14 for the fragments of the body of Osiris (J. Capart, in Revue de l'hist. des religions, 51 [1905], pp. 255-56).

Finally, it should be noted that the successive or parallel-column description of the different cults and their vicissitudes does not by itself suffice for the program of a "comparative history of religions." The latter must draw, from the analogies and contrasts noted, laws or at least plausible explanations. To succeed it manifestly requires the cooperation of other disciplines.

III. PHENOMENOLOGY

This science, distinct from the philosophical theses of Husserl (v.), has as its proper object to describe by categories, to compare and to explain by means of the causes that fall within its competence (impressions, elementary attractions, interpretations of ideas, of practices, etc.) the phenomena presented as religious. Such are, in the order of beliefs: the concepts relating to the divinity (theogonies, etc.), to the origin of the world (cosmogonies), to the final ends, to the means of salvation, etc.; in the order of rites: the forms of individual or collective worship (prayers, sacrifices, ceremonies of initiation, etc.); in the order of institutions: the presence or absence of a regulating authority, the forms of the priesthood, of confraternities, etc.; in the order of religious experiences: the various types of devotion, of conversion, of mysticism, etc.

Phenomenology certainly cannot pronounce by itself on the origin of religion and on its first forms. "In religion," writes G. van der Leeuw, "God is a personage who came late" (La religion dans son essence et ses manifestations, Paris 1948, p. 36). "At present," attests M. Eliade, better informed, "no religion is known that is reduced to the elementary hierophanies and cratophanies of mana, of animism, etc. Among primitives the belief in a Supreme Being, creator and omnipotent, appears almost everywhere" (Traité d'histoire des religions, Paris 1949, pp. 36-39; cf. A. Jepsen, Anmerkungen zur Phänomenologie der Religion, in Festschrift A. Bertholet, Tübingen 1950, pp. 271-72; see also EVOLUZIONISMO CULTURALE). The question of the origins of religion belongs to history; while the question of its "essence," at least in the ontological sense of the term, evidently belongs to philosophy.

As for the phenomenological work of description, classification, explanation, it must be repeated that it would be without critical value if it took into account exclusively partial analyses. Almost all religions admit, at least to some degree, private inspiration; a great number possess sacred texts; but this inspiration and the exegesis of the canonical books are, in some, rigorously controlled, in others without control. Magical practices are observed in all religions; but in some they are officially organized, in others at least tolerated, in still others severely prohibited. In many, confession of sins is required; but this is frequently limited to ritual faults alone or is reduced to pure formality; in Egypt, identification with the god Osiris ended by assuring impunity in the afterlife (H. Junker, in Semaine internationale d'ethnologie religieuse, IV sez., Paris 1926, pp. 276-90; v. CONFESSIONE). Such nuances certainly have grave repercussions in the spiritual life of individuals and of collectivities.

Following instead a conscientious criticism, phenomenology can bring to history contributions that are very precious; among others, these: the proof, very clear on the whole, of a distinction between magic and religion, the one aiming only at the utilization of occult forces, without any thought of homage, the other importing, even with interested aims, some commitment of respect and submission; quite frequently, given the agreement of the individual notes or the "criteria of form and quantity," the proof of original kinship or of borrowing; sometimes the revelation of constant associations between economic regime, social organization, mythology, rites of initiation, as is observed in primitive societies of the matriarchal type or of the patriarchal type, etc. And moreover it manifests, according to the extent of their diffusion, the power of seduction of certain ideas or of certain rites, in the sense either of rigorism or of moral laxism, as well as the more or less regular consequences of conceptions either pantheistic or dualistic, of religious skepticism, of amoralism, etc.

IV. NORMAL PSYCHOLOGY, PSYCHOPATHOLOGY, PSYCHOANALYSIS

1. Normal psychology

This discipline aims, for its part, at explaining the conceptions, practices and experiences of individuals whose habitual behavior reveals neither mental defects nor physiological disorders; that is, of subjects who have reached an average measure (which is precisely what makes them be considered normal) of controlling and mastering instinctive or unreflective impulses.

a) By means of introspection, the psychologist analyzes his own experiences, whether in the course of his religious activity, or by recalling his memories and examining the variations resulting from changes in his conceptions and his practical conduct, or by observing his reactions before forms of piety presented to him by history (v. PSICOLOGIA SPERIMENTALE).

b) By extrospection, he studies the experiences of others. In this case statistics offer but mediocre help. For their figures would have no value unless they grouped identical individualities; now, instead, they commonly group under one and the same denomination (Hindus, Muslims, Protestants, etc.) very disparate collectivities; similarly, within the limits of more homogeneous groups, they gather together degrees ranging from intense piety to almost indifference. More useful are questionnaires, written and oral, provided they are addressed to sufficiently numerous informants, each authorized to represent a determined religion or sect, and provided the sincerity of the answers is trustworthy.

c) Experiment strictly so called, that is, the practice of piety or devotion "on trial," simply "to see," cannot but be illusory. For a truly religious mentality presupposes conviction and sincerity. If God is holiness, the most revealing religious experiences require beforehand such degrees of moral purity and generosity as are not given at discretion, like heat and cold; one may even say that they could not even be imagined, unless one at least goes through the writings of St. Bernard, St. Teresa of Avila, St. John of the Cross and similar figures.

d) There remains, therefore, recourse to history. Spiritual notes, biographies and autobiographies of notable persons make it possible to extract the characteristic traits of the mentalities and intimate experiences of the materialist, for example, of the rationalist, of the pantheist, of the adherents of each religion, at least when they can be considered as its authentic representatives. To verify this point, it is enough to have recourse to the symbols of faith, to ascetic treatises, to collections of sermons, because in every confessional group one naturally finds again what spiritual direction and preaching put into it. This recourse to history, which is an expanded form of extrospection, is moreover indispensable for judging in the light of sufficiently numerous examples and, at the same time, of the causes that explain them (doctrines and institutions), the respective aptitude of religions to favor the development of the natural faculties (sound humanism), to procure the progress of the virtues and to pacify souls. This last point is of capital interest. For restlessness and dissatisfaction stand at the origin of every religious orientation; peace is the fruit of order. Pax omnium rerum, tranquillitas ordinis (St. Augustine, De civ. Dei, l. XIX, cap. 13, n. 1; PL 41, 640). Now, neither amoralism, whether it proceeds from materialism or from pantheism, nor the promise of an unconditional salvation, nor any religion vitiated by some false principle, can assure it, because then at the bottom of the heart all or at least some causes of disorder subsist. Christ promised it: Pacem relinquo vobis, pacem meam do vobis; non quomodo mundus dat ego do vobis (Io. 14, 27); and history proves that he effectively gives it even to the humblest of his servants, strictly faithful to the practice of his commandments (Io. 14, 21; cf. H. Pinard, Experience religieuse, in D'ThC, V, coll. 1858-60; and the collections of conversions of C. F. Chevé, A. Räss, D. A. Rosenthal, etc. cit. in bibl.).

2. Psychopathology

E. Haeckel said: "Our firm monist conviction, that the fundamental cosmological law (of determinism) holds universally for all nature, negatively accomplishes the supreme intellectual progress, the definitive fall of the three central dogmas of metaphysics: God, freedom and immortality (Les énigmes de l'univers, French trans., Paris 1903, p. 265)." For him and his adherents, evidently, religious faith and especially mysticism derive from pathological causes... perhaps also their own psychology, that of the pessimists, like Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, and that of the atheistic existentialists. In any case the modern discoveries concerning asthenias, neuroses, psychoses, the splitting of the personality, the disorders deriving from sexuality, etc. intervene to clarify many psychic phenomena: anxieties, despairs, crises of scruples, visual or auditory hallucinations, sometimes unduly qualified as revelations or possessions, etc.; and this, because morbid traits are also found, in the profane field, in various geniuses, even in eminent religious persons, indeed in saints. For its part the Catholic Church has never ceased to warn its faithful against the numerous "visionaries," the "false prophets," the "false mystics." Almost alone and for a long time it has possessed rules for the "discernment of spirits" (v.); it can therefore, today, do nothing other than recommend to directors of conscience to make prudent use of the modern medical discoveries mentioned.

And it should be added that the ministry of Confession allows the priest to penetrate into the very depths of consciences and to discover there elements that may escape the simple psychiatrist: pride, spirit of independence, human respect, repugnance to mastering the instincts, etc. Therefore P. Janet, author of highly esteemed works, especially of Les médications psychologiques (3 vols., Paris 1919), said that religious psychology can be written only by ecclesiastics accustomed to dealing with souls and to ascertaining their living and mysterious activity (cf. J.-B. Sauze, in Revue de philosophie, 18 [1911], p. 249; R. Wielandt, in Arch. für Religionspsychologie, 1 [1914], p. 197). The Catholic Church, in order to re-establish and maintain equilibrium in souls, also possesses many other means than the psychiatrist. The collections of conversions, already cited, offer experimental proof of this.

3. Psychoanalysis

As this science is already treated separately, here we shall limit ourselves to its applications to the religious life (v. PSICANALISI). The most ardent among its representatives, S. Freud, a materialist and atheist, claimed to explain everything by the sexual instincts: the theory of "pansexualism." His explanation of dreams, in many cases, and his excursions into the field of history (v. Totem und Tabu, Leipzig 1913) are the fruit of the purest fantasy (cf. W. Schmidt, Der Oedipus-Komplex, in Nationalwirtschaft, 2 [1928], pp. 401-36; separately, Berlin 1928).

a) Now that psychoanalysis is indicated for illustrating the cases of erotic cults, abundant in paganism, the licentious practices justly reproached to certain Christian sects, and, apart from these, certain psychological disorders and crises of souls deriving rather often from a defective sexual education, cannot be denied. But the numerous representatives of this science would gain a great deal, if they renounced explaining either by means of the either through sexuality or through unreflective instincts deriving from our sensible nature, ascetic practices in general and even more the aspirations and experiences of the mystics who are most balanced from the mental point of view, most irreproachable from the moral point of view, most ardent in glorifying with an unreserved devotion the Infinite of holiness and goodness, with which their heart is inflamed. "By dint of always finding under one's pen such strident absurdities," writes M. Penido, "one comes to ask whether psychiatrists should not treat psychoanalytic delusions in the chapter on paranoias" (La conscience religieuse, Paris 1936, pp. 133-58; cf. J. Maréchal, Études sur la psychologie des mystiques, II, ibid. 1937, ch. 11, pp. 394-99).

b) In the subconscious, moreover, there reside — a thing of which Freud did not take account — moral complexes "more powerful and altogether more serious" (H. Baruk, Précis de psychiatrie, Paris 1950, pp. 380-84), which are formed in large part spontaneously. Man, in fact, cannot fail to notice or to feel the contradiction he accepts, the distortion he imposes on himself by doing to others what he would not wish done to himself (Tob. 4, 16; Mt. 7, 12; Lc. 6, 31). This is certainly enough to make even primitive peoples understand certain elementary duties of justice and charity, which the family, the tribe, the nation ordinarily place, in a more or less strict manner, under the aegis of their god or gods.

c) C. G. Jung, at first a fervent disciple of Freud, later broke away from him on several points. Studying the collective unconscious, "not individual, or rather supra-individual," he discovered, among the ancestral images (Urbilder), the religious archetype (L'inconscient dans la vie normale et anormale, French trans. from the 3rd German ed., Paris 1928, pp. 107-32, 155-59). Numerous psychiatrists share his ideas up to this point. Religious ideas, he continues, are nothing but projections of these hereditary predispositions. That any religion, in order to be accepted, must to a certain extent accord with these predispositions can be admitted; but when a particular cult imposes more or less painful restrictions on the most tenacious fundamental instincts (appetites of the flesh, tendencies of the spirit and of the will toward full autonomy), reflection necessarily intervenes. Hence, very frequently, the regulating motives of the choice do not merely determine a "sublimation" of the subconscious complex, but a "transformation"; and a total transformation when these motives lead to the decision to "renounce oneself" (Lc. 9, 25), that is, to substitute for the cult of the "I" the love and service of another, in the case of Christianity the love and service of a sovereignly perfect lawgiver (J. Nuttin, Psychologie et conception spiritualiste de l'homme, Louvain-Paris 1950, pp. 186 ff.).

Indispensable to the equilibrium of psychic life, Jung concludes, religious ideas must remain suited to the temperament of each individual. Such a solution entails indifferentism regarding positive religions. It is as if to say: to recover your health, adapt the treatments you know to your own pleasure!

Moreover, is it really certain that "the religious archetype," analogous in some respect to the προλήψεις of the Epicureans, to the κοιναὶ ἔννοιαι of the Stoics, really deserves this epithet and is universal? Since it is hereditary, it should, at least in the long run, disappear in areligious or irreligious collectivities. Yet here is the noteworthy fact: even then man generally gives himself an ideal: a mystique of art, of science, dedication to a cause (hegemony of a race, universal equality and well-being), etc. The fact is that, precisely because he is capable of reasoning, every individual, in order to find his equilibrium, needs to find a reason for living. The psychiatrist evidently can use as remedies, even if it is different from his own, this or that ideal which his client is capable of embracing. Anesthetics and narcotics too procure a momentary relief, yet none is worth health. The same holds for religions: history proves it: they are far from possessing the same capacity to pacify human restlessness, and even less from procuring already on earth the fullness of joy which Christ promised, at the price of full submission to his laws (Io. 15, 11; I Io. 1, 4).

DThC, V (1912), coll. 1786-1868, bibl. coll. 1864-68; id., La
théorie de l'expér. relig. de Luther à W. James, in Rev. d'hist.
acclés., 17 (1921), pp. 63-83, 306-48, 547-74; A. Rademacher,
Das Seelenleben der Heiligen, 3ª ed., Paderborn 1920; G. Wunderle, Einführung in die moderne Religionspsychol., Kempten
[1923]; id., Das relig. Erleben, Paderborn 1922; id., Über das
Irritationale im relig. Erleben, ivi 1930; L. de Grandmaison, La
religion personnelle, Parigi 1927; el. Etudes, 84 (1900), pp. 241-53,
594-616; A. dal Convolo, La psicol. dell'incredulo, Milano 1945;
F. M. Sciacca, L'esperienza relig. e l'io in Hegel e Kierkegaard,
Palermo 1948, p. 60; H. de Lubac, Le drame de l'humanisme
athée [Feuerbach, Nietzsche, Comte, etc.], Parigi 1949, 4ª ed.,
ivi 1950, trad. it., Brescia 1949; J. Maritain, La signification de l'a-
théisme contemp., Parigi 1949, p. 42; A. Léonard, Chronique de
psychol. de la r., in Vie spirituelle, supplementi a febbr. 1950,
pp. 67-83, maggio pp. 212-31, sett. 1951, pp. 319-52; v. ATESIMO;
CONTEMPLAZIONE; CONVERSIONE; ESPERIENZA RELIGIOSA; MISTICISMO.

2. Psychoanalysis: precise exposition with a list of the works of
due psicologi: F. Challaye, Freud, Parigi 1948; J. Jacobi, La
psychol. de C. G. Jung, Neufchâtel-Parigi 1950. - Studi: Ch.
Baudouin, La psychanal., Parigi 1939, bibl., pp. 141-49; G. Richard, La psychanal. et la morale, ivi 1946; su questo libro M.
Th. Calmel, in Rev. thomiste, 46 (1947), pp. 158-68; T. Reik,
Il rito relig., Milano 1949; J. Nuttin, Psychanal. et conception
spiritual. de l'homme, Lovanio 1950, bibl. critica pp. 381-404;
v. PSICANALISI.

V. CASI TIPICI: CONVERSIONE, MISTICA, ILLUMINISMO

D'interesse tutto particolare per ogni
psicologo sono le conversioni, le esperienze mistiche,
l'illuminismo.

1. Conversioni

« W. James », scriveva G. van der
Leeuw, « potrebbe bene aver definito l'essenziale. La con-versione sarebbe l'affiorare repentino di quello che da
lungo tempo si è andato ammassando nel subcosciente, e che finalmente si apre rumorosamente la via » (La religion dans son essence et ses manifestations, Parigi 1948,
p. 521). Tuttavia W. James e J. H. Leuba confessavano
lualmente che la loro spiegazione, molto plausibile per
le conversioni metodiste, predominanti in America, si
addiceva forse meno ad altri casi. Infatti le conversioni
di tipo emozionale abbondano negli ambienti in cui
sono presentate come normali, anzi le sole normali, perché
si deve cogliere il momento che Dio dà la fede e cambia
il cuore (G. Swarts, Salut par la foi et conversion brusque,
Parigi 1931). Ma vi sono anche conversioni lente, assai
lente, di tipo intellettuale, spesso senza sconvolgimenti o
crisis of sensibility, characterized by a patient search for truth. Others correspond to the voluntary type
e vi predomina il desiderio, se non della perfezione, almeno di un progresso morale.

Alcune, poi, esigono sacrifici molto penosi (nella
the Roman Church, for example, the integral and definitive submission to its official doctrine and its laws); others
possono essere determinate in grado diverso da un bisogno di indipendenza intellettuale o pratica; o, trattandosi di sette erotiche, da tendenze ancora meno confessabili. In fondo queste anime cercano più la propria
soddisfazione, che non il servizio di Dio; conversioni
quindi a tinta religiosa quando fanno appello a motivi
di pietà; a tinta filosofica, quando si appoggiano a questo
o a quel sistema o alla pura ragione. Il Renan giustificava
la sua in questi termini: « La base della nostra morale è
l'eccellenza, l'autonomia perfetta della natura umana; il
fondo del nostro sistema filosofico e letterario è l'assoluzione di tutto ciò che è umano » (L'avenir de la science,
2ª ed., Parigi 1890, p. 355).

È poi necessario, per completare l'inchiesta, l'esame
of the later life of converts: stability or instability
delle decisioni, pace intima o persistente inquietudine,
ascesa o regresso intellettuale e morale, fecondità o sterilità sociale, ecc.

The subconscious, the threshold of consciousness, according to James and various psychologists, would be the point of insertion of "Grace." An unjustifiable reconstruction. Why could God not act at the very center of consciences? According to Catholic theologians, neither Grace in the broad sense of the word (simple increase of light or energy) nor supernatural Grace properly so called (gratuitous participation in the divine life: I Jn. 3:2; II Pt. 1:4) modify the normal play of the faculties. Except in the case of miracles, recognizable precisely by their extraordinary character, divine interventions could therefore be empirically indiscernible, at least in themselves.

Even more inexplicable with the irruption of the subconscious remain the "second conversions," or passages either from tepidity, or even from generosity, to a heroic pursuit of perfection (M. Lépée, Ste Thérèse d'Avila, Paris 1947, pp. 81-93; see also Conversion, in DSp, II, cols. 2259-64).

2. Mystical phenomena

In a broad sense James speaks of the "mystical feeling of expansion and free development," for which he can affirm: "There is no intellectual content that is proper to it and cannot be invoked as rigorous proof of any determinate belief" (The Varieties of Religious Experience, London 1903, p. 425). A simple feeling of euphoria can in fact derive, at least temporarily, from the most diverse causes, even from exclusion from every religious or moral constraint: the intoxication of a freedom that one thinks conquered forever.

In a stricter sense the term "mystical" designates, among numerous psychologists, certain intense intuitions or illuminations, ordinarily sudden and of short duration, presented as delightful or ineffable. Catholic theology habitually reserves it for the "graces of prayer," or divine favors outside the ordinary psychic laws; the Holy Spirit, then, without violating the soul, directs the activity of souls. Resemblances among the various "mystical experiences" are possible; and they are frequently accentuated by the use of a common terminology, inherited, according to the milieus, from Hindu yoga, from Neoplatonism (also among Catholic mystics) or from Christianity.

We pass over the "trances" and the alleged revelations provoked, especially in Siberia and India, by the disordered movements of the "shamans" (F. A. Mac Culloch, Shamanisme, in Enc. of Rel. and Ethics, XI, pp. 441-46; G. Nioradze, Der Schamanismus, Stuttgart 1925, bibl. pp. 109-14). We pass over the visions obtained, among various American Indians, through the use of narcotics (R. Schone, Peyote, the giver of visions, in American Anthropologist, 27 [1925], pp. 53-75, bibl., pp. 74-75). We likewise pass over, however interesting they may be for the history of religious feeling, the literary fictions of Greek-Roman Hermetism (A.-J. Festugière, La révélation d'Hermès Trismégiste, I, Paris 1941, pp. 308-19).

On the other hand, if one examines them closely, how many contrasts one discovers! a) Contrasts in the intended goal: this is sometimes, without any relation to God or the gods, as in the Buddha and his rival Mahāvīra, the rule of life that will allow one to escape earthly sufferings and the law of rebirth; sometimes, as among the more distinguished yogis of India, the perception of ultimate reality, through nescience and the momentary conquest of everything that hides it, an experience purely intellectual, at least among yogis foreign to bhakti or devotion (O. Lacombe, La mystique naturelle dans l'Inde, in Rev. thomiste, 59 [1951], pp. 134-49). In other cases, as in Plotinus (v.), it is the contemplation of the first among intelligibles, of the One, and the union or momentary contact with him, without concern for homage (J. Maréchal, Etudes sur la psychologie des mystiques, I, 2nd ed., Paris 1938, pp. 51-87; R. Arnou, Contemplation, in DSp, II [1950], cols. 1727-38). Among the mystics favored by the Roman Church, and among the flower of Muslim sūfīs, such as al-Ghazālī (v.) and al-Hallāj, it is the loving union with Him whom the Evangelist defined as Love itself: Deus caritas est (I Jn. 4:8; L. Gardet, Mystique naturelle et mystique surnaturelle en Islam, in Rech. de science relig., 37 [1950], pp. 321-365). b) Differences as to technique. In early Buddhism an effort, a concentration of the intelligence to free oneself from sensible illusions and from the desires from which suffering is born; in yoga, a more or less complicated physical technique; in Neoplatonism a dialectical ascent that progressively transcends all that is sensible; among the early Hesychasts, suspension of breathing and fixation of the gaze on the navel (whence the name omphalopsychites; v. hesychasm); in Catholic mystics, normally, a rigorous ascetic preparation through perfect "renunciation" (Lk. 9:23) and the total gift of the heart; a preparation, however, by no means efficacious in itself, because these favors, they say, God grants to whom and when he pleases, perhaps during the most absorbing exterior occupations. c) Contrasts as to consequences. In the intellectual order, when the mystic admits no judge of his experiences other than himself, there is habitually a free reworking of received beliefs, frequently an incoherence of conceptions; in mystics, on the other hand, recognized as such by Rome, there is in substance full agreement with the traditional faith. In the moral order: in some, self-sufficiency, often rejection of obligations considered good for the vulgar, even license of morals; in Catholic mystics, on the other hand, fear of illusion in the face of the extraordinary, hence the search for a control, manifest progress in humility, in charity, in apostolic zeal. In the social order: Benedict, Bernard, Dominic, Francis, Teresa and their peers have been and remain always, with their foundations and their writings, admirable promoters of all the Christian virtues; therefore, without thinking at all that the influence of their rivals has always proved baneful, one prefers to leave to the reader the task of forming a just appreciation of it. In any case the diversity of effects reveals the diversity of causes. d) No less necessary than the study of the consequences is the study of the concomitant elements. Apart from their short-term prophecies, the intuitions of the mystics whom the Roman Church considers favored with "graces of prayer" are evidently uncontrollable in themselves. In any case their concordance as to essentials (the perfections of God, the dispositions of his providence regarding the world) constitutes a fact whose importance determined Bergson (v.) to declare himself clearly in favor of Catholicism (A. Sertillanges, H. Bergson et le catholicisme, Paris 1941, pp. 69-78; J. Chevalier, Comment Bergson a trouvé Dieu, in Revue des deux mondes, 1951, v. pp. 608-15). Truly, to explain this concordance, as H. Delacroix does, by tradition and ecclesiastical control, accepted or rather sought by these mystics (Les grands mystiques chrétiennes, 2nd ed., Paris 1938, pp. 363-64) amounts to taking into account neither their originality in more than one respect, nor the energy and spirit of initiative of many among them, founders and reformers of Orders, nor the following characteristics certainly connected with them: their experiences are inserted in a context of anomalous facts: extraordinary healings, predictions, direct reading of souls (cardiognosis), etc. (cf. O. Leroy, Miracles, Paris 1951). To reject a priori all these facts as legendary is quite easy, but there are some that the most demanding impartial criticism cannot contest. It is for the psychologist to point them out; for the philosopher to judge them and draw the conclusions.

As for Catholic theologians, unable to restrict the action of Grace to souls alone adhering to their Church by visible bonds, they do not hesitate to grant that mystical favors, analogous to those enjoyed by their saints, may be accorded to other souls, when their sincerity is complete and their generosity is such as God requires (J. H. Newman, Difficulties felt by Anglicans in catholic teaching, London 1850, pp. 57-80; P. Thureau-Dangin, La renaiss. cathol. en Angleterre, II, Paris 1902, p. 106 ff.; L. de Grandmaison, Le Sadhu-Sundar Singh et le problème de la sainteté hors de l'Église catholique, in Rech. de science religieuse, 12 [1922], pp. 1-29). It goes without saying, however, that the verification of the facts is more rigorous among them (cf. O. Pfister, Die Legende Sundar Singh's, Bern and Leipzig 1926; A. Vāth, Das Leben Sundar Singh's, in Stimmen der Zeit, 111 [1926], pp. 118-36).

3. To the comparative study of mysticism there must be added, as complementary evidence, that of the different forms of illuminism. Among rationalist associations, for example, the "Illuminati of Bavaria" (cf. G. Bareille, Illuminés de Bavière, in DThC, VII [1921], coll. 756-66) or among the representatives of the Aufklärung, "illuminist" means "strong spirit." Here only the sects are intended, whose leaders, if not also each of their adherents, make use either of pantheism or of ecstasies, revelations, extraordinary experiences to proclaim manifestly extravagant doctrines, often also to authorize licentious practices or to stir up insurrectionary movements. A. Barth, with regard to India and yoga (v.), wrote: "These doctrines will furnish all the sects with a kind of superior theology. Some will prize them as an ideal and thus works of incomparable elevation and delicacy will be born from time to time; others will seek to lower them to their own level... The less religious sects will take from them the outward forms of devotion; the most abject and the most execrable will clothe themselves in their mysticism and will make use of their formulas" (Les religions de l'Inde, in Oeuvres complètes, I, Paris 1914, ch. II, p. 84). Since the formulas are the same on one side and the other, the only means of discerning exactly the doctrine they cover will therefore consist in examining, for each of them, the antecedent, concomitant and consequent elements. In the final analysis, these sects so ready to appeal to supernatural illuminations bring to psychopathology and psychoanalysis ample justification for a good number of their theses. And at the same time they offer the occasion to observe the frequent outcome in pantheism, the fruits of a theory of individual inspiration without control, and the simultaneous influence of economic and social causes upon uprisings whose repression, as in the case of the shepherd children in the 13th and 14th centuries, of the Anabaptists in the 16th century, of the Tai-p'ing of China in the 19th century, has cost humanity rivers of blood (cf. L. Wieger, Histoire des croyances en Chine, 3rd ed., Hien-Hien 1927, pp. 728-30).

There follows a very incomplete list of these illuminists: a) in Judaism: the false prophets denounced by the Bible and the false messiahs from the most ancient to the most recent (cf.

Revue biblique, new series, 13 [1916], p. 295); b) in the Catholic Church: the Montanists (2nd century), the Euchites or Messalians (4th century), the Amalricians (12th century), the Brethren of the Free Spirit, the Guglielmites (13th century), the Dolcinists and some Beguards (14th century), the Alumbrados (16th century), the "guérinots" of Picardy, Molinos and his disciples (17th century)...; c) sects derived from the "Reformation": from the beginning the Anabaptists, then the Familists, members of the Family of Love, founded by H. Nicolai, in the 17th century the Camisards, the Quakers or Tremblers, derived from Puritanism, the Muggletonians, the Philadelphians, the "mirers," the Southcottians; in the 18th century, in Sweden, the Swedenborgians; in America, the Society of True Inspiration (Amana Society), the Irvingites, the jumpers of the Welsh country, derived from Methodism as, somewhat later, the revivalists of Kentucky; in the 19th century the Mormons, the Shakers (the Tremblers) very close to the Quakers, the Beckmanns of the Church of the Redeemed, in Illinois, the wilderness worshippers of Georgia and Carolina, the Heavenly recruits of Illinois; the dancing angels of New Jersey, likewise derived from Methodism; in the Protestant missions, the Tai-p'ing of China, the adherents of ngounzism and kibangism, in the Congo; those of ethiopism, etc.; d) in the Greek-Russian Church, in the 10th century, the Bogomils, in the 14th, certain Hesychasts, in the 17th century, the priestless ones of the "Bezpopovtchina" sect, the klysty, "men of God," the skoptsy, "white doves," etc.; in the 19th century, Tolstoy and his disciples, etc.; e) in Islam: the movements derived from Shī'ism and Mahdism, a certain number of Sūfīs and especially of dervishes, the adherents of Bābism and Bahā'ism, founded by the successor of the Bāb (1819-50), Bahā'ullāh, "splendor of God"; in the Indies the Qadianis or Ahmadis, founded by M. G. Ahmad (1839-1908), the African Murids, founded in 1889 by Amadū Bamba, etc.; f) in the Indies illuminism has long been favored by the divine character attributed to the initiators or spiritual masters, the gurū, as also by the theory of the avatāra, incarnations of this or that deity, and by the practice of yoga, especially of hathayoga. It is no wonder that many modern reformers, in favor either of Hinduism or of a fantastic syncretism, present themselves as gods or as inspired by some god; such, among others, Rāmakrishna (1834-86), Vivekānanda, his disciple, Keshab Chandra Sen (d. 1884), the founders of the Rādhā sāmi satsang, etc. They do not link themselves to any Church: Ant. Bourignon, the baroness of Kridener (ca. 1766-1824), Catherine Théot (1725-94), St-Martin, "the unknown philosopher" (1743-1803), H. Wronski (1778-1853), Vintras (1807-75), G. Monod (1800-96), G. Barzellotti (v.), etc.

VI. SOCIOLOGY

It falls to this science to study the mutual relations between religious life and the forms of social organization realized both within the various cults and outside them, in the profane order.

1. The internal organization of religions

a) After recent investigations, and setting aside the two postulates of evolutionism (primitive promiscuity and the uniform origin of all religions), it may be regarded as certain that, in the most archaic communities, the members of one and the same family, of one and the same clan, of one and the same tribe, placed under the protection of God or of their gods the whole body of their interests concerning the present life and that of the beyond. At this stage, their religion, from which they generally exclude foreigners, strengthens the union of all, just as the influence of the group accredits the beliefs and the elementary moral rules required by the maintenance of the common understanding. From this point of view, it seems impossible to admit that religion and morality were ever completely separate.

b) The more evolved religions frequently subdivide their adherents into different categories — monks and laypeople, for example, in Buddhism, in Jainism and in Christianity — pneumatici, psychics, hylics, in the Valentinian Gnosticism of the 2nd century — perfect ones and simple hearers, in Manichaeism, in Catharism, etc. These distinctions manifestly carry with them, both for the religions and for the States, very important consequences, according as the obligations — not only ascetic and ritual, but above all moral — instead of remaining identical for all, as in Christianity, are attenuated or vanish entirely for this or that class.

In these same religions the collective or public cult develops. The power it has to maintain beliefs and to arouse religious emotions and experiences is evident; however, it varies according to the dramaturgy put into play; it can therefore be "edifying" in the Christian sense of the word, or demoralizing, if it commemorated, for example, the amorous adventures or the lust of some god. Moreover, grave dangers threaten it everywhere: the regular return of the same liturgies brings with it habituation and drying up; and since respect for the divinity and at the same time habit, superstition, the infiltration of magical conceptions require a minute observance of the ceremonial, fidelity to the rites can become the essential element of religion, and this or that rite (for example, the sacrifice of soma in Brahmanism) will be esteemed efficacious by its own virtue, even for the divinity itself. Only a moral and religious teaching in the theological sense of the word could prevent these consequences, especially on the part of the ministers of the cult. But where is it to be found? (v. CULTO).

Of no lesser importance are the questions concerning authority: its democratic, oligarchic or monarchic form — its task, according as it is limited to the supervision of the rites or extends also to beliefs —, its sources of information, whether regular (ancestral traditions or sacred books) or occasional (such as recourse to more or less heteroclite oracles, for example, Delphi, Cumae, Lebadea, or to more or less qualified diviners), its mode of election, a more or less effective guarantee of its religious value (cf. various authors, Priesthood, in Enc. of Relig. and Ethics, X, pp. 278-336); its repressive power (J. Wach, Sociology and religion, Chicago 1944, ch. 8, bibl., pp. 330-31). The existence of distinct sanctuaries, relatively independent, such as those of Heliopolis, Hermopolis, Memphis and Thebes in Egypt, is by itself enough to bring about, despite the common origin, the flourishing of sensibly dissimilar religions. Whence the law of Deuteronomy (12, 1-32), which imposed the uniqueness of the sanctuary (L. Pirot, La Ste Bible, II, Paris 1946, pp. 588-600).

2. Relations of religions with profane societies

a) As regards the religion of primitive peoples, one is forcibly constrained to adhere to the few indications given above (v. ETNOLOGIA). b) In more or less hierarchized societies, the specialization of functions comes into play: the religious order and the civil order each have their own dignitaries and also have their own ends, clearly distinct, at least in the abstract: for the State, well-being, prosperity, the development of human faculties, the union of its members; for every religion, moreover, and above all, in fidelity to traditions, the service of God or of the gods, the condition of their favor on earth and in the beyond.

Between the religious and civil powers some clash cannot fail to arise. It is indeed well to recall alongside them the power of the magicians and the sorcerers. The latter, like the secret economic-political societies, ordinarily hold themselves apart. Between priests and magicians, on the other hand, the distinction is often difficult: magic, when a more or less official part has been granted to it, tends to invade everything.

In this struggle for supremacy, except in the case of vigorous convictions, of an energy proof against all on the part of the clergy, victory remains in the hands of the authority that disposes of the most effective resources and means of seduction. In fact, except in the theocratic regime of Israel, before the period of the kings, and then among the Prophets, tireless preachers of strict monotheism and of the Decalogue, history records before Christianity nothing but capitulations, or nearly so. Calculations of interest and magical conceptions lead to revering kings either as princes of fertility, or as gods, only to then demand their death at the opportune moment. Many authors, unfortunately with more erudition than critical sense, have reported abundant examples of this (cf. J. G. Frazer, The magical origin of kings, London 1920; G. van der Leeuw, La religion dans son essence, Paris 1948, pp. 107-26; cf. various authors, King, in Enc. of Relig. and Ethics, VII, pp. 708-32).

Christ for his part ordered his disciples, "render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's" (Mt. 22, 21; cf. Rom. 13, 1-7). His ministers, it is true, have several times favored the game of the Caesars in exchange for the support demanded from them; emperors and kings have meddled directly in doctrinal controversies and indirectly in the government of souls by appointing bishops of their own choosing, by assigning benefices to their favorites (v. ABIANESIMO; CESARISMO; COMMENDA). All these are phenomena to be studied (cf. J. Wach, art. cit. in bibl., p. 324, n. 184).

c) In nations with mixed religions, the spiritual union of peoples has been lost. Before the Christian era, heads of State attempted to restore it, adopting the gods of the vanquished, identifying them where necessary with their own (theocrasia), introducing new cults, such as those of Serapis, of the Sol invictus, of Rome, of the deified emperors — solutions whose consequences are likewise to be evaluated.

When souls are already more obstinately attached to their beliefs (Christian churches and sects, Muslim, etc.), persecutions and fratricidal wars break out; in calmer periods, rivalry among confessions persists; the struggle becomes normal in democratized societies: the attitude of the State regarding cults or some particular cult varies according to the taste of the majorities. The situation becomes more serious when that late fruit of progress makes its appearance, namely atheism, whether in the form of the sociologism of E. Durkheim, or in that of the dialectical materialism of K. Marx and F. Engels, or in others. Morality no longer has an absolute value, but is made; it is simply a reformable convention. Consider what, under these conditions, become the "majesty of the laws," respect for the human person, freedom of conscience, the union of fellow citizens. At present, large-scale social experiments are under way, which already authorize prudent conclusions. Consider, then, even if only from the phenomenal point of view, what the precepts of Christ, better practiced, have produced and would produce: "Love one another, as I have loved you" (Jo. 13:34; 15:12); "what you do for the least of my brothers you do for me" (Mt. 25:40), etc. In this way humanity would be transformed into a family, whose members, without distinction of race or class, would treat one another as adopted children of God (v. CORPO MISTICO, IV, coll. 595-98).

VII. SCIENCE OF RELIGIONS

This last science (Religionswissenschaft) coordinates the information supplied respectively by history, by the partial studies of phenomenology, by psychology and by sociology. It further aims to deduce general conclusions from them. If it is kept, as is right, among the empirical disciplines, it constitutes an integral or synthetic phenomenology. Using essentially the comparative method, it remains bound to follow the critical rules already recalled above. J. Wach, who applied himself in a particular way to defining its method and procedures, but from whom we depart on a few points, calls it "systematic science of religions" and proposes to divide it into "material systematics" and "formal systematics."

First of all it would be necessary to fix judiciously the vocabulary and the agreement among specialists on the precise sense of the terms: religion, magic, witchcraft, fetishism, grace, mysticism, illuminism, etc. Such definitions would prevent, for example, many scholars from classifying the Catholic Sacraments among magical rites. Efficacious in themselves, ex opere operato, the sacramental rites, according to the doctrine of the Roman Church, require a right intention: that is, the intention of obtaining a spiritual benefit, the first grace or its increase; they presuppose, under pain of sacrilege, exemption from grave sins and the firm resolve to avoid them in the future; the measure of grace that they confer is proportioned, not to the affective fervor of each soul, but to the effective generosity with which it intends to fulfill all its duties.

1. Once this agreement on the value of terms is presupposed, the first task of the science of religions is: a) to classify the different types of phenomena: types of beliefs concerning the divinity, the origin of the world, the future life, the conditions of salvation, etc.; types of morality and of holiness, of public and private worship, of internal and external organization, of individual and collective experiences; b) to investigate the relations that unite them, to separate out, wherever they manifest themselves, the regular or quasi-regular associations between the elements of a civilization (economic regime, social organization, beliefs and myths, forms of worship), in short, the structures, etc.

That the various types of religions should be catalogued seems contestable, because few are the religions that constitute a coherent whole, and very few those that do not change in the course of the years. Nevertheless it is indispensable, wherever the thing is possible, to bring out the relations of the different obligations, practices and experiences with this or that characteristic idea: in islām, for example, that of the uniqueness and ineffable majesty of Allah; in Christianity, that of the holiness and infinite goodness of the Most Holy Trinity. As for classifying religions in an evolutionary series, in the manner of Hegel and Comte, it must be said that this is a pastime or a game from which science has nothing to gain.

2. The final and principal task is that of deducing laws, together with their cause and their consequences. It goes without saying that in this matter, as in sociology, there are no laws so rigid as to admit no exception; the intervention of personalities either eminent or at least very powerful can modify in an unforeseeable way the course of things (cf. G. Richard, La sociologie générale et les lois sociologiques, Paris 1912, pp. 183-372, bibl. pp. 372-88).

In conclusion to a very erudite inquiry, M. Eliade writes: "We can register a double process in the history of religious facts: on the one hand, an excessive fragmentariness of the manifestation of the sacred in the cosmos; on the other, a unification of these hierophanies through the effect of their innate tendency to incarnate the archetypes as perfectly as possible and thus to realize fully their own structure." One may observe: no marvelous, unexplained or extraordinary phenomenon takes on the character of a "hierophany" except as the result of an interpretation; the "hierophanies" considered as more important owe this certainly in part to their own splendor, but, at bottom, to the free choice of religious consciences, in proportion to their spiritual or temporal interests: they have no "innate tendencies" at all. The same scholar adds: "Thus is explained a phenomenon that has occurred from one end of the history of religions to the other: the possibility that every religious form has of growing, of purifying itself, of ennobling itself, for example for a tribal god to become, with some new epiphany, the god of monotheism; for a rural goddess to be transformed into mother of the Universe" (Traité d'histoire des religions, Paris 1949, p. 395). One may limit oneself to this observation; the notion of law imports the notions of necessity and regularity; a possibility is something quite different. Moreover, it is still awaited that history should establish on concrete evidence the passage of any "hierophany" not indeed to the supreme rank in a hierarchical polytheism, but into a strictly monotheistic system. As for the pantheism of India and of China, for example, these proceed manifestly from philosophical speculation.

Here, now, among many others, apparently, are some laws that seem true: magic (white magic) is invasive, because it already finds a bait in ritual formalism and because it provides, without moral conditions, for the most varied needs; with this it necessarily becomes demoralizing, one should even say also irreligious, for anyone who thinks that God or the gods have some care for morality. Another law: every pantheism issues either in moral indifferentism, as in Chinese Taoism, or in moral subjectivism, as in Greco-Roman Stoicism; God himself or man, who believes himself God or a part of God, finds in himself his rule of conduct, reserving the right to inspire himself, for example, whenever he judges it convenient, from the marvelous order of the cosmos. Similarly, traditions or sacred texts left to private interpretation or inspiration lose their probative force and can serve to authorize both heterodox speculations and more or less contestable claims; allegorizing exegesis, as among the Stoics and certain humanists of the Renaissance, the treatment of dogmatic formulas as pure symbols, as among the modern symbolo-fideists, the effort to "demythologize" beliefs and traditions among various representatives of liberal Protestantism, provide the means for this.

The method of "concomitant variations" will permit, in all likelihood, the derivation of other laws, given the extreme variety of religions, of their sects and sub-sects. And it will further be fitting to study the ancient and modern forms of occultism, of theosophy, of anthroposophy, certain ephemeral cults, such as those that the French Revolution saw arise; likewise, by way of counter-proof, the modern collectivities officially antireligious or "without God."

Extended at least to cases sufficiently numerous, sufficiently varied and also sufficiently opposed, all chosen among the most significant, such an inquiry cannot fail to ascertain, in the expression of Bacon and of Stuart Mill, certain "residues." By "residues" are meant more or less disconcerting anomalies. Such, among others, is Hebrew prophetism, not only as regards its doctrine, but as regards the marvelous facts that led Israel to preserve, as sacred texts, only the writings of those "seers" and not those of their rivals. Such is the fulfillment of their predictions in the person of Christ, his character, his teaching, his prodigies, which despite his ignominious death confirmed the enthusiasm of his Apostles, the survival of his work, etc.

Limiting itself to the empirical order, the science of religions has no business deciding on the miraculous character of these facts. Nor can it, without sinning against logic, pronounce itself, at least in the metaphysical sense of the term, on the "essence" of religion, nor on the respective value of religions, except with regard to the benefits that derive from them, such as social concord, the development of the sciences and arts, the prosperity of States. Since it ignores in principle whether there is a God and whether man is endowed with an immortal soul, one does not see how it could be authorized to prophesy about the future of religion. A Christian would add: "especially about the one that has received from its Founder a promise of immortality" (Mt. 16:18).

VIII. PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION

Strictly speaking, in order for this discipline to be able to pronounce on the "essence" of religion, whatever its origins may have been, it is enough that it be able to establish on the one hand the existence and nature of God and, on the other, the nature of man and of his soul; then the normal relations between the terms Creator and creature endowed with reason will be deduced as consequences. History, on the other hand, becomes indispensable for it in order to judge man in the concrete, across the various millennia, according to his psychic development and the varied conditions of his existence; only with this help can it correctly appraise the institutions of the past and prudently determine the desirable reforms.

Now, if one observes the multiplicity of solutions given to the two fundamental problems, the nature of God and the nature of the human soul, one immediately understands the extreme diversity of the "philosophies of religion." Just so many "apologetics," in short; and this term imposes itself, because their authors indifferently speak or write to justify their options, on which depend the dignity of their life and their eternal salvation, and to convince other minds.

A cause of even deeper disagreement is the criteriological problem. The audacities of the rationalists and their rivalry, today more than ever, have ruined confidence in reason. For a long time now the attempts to reach the Truth by other paths have multiplied: supernatural illuminations, impressions regarded as "the testimony of the Holy Spirit," intimate experiences, feeling. The convictions to which these criteria lead, including reason, evidently hold only for those who have preferred them; both the one and the other, therefore, lead to individualism. To judge by the facts, one even observes that mere degrees or shades of the arbitrary and of the play of the imagination separate from illuminism the appeal to the "testimony of the Spirit," to intimate experience, to feeling. Luther himself recognized this: "I do not stop at the texts of Scripture, even if you were to propose an infinity of them (saxeretos) for the justice of works against the justice of faith... It is up to you to see how to reconcile Scripture; I, for my part, remain with its author" (In Gal., 3, 14; Luthers Werke, ed. Weimar, XL, p. 458 ff.). Regarding the Anabaptists and the Sacramentarians he observed: "These people are fascinated, convinced that they possess the pure truth and the perfect understanding of Scripture. Now, whoever lives in this persuasion neither understands nor listens to anyone. I too can hear nothing contrary to my doctrine" (In Gal., 3, 1; Luthers Werke, p. 323; cf. pp. 316-17, 320). Indeed the creation of new cults within the ancient religions, the creation of ever more numerous Churches and sects after the Christian era, derive, in their founders, from this recourse to individual sense, whatever term may be used to designate it.

The more passion for the Truth and loyalty one admits in the founders of these movements and in the authors of these "philosophies of religion," the more their disagreement and the individual and social consequences that follow from it manifest not only the unresolved necessity of a divine Revelation, in the strictly unforeseeable case (which nevertheless corresponds to the present order) that it should please God to call man to participation in his intimate life from this earth onward, and later to participation in his happiness (Jn. 1, 12-13; I Jn. 3, 1; Rom. 8, 15-17; II Pt. 1, 4), but also the supreme fittingness or moral necessity of an intervention of this kind, "so that the notions (religious ones) that are not of themselves inaccessible to human reason may likewise, in the present condition of the human race, be known by all, without difficulty, with firm certainty, every error excluded" (Denz-U, nn. 1786, 1807-1808; J. Vacant, Etudes sur le Concile du Vatican, I, Paris 1895, pp. 343-56). To demand that an authentically divine revelation impose itself with a force in some way necessitating is simply unreasonable, because no historical fact imposes itself in this way, except on one who has been its immediate witness. For later ages it is enough that it present itself at the same time as a sensible fact and as a miraculous fact, with the characteristics suited, at least taken as a whole, to ground a certain judgment in minds not blinded by any apriorism. Apriorism, on the other hand, is that of rationalist deism, which forbids a personal Absolute, immanent in all beings, to permit itself in favor of its creatures any derogation whatsoever from the laws established by himself.

Without pronouncing on interventions of this kind, philosophy must at least consider the hypothesis as possible. One easily understands what a poor figure it cuts when it wants to judge from on high institutions that derive from a wisdom superior to its own. In any case it will fall to it to examine a capital question: that of authority, especially in matters of belief. A judicious exercise of authority — we are not speaking here of coercion — constitutes, in fact, the only means, not of eliminating individualism, but of at least attenuating fantasies and their consequences. So grave a problem cannot be treated in a few lines (v. CHIESA, III).

One solution that currently captivates many minds must nevertheless be pointed out at least. "Let us cease," say its partisans, "to argue about beliefs and unite in charity! Let us leave the juridical Church and return to the Church of love, to the primitive Church." Apart from then neglecting many other texts (Mt. 16, 16; Jn. 3, 18; Lk. 10, 16; Mt. 16-19; II Jn. 10-11, etc.), some philosophers, more or less familiar with the New Testament, do not fail to refer, in this connection, to the words of Christ and his apostles: "Love one another as I have loved you" (Jn. 15, 12); "If anyone says: I love God, but then hates his brother, he is a liar" (I Jn. 4, 16-21). To proclaim such a solution aloud is equivalent to forgetting that freedom of thought carries with it freedom of action: new religions, sects and sub-sects have always formed a separate group precisely in order to practice the liturgy, the ascetics, the morality that corresponded to their dogmas; liturgy, ascetics and morality such, in many cases, that the civil authority could not exempt itself from intervening. It is also equivalent to forgetting that, if charity, according to Christ's precept (Mt. 5, 43-47; Lk. 6, 27-36, etc.), remains possible for some souls even toward persecutors, concord, on the other hand, practically ceases to be so, especially in deeply divided democratic societies with shifting majorities. For his glory, as well as for the pacification and prosperity of the world, can it truly be that God has not, in the course of the centuries, prepared any remedy for so many evils? (v. INDIFFERENTISMO; PROTESTANTISMO LIBERALE).

Renouncing here the analysis of even only the most meritorious "philosophies of religion," we shall limit ourselves to indicating in the bibliography some works that set forth the evolution of ideas in the modern era.

IX. COMPARATIVE THEOLOGY

This last term can designate three different sciences: a) an empirical science that compares, as so many phenomena, beliefs, their repercussions on individual and social religious life, their respective evolution, and then sets about explaining these evolutions by means of the logical expansion of their constituent elements or of extraneous influences. Understood in this way, this science is nothing but a section of the phenomenology of religions.

b) Philosophical inquiry, the kind that aims to bring out the respective value of doctrines and institutions, in order to facilitate, at least for believers, a mutual understanding and a possible enrichment even for those who already enjoy, on various points, an undeniable superiority. Of this kind are: K. Prüm, Die christliche Glaube und die altheidnische Welt, Leipzig 1935; A. Vögtle, Die Tugendund Lasterkatalog im N. T., Münster 1936; O. Lacombe, L'Absolu dans le Védénat, Paris 1937; L. Gardet - M. M. Anawati, Introd. à la philosophie musulmane, ibid. 1948 (cf. Revue thomiste, 51 [1951], pp. 457-64).

c) Properly theological treatises, those that, whether after demonstrating the reality of the divine Revelations by history and philosophy alone (which is what the treatises called Apologetics, On the true religion, On Revelation, etc. do in the Catholic Church), or by establishing this demonstration of the Revelations simultaneously, further set about proving the transcendence of Judaism and of Christianity, the one preparing the way for the other, and justifying the designs of Providence. Undertaken occasionally by St. Irenaeus (d. ca. 202) in the work Adversus haereses, this second task was carried out more extensively by St. Augustine in the De civitate Dei, by Paulus Orosius in the Historiae adversus paganos, by Pascal in various parts of the Pensées, by Bossuet in the Histoire universelle.

X. TRANSCENDENCE OF CHRISTIANITY

In a broad sense the term "transcendence" means only superiority. Thus it is understood, with regard to this or that point of Christian doctrine, to which some of them even acknowledge a definitive or absolute value, Absolutheit (e.g., the preaching of charity), by several exegetes, philosophers, and sociologists, most of them belonging to liberal Protestantism. For Catholics, Christianity is transcendent because it ultimately constitutes a moral miracle; its origin and its history cannot be explained in their eyes without particular interventions of God.

Reduced to its essential features, their solution may be summarized as follows: the multiplicity of religions derives as from causes, all together, from the difficulty of the religious problem, from the pursuit of immediate material interests, from the enticement of the passions, especially when wealth increases, or when with the fusion of peoples the uncertainty of traditions is accentuated. Moreover, since man can discover certain truths by himself, there is presumably no religion in which some sound element cannot be detected (cf. V. Cathrein, Die Einheit des sittlichen Bewusstseins der Menschheit, 3 vols., Freiburg im Br. 1914; Th. Ohm, Die Liebe zu Gott in der nichtchristlichen Religionen, Krailling vor München 1950).

Between the "true religion" and the others, in both good and evil, certain analogies are therefore inevitable. The most authentically "divine" one will necessarily be corrupted by those among its adherents who are less gifted. Will it then be legitimate to judge it by these elements?

In fact, God spoke to Israel. Hence contrasts all the more notable the more extensive and minute the comparison becomes; namely: its strict monotheism, its decalogue, the series of its prophets, their reaction against all aberrations, their ever more precise announcement of the Redeemer, their miracles, which determine, after almost total apostasies, the successive conversions of the nation (v. GIUDAISMO, VI, coll. 697-703).

Substantially true, the religion of the Old Testament is nevertheless imperfect, because it addresses a crude people, like its neighbors, dependent on their civilization, seduced by their practices and their examples. Jahweh governed it, using "condescension," as he judged opportune at that stage of general evolution (cf. H. Pinard de la Boullaye, Etude comparée des religions, I, 3rd ed., Paris 1929, pp. 552-71).

The foretold Messiah has come: "The Word was made flesh" (Jn. 1:14), he established worship "in spirit and in truth" (Jn. 4:23). His is therefore a perfect religion, at least as regards its essential elements; moreover an immutable religion, because he presented it as such (Mt. 5:17-19; 16:18; 28:18-20). A divine sign that the authentic one is the very character of its founder: "Take the greatest among the modern anti-Christians," wrote Ch. A. de Sainte-Beuve; "whoever has completely misunderstood Jesus Christ, look at him closely, something was lacking in his spirit or in his heart" (Port-Royal, III, 4th ed., Paris 1878, p. 451). Other divine signs: his prophecies, his miracles, his Resurrection, his teaching, his morality (v. GESÙ CRISTO). That the natural evolution of humanity, or skillful borrowings from either the religions or the earlier sects, suffice to explain the appearance of such a doctrine, history still awaits the proofs (v. SINCRETIEMO). Still other divine signs: the triumph of the Church over paganism, despite such strong oppositions and so many persecutions, its survival in the unity of one and the same faith, despite the crises stirred up by heresies and although more than once the gangrene has gnawed at its heart in the person of unworthy popes (v. CHIESA). A divine sign: the uninterrupted flowering of its saints and its mystics, their social fruitfulness, etc., its conquering force, as soon as it is left free to present him who has been called "the Way, the Truth and the Life" (Jn. 14:6; v. CRISTIANESIMO).

Without ever having to renounce, or, what amounts to the same thing, to transform according to the taste of the day any point of its "articles of faith," received from its first Apostles, the religion of Jesus does not cease to be perfectible in the intellectual order through the deepening and coordination of its dogmas; in the moral order, not only as regards the sanctification of its members, but also as regards the individual and social application of its principles; in the liturgical order, as regards piety, the expressive force of its rites, their adaptation to the needs of the times, etc.

Why, one asks, did Christ himself not regulate everything himself in the most precise manner? Reflection suggests various very plausible reasons: a regulation carried to the last particulars would provoke inertia, stagnation, would suppress a quality essential to every constitution destined for different epochs: flexibility; it would suggest that the Legislator does not remain always present to preside over the necessary adaptations; now Christ has promised to the Heads of his Church, and not to those who would have rebelled against their authority, to continue to them, without end, his assistance (Jn. 16:7-14; Lk. 22:32; Mt. 28:19-20).

Common sense imposes having faith in him. To correctly appreciate the pedagogy imposed on him, a child would already have to have reached that degree of wisdom to which it is meant to lead him; in the same way, to judge exactly the divine designs, as regards the sanctification not of a chosen group and of one epoch, but of all men during the entire series of centuries to come, one would need to possess the wisdom of the Most High. If one has sufficient modesty not to claim it, there remains nothing but to obey integrally, lovingly, his laws. To demand, before subjecting oneself to them, the evidence of their "incomparable" value, when only their faithful observance, with a progressive transformation of spirit and heart, can put one in a position to judge them correctly, amounts to overturning the natural order. St. Augustine in particular strove to make this understood (cf. E. Portalié, Augustin, in DThC, I, coll. 2332-34). The evidences of faith, to the extent that this term can be used, are the sure reward of a life strictly regulated by faith (Jn. 7:17; 8:31; 14:21), the experimental proof of its transcendence.

Enrico Pinard de La Boullaye