Religion in human evolution : from the Paleolithic to the Axial Age /

Bellah (emer., Univ. of California, Berkeley), a most distinguished sociologist, has attempted a magnum opus. His accounts of the "axial age" breakthroughs in Israel, Greece, China, and India around 500 BCE are very learned comparisons of the philosophical developments that laid the foundations for the world religions. He shows how "renouncers" of the social world, such as Socrates, Isaiah, Confucius, and the Buddha, criticized the emerging states of their time, leading them to theorize a world beyond this one, ideas that later led to theories of justice. The author is less convincing, though, when he redescribes these theories as producing an "axial ethic" of universal equality. Bellah attempts to place this intellectual evolution in a framework of biological evolution by connecting the play of animals and early humans with the songs, dances, and rituals of early religions. This connection between play and ritual is, Bellah admits, a late addition to the book, and is not fully worked out. Most surprising in a book about the evolution of religion is that there is so little about the actual religious practices of ordinary people after the axial philosophical breakthrough is made. Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students, faculty. B. Weston Centre College

Robert N. Bellah explores the emergence of religion in antiquity. IN October 1963, the sociologist Robert N. Bellah gave a lecture at the University of Chicago on the subject of "religious evolution." Clifford Geertz, the widely respected American anthropologist, was only partially impressed. "I loved your talk even though I disagree with it entirely," he told Bellah afterward. Geertz died in 2006 at the age of 80, so we cannot know his reaction to "Religion in Human Evolution," the magnum opus that the 84-year-old Bellah has just published. But chances are good that he would have said much the same thing. Geertz the scholar would have been impressed by Bellah's learning and command of his subject. As a thinker who insisted that human beings shape culture that in turn shapes them, however, Geertz would quite likely have been unhappy to see Bellah become so immersed in cognitive science, evolutionary psychology and other disciplines that often give short shrift to the human capacity for autonomy. Of Bellah's brilliance there can be no doubt. The sheer amount this man knows about religion is otherworldly. Although no field worker going off to locales like Bali, where Geertz spent so much of his time, Bellah has read prodigiously about religion in, among other places, Mesopotamia, Polynesia, the American Southwest, Australia and Brazil. When Bellah says that his book could have been much longer - he leaves out Christianity, Islam, indeed every religious development of the last 2,000 years - there is no reason to doubt him. Bellah stands in the tradition of such stalwarts of the sociological imagination as Emile Durkheim and Max Weber. Only one word is appropriate to characterize this book's subject as well as its substance, and that is "magisterial." Despite lengthy discussions of tribal social organization as well as "archaic" societies like ancient Egypt, "Religion in Human Evolution" is primarily concerned with what, following the philosopher Karl Jaspers, can be called religion's "axial age." During the 500 years that preceded the birth of Jesus Christ, four great religious civilizations flourished: ancient Israel, classical Greece, Confucian China and Buddhist India. The fact of their simultaneity is remarkable enough. All four societies also witnessed greater tension between religious and political authority than those that preceded them. Perhaps for this reason, the religions of the axial age promoted philosophical speculation as well as offering spiritual comfort. As a result, they appear to us as surprisingly contemporary. "Our cultural world and the great traditions that still in so many ways define us," as Bellah points out, "all originate in the axial age." Bellah devotes a chapter to each of these four great traditions, offering a synthesis of the best available scholarship on the breakthroughs they accomplished. Specialists in these traditions - I am a specialist in none of them - may not find that much original here. But anyone looking for an authoritative treatment of. why prophecy emerged among the ancient Israelis or how Confucianism came to "uphold a normative standard with which to judge existing reality, and never to compromise that standard completely" will owe a debt to Bellah's remarkable ability to range widely with insight and depth. At the same time, it is precisely here, with the idea of breakthrough, that Bellah's argument goes off track. Things change, of course; that is why we have evolution. But in the view of most evolutionary theorists, the process is too slow to allow anything like a breakthrough to occur. Influenced by such ways of thinking, Bellah trumpets the genius of all four civilizations and then denies that their resident geniuses broke any new ground. Bellah is careful to argue that committing oneself to evolutionary theory does not mean abandoning the notion that human beings engage in purposeful action. In his view, we need theorists who recognize the importance of culture, and he finds one in Merlin Donald, a cognitive scientist who traces human cultural evolution through three stages: the mimetic, the mythic and the theoretic. Several chapters in Bellah's book - alas, for those most interested in his scholarship on religion, the early ones - sketch out what evolutionary theories like Donald's can tell us about how religion developed. And so Bellah begins at the beginning, not with Adam and Eve, but with the Big Bang, which by his account took place 13.5 billion years ago. Moving closer to the present, he remarks on our resemblance to chimpanzees; speculates on whether our predecessor, Homo erectus, had a religious sensibility; and examines how theories of child development shed light on language and music. There is even talk about the role that bacteria played in the emergence of life. I never thought I would read a work in the sociology of religion that contained a discussion of prokaryotes and eukaryotes. I now have. Bellah does all this to make a point. "We did not come from nowhere," he writes. "We are embedded in a very deep biological and cosmological history." When it comes to matters of religion, indeed when it comes to any form of human culture, "nothing is ever lost." Bellah may be correct about going back to the beginning, but despite its length his book fails to make a case for the value of evolutionary theory. His aim in his four synthetic chapters on the axial age is to demonstrate the emergence of a human capacity to think in theoretical terms, that is, to move beyond mere observation to ponder why and how things happen in the world. Even if the explanations offered during this era were not rational as we understand that term today, relying as they did on myth and superstition, they were nonetheless a significant human accomplishment. This seems to me correct, even if it may contradict the notion that no great breakthrough took place. But Bellah's decision to encase his interpretation within the evolutionary theory proposed by Merlin Donald is, simply put, unnecessary; I, for one, learned nothing new from the twisting and turning Bellah engages in to make history fit that schema. A shorter book would have been a better book. Alas, Bellah pays a significant price for his attraction to evolutionary thinking. One can, I suppose, be both a humanist and a pessimist. But what Bellah finds attractive in evolutionary theory is the brute fact of human insignificance. In his conclusion, he flirts with the apocalyptic and at times embraces it. At least five times before, the world has suffered "extinction events" in which over half of all animal species disappeared. The last one took place 65 million years ago. "As some of us know, and all of us should know," Bellah warns, "we are in the midst of the sixth great extinction event at this very moment" in which "we may well blow each other up with atomic weapons before we wipe out all species of life, including our own, by more gradual means." Bellah calls this "deep history." I call it sheer speculation. UNLIKE so many popularizers of sociobiology, Bellah consistently avoids scientistic reductionism. He speaks extensively of empathy, play, caregiving and other qualities we may share with nonhumans but that enable us to shape our own development. He emphatically rejects the hostility toward religion expressed by Richard Dawkins. As evolutionary theorists go, he belongs with the softies. (I mean that as a compliment.) But in the end, all this nuance gets lost because Bellah tries to do so much. I come away from his tome persuaded that despite the astonishing imagination human beings have shown in realms of faith, we are, when all is said and done, not very interesting organisms inhabiting a not especially noteworthy universe. If that is indeed what Bellah believes, or even half believes, I am left uncertain how the axial age, or any period of theological and religious creativity, ever came about. I cannot know for sure, of course, but I sense that Clifford Geertz would agree with me. Bellah speculates on whether our predecessor, Homo erectus, had a religious sensibility. Alan Wolfe directs the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College. His latest book is "Political Evil."

In this magisterial effort, eminent sociologist of religion Bellah (Habits of the Heart) attempts nothing less than to show the ways that the evolution of certain capacities among humans provided the foundation for religion. He traces three stages of cultural evolution that give rise to various types of religion. Thus, mimetic culture was primarily gestural and nonverbal; dance might have been one of the earliest forms of such culture. Mythic culture arises as language develops and complex explanatory narratives emerge. Archaic religion evolves out of the capacity for mimesis and myth, but as society becomes more complex, religions attempt to clarify the differences between themselves, to question old narratives, and to call into question the old hierarchies in the name of spiritual and ethical universalism. Within this new theoretic culture, the great axial religions of the ancient Near East, China, Greece, and India combine the capacities for myth and ritual even as they develop the capacity to theorize. Bellah brings his thesis to life by illustrating profusely this development in each type of religion. Those with the stamina to trudge through Bellah's dense prose will be rewarded with a wealth of sparkling insights into the history of religion. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Bellah (sociology, emeritus, Univ. of California, Berkeley) examines the genesis of religion in human culture, artfully demonstrating how play, myth, and ritual developed during the Paleolithic era into the essential components that are still recognizable in religion today. He then examines the Axial Age (c. 800-c. 200 B.C.E.), with which we are more familiar: great philosophers in Greece, Israel, China, and India put forth ideas that were based on both the natural world and the spiritual plane; they effectively married the two. Bellah's book is an interesting departure from the traditional separation of science and religion. He maintains that the evolving worldviews sought to unify rather than to divide people. Poignantly, it is upon these principles that both Western and Eastern modern societies are now based. What strikes the reader most powerfully is how the author connects cultural development and religion in an evolutionary context. He suggests that cultural evolution can be seen in mimetic, mythical, and theoretical contexts. Ultimately, Bellah contends that our society is especially informed by our lengthy biological past. VERDICT This is an academic work recommended for specialists in the field of religion and sociology. Most lay readers, even if compelled by the subject, will find it heavy going, but the intrepid ones may well want to take it on and will marvel at Bellah's approach.-Brian Renvall, Mesalands Community Coll., Tucumcari, NM (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.