SUNY series, Pangaea II: Global/Local Studies

Saïd Amir Arjomand, Stephen Kalberg, Saïd Amir Arjomand, Stephen Kalberg

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781438483412
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology of Religion
• Index: Social Sciences

The post–World War II idea of the Axial Age by Karl Jaspers, and as elaborated into the sociology of axial civilizations by S. N. Eisenstadt in the later twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, continues to be the subject of intense scholarly debate. Examples of this can be found in recent works of Hans Joas and Jürgen Habermas. In From World Religions to Axial Civilizations and Beyond, an internationally distinguished group of scholars discuss, advance, and criticize the Jaspers-Eisenstadt thesis, and go beyond it by bringing in the critical influence of Max Weber's sociology of world religions and by exploring intercivilizational encounters in key world regions. The essays within this volume are of unusual interest for their original analysis of relatively neglected civilizational zones, especially Islam and the Islamicate civilization and the Byzantine civilization, and its continuation in Orthodox Russia.

1

World Religions, Civilizations, and the Axial Age

BJÖRN WITTROCK

Introduction

Human beings seek to make sense of their existence by locating themselves in relation to other individuals, to societies, to the passing of time, and to possibilities of changing the conditions of their lives, and perhaps also by reflecting on questions of a cosmological nature. Efforts to achieve an orientation and knowledge along such lines seem to be inherent in human existence. In recent centuries some of these types of efforts have been pursued under the label social science. This term, and a set of related practices, emerged in response to uncertainties and transformations inherent in distinctly new societies and polities that came into being during the course of the last two and one-half centuries. This shift—some scholars would call it the formation of a modern world—had its origins in some parts of Europe but has come to have repercussions for the entire world. Efforts to grasp these transformations came to manifest themselves in different theoretical and disciplinary guises.1

Taking as the point of departure the call of the editors for a consideration of links between world religions and civilizations, I shall discuss the idea of the Axial Age against the background of the last century and a half at three junctures that are crucial both in societal and epistemic terms.2

One pivotal time period for the efforts at reconsideration of the nature and pathways of world religions and civilizations occurred in the decades around the turn of the twentieth century. Another critical period is the time around the middle of the twentieth century, and yet a third one occurs in the first decades of the twenty-first century. Each of these periods of change has as its background profound transformations in global patterns of appropriation, trade, and domination but also shifting cultural and academic landscapes. I shall highlight these shifts and contestations as they are reflected in the writings of a few prominent scholars during each of the three transformative periods.3

The half-century preceding World War I is an age in which the countries of Europe and North America undergo rapid change on an unprecedented scale. Their contacts with subtropical, tropical, and subarctic areas of the globe change from being largely commercial and colonial into becoming increasingly intrusive and imperialist. It is in this era that some parts of social science become professionalized in terms of associations, academic institutionalization, if on a limited scale, and go through a period in which basic conceptual categories are formulated, contested, and eventually standardized.

One important element in this process is the search for means to make sense of the other, of forms of life, of believing and doing, outside of the North Atlantic region. One focal point in intellectual debates in this period concerns the question whether religions other than Christianity should be addressed within theological faculties at European universities and how such religions should be regarded more generally.4

In this discussion, different assumptions about the origins and historical trajectories of world religions have to be clarified but also assumptions about the modern world more generally. Ernst Troeltsch and Max Weber are two important contributors to this debate.

In the middle of the twentieth century, the societal and scholarly terms of this debate were radically reformulated. It was in this changing context that Karl Jaspers’s work on the origin and goal of history was published. In some ways, it represented continuities relative to the works of Troeltsch and Weber, in other ways it differed profoundly. I shall then relate the continental European discussion about the Axial Age to the works and views of the leading sociologist and exponent of modernization theory in the American context, namely, Talcott Parsons. I shall highlight the ways in which a natural link between Continental European and American scholars about the study of world religions, civilizations, and the idea of the Axial Age failed to materialize in these years, and I will end by indicating that this was to occur but decades later.

I shall also analyze some features of current scholarly debates about world religions and civilizations against the background of ruptures in patterns of global economic power and hegemony but also shifts in the intellectual landscape and ensuing conceptual contestations of a new type. I shall finally indicate some features of an emerging scholarly consensus on prerequisites for further efforts to articulate a way of writing a contextually sensitive history and sociology of world religions, civilizations, and their global interconnectedness.

The Study of World Religions: Ernst Troeltsch and Max Weber

The period from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century was one in which Europeans came into ever more frequent contact with the inhabitants of other parts of the world and tried to understand, trade with, and, increasingly, to dominate and subjugate peoples and territories in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. Out of such contacts, disciplines such as anthropology and a variety of linguistic and ethnographic forms of knowledge emerged but also new types of medicine. Gradually, in the second half of the eighteenth century, there was also a shift in the balance of economic, commercial, and political resources that tended to give increasing weight to European powers relative to nations and societies in other parts of the world.

Similarly, there were signs that European cultural and scientific achievements were increasingly being incorporated into an imaginary in which Europe was presented as being no longer one among several civilizations but as epitomizing the characteristics of civilization as such. This imaginary became more prominent relative to an older conception that had depicted other civilizations as different, but not inferior, and sometimes also superior in some respects, as in the views among some Enlightenment thinkers of China as being exemplary in the way in which wisdom and power were linked in the conduct of public affairs.

It is only in the course of the nineteenth century, though, that ever-larger parts of the world became subjected to European territorial expansion and acquisition on a massive scale and that it is possible to characterize the entire age as one of imperialism. In this period, many European scholars and observers took it for granted that a profound divide existed between their own religious faith—most often varieties of Christianity, with a foundation in religious experiences of divine revelation—and other forms of beliefs and practices. Simultaneously, however, the nineteenth century also witnessed a gradually growing interest among European theologians in extra-European religions. In the early twentieth century, this ushered in a debate about the possibility of a sociology of religion and, indeed, about the scholarly study of religion in general. This is a debate, however, that has to be seen in a wider intellectual context.

Thus, this was a period that the intellectual historian H. Stuart Hughes (1958), in a now-classical overview, Consciousness and Society, described as one in which an earlier confidence in the universal applicability of a naturalistic and positivistic program to all domains of scholarship was waning despite advances across a range of fields in the natural sciences. At the same time, a variety of programs for the incipient social sciences were competing with each other.

It was also a time when political and social contestations within countries were becoming sharper, a time when deeper international scientific cooperation occurred amid an ever-growing volume of international trade and commerce at the same time as relationships between nations became sharper and more closely tied to armaments. Religion, its study and its roles, was in many ways at the crossroads of this variety of processes. At this juncture in time, programs were outlined for the systematic study of religion. Two of these programs came to be particularly seminal and exemplary for the study of religion in its historical and societal contexts, namely, the historical sociology of the Protestant theologian Ernst Troeltsch and Max Weber’s strongly historically orientated sociology of religion.

A sociology of religion in general and of world religions in particular has to articulate a stance toward two sets of problems, namely, the following ones: First, on what grounds can a distinction be drawn between the so-called world religions and other conglomerates of religious practices? Furthermore, if such a dividing line can, indeed, be drawn, what then is the status of the so-called world religions relative to each other and to sets of religious practices of a more local or regional nature?

Second, is it possible to explain how and through which mechanisms world religions influence key societal practices and vice versa? In particular, what are the interconnections between world religions and those wider patterns of exchange, domination, and interpretation that may be labeled civilizations? Furthermore, are there features in some world religions that have been of key significance for the formation of a modern world and for its further efflorescence and radicalization? Is it, for instance, as Weber suggestively proposed, possible to outline mechanisms through which the emergence and growth of modern capitalism depends on a specific type of religious system of beliefs and modes of conduct? Can we, as Weber intimates more than demonstrates, discern tensions that emerge as a result of the unfolding of ever more radical features inherent in both religious practices and other societal and cultural practices?

Both Ernst Troeltsch and Max Weber engage with these problems. They do so in terms that differ in style, temperament, form of exposition, intensity of narration, and theoretical imaginary. Yet, both of them produce versions of answers to these two sets of basic problems for a sociology of religion that, for all their differences, tend to be compatible, complementary, and mutually reinforcing.

However, from its inception in scholarly works and universities in Europe and North America in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, scholars engaging in any debate about history of religion as an academic subject were confronted with an even more elementary question than the two discerned above, namely the following one: Should the dominant religion in Europe and North America, Christianity, be assigned a special, privileged position as a preeminently universalistic religion of revelation and salvation? Such a stance might be asserted and perhaps even imposed. However, in scholarly terms it required that two intellectual moves be made.

First, Christianity as a religion of revelation would have to be regarded as categorically different from the forms of tribal and clan religions reported by European explorers and administrators as they traveled across or conquered ever larger extra-European areas of the globe. Such a move entailed that religious practices among inhabitants in the subtropical, tropical, and subarctic zones, increasingly subjected to European rule, were assigned to fields of study such as folklore and ethnography and kept separate from those of theology and biblical and religious studies. In practice, most European and North American scholars adhered to a delimitation roughly along these lines. Second, another move had to be performed, namely, one that ensured that a distinction be made between Christianity and other forms of “higher” religion that bore an appearance of being analogous to Christianity in structural, semantic, and even genealogical terms and, possibly, constituting religions of revelation.

In order to perform this second move, some scholars, notably the Leiden Old Testament scholar Abraham Kuenen (1883), argued that a distinction be made between truly universal religions and religions that in fundamental ways were, rather, exponents of various ethnic or national properties. The upshot of this analytical apparatus was that, despite apparent similarities between Christianity and other religions with a vast extension, elaborate rituals, and theologies inscribed in books that had been assigned sacred status, it was in the end only Christianity that might be labeled a truly universal religion rather than merely a cultural and theological expression of a particular nation, a people, or a similarly delimited collective.

Already, at the turn of the nineteenth century, such an assumption about the superiority in terms of universalism of Christianity relative to other world religions was becoming, even though still widely held, increasingly problematic. This problematic position is reflected in the programs for a sociology of religion elaborated by Ernst Troeltsch and Max Weber.

In the German academic world, a group, mainly of theologians, emerged and gained strength within the framework of the so-called religious-historical school. It had taken shape in the 1880s and 1890s at several German universities, including Göttingen, Tübingen, Marburg, Leipzig, and Bonn. Its members argued for a strengthening of the study of the history of extra-European religions also within theological faculties of universities. Ernst Troeltsch was a key member of this intellectual circle. The group met with sympathies in several circles. However, as late as in 1901, Adolf von Harnack, like Troeltsch a Protestant liberal theologian and church historian, but of an older generation, resisted the idea that faculties of theology should create chairs in the history of religion in terms that reveal a deep emotional aversion to the idea of such chairs and of studying the histories of Christianity and other religions on equal terms.

Harnack was not alone in holding such views, but his reputation and position in the German academe was exceptional and he played a prominent role in academic and public life in general. He was also some years later, namely in 1911, to become the first president of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society (KWG), the precursor of today’s Max Planck Society (MPG), at the time sometimes ironically described as the emperor’s academic guards regiment. Hence, when Troeltsch and Weber addressed the theme of the possibility of a scientific study not only in the form of church history but as a history that treated Christian religion as one among several world religions, this was a theme of interest to many intellectuals, but within theological faculties and also beyond them was still an unorthodox stance, and to some even a scandalous proposition.

In the present context it is possible to indicate Ernst Troeltsch’s stance in some of its outlines only by way of pointing to a small pos...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• About Pangaea II: Global /Local Studies
• Introduction: From World Religions to Axial Civilizations and Beyond
• Chapter 1 World Religions, Civilizations, and the Axial Age
• Chapter 2 Ideas and Interests: From Weber’s Protestant Ethic to the Later Writings on the Sociology of Religion
• Chapter 3 Karl Jaspers on Paradigmatic Individuals: A Complement to His Concept of the Axial Age and a Subtype of Weber’s Concept of Charisma
• Chapter 4 Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors: Some Forerunners and Followers of Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic Thesis in France and Brazil
• Chapter 5 Images of Natural Order and Rulership by Measure, Number, and Weight, in the Hellenistic-Roman Era: A Study of Intercivilizational Encounters
• Chapter 6 The Pioneers of Islamicate Civilizational Analysis
• Chapter 7 More (or Less) than a Civilizational “Formation”? Islam as the “Black Hole” of Comparative Civilizational Analysis
• Chapter 8 The Reception of Axial Age Legacies: Christianization and the Byzantinization of Russia
• Chapter 9 The Forgotten Earth: Nature, World Religions, and Worldlessness in the Legacy of the Axial Age/Moral Revolution
• Conclusion
• Contributors
• Index
• Back Cover