Deft as this is, there remains a certain ambiguity surrounding any such search for aspects of supposedly universal phenomena. His case studies have a sky-world and gods, and so do meet normal criteria for a religion, bearing within them an engagement with an Eliadean encompassing “non-ordinary reality.” But I have investigated another preconquest situation that appears not to. It is from one of the places Bellah does not write about, southern Africa. For South Africa in early times, I did not need religion in reconstructing how agropastoralists lived and how they apparently saw themselves living.

To rephrase: in the cases Bellah examines, the Carib- and Navajo-speakers and desert aboriginal Australians, it is the gods or spirits and an “other world” that allow us to easily attribute religion to them. But what to do in other cases? Bellah correctly refuses to call “religious” the basic (totemic) phenomena Émile Durkheim examined in Australia and repudiates the notion of a universal, primordial monotheism. Yet he is not so interested in the question of when religion is, or is not, and he recognizes religion in his argument, in fact, by many different criteria.

In southern Africa, ancestors were chiefs and other fathers in the past, whose presence had registered in men’s collective actions and fates. The personal movements of ancestors occurred in “greatness,” bogologolo, a space equally similar to Western “history” as it is comparable to the Dreaming of the Walbiri that Bellah discusses. It is problematic to see religion in it. For one thing, at first, in missionaries’ accounts, the notion of having an old religion was absent in South Africa. Only after basic translations were accomplished and rehearsed in rituals (in church), did the old religion appear as a concept. It therefore began its life as a disjointed series of improbable beliefs, customs, and rites, immediately preceding Christianity or Islam, their corrected versions.

To make this point in tangible form, consider the distance between two phrases, both originating in the same Sechuana words. The first is a phrase people heard from early missionaries, some version of the following: “The chief’s (or the ancestor’s) people will be gathered and their production made fertile and they will have a lovely settlement.” These words meant just that, and might be said in various circumstances, most straightforward, some metaphorical. After the old deployment of patriarchal terms connected to power and to ancestral chiefs uniting men was ended, however, leaving behind the Christians’ use of the same vocabulary, the above phrase became, “God’s people will be saved and dwell in a millennial kingdom on earth (or go to paradise after death).” The same phrase in a different context, so a different meaning: that shift defined the creation of religion in South Africa.

Missionaries had only local concepts and locutions in which to express themselves, and they had difficulties because they did not know the language right away, and because they had not yet enlisted Africans in group behaviors and rituals that would create their world. The vocabulary they wanted to use was already heavily trafficked, and had to do with past chiefs, fatherhood, ancestry, and larger forms of subordination with immediate import; it motivated men and women to endure hardship or go to war. Ancestors and chiefs of the past and in the present formed a latticework of possible affiliations, some of which were activated, and some of which were allowed to die over time. A communal ethos, a common body of oral lore, offered people (married men especially) a set of strategic choices, and in turn conditioned public memory. The life of this ethos blocked Christianity’s way.

Missionaries well grasped the necessity of constructing the sacred realm with existing terms, choosing underused words that might more easily take new meanings. Missionary Robert Moffat protested that he was frustrated because African people had no spiritual realm and were instead utter pragmatists, trusting only of what they could see with their own eyes. There were real forces binding people to the communities they lived in, under which they used the word ancestor (modimo); but no one, single [M]odimo (“God” in the missionaries’ lexicons) governed the world. Yet this was what Modimo was said to be! Thus its introduction as a concept used by Christians required their nullification of its meaning in ordinary interactions. From then on, ancestor and God diverged, two branches from a single concept and word.

The history of this working-out of religion and not-religion, insofar as we know it, unfolded from the later half of the nineteenth century, not before. It was only then that ordinary black peasants in the middle of South Africa midwived the religious domain among themselves, and the process was (in-line with Paul Feyerabend’s argument in Against Method) not instantaneous. After about 1840 one could adopt a new faith and meaningfully protest that one’s loyalty to a chief would continue; after 1880 one could preach as an Anglican and be a Sotho even during wartime (never before); after 1915, one could for the first time be a Christian and Zulu at the same time.

Talal Asad has shown how problematic colonialism makes the whole project of describing what people “believe,” as has Greg Dening. Among archaeologists, the category of cultic or religious (as is well known) is conveniently large, good for grouping together objects whose functions are mysterious. On slender evidence (it seems to me) whole lost societies are imagined to have operated as religious centers. It has often been much the same in ethnographies of African and Polynesian societies (on which archaeologists draw), wherein opaque chains of reference or ritual are grouped together as religion. My view is they may be better positioned within the realms of ideology, politics, and art. The danger in factoring in “religion” to political explanations of preconquest societies is that scholars sometimes imagine that their own lack of knowledge was a native opacity, and so a source of indigenous occult power. The sign of their ignorance slips somehow into the evidence pile.

To establish this alternative perspective, Bellah develops a very distinctive understanding of the evolutionary process, which he traces back in pre-human, and indeed pre-primate, speciation to arrive at the ascent of critical thinking as it first crystallized in the axial age. In an original sociological reading of ethology and evolutionary biology, Bellah establishes a causal-evolutionary model that begins with the active participation of various life forms in species complexity (rather than species specialization), then moves to mammalian play, empathy, and ritual, and culminates in the primate “episodic” and the uniquely human “mimetic,” “mythic,” and “theoretic” stages of cultural evolution.

Bellah’s grand argument is complex but elegant: social cohesion constitutes, simultaneously, a functional mechanism for group survival and an incubator of more complex forms of social evolution; these various forms of social cohesion, in a certain evolutionary stage of social development, crystallized in institutional “religion”; religion became a generalized means of generating social capacities that increase in every new stage of cultural evolution; failing to develop such patterns (a very real possibility) means the neutralization of the evolutionary process itself; and religion, even in its most domineering forms, entails moral reflexivity and social criticism, based upon the crucial distinction between reciprocal hierarchies and brute exercise of domination. In a nutshell, Religion in Human Evolution is a story of life on Earth stretching itself to consciousness as a product of “relaxed fields” of alternative realities sheltered from the struggle for survival; first interspecific, then species-specific, and eventually intraspecific. I cannot help but think of Robert Bellah having turned Teilhard de Chardin on his head.

The originality, depth, and cross-disciplinary nature of the book is bound to trigger a series of controversies as well as original research programs limited only by the intellectual background and imagination of the reader. I will not dwell on this matter, as other scholars more competent than me have already done so on this website. I only wish to point to some definite accomplishments I believe the book has already made, the impact of which will be deep and lasting.

First, the book has challenged the monopoly sociobiology and militant naturalism alike hold on evolutionary theory. Since E. O. Wilson’s Sociobiology: the New Synthesis and Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene, a rift in the midst of human studies is lurking deep. On the one side stand those who scorn the sacred, spiritual, or religious aspects of social life as various forms of a grand illusion; on the other side, those who claim that evolution does not apply to humankind since we have escaped its “red in tooth and claw” and we are masters of our fate. Religion in Human Evolution does not operate as a bridge between them; rather, it transcends the whole debate by introducing, and bringing into the heart of sociology, a developmental understanding of evolution that depends on the principle of play rather than competition and leads to increased complexity rather than specialization. Bellah exposes us to a much more balanced view of the natural process as a dialectic of necessity and freedom that is able to offer a valid scientific hypothesis of not only how the flesh multiplied, but also how the flesh (eventually) became spirit.

The second accomplishment is nothing less than the detailed and meticulous philological description of the birth of axial thinking itself. To follow Bellah’s guiding light, as it leads the reader through a vast labyrinth of ancient texts to demonstrate, for the first time, the actual ways that mythos became logos, is as pleasurable as it is intellectually rewarding. It delineates the presence of both the indispensable contribution of pre-axial literacy and the sudden eruption of creativity. As I see it, Bellah in one stroke solves the riddle of the “sudden appearance” of axial thinking and offered four case studies of the merging of mimetic, mythic, and theoretical culture. In effect, he provides a strong case for the evolutionary power of society—that new social capacities for organization, cohesion, and mobilization can be mastered only in a process of accumulation; and that the more we move to more complex forms of social organization, the more the individual becomes necessary to provide society with new impetus to push history forward.

The last two accomplishments of the book become evident when we compare its logic with the neo-Marxist and neo-Weberian grand narratives that have monopolized the field of grand historical sociology for the last forty years. The 1970s witnessed a strong revival of Marxism, which was followed by thirty years of a “neo-Weberian revolution,” incorporating a strong dose of Marxist conflict analysis, which until today rules the discipline. The hegemony of the two perspectives, irrespective of their interchangeability or particulars, have established certain assumptions about religion and the nature of historical change—that is, underlying suppositions of the nature of social change in toto.

First, on religion: Both neo-Marxist and neo-Weberian grand narratives tend to downplay or even ignore religion as they reduce it to its political and organizational features and neglect its ideational side. Bellah restores religion to its former glory, not by reminding the reader of its Durkheimian or Weberian features, but by locating it in a wider framework of an endless quest for meaning and alternative perceptions of reality. In this context, religion becomes the key to understanding social evolution (at least up to modernity), since religion and its concomitant practices are the means to firmly establish increasingly complex social power arrangements and structures that otherwise would be unattainable. For Bellah, religion is a generalized means of social action: as religion derives from the relaxed field of play (not “functional” itself), it remains, even in its most institutional forms, a bridge between necessity and freedom, between actual and potential forms of social life, and thus a privileged locus for social criticism and new visions of social organization and justice.

Second, on the suppositions of historical change and the fate of society itself: Neo-Marxist grand narratives tend to be teleological and moralistic, producing reductionist visions of social change and utopian outcomes. On the contrary, neo-Weberian grand narratives are cynically realistic and develop anti-teleological views of historical change that come close to declaring social evolution meaningless, blindly walking (or even bouncing back) through the corridors of history as if guided by accidents, unintentional consequences, and perilous passions. Considering the post-1980s demise of neo-Marxist grand theory, all that is left to us today is the hegemony of this neo-Weberian cynicism and pessimism.

Robert Bellah’s Religion in Human Evolution comes to counter this cynicism and pessimism in a most forceful way; and it does so in spite of the open pessimism and cynicism of the author himself, who in the concluding chapter of his book declares that we are in fact an insignificant and short-sighted species that is driving the planet to extinction. There is nothing in the book that prepares you for this conclusion, and rightly so. True as it is that Bellah is very careful to avoid teleological arguments—and his evolutionary scheme always allows for alternative paths, even dead-ends—reading the book unfolds a magisterial hopeful, if not optimistic image of an unbroken pathway that life on Earth has taken to self-reflection, awareness, and eventually an ecumenical sense of justice. And this is persuasively presented as the natural, though fortuitous, outcome of propensities latent in the evolutionary paths opened first by simple life forms, then by the “relaxed fields” of mammalian social life, and realized when we arrived at contemplation by self-reflecting individuals—“nothing is ever lost.” It is in this evolutionary context that Bellah investigates the emergence of axial thinking that is still with us today; in fact, an equally proper title of the book, though I admit, provocative in extremis, would be Human Evolution in Religion.

Thus, the book might be more controversial, and not as straight forward as, for example, Michael Mann’s Sources of Social Power, John Hall’s Powers and Liberties, or W. G. Runciman’s A Treatise on Social Theory, but its “looseness” is its power: more imaginative, more provocative, and more suggestive. Perhaps in part this might be explained by the fact that this masterpiece was written not under normal academic pressure, but in the relaxed field of honorable retirement.

Readers interested in Bellah’s work obviously remember his 1964 paper on “Religious Evolution” (Jonathan Z. Smith gave us an interesting reading of the differences between the two works), and some may even know that he wrote a first draft of that essay while in Montreal in 1956—that is, 55 years before he published Religion in Human Evolution. Students of Bellah also know that his undergraduate course on the sociology of religion always included a historical section in which two or more world religions were compared to show the development of religious symbols, actions, and organizations within different societal and cultural contexts. In fact, Bellah’s attempt at casting a theoretical narrative of the evolution of major religions was never just an academic topic or an intellectual interest: it was the task he assigned himself at the very beginning of his scholarly journey.

As Talcott Parsons’s beloved student at the Department of Social Relations at Harvard in the 1950s, Bellah was subject to high expectations—one could even say the highest of expectations—as his teacher considered him to be the best theorist he had ever had among his students. As he internalized these expectations as one of the keystones of his self-image as a top-achieving intellectual, Bellah devised for himself an ambitious scholarly program. A couple of quotes from a letter sent by Parsons to Harvard President Nathan Pusey on January 24, 1961, will suffice to illustrate the point. In his note Parsons described his 32-year-old colleague as “a special modern variant of the older style of universal scholar,” and spoke of Bellah having “developed a life plan of research” of “comparative historical studies of the relations between religion and society in the areas of the principal great world religions.” According to Parsons, in order to accomplish this “basic program of scholarship” Bellah had equipped himself with an astonishing amount of historical and theoretical knowledge, and the outcome of his inquiry was going to be of primary importance from both a scholarly and a practical point of view. As early as 1961, Bellah had pledged himself to a lifelong agenda that greatly exceeded his published work on East Asia and modernization.

This personal commitment—which one may all too easily evoke with Puritan ideals of “duty” and “calling”—explains, at least partly, why Bellah went back to his original plan after thirty years of silence on evolutionary matters. As most readers know, Bellah’s long “holiday” was due to the unexpected success of his 1967 essay “Civil Religion in America,” which brought him away from his earlier concerns and made him into a specialist in American religion and politics; this second phase of his career reached its peak with the publication of two co-authored books, Habits of the Heart and The Good Society, which firmly established him as a public intellectual. After his retirement from UC Berkeley in 1997, Bellah went back to his roots and, even if he has never given up writing on American matters, he successfully resumed his original plan and brought it to a (provisional) end. I will return to the relationship between Bellah, the American civil religion, and Religion in Human Evolution in a moment.

The roots of Bellah’s “life plan of research” also help to make sense of some of the basic theoretical decisions he took forty years later. As the readers of Religion in Human Evolution know, for example, the book unexpectedly starts…from the start, that is, from the Big Bang and the origin of the universe. Even if the strictly non-sociological stuff fills barely 40 pages within a 700-page book, some critics have paid it a disproportionate degree of attention, often without trying to understand its place within the wider line of reasoning; one such critic is, regrettably enough, Alan Wolfe, who in his New York Times book review wrote: “I never thought I would read a work in the sociology of religion that contained a discussion of prokaryotes and eukaryotes. I now have.” In the book, Bellah vindicates his comprehensive and deep narrative out of a more general sense of universal connection, according to which “we, as modern humans trying to understand this human practice we call religion, need to situate ourselves in the broadest context we can, and it is with scientific cosmology that we must start.”

From the point of view of the sociology of ideas, this strategy might be seen as both a homage to a venerable sociological tradition—going all the way back to Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer and the incredibly vast array of interests of 19th-century sociology—and as an attempt to bring Talcott Parsons’s work to a higher level of complexity and explicative power. Many may not know, but Parsons was a biology major and remained a voracious reader all his life, eager to make almost everything fit inside his signature “theory of social action.” Given Parsons’s charismatic personality and influence, these interests repeatedly impacted the members of his inner circle. Edward Tiryakian, who was a graduate student at Harvard in the mid-1950s together with Bellah, told me an anecdote about Parsons’s interest in decidedly non-sociological themes that I would like to share: “In one of his discussions… [Parsons] was talking about the evolution of species. So he looked at people and he said: ‘Do you realize the evolutionary significance of the worm having a hole from mouth to anus?’ And he looked at people. Now what do you do when Parsons looks at you? People just went,‘Wow!’” Twenty years later, when Bellah had found his own scholarly voice and only tangentially participated in the development of Parsonian theory, Parsons tried to make sense of the whole human condition devising a comprehensive AGIL (Adaptation, Goal Attainment, Integration, Latency) scheme covering almost everything from the ultimate ground of the “telic system” to the material (i.e. chemical and physical) bases of all living systems. This time the audience’s reaction was much different from Tiryakian’s “wow,” as Parsons had irreparably gone out of fashion and his more mature efforts went almost unnoticed outside the circle of his disciples and connoisseurs.

Parsons, however, was saying something of the utmost importance: reality is an almost endless succession of levels and layers, each one emerging from simpler ones—whatever “simpler” means in this context—and giving rise to more complex ones, which possess new, emerging properties. Likewise, Bellah’s point is that biological, psychological, social, and cultural structures combine without any clear causal primacy in creating new capacities upon which further changes build endlessly. Within this framework, religion as a distinctive societal sphere of symbols, practices, and institutions both draws on capacities developed elsewhere and shapes other orders of reality. Bellah’s analysis of the interplay between religious action and the social structure(s) and psychological factors that focused attention on a single leader—a development that in turn allowed the shift from tribal to archaic religion—is, from my point of view, one of the most electrifying sections of the book. Incidentally, this also means that, pace Smith, the burden of mechanism, agency, bearer, and so on never falls entirely upon “the biological” or “the genus Homo.” As a matter of fact, Bellah’s use of Merlin Donald’s typology becomes fully clear when evolution starts to take place outside the human organism (and the human brain)—that is when, after the invention of writing and the creation of external memory, societal and cultural forms become full and irreplaceable partners of human evolution. At the end of the day, and pace Wolfe, the point is that the non-sociological stuff is there precisely so that the sociological and anthropological can properly shine without any reductionistic innuendo.

This also explains why it might be pointless to look for any strictly sociological mechanism in Bellah’s book. As David Martin has noticed, there is no Spencer—and no L. T. Hobhouse, Gerhard Lenski, or W. G. Runciman—in Religion in Human Evolution. Émile Durkheim’s evolutionary thinking is wholly absent, and general models such as the differentiation and re-integration process sketched by Parsons in Societies: Evolutionary and Comparative Perspectives are nowhere to be found. Martin is right in saying that Bellah is not even interested in tracing the diffusion of ideas or roles; that is, in the historical paths that bring society from one kind to another. In both regards, Religion in Human Evolution might be compared with another exceptional sociological work, Niklas Luhmann’s Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft , which included a neo-Darwinian evolutionary model based on the variation, selection, and stabilization of adaptive characteristics. The model, however, was not applied to explain the shifts between the four main forms of societal differentiation (segmentary, center-periphery, stratificatory, and functional differentiation): according to Luhmann, all social science could say was that only a handful of types of society have existed in human history and that the basic structures of social systems never emerge or change randomly. Luhmann’s, as well as Bellah’s, silence about historical change in general should not be mistaken for lack of scholarship or courage: on the contrary, it comes from a lucid understanding of the promises and the limits of theory vis-à-vis the study of individual historical facts and processes that takes Parsons’s tendency to over-theorize seriously and tries to find a way to transcend its shortcomings.

The story of Robert Bellah and Religion in Human Evolution can thus be told as the quest a hero had to bring to an end against all odds and impediments, and as the dutiful effort of a metaphorical son to resume and further the work of his metaphorical father within a long line of ancestors—even putting the clear Weberian inspiration aside, Bellah’s decision to go back to pre-axial and axial-age civilizations after a life of work on modernity and modernization might be read as parallel to Durkheim’s decision to focus on Australian aboriginals after The Division of Labor in Society and Suicide, a choice that Bellah himself once interpreted as a journey into the unconscious sources of social existence analogous to Freud’s work on dreams.

But I would like to conclude by telling the story once again as an attempt to finally break a spell. As I said above, the major obstacle between Bellah and the completion of his life-task was the success of his 1967 essay, “Civil Religion in America,” and his decision to engage in the discussion on American politics, morality, and religion for the following thirty years. This proved to be a double-edged sword: on the one hand, thanks to the American civil religion debate Bellah became a renowned and respected intellectual within the academic world and the wider public sphere; on the other hand, the strict identification of all his efforts with that famous essay was, at times, hard to bear, especially when his ideas or interests changed and he wanted to break new ground. As it happens with famous actors or singers, Bellah had been typecast and remained trapped in the gilded cage of success. Moreover, as he came to learn after some attempts to disengage himself from the identification with “Civil Religion in America”—in the late 1970s Bellah even stopped using the phrase “civil religion”—labels are hard to remove. After an interlude when he was mainly acknowledged as the author of Habits of the Heart, Bellah was again tied to “Civil Religion in America.” Religion in Human Evolution might then be read as an attempt to break the American civil religion spell forever—Bellah has put on our desks a larger-than-life work that dwarfs everything he did and wrote in his long, extraordinary career. I would make a fool of myself by saying that the main thrust beyond Bellah’s latest work is the resentment of the unappreciated intellectual. No need to call Nietzsche into question: I am just saying that besides the aspiration to bring his self-assigned life plan of research to an end, Bellah might have had another, all too human, desire to fulfill.

At the heart of great scholarly and literary works stands a handful of delicate threads connecting erudition, creativity, commitment, and a dense, meaningful life. I have tried to show some of these threads, and in so doing I narrated a couple of stories that make no justice to the theoretical argument of Religion in Human Evolution, and that might disappoint its readers. All I can say is that, just like anything else, they are simply small pieces of a much bigger and intricate mosaic.

Why was this event so special? It was not just the distinction of the members of the panel themselves, beginning with Bellah, arguably the country’s best known sociologist of religion and author of such seminal essays as “Civil Religion in America” and “Religious Evolution,” and groundbreaking books, including Habits of the Heart and Tokugawa Religion. Rather, the significance of the event lay in its recognition of the importance of the book’s project, a breathtaking survey of the whole sweep of the history of religiosity, which is nothing less than the history of humankind.

It can be said that no one else would have dared to write such a book, nor could anyone else have written it. Comparisons have been made to the wide-ranging explorations of Émile Durkheim and Max Weber, early pioneers in social thought who also found in religion the key to understanding much about the social imagination. Bellah’s book is that kind of project.

The wonder is that it is written so well. It reads like a travelogue of ideas, a captain’s diary of a long exploration of uncharted intellectual seas. Bellah asks some simple questions: Where did religion come from? How did it develop? These are questions that have no simple answers, though the voyage of his discoveries through different disciplines and schools of thinking are fascinating, from physics to biology, from ancient history to classic texts. Through it all Bellah maintains a wonder about the questions and their possible answers—a humility towards the vastness of the project—that is both endearing and seductive. The reader is easily brought along for the ride.

Though the 746 pages of the book cover much, and will be mined for their varied insights for some time to come, there are roughly three foci. One is the engagement with scientific theories about evolution. Here Bellah explores the literature on the Big Bang, the beginning of the time/space continuum, and the emergence of self-sustaining life. The evolutionary physical and social development of humans is linked with their cultural development, and Bellah is aided by the theories of Merlin Donald, who outlines three major stages in human cultural history: mimetic, mythic, and theoretic. Bellah views the religious dimensions of this development, seeing in them three types of religious representation—enactive, symbolic, and conceptual.

Fully half of the book is devoted to the axial age, one of the most significant stages of religious change in response to the enlargement of human societies’ cognitive and social capacities. Here, in a way that is reminiscent of Max Weber’s comparative project on the religions of India, China, Israel, and Protestant Christianity, Bellah takes each of several ancient cultural traditions in turn, revealing an exhausting study of historical detail. He looks at ancient periods of Greece, China, Israel, and India. What Bellah explores is how—in four cases that are in many ways quite different from one another—they each have developed some of the characteristics of what are the hallmarks of axial age religiosity: individualism, critical thinking, and theoretical and reflective observation.

The third focus of the book is religion itself—what it is, and how it came to be. Unlike many contemporary thinkers who find the idea of religion to be a puzzling and difficult invention, Bellah seems confident in asserting that it is something—a stretch of human imagination that can be set apart from the other, more material aspects of human occupation. He regards it as an alternative perception of reality. It is one of the “other realities,” which, like poetry and science, “break the dreadful fatalities of this world of appearances.” But the ability to perceive these alternative realities does not come easy or early to the capacities of living species. He searches for those moments in the early development of conscious life when basic material needs are sufficiently met, and the mind can roam freely to imagine distant forms of order and other ways of understanding reality. Bellah sees this not just as a cognitive but as a physical activity, and finds the early origins of ritual and religiosity in the simple acts of play.

The critical comments about Bellah’s book tend to be related to these three foci—the relationship of religion to scientific theories of evolution, the historical cases of ancient religion during the axial age, and the conceptualization of religion and how it emerged. Regarding the scientific aspect, Luke Johnson raised the issue of the connection between biological evolution and cultural evolution. Johnson observed that Bellah meant to use the term “evolution” in more than a metaphorical sense, but he questioned to what degree that is possible. Religious dispositions are not, of course, genetically transferred traits, so this makes commentators such as Johnson question to what extent the exploration of scientific evidence is relevant to developments in religious expression, and to what extent religion can be said to evolve as opposed to simply change. In the subsequent response, Bellah made clear that religious evolution was real enough, though it was related to the evolving capacities of humans and their societies for different kinds of religious representation.

Regarding the specific case studies that Bellah explores as examples of axial age religiosity, specialists such as Wendy Doniger raise significant questions of their own. Doniger pointed out that changes in ways of thinking are gradual, and that elements of the reflective, philosophical ideas associated with the Upanishads are also present in early Vedic writings. Luke Johnson added that theoretical thinking is the privilege of elites, and for the masses, narrative and mimetic forms of religiosity continue to reign supreme. Jonathan Z. Smith questioned the very notion of the axial age, and suggested that Bellah’s book would have worked just as well without mentioning it. Bellah appreciated these insights, while affirming that different strands of religious representation can exist together, that change often does not work in steady increases but in paradigmatic leaps, and that such moments require observation and explanation.

Finally, there have been questions about the way in which Bellah thinks about the notion of religion and its origins. Jonathan Z. Smith asserted that he was intrigued with Bellah’s suggestion that religion is associated with play, but he wondered whether it was even more related to a certain kind of playfulness—games, which are guided by rules as well as by spontaneous creativity. In responding, Bellah affirmed that play and games are closely related to each other, and for that matter both are associated with another form of familiar human activity, work—and that these three often overlap. The religious impulse is related to all of them, though probably more essentially to the activity of play.

Each of the commentators couched their remarks in the context of an enormous appreciation for the immensity of Bellah’s project, and the value of the book for a wide range of subjects in the study of the role of culture in human evolution. It is a book that is large in many ways, a culmination of a lifetime of diligent analysis and fertile reflection, and it sets a new landmark in the efforts to understand the nature of religion in social life.

I am also grateful to the three panelists who spoke so graciously at the panel and who have provided written versions of their comments. I tried to respond to them ex tempore at the event and have seen a video of my remarks, but I will use this occasion to give a more considered answer to the many questions they raised, having to deal with some overlap between them as I go along.

Early on Wendy Doniger calls in question the very idea of the axial age and more generally the very idea of a breakthrough. She writes, “The problem with the idea of a breakthrough is that evolution goes too slowly to be pinpointed in a single age, that change is gradual.” I will first discuss briefly the objection that the fact that change is gradual rules out the idea of moments of dramatic change, of breakthroughs. It is surely the case that much of the time, maybe for millions of years in biological time, change is indeed gradual. Nonetheless there are moments of dramatic change, transitions, in which the emergence of new capacities leads to remarkable new developments. John Maynard Smith and Eors Szathmary, in their book The Major Transitions in Evolution, describe a number of such developments, as I indicate in chapter 2 of my book. No transition is more remarkable or, as far as we know, more sudden, as the transition from inorganic matter to life itself, something that we know happened maybe 3.7 billion years ago, but that no one knows for sure why it happened. The transition from monocellular to multicellular life is another such transition, as is the emergence of almost all the major body plans of multicellular organisms in the early Cambrian period. Perhaps the single most important transition at the level of cultural evolution is the emergence of language itself, the greatest development in human technology in history, upon which all later developments rest, and relative to which the invention of computers seems minor indeed. And, although there may have been something like proto-language, the emergence of fully grammatical language was almost necessarily sudden. So my argument that theoretic culture emerged during the axial age in the first millennium BCE is hardly startling, nor is it undermined by any emphasis on gradual change, which in the area of metallurgy, agricultural technology, urbanism, etc., was indeed also taking place in the same period.

Doniger’s doubts about the actuality of the axial age focus mainly on India: Wasn’t something like theoretic culture, my index for the axial transition, already present in the Vedas, well before the Upanishads and the Pali Canon of early Buddhism, which are usually seen as exhibiting axial traits? My answer is that no, it wasn’t: the Vedas are largely tribal ritual poetry with a few moments of riddling that could be seen later as foreshadowing metaphysical developments, but are not that different from riddles in many tribal cultures. The startling thing is that the tribal poetry of the Vedas remained the basis of later Hinduism, or at least the Brahmins claimed it did, though it took an awful lot of interpretation to make it seem so. Something similar can be seen in the reworking of tribal myth in Genesis in the Hebrew Bible to make it conform to much later ideas.

The axial age is a complex phenomenon and I cannot repeat here all I said about it in the book. But I should underline one point: an axial transition is only possible when an archaic state has come into existence. Aboriginal Australia could never have given rise to an axial age breakthrough. What is most characteristic of archaic states is the emergence of two mutually entailing ideas: gods and kings. Archaic civilizations fuse the ideas of gods and kings in a single cosmology in which kings are gods or children of gods or will be gods when they become ancestors. I argue that tribal societies are basically egalitarian and have neither chiefs nor gods, but do have powerful beings who are not worshipped but rather identified with in rituals. The cosmological fusion of a degree of divine and political power unknown in tribal societies is the necessary precondition for axial breakthroughs, which in every case call into question the fusion of god and king, claim an immediate relation of ordinary people to the divine and question the legitimacy of the political order. In so doing they use abstract reasoning that can be called theoretic in Merlin Donald’s terms. These theoretic ideas can be metaphysical or ethical or both depending on the case. I argue that they are metaphysical in the Upanishads but become also ethical in early Buddhism.

Doniger raises the question of diffusion versus independent emergence, which as far as I am concerned is a valid and still open question. I tried, as much as I could given the patchiness of the data, to discover diffusion, but failed to do so. The four axial cases are so radically different that I don’t see them as versions of a single breakthrough. There are analogies at a high level of abstraction, but not similarities of substance. Doniger raises the idea of reincarnation, which she finds in Hinduism and Buddhism, but also in Plato. Actually Gananath Obeyesekere, in his Imagining Karma: Ethical Transformation in Amerindian, Buddhist, and Greek Rebirth shows that the idea of reincarnation is very widespread among tribal peoples on every continent, but refers simply to the idea that children may be the return of dead relatives, completely lacking the theoretical structure of karma as found first in the Upanishads and then in early Buddhism. Reincarnation in Plato also lacks the structure of karma and it is far from clear how seriously Plato intends it. It never attained the centrality in Greco-Roman culture that it had in India. The specific implications of the idea of karma, namely that your rebirth will reflect how you have behaved in your present or past births, is specifically and solely Indian. It is a theoretical development of the widespread and very simple idea of rebirth.

I must admit to a degree of skepticism as to whether overcrowding had the significant consequences that Doniger attributes to it. I think the renouncer idea, so well developed in India but not missing in any axial case, has much more to do with a rejection of the socio-political status quo than a wish to avoid overcrowding. Actually overcrowding would be just the kind of social condition that I think should be avoided in speaking of the “cause” of the axial transition. I pointed to a number of social, economic, and political conditions that might be necessary preconditions for an axial breakthrough but cannot be seen as sufficient conditions. Breakthroughs do seem to occur in advanced agrarian societies when they suffer serious breakdowns, but here, as I note, breakdowns are much more frequent than breakthroughs so cannot be sufficient conditions for them.

Several commentators implied that I wanted to explain the axial age or religious evolution generally only by means of social conditions, but I never do that. In every case individual agency is critical and the kind of person involved in that agency will have enormous consequences. It is one of the indices of axiality that there were in the axial age individual thinkers with whom we can still argue, persons that are real to us as interlocutors, what Mencius called “friends in history.” It is striking to me and decisive for my understanding of the Axial Age that there are no such figures before the first millennium BCE. Undoubtedly the Epic of Gilgamesh is a great story, but we cannot argue with a story. We can however argue with Confucius and Mencius, with the Buddha, with Isaiah and Jeremiah, and with Plato and Aristotle. They are alive to us in a way that earlier figures are not and it is no accident that all the great traditions that are still alive today begin then and not before.

As to Doniger’s reflections on ethics, I never said ethics emerge only in the axial age—all societies have ethics. I said universal ethics begin in the axial age, and I stand by that. All earlier ethics are particularistic. Doniger herself in The Hindus: An Alternative History argues that Hindu ethics are almost completely particularistic. Nor do I equate universal ethics with Kantianism, which is unintelligible without the background of modern individualism arising from the Reformation and the Enlightenment. Neither Confucian ethics nor Buddhist ethics, nor the ethics of the Hebrew prophets, nor the ethics of Plato and Aristotle are Kantian, but they are all universal. Universal ethics is one important indicator of the theoretic element in axial culture, but it is no more important than metaphysics or cosmology.

Let me now turn to Luke Timothy Johnson. My admiration for Wendy Doniger will be evident to any reader of my book from the many citations to her work in the chapter on India. There are no citations to Luke Johnson in my book only because he writes on a period that I do not reach. Nonetheless, I want to express my admiration for his many books and in particular for Among the Gentiles: Greco-Roman Religion and Christianity, because it is a deeply comparative book that takes Greco-Roman religion as seriously as it takes Christianity and finds many parallels between them in the early centuries CE. It is just such comparative work that I find extremely helpful and seeing a specialist reach out to undertake it is most encouraging.

Johnson has raised five serious questions about my book, and I will do my best to respond to them.

1) He asks if my use of evolution is to be taken literally as applying to cultural as well as biological development. Yes, it is. Language is a biological capacity that turned out to have enormous cultural implications, but culture never ceases to be a biological capacity and is subject to the same evolutionary pressures as are biological organisms (many more than humans have incipient cultural capacities, we should not forget). I say in the preface that we need to understand what religion is before we argue about whether it is adaptive or not, yet the question of adaptation looms over the whole book and does not just return at the end of the conclusion. Even in the preface I ask whether we moderns can adapt to our own adaptations, and here the question is definitely survival. I will return to the question of evolutionary adaptation in my next book, if I live to write it, because it is in the modern era, with which that book will be concerned, that the issue becomes absolutely central. In that book I will point out that natural selection, modified in terms of recent biological theory, applies to religion as much as any other cultural sphere. For example, no tribal religion can survive in today’s world without protection from a modern state, because no tribal society, and religion is the cultural basis of all such societies, can survive in competition with much stronger, more complex societies. A careful reading of my book will find such intimations in many places. For example, I cite W. G. Runciman’s argument that the ancient Greek polis was “an evolutionary dead end.”

2) It surprises me to read that Johnson thinks that I, following one (wrong) reading of Durkheim, place the social group higher than the individual. In the theory of my teacher, Talcott Parsons, culture, society, personality, and the behavioral organism are all equally essential and interpenetrating aspects of human action. Myth and ritual, even among the Australian Aborigines, are constantly changing, and who changes them? Individuals, of course, acting within the constraints of their culture, society, and their bodies, but never without an aspect of independent creativity. And when it comes to my treatment of the axial age, I give the highest priority to creative individuals, always acting in a total situation, but with remarkable ingenuity and innovation. Johnson seems to recognize this in my treatment of the axial cases, but there is no change in my theoretical presuppositions there. Of course it is just in the axial age that we first find identifiable individuals with whom we can converse to this day. But I recognize the dancers of ritual and the reciters of myth as my teachers in my acknowledgements and they are surely individuals.

3) Johnson’s questions about the axial age start with issues raised by Doniger so I won’t go over the issue of radical transitions in biological and cultural evolution. Of course they all have precursors—nothing comes from nothing—but they are still radically new.  But Johnson is wrong in thinking I shift entirely to the cognitive in treating the axial age. In the case of ancient Greece I give quite a bit of attention to the development of the sacrificial system and its unusually egalitarian side, something that helps us understand the emergence of political egalitarianism. And I place great emphasis on festivals, especially the City Dionysia devoted to Dionysus. Here mimesis and narrative are central, not theory, but I see the great dramatists, all involved in religious performance, as narrative precursors of the axial breakthrough.

I insist that nothing is ever lost—that ritual and narrative are reconstructed in the emergence of the theoretic, but that they never go away. The focus on the cognitive, the theoretic, in my treatment of the Axial Age is not because that was all there was but because that was what was new. I did not set out to do a comprehensive history of religion in all its complexity—that would have required a much longer book. I had to focus on what was important in terms of my overall argument. Finally, Johnson argues that I stop too soon, that Hellenistic developments in Greece and postexilic developments in Israel are so important that they shouldn’t have been missed. I have already explained why the book ends where it does and that I hope to continue it in the future. Yet is Johnson right? Who are the greatest figures in Greek thought who influenced Christianity? Surely Plato and the Neo-Platonists, and much later Aristotle. The Epicureans were a largely isolated cult in ancient times and their influence on the Renaissance has been much exaggerated. And I end my Israel chapter with Deuteronomy, the core of the Torah, and not with the prophets

4) Here Johnson returns to a question with which I have already dealt. Play is dealt with throughout the book. But my book is not a history of religion but a history of religious evolution and I must focus on new capacities and the new possibilities, for good and for ill (evolution can end in successful survival, or, much more commonly, in extinction).

5) Johnson’s queries about how my book ends again miss the theme of ambiguity and human involvement with our own evolution that runs throughout the whole book. Evolution is not some absolutely deterministic external force that stands over against us. We participate in our own evolution as have all organisms since the beginning of life. How will we do so? Yes, extinction would be a natural evolutionary outcome, yet changing our ways to avoid extinction would also be a natural evolutionary outcome. My ecological reflections at the end of the book are integral to its whole argument.

Finally, let me turn to Jonathan Z. Smith. It was I who asked that he be included in the panel, and at the event I tried to explain why. For one thing he is a lifelong comparativist, as I have been. I think only such a comparativist knows the agony as well as the delight of doing comparative work, where every move is open to question, but where new insights emerge that give great pleasure.

But there was another reason. Smith had been a very strong critic of my 1964 article “Religious Evolution” and I thought it likely that he would have similar objections to my new book. Academic argument, even civil academic conflict, is essential to the life of the mind. I didn’t want to shy away from disagreement, but hoped the open discussion of disagreement would forward the general discussion. But I am quick to admit that I was happy that Smith took a much more charitable view of my book than he had of my long-ago article, though I am also glad he raised enough points of disagreement to allow a continuing discussion.

I am more than happy to accept Smith’s apology for the intemperate language in his criticism of my 1964 article “Religious Evolution.” I also understand the grounds for that criticism that he spelled out in his comment. I agree that the article was highly condensed and the explications he asked for would surely have helped to clarify what I wanted to say. But at this point that is all water under the bridge, shall we say. My new book goes much more deeply into the subject matter of the earlier part of the original article and the subject matter of the latter part of that article will be developed in dramatically new ways in my next book. I see no value in continuing to discuss an article that had considerable influence in its day, but is now outmoded by my own subsequent work.

Before dealing with the questions Smith raises about my new book, let me offer him thanks for mentioning so favorably an early article of mine, “Durkheim and History.” When putting together two collections of my writings, Beyond Belief and much more recently The Robert Bellah Reader, I seriously considered including that article. I decided against it on the grounds that it was too erudite and too specialized, but I now see that that was a mistake. That essay was based on a complete reading of Durkheim, including a thousand pages of French text not then translated in English. I suspect it was just the erudition of that article that Smith admired and that I should have thought of more highly.

So let me now take up the two questions Smith raises about the new book: the first has to do with the status of the axial age, a concern of all three commentators, and the second with the relation of play and work in thinking about ritual. Smith’s first objection to the axial age idea seems to have arisen from Jaspers’s failure to give an adequate causal explanation for its sudden emergence, dealing with it “more as a miracle than an event.” I have no causal explanation of the axial transition, although I do spell out some of the necessary but not sufficient conditions. The event itself has to do with new ideas that cannot be explained in terms of material or social conditions, though some such conditions may be necessary. Individual initiative in response to similar kinds of social crises in the four cases is surely part of the story, though how “causal” they are is problematic. In general I prefer to deal with the axial age in interpretive rather than explanatory terms, and, as I have said before, I am reassured by the fact that most of the great biological and cultural transitions in history remain unexplained to this day.

Just a word about Smith’s unhappiness that ancient Mesopotamia was not included as an axial case. He notes that I characterize Mesopotamia as archaic, but not axial, and he finds Mesopotamia to be more significant in its religious achievements than the other societies I characterize as archaic. I can see how the little information we have about Shang China, due to the nature of the texts that have survived, would limit comparison with the much richer record in Mesopotamia, but I fail to see why the very rich record of ancient Egypt would give it lesser status. In any case Mesopotamia fits my essential criterion of an archaic society, one in which cosmos, gods, and kings are fused. As Thorkild Jacobsen wrote of Mesopotamia, “the cosmos was seen as a state and the state as an essential element in the cosmos.” It is just that fusion that is broken through in every axial case.

With respect to work and play in relation to ritual I really think that there is less difference between us than Smith seems to see. Even though I quote Friedrich Schiller, I don’t think of play in Romantic terms, and especially not in terms of freedom, at least not exclusively. I see play as involving from its earliest animal appearance what Smith calls “constraint,” and indeed rules. Play requires the constraint of aggression and the maintenance of equality between the players and thus is rule-governed from the beginning. Within those rules and constraint it is true that play is free, is its own reward, but it would not be possible without the presence of constraint and rules. Rather baffling to me is Smith’s readiness to see the relation between ritual and games, but not ritual and play, when, as I think most people would agree, games are a kind of play: we “play a game.” Games indeed have rules, which is, I think, Smith’s point, but so, I have argued, does play. As to the opposition play/work, I think it is preferable to play/reality, for I think play is quite real to the players. But that ritual involves work is certain. In my Kalapalo example, months of work lead up to the great rituals and involve the accumulation of food for those who will attend, the preparation of ritual objects, and a great deal of rehearsal. A Navajo sing, lasting several nights, has been compared to a performance of Richard Wagner’s Ring; plenty of work there. Yet I think that there is a powerful element of play in ritual itself, which often involves dancing, celebration and feasting. As on most issues I am a both/and person rather than an either/or person, so I see ritual as both work and play, though perhaps its genesis was in play. Certainly my thirteen years of work on my latest book involved a great deal of work. Yet it often gave me great joy and I felt it was also a kind of play.

I cannot say how much Jonathan Z. Smith’s various appreciative remarks about my book mean to me. I admire him as one of the great students of comparative religion of our day. If he has found my book useful and even enjoyable, then I am immensely pleased.

Let me begin with the historical relationship between the several civilizations of “the axial age,” Karl Jasper’s term for a period (sometime between 600 and 400 BCE) when similar important ideas—literacy, rationality, criticism—appeared in Israel, Greece, China, India, and Iran (though Professor Bellah does not say much about Iran). It is a time of breakthroughs, or breakdowns, in all of them. But the problem with the idea of a breakthrough is that evolution goes too slowly to be pinpointed in a single age—that change is gradual. In the case of India, for instance, Professor Bellah rightly notes that there were continuities with older inquiries, that there was, already in the Rig Veda, in c. 1500 BCE, the questioning, the uncertainty that we find in the Upanishadic debates of around the 6^th century BCE. The axial spirit of inquiry, of challenge, is therefore not a breakthrough in the Upanishads or Buddhism.

But even if we assume, for the sake of argument, that in each of these ancient cultures (India, Greece, China, Israel) there was, simultaneously, a breakthrough, then we must ask, where did these changes come from? What was the historical relationship between these cultures? Did the axial idea grow up in one, to be transmitted to the others?  Did it arise in all of them at the same time because of some shared social or economic development? Was there a sudden simultaneous appearance in all of them of some vibrating pillar like the one in Stanley Kubrick’s film “2001, A Space Odyssey”? The tension between independent origin, borrowing, or diffusion from a common source is an age-old question in the discipline of comparative religions, and Professor Bellah wisely does not attempt to resolve it.

But the apparent conflict between these explanations might be resolved by a modified version of the argument that Claude Lévi-Strauss made (in “Split Representation in the Art of Asia and America”) about cross-cultural parallels:

The simplest hypothesis is that of historical contact or independent development from a common civilization. But even if this hypothesis is refuted by facts, or if, as seems more likely, it should lack adequate evidence, attempts at interpretation are not necessarily doomed to failure. [...] Even if the most ambitious reconstructions of the diffusionist school were to be confirmed, we should still be faced with an essential problem which has nothing to do with history. Why should a cultural trait that has been borrowed or diffused through a long historical period remain intact?

Lévi-Strauss further argues (in The Story of Lynx) that borrowing is never haphazard, that what is borrowed is not just fitted into a preexisting structure: the borrowing takes place because of the similarity in structure between concepts in the culture that “lends” them and concepts in the culture that “borrows” them. In the case of the axial age, Professor Bellah suggests a similarity not in mental structures but in social and economic events. But then, what explains the confluence of such events in several cultures at once?

There is no clear, single reason why, for instance, ideas of reincarnation and renunciation arose in India in both Hinduism and Buddhism at this time (let alone in Greece, as well). Professor Bellah, true to his discipline, notes the general changes in the economic and social background, but these changes also took place, sooner or later, in many other parts of the world, often in places where no such ideas arose. To explain the Indian instance, at least, we might use a modified version of the intriguing hypothesis that Walter A. Fairservis laid out in his book, The Roots of Ancient India. Fairservis suggests that the theory of reincarnation may reflect an anxiety of overcrowding, the claustrophobia of a culture fenced in, a kind of urban Angst (a word ultimately derived from what the Rig Veda calls amhas, the terror of being confined in a small space).

The terror of overcrowding was also a precipitating factor in the ancient Babylonian epic, the Enuma Elish. Actual overcrowding, as Professor Bellah notes, in a most moving passage near the end of the book, precipitated several crises in the history of the planet earth, including the one that seems to be beginning now. The terror of overcrowding, however, arose not when the earth as a whole was crowded, which could not have been a problem in the ancient world, but when there were clusters of overcrowding in certain places: the first cities.

The Upanishadic discussion of the doctrine of transmigration begins when a teacher asks his pupil, “Do you know why the world beyond is not filled up, even when more and more people continuously go there?” and it ends with the statement, “As a result, that world up there is not filled up.” (Chandogya Upanishad 5.10.8; Brihadaranyaka Upanishad 5.1.1 and 6.2.2). The idea of an overcrowded earth is a part of the Hindu myth of the declining Four Ages (people live too long in the first Age and become too numerous) and recurs in the Mahabharata as a justification for the genocidal war (when the overburdened earth begins to sink beneath the cosmic waters). Is this fear of crowds related to the shock of the new experience of city life in the Ganges Valley?  Were there already slums in ancient Kashi/Varanasi (as there may already have been in Harappa , in the Indus Valley Civilization, before 2000 BCE? )?   Did a fear of this sort inspire the theory of reincarnation, a recycling not of tin cans but of souls?

The spread of paddy rice cultivation into the Ganges valley, producing a surplus that could support cities, created an unprecedented proximity of people. The Greek historian Herodotus, writing in the fifth century BCE, said that the Indians were the most populous nation on earth (History, 5.3). Population densities had significantly increased as a result of a combination of the incorporation of indigenous peoples, a soaring birthrate, and the creation of agricultural surpluses. This led to a burgeoning of all the things that people who (like the ancient Vedic Indians) like to sleep on their saddlebags at night don’t like about sleeping indoors, things that are for them a cultural nightmare. The movements to renounce the fleshpots of the Ganges Valley may have been inspired in part by a longing to return to the good old days preserved (or imagined) in the Vedic texts, when life was both simpler and freer. Such a longing is reflected in the village settings of so much of the Upanishads, and in the forest imagery that abounds in the writings of the early sects, both inside and outside of Hinduism. Within the cities, the Buddha sat in an isolated spot under a tree to obtain enlightenment, and he first preached in a deer park. The Upanishads seem to have been composed by people who left the settled towns for rustic settings where master and student could sit under some tree somewhere, the ancient Indian equivalent of the bucolic liberal arts college; the renunciants are said to live in the wilderness, in contrast with the conventional Vedic sacrificers who live in villages.

Perhaps in reaction to this fear of the crowd, the whole Indian tradition at this time was becoming not just renunciant but individualistic; we begin to see a transition from group to individual, a perceived need for personal rituals of transformation, forming a certain sort of person, not just a member of the tribe.

As Professor Bellah rightly notes, it seldom if ever occurred to anyone in India, then or at any time before the 19^th century, to attempt to change the world; but many people made judgments against the world, particularly the social hierarchy of their world, and opted out, or tried to solve the problem of suffering within the individual. The new religious movements of the axial age located the problem of the human condition, of human suffering, within the individual heart and mind (where Freud, too, located it), rather than in a hierarchical society (where Marx located it). In this way, at least, these movements were individualistic—“Look to your own house” (or, in the Buddha’s metaphor, “Get out of your burning house”)—rather than socially oriented, as non-renunciant Hinduism was—“Your identity is meaningful only as one member of a diverse social body—that is, the hierarchy of caste.”  This in itself was a tremendous innovation.

I don’t think that these ideas can be explained in terms of social factors alone. Someone, someone, thought of the particular Hindu variant of the idea of reincarnation that became the theory of karma. And someone else thought of the Buddhist variant. Of course, these individuals did not produce their ideas in a vacuum, and Professor Bellah gives full credit, throughout his book, to the impact of great individuals such as Plato and the Buddha. The idea of karma, first laid out in detail in one of the earliest Upanishads (the Brhadaranyaka), was foreshadowed in many ways in early Vedic texts and perhaps developed among kings rather than priests (a possibility that Professor Bellah discusses well). There may well have also been contributions from the great Indian catch-all of “local beliefs and customs,” village Hinduism, or from that ever-ready source of the unknown, the Adivasis or aboriginals. And there is also always the possibility of an infusion of ideas from the descendents of the Indus Valley Culture, an unknowable pool of what might be radically different ideas. All great ideas are in a sense created by committees, like Hollywood film scripts and camels (in the old joke).

But rather than postulating, for the source of these ideas about individual salvation, an axial pool whose existence can’t be proved, it might be simpler to admit that some individual, some brilliant, original theologian whose name is lost to us, composed some of the Upanishads. We can line up the usual suspects: a natural development from Vedic ideas (no genius required); some brilliant person in the Vedic camp (genius required); kings rather than priests; the IVC and its descendents; Adivasis; etc. But this lineup is often nothing more than a confession: “I can’t find it in the Veda.”  And perhaps something roughly like this is what happened in axial Greece, and China, and Israel—that is to say, to use Monty Python’s phrase, something entirely different. Our failure to identify the individuals in many of these essential cases, to name a Plato or a Buddha, should not, however, drive us back upon the unfalsifiable hypothesis of an axial Zeitgeist.

Among the several factors that Professor Bellah regards as characteristic of the axial age is the dawn of a universal ethics; in India, he sees this as happening particularly in Buddhism. I would argue that various forms of, and alternatives to, universal ethics, existed before the axial age in India.

The first problem with using universal ethics as a defining breakthrough is the assumption that this particular brand of ethics is all that defines religion, and therefore that when ethics improve, religion evolves. But many other aspects of religion also underwent dramatic evolution during this period—mysticism, theology, the use of narrative in argument, changes in ritual, the beginnings of sectarian worship, and so much more. Moreover, although certain forms of ethics did in fact evolve at this time, other ethics were already there long before. Generosity in particular was basic not only to the ethics of Vedic religion but to the broader Indo-European world that preceded the Vedas.

My colleague Jim Gustafson, in Ethics from a Theocentric Perspective, working from assumptions he derived from Robert Bellah’s Habits of the Heart, made a useful distinction between, on the one hand, an ethics of obligation, a universal, Kantian agenda of following the rules, doing your duty to society; and, on the other hand, an ethics of appreciation, generosity, and art. An ethics of obligation may well have thrived or even developed in the axial age; but an ethics of appreciation was in place before it, and continued to thrive after it. Moreover, even if we grant that the ethics of obligation evolved or improved at this time, we must also grant that other aspects of social ethics got worse: women, for instance, had enjoyed many privileges, and a degree of freedom, in the pre-axial Vedic age that they lost in subsequent eras of Hinduism. (And in Buddhism, though many women thrived in Buddhism in ways that were not yet available to them in Hinduism.) I don’t want to veer into promiscuous relativism here, nor to rank the different sorts of ethics, but merely to point out that something that I would call ethics was already in place throughout the Indo-European world long before the axial age.

And this takes me to my final point: Rationality is one of the defining breakthroughs of the axial age; scholars tend to turn Indian enlightenment (spiritual awakening) into European Enlightenment (an 18^th century philosophical development), mistaking the Buddha for Voltaire. But near the very end of the book, Professor Bellah begins to talk about the importance of play, Huizinga’s Homo Ludens and all that, which seems to me to be part of the irrational or non-rational aspect of religion, and a very important one. The ethics of obligation is generally not playful—too much is at stake, the great challenge of human suffering. But there’s a lot of playfulness in the Upanishads and in early Buddhism. Play, the love of nature and generosity are intrinsic to the ethics of appreciation, which is also an ethics of aesthetics. Overemphasizing the ethics of obligation short-changes other religious changes and concerns that evolved at this time in the ethics of appreciation, changes in narrative, in art, in the performance of religion, the singing of religion. These seem to me to cry out to be given more prominence in any broad survey of the history of religion, especially in one so deeply humane and compassionate as Robert Bellah’s Religion in Human Evolution.

This essay is a slightly revised version of remarks delivered last month in San Francisco, at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion.—ed.

These remarks by J. Z. Smith were delivered last month in San Francisco at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion. If you are unable to view the document on this page, please click here to download the original PDF.—ed.

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.

*  *  *

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.

*  *  *

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.

His thirteen years of labor on this monumental study have yielded rich analyses on an impressive array of topics. Among my favorites are his deeply informed preliminary essays on “religion and reality” and “religion and evolution”—each carried out in close conversation with experts—his argument that play is an element of continuity among primates and humans, and his discrete studies of society and religion among the Kalapalo in Brazil, the Navaho in the United States, the Walbiri in Australia, as well as among discrete Polynesian populations in Tikopia and Hawai’i. These separate and highly detailed analyses of the mimetic and mythic dimensions of religion provide balance and depth to his argument concerning the “breakthrough” of the theoretical or critical dimension that is claimed to characterize the so-called axial age in Israel, Greece, China, and India. My admiration for the scope and detail of these individual studies is sharpened by my awareness of being only reasonably competent in two of the religious traditions he surveys.

My response, therefore, will take the form of five observations/questions at the level of the larger argument rather than at the level of specific assertions. I am emboldened to ask such questions because of the clear sense given by Professor Bellah himself that, at the end, he was not altogether happy with some of his choices, or wished that he could have pulled some elements together more coherently.

My first question is fairly fundamental. How literally is “evolution” to be understood in the analysis of cultural/historical phenomena? Is the evolutionary paradigm more than a helpful analogy when looking at changes in society and religion? Or is Bellah committed to it as a scientific thesis to which both his inquiry and his subject adhere? On one side, Bellah seems to think of evolution as literally operative, as when, at the beginning of chapter two, he characterizes his work in the first chapter as looking “at human development as the acquisition of a series of capacities, all of which have contributed to the formation of religions.” He then shifts from ontogeny to phylogeny in asking “when did religion begin?” and “were there earlier developments that made its emergence possible?” All this sounds very much like Bellah is considering religion as an aspect of evolutionary development; there is no religion until there is the development of capacities. Fair enough. But then, following such a scientific inquiry, should not an evolutionary consideration turn to how “the acquisition of [religious] capacities” is somehow adaptive or maladaptive? But we find nothing along these lines. When Bellah describes the transitions from episodic culture to mimetic to mythic to theoretic/critical, likewise, the discussion is not in terms of adaptation for survival, but rather adaptation to changing social forms… so that evolution seems here more as an analogy than as literal mutation. Can the author clarify?

My second question concerns the commitment—utterly understandable for a disciple of Émile Durkheim—to the social group rather than the individual. I take this to be analogous (again) to the author’s preference in evolutionary theory for the organism over the “selfish gene” as the entity that adapts. But when it comes to religion, is it the case that religious expression is always epiphenomenal to social form? Sometimes in Bellah’s book, the link seems to be drawn too strongly. Are tribal religions mimetic because of tribal organization? Is myth a corollary of empire? Is theory unthinkable without cities? And is the secondary position of the individual religious experience and expression always justified? Bellah’s opening set of unitive experiences would suggest not. And in some cases, as in ancient Israel, can it not be argued that the experiences/conviction of the prophets help determine social forms, rather than the reverse? Again, within evolutionary theory, the role of individual mutant genes is part of the mix. Indeed, in the attention given to Jeremiah, Confucius, Plato, and others of the axial age. Bellah’s attention seems to shift almost entirely to such mutants.

My third set of questions, in fact, concerns Professor Bellah’s commitment to the notion of an axial age, which dominates the book (with some 300 pages devoted to it), yet occupies an oddly awkward place within the argument as a whole. The term follows Karl Jaspers in locating an independent “breakthrough” to critical thought in disparate parts of the world between 800-200 BCE, that influenced all subsequent philosophy and religion.

1. It forces a series of qualifications concerning anticipations (“breakouts”which are not quite “breakthroughs”) and remnants of earlier phases that persist.

2. It represents almost totally a shift to the cognitive, so that the new element becomes the defining element in religion—here, there is a real break with the wonderful analysis of play as the anticipation of religion’s ritual. In the study of the axial age in Greece, for example, we learn about a series of critical thinkers more or less “relative to the sacred,” but we lose sight of the other modes of religious practice continuous with play that persist in Greece among the vast majority of people. Plato and Aristotle may represent an interesting new wrinkle but they do not represent a “new age” in Greek religion. In my own analysis of Greco-Roman religion, I would identify them as one sort of religious sensibility—but other sensibilities were just as important—if less available to the student of ancient literature.

3. It stops with the axial age, without making clear whether the “breakthrough” represented by critical thought was a permanent mutation or only an passing phenomenon. In Greece, for example, if we move just slightly past Aristotle, we find on one side the description of the superstitious man in Theophrastus’ Characters, and on the other side, Epicurus’ Sovereign Maxims, which advance an attack on religious belief and practice that far surpasses anything in Plato or Aristotle. One could argue, indeed, that Epicurus’ “breakthrough” is far more influential on religion within modernity than the form of critical thought Bellah locates in the axial age. Similarly, in Israel, the prophetic breakthrough, while certainly important, was not defining of Jewish religion nearly so much as was the religious practice centered in the temple and torah.

My fourth observation follows from the previous one, and picks up from Professor Bellah’s intimation that he might have done better to follow through the very intriguing link established between the play of primates and the play/ritual of humans. I think this might indeed have been a more capacious—and more consistently evolutionary—framework for the analysis of religion in diverse social settings. This would enable the inclusion of all those modes of social and individual activity that usually are recognized as religious but are not necessarily verbal or conceptual—sacrifices, festivals, dance, painting, healings, ecstatic babblings—and also enable the recognition of the religious element in philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle simply as one “way of being religious” among others.

My fifth and final observation concerns the two aspects of “practical intent” with which Professor Bellah concludes his book. I am completely in agreement with his desire that people be more accepting of each other’s religions, and have argued a similar position in my recent book on Christianity and Greco-Roman religion. But I fail to see how such a desirable disposition follows necessarily from an evolutionary understanding of religion. A rigorous historical-comparative analysis could lead to the same conclusion. But neither analytic approach enables an automatic turn from what is to what ought to be.

Still less do I grasp how a moral posture toward climate change arises from evolutionary theory. If, as Professor Bellah states, the catastrophic disruption of the eco-system began as long as 100,000 years ago with the invention of agriculture, and if, as he also states, the proliferation of the human species at the cost of other species is a consequence of the success of human adaptation—and adaptation to adaptation—then it would seem that a properly evolutionary perspective would be one of wonderment or resignation (the bacteria win in the end anyway), but not one of moral indignation. Indeed, a robust theology of creation might more logically lead to a moral stance with regard to the excessive exploitation of the earth’s resources, but a strictly evolutionary perspective should—unless I have badly misunderstood things—lead only to applause at our species remarkable cunning in survival—up to now!

I have posed some questions concerning Professor Bellah’s argument, but I want to close by repeating my admiration for his accomplishment. This book rewards close reading by enriching the reader in many ways. It has been a challenge to read, but also a stimulus to serious thought on truly important questions. In a season of small and careful statements, such a bold, sweeping, and genuinely passionate argument deserves all the honor it will undoubtedly receive.

This essay is a slightly revised version of remarks delivered last month in San Francisco, at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion.—ed.