The scholarly discovery of religion in early modern times

GUY STROUMSA

Early modernity brought many deep changes to the status of religion in Western European countries. The Reformation constitutes obviously the major parting line for the transformation of religious attitudes in Europe.

Traditionally, the modern, comparative, and historical study of religion is perceived as having started with the establishment of specialized chairs in a number of European universities. To my mind, this new discipline started much earlier, long before institutional frameworks were established - and therefore, long before comparative religion, or the “science of religion,” could be taught to a body of students. In a sense, the defining moment for the modern, non-theological study of religions starts with its intellectual conception rather than with its academic birth.

In his big book on the conditions and the nature of religion in the modern world, A Secular Age, the philosopher Charles Taylor insists on the fact that the very idea of religion in 1500 (in Western Europe) was strikingly different from what it is in the twenty-first century.¹ My focus here is on a much more limited period.

Comparative religion is still too often perceived as having been born, like other comparative sciences, in the second half of the nineteenth century, under the influence of biology, in particular of Cuvier's comparative anatomy and Darwin's evolutionary theory.^{[257] [258]} Such a perception, probably stemming from the fact that the late nineteenth century saw the establishment of chairs devoted to the study of religion in a number of universities, must be strongly qualified. The real breakthrough in comparing cultures and religions, the most significant passage from the medieval world-view to modern approaches, stems from the seventeenth-century transformation of discourse on religion. In this context, Richard Popkin speaks of the “budding development of comparative religion” in the second half of the seventeenth century.^[259] While it is true that the latter part of the seventeenth century would see a plethora of works on “comparative religion,” it seems to me that the real watershed separating the Renaissance from the modern world happened in the early part of the century. A small number of scholars then learned to recognize, although in different ways and from different perspectives, the multiplicity of observable religions, past and present. Eventu­ally, comparison, no longer mainly perceived as a polemical tool, would rather be used to recognize the irreducibility of differences, as well as the similarities between cults and beliefs, ancient and modern, from all around the globe.

A paradigm shift

The early modern transformation of the late medieval conception of religion was due, first of all, to the dramatic change of scale in the contacts between

The scholarly discovery of religion cultures and civilizations - which to a great extent had had until then very limited relations, if at all.

The great discoveries were of course of a geographical nature. But with the new lands in the Americas, peoples that were so far unheard of were revealed to Christian Europe, together with their languages and their cultures, and in particular their religious rituals and beliefs. At the same time, travelers to the Ottoman Near East, to Persia, India, China, and Japan were encountering no less fascinating cultures. In contradistinction to the cultures of the New World, those of the Old World were perceived as stemming from long traditions and rooted in fundamentally literate societies. In Asia, as in America, one of the most puzzling problems encountered in the new communities was the nature of their religion. For Early Modern European Christians, such traditions did not belong to any of the known ways of revering the divinity. The question was, rather, whether one could at all call religion a set of beliefs and actions that were so strikingly different from both Christian rituals and beliefs and traditional forms of paganism.

Hence, the discovery of a whole spectrum of previously unknown religious attitudes permitted the development of a new sensitivity as well as a broadening of traditional Christian religious sensitivity. From now on, one knew that living religion, even when it appeared to shock Christian consciousness, could nonetheless reflect deep religious feelings. This new sensitivity, I wish to insist, brought nothing less than a paradigm shift in the

understanding of religion. The social transformations of early modernity, then, entailed new intellectual vistas and religious mutations.

In its turn, the paradigm shift entailed the passage from a subjective to an objective approach to religion. This passage, which has mainly been presented as one of the causes for the growing distance from religion, also permitted the establishment of a new, comparative approach to religions, past and present. To be sure, the modern study of religion was not born only thanks to the explosion of data that followed the great discoveries. Other major historical and cultural phenomena, such as colonialism and the birth of the modern research universities, were necessary in order for these new data to become integrated into a new overall picture.

Yet, it would be deeply misleading, as has become fashionable, to speak about the “invention” of religion. Religion had always been there, in highly different societies, since antiquity. As we know from Herodotus as well as from the Hebrew Bible, the ancients clearly knew how to recognize a religion when they saw one. On his side, Cicero had offered theoretical discussions of religion in his On the Nature of the Gods and in the Tusculan Disputations. The new insights about religion from the sixteenth century were now developed as new categories, permitting the understanding of different religions as aspects of a universal phenomenon.

What are the epistemological foundations of the new cognitive structures invented for the understanding of religious phenomena, at the dawn of the modern times?^[260] Intellectual revolutions, however, are not born from a Big Bang. At least three major historical events were necessary for the emergence of the modern approach to religious phenomena. The first, already mentioned, is the Great Discoveries: the Americas then South and East Asia were the first laboratories where the new categories meant to describe and analyze hitherto unknown phenomena were invented by Span­ish and Italian missionaries. Without the Discoveries, there would have been no encounter with the peoples and religions of the New and of the Old Worlds, and hence no emergence of a new approach to religion. The second is the Renaissance itself, or rather some of its direct consequences, such as the new interest in Antiquity and the growth of modern philology, which permitted the study of classical and oriental languages and brought the publication of major texts from different cultures, in a number of alphabets. The wars of religion, which devastated significant parts of Western Europe in the wake of the Reformation, provided the third impetus for the new science. For the best minds among scholars, both Catholics and Protestants, the claim of their own faith to express divine truth had lost much of its persuasive force. The violent, painful divisions of Christendom cast a doubt upon the absolute validity of Christianity itself. As anyone could see, the Turks, those followers of “the false prophet Mahomet,” showed a much more tolerant attitude both to outsiders such as Christians and Jews and to their own sectarians than the Christian authorities throughout Europe. This question­ing of one's own Christian faith, with its universal pretensions, was a major incentive toward the new understanding of religions as reflecting, rather than perennial truth, the values of the specific society in which they blossomed.

The first to correctly identify this crisis was the French intellectual histor­ian Paul Hazard, who published in 1935 his seminal La crise de la conscience europeenne, 1680-1715 - a complex title overly simplified in its English rendering: The European Mind.^[261] In this work, Hazard identified the last two decades of the seventeenth century and the first of the eighteenth as the period of “crisis,” i.e., of the breaking of the old conceptions, which engen­dered the emergence of the new ones, through the Enlightenment. Jonathan Israel has recently argued that one should date the start of the “crisis” earlier, around the mid-seventeenth century.^[262] The difference between the views of Hazard and Israel should not really concern us here, as it may be, to some extent, a matter of definition, depending on how broadly one defines the crisis in question. Let us only note that Hazard's identification of a major crisis in European culture was made at a time when various radical move­ments were sweeping European countries, paving the way to the Second World War. Indeed, that very same year, Edmund Husserl was delivering in Vienna the lectures which formed the basis of his Krisis in den europdischen Wissenschaften und die transcendentale phdnomenologische Philosophie. A crisis in culture reflects the collapse of old paradigms, and permits the establishment of new ones. The comparative approach to religious phenomena, born with the crisis in European consciousness, created what one can call the first modern phenomenological approach to religious phenomena - a method which would become best known in the thirties of the twentieth century, embodied in the work of the Dutch scholar Gerardus van der Leeuw.

Hazard provided in his great book a magisterial analysis of the intellectual changes, which led to the formation of the “Republic of Letters” at the passage from the classical age to the Enlightenment. At the time when modern science was born, religious ideas were undergoing deep transform­ations, as was, in a different register, the intellectual approach to religious questions. This was the case almost all over Europe, among both Catholics and Protestants, but in particular in the Netherlands, in Switzerland, in France, and in England. The blurb on the back cover of the Penguin edition (dating from 1964) of The European Mind reads:

Paul Hazard conveyed all the excitement - and much of the detail - of what he saw as the most significant single revolution in human thought: the birth of Newtonian science and of comparative religion: the impact of Descartes and Bayle, Newton and Locke, Spinoza and Leibniz; the creation of our world.

A whole generation before Michel Foucault's Les mots et les choses (first published in 1966), Hazard was able to identify in that period the birth of the human sciences. He also recognized that among the new sciences and disciplines emerging out of the crisis of European consciousness, one should include a new approach to religion. Together with the discovery of the New World, that of chronology, of the parallel histories of ancient civilizations, permitted the emergence of a hitherto unknown conception of the unity of humankind. Beyond the multiple forms of religion, including the most barbarian forms of idolatry, such as the human sacrifices practiced by some American peoples, all religions reflected the unity of humankind: the Jesuit Joseph Acosta noted that the Indians “possess some knowledge of God,” (“que en los Indios ay algun conoscimiento de Dios”), while the Dominican friar Bartolome de las Casas - a man whose encyclopedic vision of the world's religions remains stunning - would say: “Idolas colere humanum est” (idol worship is human).^[263] The idea of idolatry was one of the major preoccupations, if not obsessions, of the early modern students of religion, starting with the Spanish missionaries in America.^[264] In this sense, too, one can legitimately speak of “the discovery of religion,” as it is beyond the multipli­city of its historical and cultural forms, and upon the essence of religion that scholars would now start to focus. In earlier times, religion had always remained a binary concept, centered upon the Augustinian opposition between vera and falsa religio. Together with the devaluation of Christianity, both implicit and explicit, the discovery of so many and so different forms of religion permitted, paradoxically, the development of a single concept of religion. From then on, religion would be perceived, primarily, as a central aspect of any society, endowed with a different function in each one of them. Religion had become part of collective identity, and the study of religions would see, gradually, intellectual curiosity take over polemical animus - although this remains, alas, a never-ending process.

In a seminal book, The Meaning and End of Religion, Wilfred Cantwell Smith noted, more than a generation ago, the major changes undergone by the concept of religion in the aftermath of the Reformation, as religion became increasingly identified with a system of beliefs and practices.^[265] It is a pity that Smith's insights were not quite carried through, and that they seem to have had relatively little impact on scholarship. Vera religio, since Augustine's days, was indeed represented through a series of correct actions, both personal and public. It was, however, essentially a personal attitude, the right belief, the correct understanding of the Christian mysterium. Whereas heresies were perceived as a multiplicity of ugly movements, or medusa heads, to use Irenaeus' metaphor, orthodoxy was characterized not only by its unity, but also by its interiority. The Reformation was to break this deeply ingrained perception. Polemics between Protestants and Catholics raged more over rituals and exterior forms of piety than over religious belief itself. The polemics on Christian rituals must be seen also in the context of the puzzlement created by the discovery of so many odd forms of ritual, observed throughout the world, before one could read the texts and under­stand the etiological myths that permitted the contextualization of these rituals, or “cults.” In the constant pendulum between what one says and what one does in religion, the seventeenth century gave preference to acts, dromena, while the following century would witness the turn to the under­lying words, legomena.

In The End of Sacrifice: Religious Transformations in Late Antiquity, I argued that a series of major transformations of the very concept of religion could be discerned in late antiquity: from the suppression of blood sacrifices to the new central role of books in religious identity and ritual. The victory of Christianity did not only represent the passage from polytheism to monothe­ism; it also entailed a radical transformation of the very concept of religion, which included its internalization.¹⁰ In modern times, the medieval concept of religion, with its late antique roots, would be ushered out. It is thanks to this transformation that the modern, comparative study of religions was made possible.

Although secularization is a striking and obvious characteristic of modern­ity, its implications for the study of religion are not commonly understood. We readily acknowledge the role played by biblical criticism, as first under­taken by Richard Simon and Spinoza, in the fast erosion of revealed religion in Western European countries. Much less well known, however, are the contemporary efforts by a long list of scholars to describe and analyze, as adequately as possible, religious phenomena across the world and through­out history. The secularization of modern times is usually seen as having permitted, or imposed, a privatization of religion, together with its progres­sive disappearance from the public space. Religion now became more and more the affair of the individual, whose choices need no longer be shared by the whole community. This is certainly true, but it is as true, although less commonly recognized, that secularization also transformed religion into a

1^o Guy G. Stroumsa, The End of Sacrifice: The Religious Transformations of Late Antiquity (University of Chicago Press, 2009). This book was originally published as Guy G. Stroumsa, La fin du sacrifice: les mutations religieuses de Vantiquite tardive (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2005).

The scholarly discovery of religion major facet of any society. In that sense, ethnology would now replace theology at the forefront of the study of religion. From the individual's viewpoint, religion was now privatized, meaning that one was free to choose among different possibilities of religious - or, for that matter, of non­religious - behavior. The development of religious toleration, thanks to its great advocates from Locke to Lessing, would become one of the main benefits of this privatization. For religious scholarship, however, the progres­sive weakening of Christian revelation as the only form of truth meant the opposite: religion, in all cases, should be studied, rather, as an individual endeavor, but within its social context.

Throughout history, since the great figures of Karl Jaspers' “axial age,” (a concept of dubious heuristic value),¹¹ Zarathustra, the prophets of Israel, the Buddha and the Greek philosophers, any reflection on religion has also been a Kulturkritik.^{[266] [267]} Reflecting on religion, even on the part of theologians, who in principle write on their tradition as insiders, entails a certain distan­cing from current religious beliefs and religious practice. The early modern study of religion is no exception to this rule. Its close connection to the critique of Christianity, by both Catholic and Protestant practitioners, is too obvious to need elaboration. What is less obvious, however, is the fact that this new science was born from the relationship between Catholic and Protestant intellectuals. Neither the Catholic missionaries playing ethnolo­gists, nor the Protestant theologians turned philologists, would have been able, alone, to assert the premises upon which the modern, comparative study of religion is established. This became possible only thanks to the dialectical process between them.

In fact, this dialectical process took place not only between Catholic and Protestant intellectuals, but also between two kinds of scholarship. On the one hand, there were ethnologists, or, more precisely, missionaries groping to understand the language and mores of those they were seeking to convert, and discovering, unintentionally, “sans le savoir,” the principles of ethnology. On the other hand, there were philologists working on various oriental languages and learning to appreciate, sometimes despite themselves, the

content of the texts they were trying to edit and translate. From the Dominican Bartolome de Las Casas to the Jesuit Franςois Lafitau, the Catholic missionaries to the New World were establishing, at least implicitly, some of the principles of social anthropology. One can also say, moreover, that the modern study of religion, comparative by nature, involves by necessity a complex mixture of philology and ethnology, in the analysis of both sacred acts and sacred words. If the religious world of contemporary savages is similar to that of ancient pagans then comparison is not only possible, legitimate, and necessary between similar or comparable texts, such as the Bible and the Koran, but also between what ancient texts and contemporary mores teach us, when studied together.

The Christian crucible of comparative religion

I have referred above to a new paradigm of religion, and to cultural criticism. While freethinkers, such as Franςois de la Mothe le Vayer (1588-1672), showed a great interest in the comparison of pagan and Christian myths and rituals, with the aim of demoting the latter, early modern scholarship on religion remained, by and large, an enterprise of Christian believers.¹³ It is important to insist upon the fact that these intellectuals and scholars were no freethinkers, but rather “enlightened” Christians. Intellectual curiosity for religious traditions different from their own (including Christian heresies) permitted them to overcome, to some extent, religious and theological prejudice, and to mute down polem­ical instincts. As enlightened Christians, they were all critical of various forms of religion, past and present, and able to recognize similarities, both in structure and content, between rituals and beliefs from different religious traditions, including their own. In that sense, Vico, who draws a hermetically sealed border between the tradition of Israel and its Christian sequel on the one hand, and all other traditions on the other, is strikingly out of tune with the attitude of the best among contemporary intellectuals and scholars.

The fact that the modern, comparative study of religion was born in Christian milieus is not only due to the fact that the dawn of modernity occurred in Western Europe. As Max Muller saw so well, Christianity itself was particularly fit to become the humus of such a development:

In no religion was there a soil so well prepared for the cultivation of Comparative Theology as our own. The position which Christianity from ^{[268] [269] the very beginning took up with regard to Judaism, served as the first lesson in comparative theology, and directed the attention even of the unlearned to a comparison of two religions...14}

Meanwhile, some form of unity was provided through all this diversity, mainly thanks to the traditional concept of natural religion - a concept inherited from medieval, and ultimately from ancient, philosophy. It was natural religion, permeating the multiplicity of rituals and beliefs, which retained the unity of humankind. As we shall see, however, the appeal to natural religion would eventually become a powerful instrument in the hands of those who sought to undermine adherence to Christian suprem­acy, as it presupposed an identical approach to all observed religious rituals, irrespective of their beliefs. Even in its strangest, or most objectionable, forms, such as human sacrifices, religion could now be perceived as reflecting natural religion, and even a powerful religious faith. That clearly dealt a serious blow to the idea of revelation.

One should seek, then, to understand more precisely the conditions under which the modern study of religion first appeared and grew. The main question lies in identifying the kind of discourse that made its birth possible.¹⁵ As we have seen, the deep transformation of scholarly approaches to the religions of humankind, and to the phenomenon of religion itself, between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, must be seen in the context of the three major phenomena referred to above. The Great Discoveries, the birth of modern philology, and the wars of religion profoundly transformed intellectual and religious attitudes alike. It is only the joint effects of these three distinct phenomena which would permit the formation of a new kind of intellectual curiositas and the birth of comparative religion. This last point is essential. As Edward Said has shown in his famous book, the birth of

1 ⁴ F. Max Muller, Lectures on the Science of Religion (London: Longmans, Green, 1893), p. 29. The lectures were delivered in 1870 and first printed in 1873. I owe this reference to Simon Cook. Lourens P. van den Bosch, Friedrich Max Muller: A Life Devoted to the Humanities (Leiden: Brill, 2002), ch. 3, pp. 243-92. To be sure, a parallel case could be made for Islam, and indeed, medieval Islamicate civilizations showed some extremely impressive intellectual efforts to understand the history of religions from a comparative perspective. It is in this context that Maimonides should be understood. See Sarah Stroumsa, Maimonides in His World: Portrait of a Mediterranean Thinker (Princeton University Press, 2009), ch. 4.

¹⁵ Martin Mulsow has insisted upon the dramatic intellectual changes which made the modern history of religions possible. See in particular Martin Mulsow, "Antiquarianism and Idolatry: The Historia of Religions in the Seventeenth Century,” in Gianna Pomata and Nancy G. Siraisi (eds.), Historia: Empiricism and Erudition in Early Modern Europe (London: MIT Press, 2005), pp. 181-209.

Orientalism, for instance, is certainly related to imperialist designs and attitudes in France and in England.¹⁶ But this is true only to a certain extent. What Said did not see, and what too many forget, or fail to notice, is that in order for scholars to invest so much energy, throughout their lives, in the study of difficult languages, abstruse mythologies and odd literatures, they must be imbued with great doses of intellectual curiosity. Such intellectual curiosity goes a long way in transforming traditional perceptions and patterns of thought. Crossing all traditional boundaries, ethnic, cultural, religious or ideological, intellectual curiosity provides a necessary condition for the blooming of “la science pour la science.”

The early modern scholars who launched the modern, non-theological study of religion, all had personal stakes in their research. And yet, it would be misleading to think that their lack of disengaged objectivity entailed a deeply flawed method, and to deny their work real scholarly value. Thanks to their deep personal involvement with the subject of their inquiry, they developed some sympathy for those whose beliefs they were studying. Their intellectual curiosity, therefore, permitted them to overcome, at least to some extent, their personal attitudes and prejudices. To be sure, the idea of scientific objectivity, which is always problematic in the humanities, is all the more so in a field as complex or as fraught with deeply engrained personal attitudes and beliefs as the study of religion. Whether scholars of religion are ever able to develop a completely wertfrei approach to the phenomena they study, either within or without their own tradition, remains a moot point. But we deal here with the very beginnings of the secularization process, at the time of the discovery of American and Asian civilizations. In the study of all cultures and religions involved, from those of the native Americans to those of the Jews, of the Muslim world, of India, China and Japan, European Christians could not be devoid of old and engrained prejudices and were often moved by the temptations of imperialism - the snares of colonialism would only come later.

In 1614, the year of his death, the great philologist Isaac Casaubon pub­lished, in London, where he was living at the time, De rebus sacris et ecclesiasticis exercitationes xvι. In this work, Casaubon demonstrated, using rigorous philological arguments, the late date and the pseudepigraphical nature of the Corpus Hermeticum. Dame Frances Yates has famously called the publication of this work a watershed, separating the modern age from the

1 ⁶ Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978). One should note that Said discusses a period later than the one dealt with here.

Renaissance.¹⁷ According to her, it definitively tore down the earlier, holistic conception, to make way for the historical and critical approach to ancient texts, and hence to the early history of religious and philosophical ideas. Hence, the new paradigm for studying religious phenomena, past and present, was born from the scholarly endeavors of the early seventeenth century. To be sure, very important work on religious traditions was done both before and after our period. But a new discipline is constituted by a series of individuals, acting in a particular context. And this context must be over-determined, and has to offer a set of reasons, which, combined, transform individual oddities into a collective activity.

Among the bolder harbingers of modernity, Jean Bodin (1530-96), retaining the medieval taxonomy of religions, referred (under the name of Fridericus, one of the characters of his Heptaplomeres) to “the four kinds of religions, namely, those of the Jews, Christians, Ismaelites, and pagans...”1⁸ At the time, Spanish missionaries as well as various travelers had started to circulate reports on the religious customs of the people they met, from the Indians of New Spain and Peru to those of India, as well as the Chinese, the Turks, and the Persians. Such works, however, had yet to have their full impact on the transformation of categories through which European intellectuals, both Catholics and Protestants, perceived the religions of humankind. While the multiplicity of mores throughout the continents had already started to be registered - a case in point is Montaigne's famous Essay on Cannibals - the new categories that could deal effectively with this recently discovered complexity were still to be formulated.

Indeed, the late sixteenth century had seen a series of daring publica­tions, which opened new vistas on the religions of humankind, past and present. Already in 1571, Vincenzo Cartari had published in Venice his iconogaphic study of Greek and Roman deities, Le imagini degli dei degli antichi, nelle quali si contengono gl'idoli, riti, ceremonie, e altre cose appartenenti alla religione de gli antichi. Cartari also published a work called, in the Renaissance fashion, Theatrum, a synoptic presentation, as it were, of all

1 ⁷ See Frances Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Traditions (University of Chicago Press, 1964). See further Anthony Grafton, “Protestant versus Prophet: Isaac Casaubon on Hermes Trismegistus,” in Anthony Grafton, Defenders of the Text: The Traditions of Scholarship in an Age of Science, 1450-1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), pp. 145-61.

¹⁸ Heptaplomeres v. I quote the translation of Jean Bodin, Colloquium of the Seven about the Secrets of the Sublime, Marion Leathers Kuntz (trans.) (Princeton University Press, 1975), p. 266.

“idolatrous cults” of antiquity, including a description of their temples, sacrifices, idols, rituals, and “ceremonies.”¹⁹

Another milestone in the early days of the modern study of religion, Iohannes Boemus' Mores, leges et ritus omnium gentium, was first published in Augsburg in 1520. This book, which would go through forty-seven editions in a century, and would soon be translated into Italian, French, English, Spanish, and German, dealt with the cultures of the various parts of the old worlds, from Ethiopia and Egypt to Persia and India, tackling also Northern countries such as Poland, Russia, Lithuania, Bohemia, and Germany.²⁰ It showed no arrogance vis-a-vis exotic cultures, but rather approached them with sheer intellectual curiosity. Such works, however, were still rare.

Attempts to legitimize the newly discovered cults had already started, with the works of some of the Catholic missionaries to the American Indians, such as the Dominican Bartolome de Las Casas (1474-1566), and somewhat later the Jesuit Jose de Acosta (1540-1600).²¹ In order to better understand odd practices and beliefs, the missionaries often compared these rituals and myths to those they knew, in particular from ancient Israel and the religions of Greece and Rome.²² One should stress that in the works of the Spanish frailes, comparisons between Greek and Roman paganism and that of America usually turned to the disadvantage of ancient paganism.

Such studies, which started to appear in the sixteenth century, were published in more significant numbers throughout the seventeenth century. A real revolution in knowledge and in attitudes had taken place, which had permitted a radical transformation in the perception of religious phenomena. The dramatic events of the sixteenth century were only now having their full impact. The newly discovered continents and cultures were slowly becoming part of the “cultural landscape,” or what the French call the imaginaire, of European intellectuals. Besides, books were now being printed in classical or “exotic” languages, such as Hebrew or Arabic, and the world of European Christendom had been torn asunder. A major diversification of the religions being practiced around the world entailed the urgent need to re-define religion, as a universal phenomenon, with a strong emphasis on ritual, rather than on beliefs.

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See Caterina Volpi, Le immagini degli dei di Vincenzo Cartari (Rome: De Luca, 1996).

See Klaus A. Vogel, “Cultural Variety in a Renaissance Perspective: Johannes Boemus on ‘The Manners, Laws and Customs of all People' (1520),” in Henriette Bugge and Joan Pau Rubies (eds.), Shifting Cultures: Interaction and Discourse in the Expansion of Europe (Munster: LIT, 1995), pp. 17-34. Vogel deals with the reasons for Boemus' omission of reports on culture and religion in the New World.

Las Casas' Brevissima relation de la destruction de las Indias was published in 1552, while D'Acosta's De procuranda Indorum salute appeared in 1596. See in particular Louis Hanke, All Mankind is One: A Study of the Disputation between Bartolome de Las Casas and Juan Gines de Sepulveda in 1550 on the Intellectual and Religious Capacity of the American Indians (De Kalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 1974); Anthony Pagden, Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology (Cambridge Univer­sity Press, 1981); and Bernand and Gruzinski, De Lidolatrie.

See Sabine MacCormack, Religion in the Andes (Princeton University Press, 1991).

Thomas Hobbes offers in his Leviathan, published in 1651, one of the very first discussions devoted to religion as a generic term for an essential element found in all societies.^[270] In his discussion, Hobbes mentions Numa Pompilius, “the first king of Peru” (he means Pachacuti), and Mahomet as three “founders and legislators of commonwealths among the Gentiles,” who created a religion as the basis of their political covenant. The reference to Pachacuti, side by side with that of Numa, clearly points to the direct influence of Las Casas. In his Apologetica historia, Las Casas “made Numa the Old World model for Pachacuti, the Inca leader responsible for reconsti­tuting ancient Andean religion.”^[271] The early modern construction of civil religion, indeed, would be based to a great extent upon the missionaries' ethnographic discussions. Actually, the missionaries themselves often described the rituals they were observing as belonging to “civil religion,” in order to salvage them from being considered pagan. If Confucian rituals, for instance those centered on the Zoroastrian fire cult, are to be understood as rituals invented in order to maintain the society, they are ipso facto exempt from the accusation of paganism. The argument about the Confucian rituals was made by the Jesuits to counter the accusation of the Dominicans, in what came to be known as La querelle des rites, that by behaving like Chinese mandarins, they were taking part in pagan rituals. The Jesuits would eventu­ally be condemned by the Sorbonne in 1700. Similarly, Thomas Hyde, the author of the first scholarly work on Zoroastrian religion, Historia religionis veterum Persarum eorumque Magorum, published in 1700, argued that the Zoroastrian fire cult should be understood as a ritual of their civil religion, just as the adoration of the sun by the Peruvians was. This permitted him to include ancient Iranian religion in the religions issued of Abraham, of whom Zoroaster had been a disciple.^[272]

A new science

In the early eighteenth century, things would have changed in some radical ways. Giambattista Vico's magnum opus, La scienza nuova, was first published in 1724. It is a central witness to the birth of comparative religion, a science of which Vico thought he had discovered the essential principles. Many of the early modern scholars working on religion belong to those whom Paolo Rossi has called “Vico's great interlocutors.”^[273] They played an essential role in the formation of his ideas, and are referred to at the start of La scienza nuova. To my mind, the common failure to see the direct relationship between La scienza nuova and the early modern explorers of religion reflects a category mistake. When Vico, like others during the Enlightenment, speaks of mitologia, he does not refer to what we call today mythology but rather, more broadly, to the comparative study of religion in general. We should not underestimate the differences in intellectual climate and freedom between Naples and Europe north of the Alps in the first half of the eighteenth century. These differences go a long way in explaining Vico's odd decision to exclude from his world­wide inquiry the tradition of Israel, together with Christianity. Vico was a man of his time when he was searching for principles explaining the history of religion in ancient societies. The publication year of La scienza nuova was an annus mirabilis of sorts, as it also saw the publication of both Les moeurs des sauvages ameriquains comparees aux moeurs des premiers temps, of the Jesuit Joseph-Frangois Lafitau, a book which has been acclaimed (at least in the French-speaking world) as the founding study of modern social anthropology, as well as De l'origine des fables, Bernard Fontenelle's seminal book.^[274]

Ceremonies et coutumes religieuses de tous les peuples, the first modern multi­volume encyclopedia of the world's religions, with the famous engravings of Bernard Picard, was published (both in French and in English) from 1723 to 1743.^[275] This remarkable achievement was only made possible thanks to a whole library of monographs and synthetic studies. In its turn, Ceremonies et coutumes has recently been the object of a series of important studies, which have emphasized its crucial role in the early stages of comparative religion as an intellectual enterprise.^{[276] [277]}

This direct relationship between the work done by antiquarians and missionaries and the concept of civil religion, which would grow in import­ance up to Rousseau's Contrat social, shows how central the comparative reflection on religions had become in early modern discourse. A common perception sees the early comparative studies of religion as stemming from freethinkers. This view of things is mistaken. In their great majority, the early antiquarians and scholars were good yet enlightened Christians, both Catholics and Protestants, and sought to accommodate their religion to their research. It is only in the eighteenth century that freethinkers and Deists realized the subversive power of the new discipline. If religious legislators could be shown to have used the same methods in order to establish their religions, and if these methods, like in the case of Numa Pompilius, were notoriously fraudulent (according to Livy [ι. 19], he had concocted the story about his nightly meetings with the nymph Egeria), there was no reason not to compare also Jesus to Moses and Muhammad. Indeed, this is what would be done in the most famous samiszdat of the eighteenth century, the anonymous De tribus impostoribus, which circulated first in Latin, then in French as Le traite des trois imposteurs.³° From now on, religion in bonam partem would more and more be natural religion, entailing disdain, or worse, for revealed religions in general, and Christianity in particular.

This turn of affairs was perhaps inevitable. Comparative patterns them­selves evolved in our period. From the sixteenth to the seventeenth century, there had been a passage from an inclusive to an exclusive mode of mental functioning.³¹ In the early seventeenth century, the comparison of religious concepts and systems started from the discovery of cultures as ancient as the Bible. With the limited tools available, scholars such as John Marsham built synoptic chronologies, and learned to compare Homer and the Bible, as the two canonical texts of European culture. One was then interested in structural more than in genetic arguments. For some time, there seems to have been a delicate, precarious equilibrium between Homer and the Bible. It is only later, with the discovery of other sources, that this equilibrium was broken. In particular, the legendary figure of Sankhuniaton, the Phoenician author from the ninth century bce, whose quotations by Philo of Byblos had been preserved by Eusebius, caught the fancy of many in the eighteenth century. The die was cast: from now on, the antiquity of the Bible was not absolute anymore; other texts and figures were now known to have been older. The Bible had now definitively fallen from its pedestal, and the aura of utmost antiquity and cultural primacy would move to China in the eighteenth century, and then to India, in the early nineteenth century, once the travails of Sir William Jones (1746-94), a.k.a. “Orientalist Jones,” had introduced the knowledge of Sanskrit to Europe. Together with the rise of India, and then of Indo-European linguistics, the nineteenth century would see, with the demise of the biblical tradition, the opposition between the Indo-European and Semitic “mythologies,” and the hierarchic classification of cultures, with their well-known dramatic consequences.³²

The creation, ex nihilo, of a new, short-lived religion, Ie culte de l'Etre supreme, in the aftermath of the French Revolution may be seen as a conveni­ent symbolic end to our period. In the same last decade of the eighteenth century appeared Charles Dupuis's multi-volume Origine de tous les cultes, a mammoth work, which sought to interpret the religious traditions of all peoples as so many transformations of an original cult of the sun.³³ Soon afterwards, Friedrich Schlegel's Uber die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier (1807) would usher in a strikingly different era for the study of religions, well anchored in a new philological rigueur.

³¹SeeJohn Bossy, “Some Elementary Forms of Durkheim,” Pastand Present 95 (1982): 3-18.

³² See Maurice Olender, Les langues du paradis (Paris: Gallimard, Le Seuil, 1989), and Suzanne L. Marchand, German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Religion, Race, and Scholarship (Cambridge University Press, 2009).

³³ Charles Franςois Dupuis, Origine de tous les cultes, ou religion universelle (Paris: Chez H. Agasse, L'an ιιι de la Republique, 1794), and Frank E. Manuel, The Eighteenth Century Confronts the Gods (New York: Athenaeum, 1967), pp. 259-70.

As is well known, Edward Said stressed the fact that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Orientalism was tainted by its belonging to the age and culture of imperialism. While there is no denying that fact, Said clearly overplayed his hand by failing to recognize that the early Orientalists were not only puppets in the great game of the European courts, but could also have been moved by intellectual curiosity in their persistent endeavors.^[278] This is certainly true of many early Arabists and Islamicists, who learned to respect Islam even though their starting point had been the instinctual Christian opposition to the prophet Muhammad and his religion. This is also true of the Christian Hebraists who, since Johannes Buxtorf (1564-1629) and his Synagoga Judaica (1604; German edition 1603), had learned to observe the Jewish rituals. Although their first instinct may well have been an attempt to convert the Jews, they soon learned to respect the texts of the vast rabbinic tradition. But the Jews were a special case: for European Christians, they were at once insiders and outsiders, tolerated but not easily integrated into society. Hebrew was both a sacred tongue and an Oriental language. The modern study of Judaism soon learned to appreciate Jewish post-biblical literature, traditions, and customs, in particular thanks to Richard Simon's Comparaison des ceremonies des juifs et de la discipline de l'eglise, a text first published in 1681, and which would have a long and impressive career.^[279] More and more, however, as the Oriental character of Judaism grew in prominence, the blatant genetic and structural connections between Judaism and Christianity would be perceived as less significant. Judaism was now seen as a religion in its own right, rather than as only the fossilized remnant of early Israel. A curious book published by the marquis de la Crequiniere in 1704, Conformites des coutumes des Indiens orientaux avec celles des Juifs et des autres peuples de l'antiquite, and immediately translated by John Toland, offers an interesting testimony to this fact.^[280] Side by side with this “Orientalizing” of the Jews came the new racial anti-Semitism of the late nineteenth and twentieth century. But this is another story.

All in all, the trajectory of the early modern comparative studies of religion reflects a passage from ritual, in the seventeenth century, to myth in the eighteenth. As mentioned above, “mythology” was then equivalent to “religious system,” a fact underlined by the entry “Mythology” (an entry perhaps written by Diderot himself) in the Grande Encyclopedie. The results of the major intellectual efforts to decipher and understand the religious trad­itions of humankind, past and present, soon to be used by Schelling and Hegel, would then become the basis for the chairs of Oriental studies and science of religion established from the seventies of the nineteenth century.

FURTHER READING

App, Urs, The Birth of Orientalism (Philadelphia, PA: Pennsylvania University Press, 2010). Bernand, Carmen, and Serge Gruzinski, De l'idolatrie: une archeologie des sciences religieuses (Paris: Seuil, 1988).

Bodin, Jean, Colloquium of the Seven about the Secrets of the Sublime, Marion Leathers Kuntz (trans.) (Princeton University Press, 1975).

Feil, Ernst, Religio, die Geschichte eines neuzeitlichen Grundbegrifs (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1986-2001).

Grafton, Anthony, “Protestant versus Prophet: Isaac Casaubon on Hermes Trismegistus,” in Anthony Grafton, Defenders of the Text: The Traditions of Scholarship in an Age of Science, 1450-1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), pp. 145-61.

Gruzinski, Serge, Les quatre parties du monde: histoire d'une mondialisation (Paris: La Martiniere, 2004).

Hanke, Louis, All Mankind is One: A Study of the Disputation between Bartolome de Las Casas and Juan Gines de Sepulveda in 550 on the Intellectual and Religious Capacity of the American Indians (De Kalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 1974).

Hazard, Paul, The European Mind, 1680-1715 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1952). Hunt, Lynn, Margaret C. Jacob, and Wijnand Mijnhardt (eds.), Bernard Picart and the First Global Vision of Religion (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2010).

The Book that Changed Europe: Picart and Bernard's Religious Ceremonies of the World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).

Israel, Jonathan I., Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650-1750 (Oxford University Press, 2001).

Kippenberg, Hans Georg, Discovering Religious History in the Modern Age (Princeton University Press, 2002).

Lafitau, Jean-Franςois, Customs of the American Indians compared with the Customs of Primitive Times, William N. Fenton and Elizabeth L. Moore (trans.) (Toronto: Champlain Society, 1974-7).

Manuel, Frank E., The Eighteenth Century Confronts the Gods (New York: Athenaeum, 1967). Marchand, Suzanne L., German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Religion, Race, and Scholarship (Cambridge University Press, 2009).

Minois, Georges, Le traite des trois imposteurs: histoire d'un livre blasphematoire qui n'existait pas (Paris: Albin Michel, 2009).

Muller, F. Max, Lectures on the Science of Religion (London: Longmans, Green, 1893).

Mulsow, Martin, "Antiquarianism and Idolatry: The Historia of Religions in the Seven­teenth Century,” in Gianna Pomata and Nancy G. Siraisi (eds.), Historia: Empiricism and Erudition in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), pp. 181-209.

Olender, Maurice, The Languages of Paradise: Race, Religion, and Philology in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992).

Pagden, Anthony, Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology (Cambridge University Press, 1981).

Preus, James S., Explaining Religion: Criticism and Theoryfrom Bodin to Freud (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987).

Rossi, Paolo, The Dark Abyss of Time: The History of the Earth and the History of Nations from Hooke to Vico (University of Chicago Press, 1984).

Said, Edward W., Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978).

Silk, Mark, "Numa Pompilius and the Development of the Idea of Civil Religion,” in Giovanni Filoramo (ed.), Teologie politiche: Modelli a confront (Brescia: Morcelliana, 2005), pp. 335-56.

Smith, Wilfred Cantwell, The Meaning and End of Religion: a New Approach (New York: Macmillan, 1963).

Stroumsa, Guy G., A New Science: the Discovery of Religion in the Age of Reason (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).

Taylor, Charles, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).

Vico, Giambattista, La scienza nuova (Milan: Rizzoli, 1977).

Vogel, Klaus A., "Cultural Variety in a Renaissance Perspective: Johannes Boemus on ‘The Manners, Laws and Customs of all People' (1520),” in Henriette Bugge and Joan Pau Rubies (eds.), Shifting Cultures: Interaction and Discourse in the Expansion of Europe (Munster: LIT, 1995), pp. 17-34.

Volpi, Caterina, Le immagini degli dei di Vincenzo Cartari (Rome: De Luca, 1996).

von Wyss-Giacosa, Paola, Religionsbilder derfruhen Aufklarung: Bernard Picarts Tafelnfur die Ceremonies et coutumes religieuses de tous les peuples du monde (Wabern, Bern: Benteli Verlag, 2006).

Yates, Frances, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Traditions (University of Chicago Press, 1964).