In a previous post, the author gives a brief summary of Bellah’s book and argues that Bellah’s approach goes beyond the reductive naturalist account of religion—ed.

The subtitle of Bellah’s book, From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age, indicates that it is about religions between the Paleolithic and the axial ages. Bellah explicitly states that this is “not a book about modernity,” and that he plans to write another, smaller book on modernity. However, I want to suggest that in a very important sense this book is about modernity as well. This is because Bellah believes that there are necessary links “between past and present,” and that “nothing is ever lost.”

In fact, the idea that nothing is ever lost is the guiding heuristic device of Bellah’s project. For instance, this is very much the idea that guides Bellah’s discussion of individual developmental psychology: nothing in the early stages of an individual’s psychological life is “ever lost” in the later stages. And this is also the case on the level of human history. As he puts it, “the view that ‘nothing is ever lost’ can, as we shall see, also be brought to bear on religious history.” Indeed, this heuristic guides Bellah’s discussion of Merlin Donald’s thesis that human culture has evolved through three stages: mimetic, mythic, and theoretic. Bellah argues that the early stages are never lost in the later stages.

For example, when he discusses Mesopotamian culture, which is supposed to be a “dead civilization” (a phrase that appears in the title of Leo Oppenheim’s book on Mesopotamian civilization), Bellah insists that “[I]n an important sense, all culture is one: human beings today owe something to every culture that has gone before us. Mesopotamian culture certainly had an influence on its neighbors, notably Persia, Israel, and Greece.” While discussing the gods in Egyptian religion, Bellah says, “Since ‘we’ are the product of all previous human culture, we have, at some level ‘already’ experienced those gods, as we have ‘already’ experienced the powerful beings of tribal peoples. If we are truly to understand ancient Egyptian religion (or any religion) it will be part of our task to ‘remember’ what we have forgotten, but which in some sense we already know.”

The idea that nothing is ever lost is also the guiding heuristic in the chapters on the axial religions. What makes the axial religions axial? How should we understand the axial age? According to Bellah, there are two defining features of the axial age: the emergence of a reflective and critical standpoint (what Jaspers calls “reflexivity,” what Momigliano calls “criticism”), and the emergence of theoretic culture (especially “theory-construction”). Bellah makes a compelling case for a general similarity amongst the four axial religions, which is that all forms of culture—mimetic, mythic, and theoretic—co-exist in all the axial religions, and they form a “hybrid system” even after the emergence of theoretic culture. In other words, the first two forms of culture are not replaced by the theoretic culture, which is the last stage. Instead, the theoretical culture “grows out of and significantly criticizes, but never abandons, the early stages [of mimetic and mythic culture].” I shall call this Bellah’s “hybrid system” thesis. This is obviously a particular version of his more general “nothing is ever lost” thesis.

In the case of early China, Bellah’s “hybrid system” thesis makes perfect sense. Here are two of many pieces of evidence: First, narrative is a major part of almost all Chinese texts in the axial age. Second, most of early Chinese thinkers in the axial age argued that ritual was indispensable. In other words, after the emergence of the theoretic culture in axial China, mythic culture (narrative) and mimetic culture (ritual) are not being replaced. Unlike in the case of ancient Greece, it is relatively much easier to show that ancient China is a cultural “hybrid system” that includes all three cultures at once. However, when we move to Plato, we tend to assume that philosophy as theory-construction has completely replaced myth and narrative. This is perhaps why Bellah devotes a substantial part of the Greece chapter arguing that the “hybrid system” thesis applies to Plato as well. As he puts it:

My point is that the power of Plato is his reform of the whole of what Donald called the cultural “hybrid system,” the system that includes mimetic, mythic and theoretic in a new synthesis, but not the replacement of mimetic and mythic by the theoretic alone. Such a replacement is an experiment that no one central to the axial transition in any of the four cases undertook; that awaited the emergence of western modernity in the seventeenth century.

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Bellah’s reading of Plato is just one example of what may be called Bellah’s “friendship-based hermeneutics,” which is practiced throughout the book. Here we are using Aristotle’s definition of friendship: a friend is another self. In this sense, Plato is still our friend, and this may be the reason why he is still speaking to us today. Bellah believes that there is “friendship between the ancients and the moderns”:

This book asks what our deep past can tell us about the kind of life human beings have imagined was worth living. It is an effort to live again those moments that belong to us in the depths of our present, to draw living water from the well of the past, to find friends in history who can help us understand where we are (emphasis added).

The last phrase is an allusion to a passage from Mencius, which Bellah uses as one of three epigraphs for his preface. In this passage, Mencius is essentially saying that the right way to read the writings of the ancients is very much like “finding friends in history.” This Mencian hermeneutics is further illustrated by a moving passage in Bellah’s acknowledgments:

It perhaps goes without saying, but I will say it anyway, that I owe much to the friends in history that Mencius talked about, not least to Mencius himself, but to all the creators of the great traditions that I deal with in the later chapters of this book, as well as to the reciters of myth and the dancers of ritual in the tribal and archaic traditions, who must remain anonymous, but who have been, not merely my examples, but my teachers in this enterprise.

If we contrast Bellah’s “the ancients-as-friends” hermeneutics with the antagonistic hermeneutic approach to the past that is articulated in Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence, it is illuminating that we don’t see any “anxiety of influence” here. Much could be said about Bellah’s uniquely calm and generous voice in this book. There is no anxiety in his engagement with the ancients; there is instead magnanimity.

In his 2007 book A Secular Age, Charles Taylor has identified “secularism’s subtraction stories” as the central dogma of secularism and modernism. They are, as Taylor puts it, “stories of modernity in general, and secularity in particular, which explains them by human beings having lost, or sloughed off, or liberated themselves from certain earlier, confining horizons, or illusions, or limitations of knowledge.” Obviously, Bellah’s “nothing is ever lost” theme-based Bildungsroman of human religion implies a rejection of secularism’s subtraction theories. In other words, Bellah has an implied thesis about modernity, which is that what has gone wrong in modernity is its dogmatic assumption that theoretic culture can be the only sources of knowledge, representation, and criticism, and that it can completely replace mimetic and mythic cultures.

Since Taylor focuses on telling the stories about what has happened between the sixteenth and twentieth century in Europe, he does not have much to say about the early history of religion in a global setting. From this perspective, Bellah’s and Taylor’s books complement each other perfectly. They will certainly become two landmark texts in our ongoing discourse on modernity and secularism in the twenty-first century.

I have said earlier that the idea that nothing is ever lost is the guiding heuristic for Bellah. I intentionally used the term “heuristic” because Bellah does not take it to be literally true with regard to everything in history. As Bellah puts it, “I also believe that there are types of religion and that these types can be put in an evolutionary order, not in terms of better or worse, but in terms of the capacities upon which they draw.” In the following passage, Bellah explicitly says that the slogan “nothing is ever lost” means that the capacities are never lost:

I have been concerned with the development of new capacities in human culture: mimetic, mythic and theoretic, but I have argued the later capacities do not replace the earlier ones, that all these capacities continue in complex relationships right to the present. That is what I have meant by saying in various contexts that ‘nothing is ever lost.’ A great deal of past is lost, irretrievably lost, but not the fundamental cultural capacities.

This crucial insight allows Bellah to hold the view that there is “progress” in the sense that new capacities are acquired as humankind moves from tribal and archaic religions to axial age religions. Yet he can at the same time reject the view that there is progress in all aspects in general:

Religious evolution does not mean a progression from worse to better. We have not gone from ‘primitive religion’ that tribal peoples have had to ‘higher religions’ that people like us have. […] Religious evolution does add new capacities, but it tells us nothing about how those capacities will be used. It is worth remembering, as Stephen J. Gould pointed out, that complexity is not the only good.

In other words, Bellah is able to take seriously the grand universal narrative of the development of human capacities without falling into the traps of a modernist and triumphalist history of religion, which were popularized in the nineteenth century, often assuming a hierarchy of religions, from “primitive” to “advanced.” Bellah does not assume the teleological primacy of “progress” in religious evolution; instead he pays great attention to the evolution of new “capacities” in each religious tradition on its own terms.

Bellah’s book seems to be a sign that postmodernism is on its way out, and grand narrative has returned. Postmodernism can mean too many things these days, but its initial and defining meaning, as Jean-François Lyotard has claimed, is really its complete rejection and distrust of any grand narrative or universal history. However, as Bellah would certainly remind us, since nothing is ever lost, postmodernism cannot be completely forgotten. What we find in Bellah’s book is critical universal history because it has absorbed the postmodernist critique of the traditional, dogmatic, and provincial “universal history.”

Again the chapter on ancient China is a great example here. It is clear that one of Bellah’s goals is to use the case of ancient China to test his general theory of religion and cultural evolution. However, the China chapter is much more than that. Any reader will be impressed by Bellah’s genuine curiosity and fascination about the historical, social, and cultural details of ancient China, many of which are not necessarily relevant for the purpose of confirming Bellah’s general theories and theses. It seems that Bellah wants to tell the story of early China and its religions for its own sake, trying to do justice to its particularities and diversities. The same can be said about the chapters on the other axial civilizations. The generosity and breadth of Bellah’s empathy and curiosity in humanity is on full display on every page. One will never see human history and our contemporary world the same after reading Bellah’s magnificent book.

Future histories may report that the public discourse on religion was dominated by reductive naturalism until Robert Bellah’s Religion in Human Evolution appeared in 2011. One of the most distinctive features of Bellah’s book is his extensive use of the latest developments in the natural sciences, such as biology, cognitive science, evolutionary psychology, and developmental and child psychology. One of his purposes is, as he puts it, “to show how deeply we are shaped by a very long biological history.” This might give the wrong impression that Bellah’s approach is similar to the New Naturalist approach. However, Bellah’s is better characterized as a non-reductive humanistic naturalism, which is a synthesis of the humanistic (interpretative, social, and historical) understanding of religion and the naturalist approach. Bellah belongs to a humanistic tradition of sociological, anthological, and philosophical study of religion that can be traced back to Hegel, Durkheim, Mauss, Weber, Cassirer, Schutz, Voegelin, Ricoeur, and Geertz. Bellah also draws upon the “experiential-expressive” tradition founded by Schleiermacher, James, and Tillich, taking seriously the mental, emotional, and experiential dimension of religion. Bellah’s book should remind us of a maxim by Marquis De Vauvenargues: An original book is the one that makes one love old truth.

In her 2003 lecture tellingly entitled “Who Owns Human Nature?” Marjorie Garber observed that the natural sciences now dominate the public discourse on human nature:

Humanists have, by and large, abandoned their claims to an interest in this most interesting of problems [regarding human nature], tending in recent years to regard the phrase human nature as a reductive mode of fuzzy thinking. […] But this shift in the disciplinary custody of ‘human nature’ has serious consequences for the value of that amorphous enterprise called ‘the humanities.’ For if the place to investigate ‘human nature’ is not ‘the humanities,’ what is the use of the humanistic disciplines? What else gives them cultural authority?

Bellah has a compelling answer to Garber’s question, which is that human nature should not be understood as a purely biological concept. Natural scientists do not own human “nature”; human beings are historical and cultural animals and an animal symbolicum. In other words, culture is our “acquired second nature.” Here I borrow the term “acquired second nature” from the philosopher John McDowell, whose critique of what he calls “bald naturalism” applies to the New Naturalism. Bellah has overcome almost all the problems and limits of the New Naturalism that Barbara Herrnstein Smith has identified. Smith has argued that “there are better and worse ways of pursuing the naturalistic study of religion,” and Bellah’s humanistic naturalism is exactly this “better” naturalist approach Smith has envisioned.

Let me give a brief summary of Bellah’s book before I show why Bellah’s approach is superior to the New Naturalist’s. To put it simply, Bellah’s book argues for two related theses, and the book can be divided into two parts, each of which is devoted to one of the theses. The first thesis is that religion is a cultural system, which is the topic of the first part of the book (chapters 1-2). It offers a general theory of religion as a cultural system by providing a general theory of culture. One of Bellah’s most innovative and interesting ideas is that play gives rise to culture, especially ritual and myth, which are the key components of religion. Here he draws upon Johan Huizinga’s classic Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture, Schiller’s On the Aesthetic Education of Man, as well as contemporary empirical studies of animal play, summarized in Gordon Burghard’s fascinating book The Genesis of Animal Play.

Bellah’s second thesis is that religion has evolved from the Paleolithic age to the axial age around the world. This is the focus of the second part of the book (chapters 3-9), an epic narrative of the evolution of religions. Bellah’s story of religious evolution is given as part of a general theory of cultural evolution in three stages: mimetic, mythic, and theoretic. Bellah’s second thesis is an important qualification of his first thesis. Religion is indeed a cultural system, but at the same time, religion is also always embodied, social, personal, emotional, experiential, and developmental. These two interconnected theses also serve as a fundamental heuristic device that governs and organizes the interpretations of the empirical, historical, and ethnographical materials in the book.

The second part of the book can be further divided into two sub-parts: chapters 3-5 deal with tribal and archaic religions, and chapters 6-9 cover the four axial religions in ancient Israel, Greece, China, and India. When he discusses tribal and archaic religions, Bellah focuses on the first two stages of cultural evolution, namely mimetic and mythic. He gives an account of how our capacities for mimetic and mythic culture come about as a result of long evolutionary process. In the section dealing with the four axial religions, Bellah focuses on the last stage of cultural evolution, i.e., theoretic culture, which is developed in the axial age. It should be emphasized that in this part of the book the topic is really religion in human history.

Now let me turn to three major differences between Bellah’s and the New Naturalist’s approach, and show how and why Bellah is superior to the New Naturalists in all these aspects. First, Bellah has a larger and better set of data. The New Naturalists tend to focus on religious beliefs; more specifically, they tend to focus rather narrowly on beliefs in monotheistic religions, such as beliefs in immortality, life after death, and the existence of supernatural agents such as God and spirits. Bellah’s book, on the other hand, is one of the most comprehensive and global-minded studies of all types of religions ever existed. It is a massive synthesis of various archeological, anthropological, and ethnographical studies of religious beliefs as well as practices. Bellah’s “general theory of religion” is solidly based on empirical and historical case studies. The book can be said to consist of close examinations of a wide range of historical cases from around the world: the Australian Aborigines, the Brazilian Kalapalo, the North American Navajo, the religious practices in Tikopia, Polynesia, Hawaii, ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt, Shang and Western Zhou China, and finally religions in the four axial civilizations in ancient Israel, Greece, China, and India. Bellah’s general theory is built on these concrete cases, and is further tested, modified, and developed through the articulations and interpretations of these cases. One could argue that Bellah is doing better science of humanity partly because he has a much larger and better set of data than the New Naturalists.

The second difference between Bellah and the New Naturalists is that Bellah’s approach is interpretative. The New Naturalists tend to focus on mental modules, and religion is often explained in terms of a “module for supernatural being,” as if there were immediate and direct causal connections between a mental mechanism and a religious belief. They do not see religion as a cultural system of meaning, mediated and expressed by various modes of representations. Instead, as Smith points out, they see religious beliefs as “the automatic outcome of the activity of a universal cognitive mechanism responding to the inherent properties of some domain of stimuli,” and they are not aware of what Smith calls “more than a century of relevant work in social theory and sociology of religion.” Pascal Boyer’s 2002 book Religion Explained is a good example here. As Smith puts it, Boyer “identifies interpretation with intellectual approaches cast as intrinsically nonscientific. Thus it is not surprising that terms like ‘symbol’ or ‘represent’ do not appear anywhere in his discussion of rituals or that he treats references to their ‘meaning’ so dismissively there. Indeed, according to Boyer, rituals, contrary to the accounts of them given by many anthropologists and participants, are virtually meaningless.”

Smith’s book Natural Reflections was published before Bellah’s book. She could have made use of Bellah’s book as a positive model to show how to make sense of rituals and symbols. Bellah gives a comprehensive picture of various modes of religious representation: unitive representation, enactive representation, symbolic representation (such as iconic, music, and poetic symbolization), and conceptual representation. For Bellah, religion is primarily about meaning; mimetic culture (ritual) and mythic culture (symbol and narrative) are essential parts of religious practice. This is his definition of symbol: “It is always possible that an object, person or event in the world of daily life may have a meaning in another reality that transcends the world of working. If so we call it a symbol.” Bellah calls this approach “cultural-linguistic.”

The third difference between Bellah and the New Naturalists is that Bellah can give an adequate account of the particularities and varieties of religions throughout human history, whereas the New Naturalists take particular religions as mere manifestations of the same universal and ahistorical mental module for supernatural beings. The New Naturalists are unable to do justice to the cultural and historical differences among religions. Interestingly, Bellah may encounter a similar problem on a different level. I have mentioned that he draws upon the “experiential-expressive” tradition, which assumes that there is “a general human capacity for religious experience that is then actualized differently in different religious traditions.” Bellah is aware that this approach may have the tendency to take particular religions as simply “surface manifestations of this deep pan-human experiential potentiality.”

Bellah’s solution is that we should take the “experiential-expressive” and the “cultural-linguistic” as “coordinate approaches.” As he puts it, “we need to move back and forth between them to understand the phenomenon of religion.” Bellah emphasizes that the “cultural-linguistic representation” can have a looping-effect on human experience. He believes that the cultural-linguistic approach “takes symbolic forms as primary, seeing them not so much as expressions of underlying religious emotions, but as themselves shaping religious experiences and emotions.” This will enable Bellah to accommodate the multiple aspects of particular religions, especially the cultural and historical particularities of various religious practices. Let me cite an important passage here:

Thus when I characterize widely different expressions as examples of Being cognition, I am not arguing that there is a subsistent reality of Being experience that simply comes out in different forms on different occasions. Rather, I am recognizing that there are some common human experiential potentialities that have recognizable similarities, but are inchoate until given shape by symbolic form. Once so shaped, their similarities are always qualified: the differences may be crucial. I am also fully in agreement with Lindbeck that cultural traditions not only shape, they even call forth emotional experiences. In short, we cannot disentangle raw experience from cultural form. Nevertheless we can see them as equally essential, like the Aristotelian notions of matter and form, and not have to choose one approach as primary.

This passage provides the key to understanding why Bellah’s general theory of religion in the early chapters is able to accommodate the great diversity of so many particular religions discussed in the later chapters.

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Bellah’s book represents the most comprehensive investigation into the “reality of life in the religious mode.” If we want to find another work that equals the scope, ambition, depth, and rigor of Bellah’s book, the closest might be Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion. There are several striking characteristics shared by both Hegel’s and Bellah’s projects.

First, both projects were produced at the pinnacle of two magnificent careers, at the most mature stage of their intellectual lives. After retiring from UC Berkeley, Bellah spent the last thirteen years working on this book. As he says, “this [is] my last major work.” Hegel gave his lectures on the philosophy of religion for the first time in 1821, and gave them again in 1824, 1827, and 1831 (he died from cholera in November 1831).

The second common feature is that Bellah’s book matches Hegel’s Lectures in terms of scope, ambition, and weight. Hegel’s Lectures might be the only other major work, in addition to Max Weber’s sociology of world religions, which covers the same wide range of themes as Bellah’s: a general theory of religion and history, as well as religions of ancient Israel, Greece, China, and India. Hegel’s Lectures represents the final and in some ways the decisive element of his entire philosophical system, and the same can be said about Bellah’s book regarding its place in his system of thought. In his concluding chapter, Bellah characterizes his book as belonging to the genre of “universal history.” Even though Bellah emphasizes that his history is quite different from the traditional Hegelian “universal history” in many aspects, it is still a universal history.

The third common feature of Hegel’s and Bellah’s work is the most important one, which is that Bellah’s guiding heuristic that “nothing is ever lost” is a Hegelian idea. The Hegel passage Bellah has chosen as one of three epigraphs for his preface is very telling: “Those moments which the spirit appears to have outgrown still belong to it in the depths of its present. Just as it has passed through all its moments in history, so also must it pass through them again in the present.” Both Hegel and Bellah try to tell the story of the universal history of religion as Bildungsroman of humankind. And they see it as an essential part of human Bildung through which a particular individual becomes a universal individual, which is the goal of Bildung (education and culture). To become truly human, we must, as Bellah puts it, “live again those moments that belong to us in the depths of our present, to draw living water from the well of the past.” I speculate that this might have been one of the reasons Bellah changed the original title of his book manuscript from Religious Evolution (which is also the title of his celebrated 1963 essay) into Religion in Human Evolution. This is also why Bellah’s book should be a must read for anyone who considers herself/himself an educated human being.

However, there are important differences between Hegel and Bellah. For instance, Bellah’s universal history is more critical than Hegel’s in the sense that he has corrected a major shortcoming in Hegel’s system, which is Hegel’s Eurocentralism. To tell the stories of ancient China and India as part of a grand narrative of human evolution is a refreshing and daring move. People tend to be suspicious when they see any evolutionary story, for they often assume that an evolutionary project must commit itself to the teleology of progress and Eurocentralism. I believe one of Bellah’s major contributions is to have rescued universal history from its traditional provincialist and Eurocentric dogmas. For example, Bellah shows that what is common to all of the axial religions is that they all grow through the three stages of human evolution: mimetic, mythic, and theoretic. One implication of this is that there is spontaneous becoming in different spaces, which is exactly what is missing in Hegel’s universal history.

According to Hegel, the World Spirit marches on progressively in time, and it would eventually reach its end—its actualization—in modern Europe. For Hegel, this is a world history in the sense that each nation or culture gives its specific contribution in a linear temporal manner in this process. In Hegel’s script for this grand play called “World History,” China and India appear in the first act only; they contribute something primitive at the beginning of world history, for China and India only represent “Nature Religion.” They are then “frozen” in these moments in the infancy of humankind; there is never development or evolution in China or India because the World Spirit only goes through them, moving on to Jewish and Greek religions, which are “Religion(s) of Spiritual Individuality.”

Interestingly, Feuerbach has anticipated Bellah’s critique. In fact, he might have been the first critic of Hegel to point out that Hegel does not really have a concept of spontaneous becoming in different places. Let me quote Feuerbach here:

Hegel determines and presents only the most striking differences of various religions, philosophies, times, and peoples, and in a progressive series of stages, but he ignores all that is common and identical in all of them. The form of both Hegel’s conception and method is that of exclusive time alone, not that of tolerant space; his system knows only subordination and succession; coordination and coexistence are unknown to it.

What we find in Bellah’s book is exactly this “tolerant space” that Feuerbach found wanting in Hegel. In Bellah, what is common to all axial religions is that they all grow through the same three stages of human evolution. To put Bellah’s point in Hegel’s terms, world spirit does not march through places, but rather it marches in each and every place in the world. Bellah breathes new life into universal history by making ancient Egypt, Greece, Israel, China, and India indispensable parts of a grand narrative of human religious evolution. Bellah has produced a Bildungsroman of the human spirit on a truly global scale.

In a follow-up post, the author will talk about how Bellah’s critical grand narrative of human spirit is different from modernist narratives—ed.