Tricycle | Awake in the World

It’s no surprise that science would be seen as an appealing substitute for religion. Science claims to be universal, the same truth for everyone, whereas religions seem to be indelibly particular, and in their particularity, often deadly: If you are not like me, then I’ll kill you. And if you are a Sunni in a Shi’ite neighborhood in Baghdad or vice versa, you may indeed find yourself in such a situation. Our task, however, is not to deny our particularity in favor of some abstract theoretical universalism. I am not in the least denying that what we have in common is important—it is critically important—as is the search for ethical universals that can appeal across all forms of diversity. But if genuine universality is possible for humans, it must derive from and not deny particularity. The idea of the history of religion in the singular lets us see that, though we are indelibly different, not only from other religions but also from other forms of our own religion, we yet share a common history, and we cannot understand ourselves except in the context of the whole.

To illustrate this point, we can look at two religious rituals that, though they may appear to be worlds apart, actually underscore the very same religious theme. First, a Tewa Pueblo initiation ceremony that Robert Darnton described in his reflection on anthropologist Clifford Geertz in the January 11, 2007 New York Review of Books. During the ceremony adolescent boys are awakened from their beds in the middle of the night and led into the deepest and most secret room in the pueblo. There they wait, in the dark, clad only in ritual loincloths. Suddenly there’s a terrifying thumping over their heads. The overhead door opens, and into the room comes a god in a frightful mask, and he asks if the boys are ready to be “finished” as men. (Although Geertz uses the word “god,” for reasons having to do with the connotations that word has in monotheistic cultures, I prefer to use the term Powerful Beings.) When they assent, he flails them mightily with a yucca whip. Eventually, having beaten and terrorized the youths, the Powerful Being pulls off his mask and the boys see that the man looking back at them, now laughing, is a neighbor or relative.

The important lesson is not that the Powerful Being was Uncle X, but that during the ritual Uncle X was the Powerful Being. After that, he is just Uncle X again. Yet the boys have learned something about the relationship between humans and Powerful Beings, namely, that under certain circumstances they can become identical. But the point I want to make about this “strange” event is that, in its particularity, it tells us something important about religion generally: It often involves human participation in what we can call, for want of a better term, divinity.

The ritual of the Eucharist, if one thinks about it, seems as strange as the Tewa initiation. It is familiar culturally—especially for Christians, obviously—and so many of us tend not to see the strangeness of it. But what is going on here? A narrative account of its institution is an essential part of the ritual, but the event is mimetic, enacted. Ordinary bread and wine become, through the words and actions of the priest, the body and blood of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, and the members of the congregation approach the altar and partake of that body and blood. In partaking they reaffirm their membership in the body of Christ, their identity with Christ: Though we are many, we are one body because we all share one bread and one cup.

My point is that when we make the effort to understand what may seem strange in the religious practices of others, we may find that it opens the door to something beyond the particular case, something quite general: the capacity of humans to participate in divinity.

The particularities of religions may illustrate their most universal features. All religions involve bodily enactment, performance, mimesis. Even reading, when done as a religious practice, is a form of embodiment. Young Chinese in pre-modern times, for example, began by memorizing the classics before they could understand them. The point was to make the texts a part of oneself so that the poems’ meaning, as it unfolded, did not only come from the acquisition of external knowledge, but also from within. While each religion involves unique stories, narratives, and myths, the centrality of narrative is one thing that all faiths have in common.

The concreteness and particularity of mimesis and narrative seem to limit the capacity for generalization. While all religious people incorporate mimesis and narrative, they do so in very different ways. Theory, as I said earlier, has one great advantage: It can transcend context, it can rise above the particular, or at least try to. The theoretical achievements of the religions transformed in the Axial Age may show us even more clearly that we are part of one history.

Of course, the axial transformations in Greece, Israel, India, and China were not all the same. Far from it; they were each quite different and each led to later developments that took quite different directions. But they were similar, indeed this is what makes them axial, in that they involved a new element of explicit theory: the ability to criticize, to give reasons why certain religious, ethical, or social practices are wrong and should be corrected. It is not the case that narrative religions wholly lack criticism. But they have little capacity to make criticisms explicit; what they do is tell a new story, one that includes what they feel is left out in the old story. Any primarily narrative culture has a plethora of stories, often conflicting, and different depending on who tells them. The myths of women in some Australian Aboriginal societies, for example, kept secret from men, claim that originally they, the women, had all the ritual secrets, that they gave them to the men because the rituals they involve are too much trouble, and that they still know the secrets even though the men think they don’t.

But the kind of criticism I am calling theory moves beyond telling another story to giving reasons why one’s criticism is justified. Axial criticism can be political, ethical, or religious, and sometimes all three at once. Axial societies inherited from their archaic Bronze Age predecessors the notion that the ruler is “the shepherd of the people.” When the rulers are clearly not good shepherds, there is great complaint, but little in the way of argument. In the Axial societies ideas such as justice emerge for the first time. Similarly, in pre-Axial societies, if ritual doesn’t work, the failure will be explained by saying there was some mistake in the ritual, or the people will try a new ritual borrowed from a neighboring people. But in Axial societies ritual itself comes under fire, and its very meaning is altered.

One of the best examples is Amos, one of the great prophets of early Israel. Amos is relentless in his criticism of injustice and unrighteousness, of the oppression of the poor by the rich and powerful. In viewing such injustice, God will not be placated by conventional ritual.

Thus says the Lord: “I hate, I despise your feasts, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies. Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and cereal offerings, I will not accept them, and the peace offerings of your fatted beasts I will not look upon. Take away from me the noise of your songs; to the melody of your harps I will not listen. But let justice roll down like the waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.” (Amos 5:21–24)

It is not worship as such, I would argue, that Amos criticizes, but worship used to placate or even bribe God into overlooking sins. What we see in Amos and in other prophets is the capacity to criticize the existing order, social and religious, and to offer criteria in terms of which they may be reformed. The prophets do not reject, however, the mimetic and the narrative, but seek to reform them to bring them closer to their deepest meaning. Here theory, critical thinking, is used not as an autonomous basis from which to reject the received tradition, but as a way of opening up the particularity of the tradition to a more general level of understanding.

One could produce evidence of similar developments in ancient Greece and China, but I will give only some examples from ancient India, the teachings of the Buddha in particular. In Axial India, too, a radical critique of ritual occurs, one in which the sacrifice so central to Vedic religion becomes the sacrifice of self in mystical liberation, a development already apparent within the Vedic tradition itself in the Upanishads. But the Buddha carried through the criticism of the received tradition more radically than any other critic in Axial India. Key Vedic terms become radically transvalued. The central Vedic term dharma (Pali dhamma), which originally meant the act of animal sacrifice itself and was then generalized to mean duty in the context of one’s inherited status, was radically inverted to mean the teachings of the Buddha, also assertively called saddharma, the real or true dharma. Similarly, the central Vedic idea of karma (Pali kamma) was changed from a determinative principle focused on meeting primarily ritual obligations defined by social status to a moral principle focused on purifying the intention of one’s acts. To put it in more general terms, one could say that the Buddha gave an unprecedented emphasis to the rational agency of individuals and radically devalued differences of inherited status, including in principle the varna system of social hierarchy and any notion of the divine status of kings. He placed the virtues of compassion and generosity at the center of religious ethics and as preparatory to the practice of meditation that could lead to liberation. Although the Buddha, like all the great Axial reformers, took many inherited ideas for granted—above all in his case the ideas of reincarnation and liberation—he brought a theoretic clarity to religious life that undermined all inherited structures of inequality and exploitation, at least in principle. (We must admit, however, that the “promissory notes” issued in the Axial Age were never fully redeemed then or later and remain tasks for our own future action.)

My point is not that all the Axial cases are the same, or even that terms we translate as “justice” and “compassion” are the same. In every case, both ideas and words are rooted in particular traditions. Yet the use of theory, not to replace but to reform social and religious practice, provides a level of generality where we can begin to discern analogies, not just of form but of content, between the traditions. It has been a long hard road even to discern these analogies, and they are still disputed by scholars who argue for radical relativism and even incommensurability. That is an argument I cannot get into in this essay. Nor can I deal with the many ways in which power, economic and political, has used and abused religious belief and practice, a matter that can never be forgotten in any serious discussion of the role of religion in human history.

But if I am right and the objections can be overcome, then, without abandoning our indelible particularity, the fact is that, in a very important sense, we are our history. We can move to a new history in which we see that those of other faiths are not as Other as some like to claim, that we have much in common with them, that, in spite of all the differences, we are part of the same story, the human story. Religion is certainly not the whole story—science, politics, economics, and the other realms of human endeavor are part of it as well—but it is in and through and because of religion that this story is meaningful.

Robert N. Bellah is Elliott Professor of Sociology, Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley.

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