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Meaning and Action in our Strange World

ISBN 978-1-4051-8972-9

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The Importance of Religion FLOOD

“The book has a creativity, comprehensiveness, and energy not often found in contemporary Religious Studies. It has the hallmarks of a milestone statement in theorizing about the phenomenology of religion.”

William E. Paden, The University of Vermont

“In this erudite work, Gavin Flood develops a powerful new understanding of religion as springing from the nature of the human condition itself. It will challenge and pro-voke, and will surely renew the field.”

Oliver Davies, King’s College London

“Flood presents a thesis about ‘religion’ that is provocative, irenic, learned, and wide ranging. His interdisciplinary intervention is an elegant challenge to those who think religion is dead or dying. It is a sensitive exploration of religion as the textual and ritual generator of meaning.”

Gavin D’Costa, University of Bristol

In spite of the noble efforts of scientific reason to reveal everything to us, in many ways the world remains a mysterious place. For so many people, religion continues to represent a decisive guide to navigating through the strange world we all inhabit – yet never in history has religion been more misunderstood. The Importance of Religion illuminates the central importance of religion in modern times, revealing how it crucially provides people with meaning to their lives and guides them in their everyday moral choices. Renowned religion scholar Gavin Flood argues that modern religions do not just represent passive notions about the nature of reality, but are active and inspirational – they show us ways of living, dying, choosing a good life, and inhabiting the strange and mysterious world of the twenty-first century. In a wide-ranging, engaging, and brilliant book, Flood discusses the nature and meaning of religion and spirituality, as well as religion’s relationship with politics, science, evolutionary biology, human rights, culture, humanism, and more. The Importance of Religion offers rich insights into the myriad ways religion provides meaning to the lives of people and communities in the modern world.

Gavin Flood is Professor of Hindu Studies and Comparative Religion at the University of Oxford where he is also the Academic Director of the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies. He is the author of Introduction to Hinduism (1996) and The Ascetic Self: Subjectivity, Memory, Tradition (2006); and editor of the Blackwell Companion to Hinduism (Wiley-Blackwell, 2003).

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The Importance of Religion

The Importance of Religion

Meaning and Action in OurStrange World

Gavin Flood

This edition first published 2012� 2012 Gavin Flood

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Flood, Gavin D., 1954-The importance of religion : meaning and action in our strange world / Gavin Flood.

p. cm.Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4051-8972-9 – ISBN 978-1-4051-8971-2 (pbk.)1. Religion–Philosophy. I. Title.BL51.F555 2012210–dc23 2011026338

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This book is published in the following electronic formats: ePDFs 9781444399035;ePub 9781444399042; Mobi 9781444399059

Set in 10/12pt Sabon by Thomson Digital, Noida, India

1 2012

For Kwan

Hat man sein warum? des Lebens,

so vertr€agt man sich fast mit jedem wie?

He who has a why to live for,

can stand almost any how.

(Nietzsche, Die G€otzen D€ammerung (1889),

Sprueche und Pfeile 12)

Contents

Preface xiAcknowledgments xv

Introduction: Religion and the Human Condition 1Mediating Our Strange World 6Theories of Religion 8Religion and Religions 12Defining Religion 14The Argument 17Alienation and the Human Condition 17The Primacy of Perception and the System of Signs 23The Invisible and the Transcendent 24The Truths of Religion 26Conclusion 27

Part One ACTION

1 Clearing the Ground 37Reification: The Marxist Legacy 40Rationalization: The Weberian Legacy 44Knowledge and Action 46Methodology 49Conclusion 50

2 The Meaning of Religious Action 53The Sociology of Religious Meaning 55Meaning and Action 58Moral Acts 60Ritual and the Body 63A Rite of Affliction 66The Meaning of Sacrifice 69A Phenomenology of Sacrifice 71The Meanings of Death 73Conclusion 74

3 The Inner Journey 80Languages of Spirituality 83The Spiritual Habitus 91Conclusion 95

Part Two SPEECH

4 The Reception of the Text 101Routes to the World of Life 102Theories of the Text 106The Reception of Sacred Texts 109Sacred Text and Act 111Conclusion 113

5 Tradition, Language, and the Self 115Linguistic Universals 117Linguistic Relativity 118Language and Religious Experience 122Language as a Model of Religion 125Conclusion 127

6 Religion and Rationality 130What is Rationality? 131Rational Religious Communities 139Rationality and Cosmology 141Conclusion 146

Part Three WORLD

7 The Mystery of Complexity and Emergence 153A History of Antagonism 155Complexity and Constraint 159The Ontology of Process 164Conclusion 166

8 The Union of Nature and Imagination 171Art and the Real 172Cosmological Art 175Pavel Florensky 177Abhinavagupta 178Secular Art 180Re-Spiritualizing Art 182Conclusion 185

9 Religion and Politics 189Religion in the Public Sphere 190The Secular Public Sphere 195

viii Contents

The Traditionalist View 197Fundamentalism 200The Religious Citizen 201Conclusion 205

Summary 210

Epilogue 217

References 221

Index 237

Contents ix

Preface

Aprevailing idea from the Enlightenment, still with us today, is that the lightof reason would dispel the darkness of religion and reveal the universe to us.While the desire for enlightenment and the attendant aspiration for a betterhuman future are commendable, the identification of religion with darknessand ignorance is problematic. Religion has not gone away and is a topic ofdeep concern both because of its destructive capacity – most conflicts in theworld have a religious component – and for its constructive capacity as aresource that gives people truth, beauty, and goodness. While secularizationhas developed in the West, this has not heralded the demise of religion.Christianity may be in decline in northern Europe but is expanding in Africaand the Americas. Islam is expanding in Europe and it is not inconceivablethat it will be the majority religion in Europe in the course of time. With thedemise of communism in Russia and Eastern Europe and the transformationof communism in China, religions are developing in those countries, bothnew religions and reinvigorated old religions, Orthodoxy in Russia, Bud-dhism and Taoism in China. In some western societies we also have theenhancement of privatized, individual spirituality linked with a quest forauthentic experience and the true self.

This book iswritten in the context of these developments and in view of thepersistence of religion inmodern times. This is not a survey of religions or thecontemporary religious field, of which there are plenty of fine volumes, nor isit a defense of religion as such, but is intended to develop new vocabulariesand theoretical perspectives for the study of religion. It claims that theimportance of religion is existential; religions provide significant meaningto life and guide people in their choices and practices.

Religions are not primarily propositions about the nature of reality,although they can be that, but ways of living and dying, ways of choosinga good life and guiding judgments about moral choice. Through actions theways of life that we call religionsmediate the human encounter withmystery.The world is a mysterious place, which scientific accounts do not exhaust butrather serve to add to its mystery. Religions show us ways of inhabiting our

strange world that are transformative for individuals and for communities asa whole. Religious people in the modern world balance commitments to thesecular public sphere – from voting in elections to educating children – withcommitments to particular religious communities. This book attempts todescribe the ways in which people are religious and to analyze the ways ofbeing religious under the guiding thesis that religions are existentiallyimportant in providing people with meaning. While religions are, of course,important for macro-history, as large social and cultural forces movingthrough time, the argument here is that their primary importance lies intheir significance for human persons in their communities.

The book is written broadly from within a phenomenological intellectualtradition, but a kind of phenomenology that is dialogical. It is also influencedby other intellectual traditions, particularly what might be called criticalsocial science and what has come to be known as post-critical theology(theology chastened by postmodern critique). I tend to avoid the term“postmodern,” which now has limited usefulness, although this book iswritten in the wake of that great intellectual flurry and energy even thoughsome of its results were eccentric. But it seems to me that the ultimatequestions that religions deal with (why is there something rather thannothing? who am I? what is the purpose of our life?) and their meaning inpeople’s lives necessitates an approach that is both detached (and so attemptsaccurate description) and intellectually committed to truth (and so attemptsaccurate evaluation). The general orientation of this phenomenology istowards the world and this approach shows us that religions are fundamen-tally about how we are or should be in the world: they are about action, therepeated actions of the liturgical moment through history, the repeatedactions of the ascetic life, and the unrepeatable moral actions of social being.

Because of the impossibly vast nature of the topic, I have dealt with some ofthese complex issues at a fairly theoretical level, bringing in concreteexamples to illustrate points. Giving an account of religion in terms ofsubjectivemeaning takes us into a number of subject areas, including culturalanthropology, linguistic anthropology, philosophy, and theology. I hope thatthe reader will find application for the ideas and general argument presentedhere in their own contexts. Frits Staal speculates that the centre of civilizationwill return once more to China and India. This is probably an accurateprediction and while few predictions of the future prove to be correct, I thinkit safe to say that religions will continue to thrive, continue to endow liveswith meaning, and will contribute to global, social, and climatic challengesfacing the world. The new world citizen can also be a religious citizen.

After a substantial introduction outlining the general thesis I wish topresent, that religion must be understood in terms of the human willto meaning and in terms of the desire for transcendence, the book is dividedinto three parts: action, speech, and world. We can understand religions as

xii Preface

cultural forms that mediate the human encounter with mystery. Given thisgeneral thesis, in Part One, Action, I develop the idea that religion must beunderstood in terms of human meaning which finds expression in action: theencounter with mystery occurs through action which is of two kinds, ritual(within which I include spiritual practices) and moral. Chapter 1 examinesthe two processes of reification and rationalization in modernity and arguesthat these are not adequate accounts of religion; the latter needs to beunderstood in terms of the formation of subjective meaning. Chapter 2develops this thesis arguing that religion calls people into the world throughritual andmoral action. The chapter describes three examples of ritual actionfrom the ethnographic literature. Chapter 3 links action to spirituality anddescribes the cultivating of an inner journey.

Part Two, Speech, shows how mystery is mediated through text which isreceived into the human world and internalized. It presents an account ofreligion and rationality and presents an account of the internalization of thesacred text as a form of encounter with mystery. Chapter 4 is about sacredtext as characteristic or prototypical of religions, Chapter 5 on the problemoflinguistic relativity, and Chapter 6 on rationality and religion. I present anaccount in these chapters of how religious language mediates the encounterwithmystery and endowsmeaning to communities of reception. Finally, PartThree, World, shows how science, art, and politics are related to religionsand how they move towards the world, which wemight call the real, throughaction. Chapter 7 is about religion and science and offers a view of religionsin the light of complexity and constraint. Chapter 8 is focused on art inrelation to religion, the way art, like religion, mediates the encounter withmystery and its interface with religion. Finally, Chapter 9 examines religionand politics and the topical notion of how being a religious person iscompatible with the idea of the citizen. We end with a summary of thegeneral argument and an epilogue.

Gavin FloodOxford

Preface xiii

Acknowledgments

I should like to acknowledge the people who have influenced this book in oneway or another. Firstly I should like to thankmywife EmmaKwan, to whomthe book is dedicated, for her constant encouragement, love, and support.She introduced me to a new world of contemporary art. My friend of manyconversations, Luke Hopkins, years ago introduced me to Norman Brown’swork, which has had an influence on my thinking about the present project.Another friend of many conversations, Oliver Davies, as always, has been anexcellent interlocutor and I have been encouraged by his taking theology inthe direction of a “new realism.” My teacher John Bowker, whose work onreligion and science is exemplary, has continued to stimulate my thoughts.Rebecca Harkin, the commissioning editor at Wiley-Blackwell, first sug-gested the project to me and I thank her for her thoughts, comments, andencouragement. I thank the anonymous readers for their very perceptivecomments. One reader presented precise suggestions and corrected somefactual errors and although I have not always followed specific recommen-dations, I have always taken these comments very seriously. Gavin D’Costaencouraged the project and made specific, insightful suggestions that I havegenerally adopted. I should also like to thank colleagues at theOxford Centrefor Hindu Studies, particularly Shaunaka Rishi Das, Jessica Frazier, andRembert Lutjeharms, who have supportedmywork as have all the staff at theOxford Centre for Hindu Studies. Among colleagues in the Theology FacultyI would like to mention Afifi Al Akiti, George Pattison, Guy Stroumsa, JoelRasmussen, Johannes Zachuber, Mark Edwards, Pamela Anderson, PaulJoyce, Paul Fiddes, Peggy Morgan, Philip Kennedy, and Sondra Hausnerfor their support. I would also like to thank my family (especially Claire andLeela) for their love and goodwishes. Last but not least, I should like to thankmy students at Oxford on whom I tried out some of the material presentedhere, and who have provided such stimulating conversations over the pastfew years.

I am grateful to Faber and Faber for permission to use theWallace Steven’squote on the title page of Part Three from his Collected Poems.

On occasion when I have used Sanskrit terms, and a few Arabic terms, Ihave Anglicized proper names and titles of books but retained conventionaldiacritical marks for technical terms that I cite in brackets beside theirtranslation. Thus Shiva and Krishna rather than Siva and K

_r_s_na, Mahayana

rather than Mah�ay�ana, and Bhagavad Gita rather than Bhagavad G�ıt�a.

xvi Acknowledgments

Introduction: Religion and theHuman Condition

That religion is of fundamental public concern cannot be doubted as wemove into the twenty-first century, central to global politics, cultural oridentity politics, ethics, and the socio-economic processes of late modernity,as well as to the contested claims made in its name. Religions own vast tractsof land, have access to great resources which impact upon billions of theworld’s population, and 15 percent of the habitable surface of the earth isregarded as sacred.1 Yet never has religion been somisunderstood. Never hasthere been a time when the understanding of religions has been moreimportant and never has there been a greater need for such knowledge andcritical inquiry to advise public debate which so often lacks informedperspectives. Some disparage religion as irrational, making claims aboutthe world that simply cannot be substantiated in the light ofmodern scientificknowledge. On this view, religion is a series of propositions about the worldakin to scientific theories, but erroneous propositions which have hampered,and still hamper, human progress and true knowledge and understanding.On this view, religions can be explained in terms of evolutionary psychologyand are superstitions that we need to jettison. Apologists for religion react tothe critique of the new atheism defending it on rational grounds, that itsclaims are indeed compatible with modern knowledge and scientific think-ing. We only need to look around bookshops to see the proliferation of thesekinds of works.

Yet both critique and apologetic have fundamentally misunderstood thenature and importance of religion in people’s lives. This book is an attempt tounderstand religions and their attraction both in the adherent’s view and inthe context of the human sciences. Religions cannot be reduced to a series ofclaims about the nature of the world because they fulfill a much deeper,

The Importance of Religion: Meaning and Action in Our Strange World,First Edition. Gavin Flood.

� 2012 Gavin Flood. Published 2012 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

existential function that drives human beings not only to answer or come toterms with the great, disruptive events of life such as birth and particularlydeath, but also compels us to go beyond ourselves and to transcend ourlimitations. Even the Buddha understood this when he declared that the testof religious teachings is whether or not they worked to relieve humandissatisfaction; a man with an arrow in his side should remove the arrowand not inquire about who shot it and to which family he belonged.2

Religions are primarily ways of life rather than theories about the originof the world (indeed, Buddhism andHinduism think the world has no origin,a view even entertained by Aquinas3). Religions are not scientific proposi-tions4 but encounters with mystery and expressions of human needs thatform ways of life, ways of acting, ways of responding to the strange world inwhich we find ourselves.

Religions are ways of being in the world which make strong claims anddemands upon people and while they are concerned with socialization theyprimarily function to address questions of ultimate meaning at a bodily andtemporal level in which human beings make sense of their experience. Inother words, religions are responses to the human encounter with what isbeyond us, to the encounter with mystery, paradox, and the overwhelmingforce and wonder of there being anything at all. Religions cannot be reducedsimply to beliefs or propositions about the world but are visceral responses tothe human condition and expressions of what might be called the will tomeaning. Some of the claims of religion sound absurd to modern ears butreligions continue to hold great power over billions of people who cannotsimply be dismissed as irrational or deluded. Even if, as some claim, thechurches in the United Kingdom and other European countries are emptying,it is far from clear that this signals the end of religion worldwide or a totaldisenchantment. (T.S. Eliot once observed that “(w)ithout religion the wholehuman race would die . . . solely of boredom.”)5

A strong secularization thesis developed in the sociology of religion6 hasproven not to be the case in the global context, with the rise of literalistunderstandings of religions (“fundamentalisms”) and a new “recompositionof the religious field,” to use Richard Roberts apposite phrase, in“spirituality” and religious pluralism.7 Religions are expressions in actionof human need and human striving to go beyond ourselves. This will tomeaning and impulse towards transcendence we might call “the religiousimperative” or “religious impulse,” which rather more poetically DouglasHedley describes as a “longing of the soul.”8 The phrase “will to meaning”was first coined by Viktor Frankl to denote the primary motivation in humanlife, an idea that he worked out in the desperate conditions of the concen-tration camp, that the will to meaning and its associated hope is the one thingthat kept people alive.9 While I take Charles Taylor’s point that the concernwith meaning itself is a modern one,10 the deeply human concern for locating

2 Introduction: Religion and the Human Condition

ourselves in relation to the world is not. It could be argued that human beingsare fundamentally meaning-seeking creatures who try to make sense of thestrange world not simply propositionally through philosophy (at least amodern view of philosophy) but through the body and action in religions;above all in ritual action, spiritual exercises, and in moral action.

In this book I therefore intend to show (a) that religions are forms ofculture within which people live meaningful lives, (b) they fill the strangeworld with meaning though mediating the human encounter with mystery,and (c) there are political and social ramifications of these cultural forms. Iintend to achieve these ends by developing the claim that religion accom-plishes its mediating function primarily through kinds of action: ethical,ritual, and spiritual. I shall defer discussion of action until Chapter 1, but weneed to foreshadow this key idea that religions endow meaning throughaction, through focusing on the world in collective, shared action, and in thepersonal responsibility of moral judgment followed by act.Religion is linked to human meaning and need and above all to the

encounter of something beyond us that cannot be contained within the usualhuman categories of knowledge. But even if this is the case, we havewitnessed a gradual ebbing away of traditional religion, mostly in Europe,over the last two hundred years. In the nineteenth century Mathew Arnoldwrote his famous poem about faith receding like the sea on Dover Beach, hisonly hope lying in human love. More dramatically, the German philosopherNietzsche declared the death of God and so the end of religion through thevoice of the madman in the market place declaring that God is dead and wehave killed him.

These nineteenth-century voices articulated a skepticism about religionand supernatural agency that was to rise like a torrent in the twentiethcentury. The nineteenth century saw the development of the empiricalsciences, particularly evolutionary science, faith in the power of reason andthe value of individual self-assertion, which eroded traditional Christianityand the belief in God and Church. With the advance of secularism in thetwentieth century and the growth (and, onemight add, demise) of the secularideologies of Fascism and Communism in Russia and Eastern Europe,religion, it seemed, was doomed to history. But while it is certainly truethat church attendance in many countries in Europe, particularly the UnitedKingdom, is at an all time low, it is far from the case that religion has beenassigned to a phase in humanity’s past that we are now able to happily gobeyond. Anyone who saw the terrible news coverage of planes crashing intothe twin towers, or witnessed the event itself, can have little doubt about thenegative force of religion in contemporary politics. A popular Frenchmagazine even declared that a “new clericalism” is threatening the world.11

For Nietzsche, that God is dead was not a regret but a liberating event thatallowed humanity to go beyond irrational restriction and inhibition to

Introduction: Religion and the Human Condition 3

explore new ways of being in the world (albeit a new kind of irrationalism)and a new kind of morality without transcendence. Freud was to echo theview that turning away from religion was inevitable as humanity grows outof its childhood, withdraws projection, and faces up to the reality of life.12

Kristeva develops this idea that the symbolic realm, identified with thedominance of the Father in Theology, needs to be disruptedwith the assertionof unconscious power of semiosis in order to achieve balance and health; wehave to perform a kind of parricide or sacrifice,13 although Kristeva herselfrecognizes the value of religion in upholding human freedom and creatingmeaning (although at the cost of repressing the other and the repression ofsexuality).14 The death of God was precisely supposed to free us from thekinds of violent irrationalism that had been perpetrated in the name ofreligion. Yet religions have not died out and have continued, as John Bowkerhas persistently highlighted, to be implicated and directly involved in manyviolent disputes, in Kosovo and the Balkans, Northern Ireland, China,Palestine, Kashmir, Tibet, Sudan, and Dafur to name but a few.15

For most religions, life is understood to be a journey to a better place forboth individuals and communities; a journey guided (or constrained) bystories, prohibitions, and injunctions revealed in texts and expressed inreligious laws. Sometimes this journey is conceptualized as a solitary, innerquest of themystic, sometimes as a journey of an entire community or people.With the erosion of traditional Christianity in the West, other culturalexpressions have taken over these needs for orientation – we have secularmarriages and funerals for example – and meaning is constructed in otherways through art, environmental concerns, science, or politics. But religionsgenerally claim that themeaning of human life must be understood in amuchbroader context and that the journey of this life leads towards an end-statethat, at least for some if not for all, is a kind of completion or fulfillment. Sucha completion is conceptualized in a number of ways in different religions, incollective terms as a vision of a utopian society, a heaven on earth as in someChristianity, a return to a spiritual home beyond the world as in some kindsof Hinduism, an awakening or realization in the here and now of a timelesstruth, a transcendent or sublime power, the unnameable or reality limit, as inthe idea of enlightenment in Buddhism. We shall encounter some of theseconcepts in the course of this study.

Religion is not only a force in cultural and global politics; it remainsimportant in more subtle ways in contemporary culture. Often replaced bythe more amorphous term “spirituality,” religious ideas have not gone awayfrom the secularized West; and the idea that human beings can change,improve, or access higher, non-material powers, to enhance their life isclearly still with us. This is because religion – and I shall turn to the vexedquestion of the usefulness of the category presently – addresses issues offundamental human concern about being born, living, and dying, and

4 Introduction: Religion and the Human Condition

religions are about the human encounter with the depth of the universe.Indeed, only religions address these concerns in a systematic way and onlyreligions have provided structures for communities to negotiate the difficulttransitions into and out of life and have provided forms of mediation orprocesses in which we can deal with, and attempt to understand, what wemight call “mystery” or “transcendence” or “the invisible.”

While religions are undoubtedly sources of grave concern for the future ofhumanity inmany of theirmore literalist modes, they are also sources of greatinspiration that death is not the end of hope, that humans can live in a betterworld, and that religions can providemodels for peaceful cohabitationwhichrecognize the human need for group identity while at the same time reachingout to others. Religions clearly have a function in terms of identity politics,the various tribes to which we all belong, but they must also be understood interms of broader questions about shared human meaning and salvation orredemption from evil.While wemust be cautious about generalization, as thereligious field is so diverse and complex, wemight say that religions provide aparticular kind of orientation or route through the world and see human lifein terms of a much bigger, cosmic picture. Religions provide fundamentalresources for the formation of human lives in response to the strange world inwhichwe find ourselves, claim to promote human flourishing, and emphasizethe importance of finding wisdom, as David Ford has highlighted.16

But what prototypically differentiates religions from other kinds of mean-ing-seeking activity is a kind of narrative that incorporates theories ofsalvation or soteriology, that at the end of life or a series of lives, or at theend of time, all will be made complete, whole and healed, and that in life weencounter a limit to our understanding, a transcendence which can over-power us and which cannot be adequately articulated. Indeed, a soteriolog-ical dimension arguably marks out religions from other forms of culture thatserve the same function of providing life withmeaning, such as art or politics.There can, of course, be overlap between religions as soteriology and politicalideologies that seek human perfection through history. It is also the case thatmany religions are concerned not so much with salvation as with worldlyprosperity (magical protection of the family, predictions of death, thedestruction of enemies, obtaining wealth, and so on). But neverthelesssoteriology is an important, theologically articulated, ideal in religions thatseek completion to human life.

The nature of this completion has been highly contested and a source ofpassion and violence from the Inquisition to forced conversions in Islam andChristianity, alongside the more sober reflections of theologians and philo-sophers. Often within religions we find great conflict and tension over theseissues – whether a sense of the sublime or mysticism should take precedenceover law, for example, or whether connection between human beings and ahigher power needs to be mediated through hierarchical, social institutions

Introduction: Religion and the Human Condition 5

such as the church. The basic point that I wish to make is that religions aresomatic responses to human need in real space and time, responses to ourstrange world, and sources for the construction of human meaning that wemight call expressions of the will to meaning.

These meanings are formed in ways of life, spiritual practices, and in thestories we tell each other. While for the majority world, religion is less of achoice and more of a way of being brought up, in the West there is generallyvoluntary election to a particular religion. Religions are ways in which thehuman encounter with mystery, transcendence, or what we might call theinvisible, aremediated. Themediation of this encounter is also an orientationwithin subjectivity towards a power beyond us that marks a limit to ourcomprehension: mystery, the invisible, the transcendent, the sublime, theunnameable, or even the impossible. But we are racing ahead of ourselveshere and the terms we choose and those we exclude will have differentresonances and implications.

Mediating Our Strange World

There is a constellation of ideas at the heart of this study, namely the strangeworld, mediation, and action that will become clearer as the argumentunfolds. But first we need to say something more about “our strange world.”There is an intuitive sense that most of us share that the world is strange, aplace where we are not at home. Let us probe this idea a little further beforeproceeding. Many thinkers have highlighted this: the philosopher Heideggerspoke of our being “thrown” into the world and philosophy’s task tounderstand this thrownness, and Freud spoke of the uncanny.

In his perspicacious essay “The Uncanny” (“Zur Psychologie des Un-heimlichen”) Freud observes a phenomenon of how the familiar or“homely” (heimlich) can become unfamiliar or “uncanny” (unheimlich),as if the familiar were strange as “when one is lost in a forest in highaltitudes.”17 A range of experiences falls within the remit of the uncanny inboth real life and in literature; the familiar can become strange and what weare accustomed to suddenly take on a new, unfamiliar appearance. Freudgives us an account from personal experience how in a town in Italy hewandered from the piazza and found himself in the red light district. He triedto leave this particular street but found himself returned to it on threeoccasions before he finally, and thankfully, made his way out. Streets thatwould normally prove no difficulty became strange to him and tinged withanxiety.18 One of the features of Freud’s experience was repetition; invol-untary repetition “which surrounds with an uncanny atmosphere whichwould otherwise be innocent enough, and forces upon us the idea ofsomething fateful and unescapable where otherwise we should have spoken

6 Introduction: Religion and the Human Condition

of change only.”19 The unconscious provides a repetition-compulsion that isperceived to be uncanny.

Freud links these experiences to the childhood condition in which the childdoes not differentiate between his or her thoughts and reality; Freud calledthis the “omnipotence of thought,” which he associates with an animisticconception of the universe as being populated by spirits and “by thenarcissistic overestimation of subjective mental processes.”20 This overesti-mation of subjective thinking – that thought can affect reality – is further-more linked to the development of the human species as a whole: “It wouldseem,” writes Freud, “as though each one of us has been through a phase ofindividual development corresponding to that animistic stage in primitivemen, that none of us has traversed . . . without preserving certain traces of itwhich can be re-activated.”21 The uncanny is a reactivation of this animisticmental activity: a resurgence of an earlier phase of our development.

I would not wish to argue for the problematic association of individualwith species development, but I do believe that Freud is on to somethingwhen he identifies a subjective dimension to our sense of the uncanny thatcorresponds to an external situation. The uncanny – that might embrace suchexperiences as d�ej�a vu, meaningful coincidence, a significance to existencealmost, but never quite, grasped – is a dimension of human life that containssubjectivity but always an externality. The strangeness of the world is linkedto the idea of the uncanny but while we might accept Freud’s description, wedo not need to take on board his explanation. Indeed, the strange worldresists explanation (as wewill see in Chapter 8) but is saturatedwithmeaningand can be experienced as the eruption of transcendence, to use Schutz’sphrase, into everyday life.22

I have used Freud here not to agree with his etiology of the uncanny, but tohighlight something about the strangeness of theworld. The uncanny is awayof articulating the mystery of the world. Otto senses something of this in hisconception of the holy (das Heilige) but for our purposes, Otto’s is aninsufficiently social concept to convey the full sense of strangeness and hewishes to restrict the sense of the holy to “the sphere of religion.”23 Freud’suncanny points to something more everyday and mundane that I would wishto emphasize in the strangeness of the world. The strange world is notdifferent from the world, from the “lifeworld,” of our social and culturalinteractions that is perceived from a different angle as unfamiliar, mysteri-ous, or uncanny. The sense of our strangeworld is thus linked inmodernity toa sense of alienation although in a pre-modern context, the obverse of this is asense of wonder and enchantment.

This strange world is always culturally mediated.We experience the worldthrough cultures and systems of signs and symbols that link us to each other,to the past, and to the future. By mediation, then, we mean the symbolicsystems that necessarily form our encounter with the world (in other words,

Introduction: Religion and the Human Condition 7

culture); this is a process, the means whereby human beings encounter theworld, which translates that encounter into meaning and allows us to makesense of experience. Others have made a not dissimilar observation; Csordas,for example, speaks of religion as developing from a primordial sense ofotherness or alterity as “the phenomenological kernel of religion.”24While adetailed and nuanced understanding of cultural process will be dealt withmore extensively in later chapters (particularly in Chapters 1, 2, and 4), weneed to say something about this at the outset. Cultural process can beunderstood in terms of “translation,” in phenomenological jargon thetranslation of intentional objects or noema, that is, the objects of knowledge,into the process of intentionality, the noesis, that is, the processes ofknowing. It can also be understood in terms of signification and represen-tation: the sign system that forms a culture translates the human encounterwith mystery into socially sanctioned, acceptable, and understandable forms(such as a university course or a church service or even a sporting event). Butabove all, mediation must be understood in terms of action: religions processthe human encounter with mystery through ritual and ethical action. It isthrough action, particularly religious action, that people encounter and cometo terms with mystery, the uncanny, the strange.

The strangeness of the world especially takes focus in the extreme situa-tions of life, notably death and bereavement but also love, where religionscome into their own as resources formediating these encounters and allowingus to deal with life in suitably expressive ways.Mediation is thus linked to theidea of symbol as a cultural form that points to a reality beyond itself while atthe same time participating in that reality, which is a uniquely religiousunderstanding.25 For example, the Eucharist in Catholic and OrthodoxChristianity is a symbol in this sense of participating in the reality to whichit points (that is, the body and blood of Christ). Similarly, in Hinduism amantra is understood as the sound-body of the god: a symbol that both pointsto something beyond it and participates in that reality to which it points. Wecan, of course, have failed process when the symbol system does notadequately deal with the strangeness of the world, as we find in latemodernity. This alienation is well articulated in the opening of Camus’sL’�etranger, when Meursault’s mother has died and he is alienated from herdeath and from the process of her funeral; cultural process has here failed. It isnot that mediation makes the strange world familiar, but rather that theunfamiliar is given meaning through cultural process.

Theories of Religion

There are many theories of religion linked to definitions. Recent debate canperhaps be encapsulated in three statements within which different theories

8 Introduction: Religion and the Human Condition

can be located, namely religion is politics by other means, religion is nothingbut the genes, and religion is a cultural response to life. These tend to bemutually exclusive but not necessarily so. The first two claims are forms ofreductionism: a cultural reductionism, on the one hand, that says that theanalysis of religion shows that it is really only about power in humanrelationships, and an eliminative or materialist reductionism, on the other,that says that religion is really part of a cultural mechanism to ensure thesuccessful transmission of the genes through the generations.26 Both of thesepositions generally take the view that the claims of religions are false. A thirdview, that religion is an encounter with and response to life, or we might saythe strangeness of the world, claims that religions cannot be fully understoodin terms of the two reductionisms.

This last view includes a number of theoretical orientations withinphenomenology and anthropology. It is a claim that religion is a realmof human theory and practice distinct from other fundamental humanactivities such as politics and art but is intimately related to them. There isalso a group of theorists whose work crosses boundaries between socialscience and religious studies or between cognition and theology. One suchexample is a stimulating book by Thomas Tweed, who locates religions interms of crossings over and dwelling on the borders. Theories of religionare provisional, always from a perspective: “they are positioned repre-sentations of a changing terrain by an itinerant cartographer.”27 Weglimpse religion from a particular viewpoint as we pass through. Tweed’semphasis on space (and his spatial metaphors of sighting) and the physicallocation of religion is important and a welcome balance to an overem-phasis on history. Another example in the same spirit as Tweed is KimKnott’s work on the location of religion and the need to develop a spatialanalysis of the everyday practices of religious people that draws onphilosophers of space such as Lefebvre.28 These works, like my ownproject, place emphasis on the body as our location in the world andthe basis of spatial awareness.

Thirty or forty years ago there was a sense that religion was in decline andwould inevitably die out with the rise of secularism, the development ofscience, and a general incredulity towards the claims of religions that wereseen as eccentric irrationalities.While there has been a rapid decline in churchattendance in some countries in Western Europe, particularly the UnitedKingdom, elsewhere in the world we have, on the contrary, an increase inreligious activity and commitment of a kind that directly challenges secularmodernity. The rise of a highly political Islam, Hinduism, and Christianitybear witness to this. But neither has religion disappeared from those mostsecularized nations, and the impulse to religion can be seen in amultiplicity ofgroups and ideas that affect mainstream forms of life, economics, andpolitics, from business employing “new age” management techniques to

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