drawn up by Tiele (Ency. Brit., 9th ed., vol. xx. p. 360) will show what diversified products are blended together. Why should philosophical Brahmanism, or the Buddhism which reacted against it, be associated with so undeveloped a form as the religion of the ancient Latin settlers in mid-Italy? And why, on the other hand, should the religions of the lower culture, which are practically of a common type, be separated genealogically into numerous independent families? (2) Whitney[1] found the most important distinction to lie between religions which were the collective product of the wisdom of the community, race-religions as they might be called, and those which proceeded from individual founders. But, as Tiele pointed out, the “individual” element cannot be eliminated from the “race-religion,” where each myth has been first uttered, each rite first performed, by some single person. And the founder who enters history with an impressive personality can only do his work through the response made to him by the insight and feeling of his time. (3) Kuenen disengaged another characteristic, the scope and aim of any given religion; was it limited to a particular people, or could it be thrown open to the world? On this foundation the higher religions were classed as national or universal, the latter group being formerly supposed to include Buddhism, Christianity and Mahommedanism. Here, once more, the student is confronted with many qualifications. A missionary religion like Mithraism, which established itself all the way from Western Asia to the borders of Scotland, was certainly not “national.” Judaism and Brahmanism both passed beyond the confines of race. The Confucian morality could be adopted without difficulty in Japan. In other words, there was either a definite tendency to expansion, or there was no impediment in the religion itself when circumstances promoted its transplantation. Further, there are elements of Islām, like the usages of the hajj (or pilgrimage to the sacred places at Mecca), the dryness of its official doctrine and the limitations of its real character as indicated in the Wahhābi revival, which so impair its apparent universalism that Kuenen found himself obliged to withdraw it from the highest rank of religions.[2] (4) Professor M. Jastrow, jun., starting from the relation of religion to life, distinguishes four groups, the religions of savages, the religions of primitive culture, the religions of advanced culture and the religions which emphasize as an ideal the coextensiveness of religion with life. It may, however, be doubted whether the fundamental assumption of such a scheme, viz. that in the life of the savage religion plays a comparatively small part, can be satisfactorily established. The evidence rather implies that, so far as the sanctions of religion affect the savage at all, they affect him with unusual force. In the absence of other competing interests his religious beliefs and duties occupy a much larger share of his attention than the votaries of many higher faiths bestow on theirs; and though his ethical range may be very limited, yet the total influence of his religion in determining for him what he may do and what he may not, brings the greater part of conduct under its control. The savage who finds himself encompassed by taboos which he dare not break, lives up to his religion with a faithfuhiess which many professing Christians fail to reach. (5) There remains a broad distinction between religions that are in the main founded on the relation of man to the powers of Nature, and those based on ethical ideas, which partly corresponds to the philosophical division already cited. This enabled Professor Tiele to arrange the chief religions in certain groups, starting from the primitive conception of the common life of the objects of the surrounding scene:—[3]
| I. | Nature Religions— | ||
| 1. | Polyzoic Naturalism (hypothetical). | ||
| 2. | Polydemonistic-magical religions under the control of Animism (religions of savages). | ||
| 3. | Purified or organized magical religions. Therianthropic Polytheism. | ||
| (a) | Unorganized (religions of the Japanese, Dravidians, Finns, Esths, the ancient Arabs, the ancient Pelasgi, the Old-Italian peoples, the Etruscans (?), the Old-Slavs). | ||
| (b) | Organized (religions of the half-civilized peoples of America, ancient Chinese state-religion, religion of the Egyptians). | ||
| 4. | Worship of beings in human form, but of superhuman power and half-ethical nature. Anthropomorphic polytheism (religions of the Vedic lndians, the ancient Persians, the later Babylonians and Assyrians, the advanced Semites, the Kelts, Germans, Hellenes, Greeks and Romans). | ||
| II. | Ethical Religions (spiritualistic ethical religions of Revelation)— | ||
| 1. | National Nomistic (nomothetic) Religious Communions (Taoism and Confucianism, Brahmanism, jainism, Mazdeism, Mosaism and Judaism, the two last already passing into 2). | ||
| 2. | Universalistic Religious Communions (Buddhism, Christianity: Islām with its particularistic and nomistic elements only partially belongs to this group).[4] | ||
7. Revelation.—The second group in this division practically corresponds to the second stage recognized by Caird; but it rests upon a somewhat different basis, the conception of revelation addressed to the conscience in the form of religious law. Neither Taoism nor Confucianism, indeed, makes this claim. The Tao-teh-king, or book of aphorisms on “the Tao and virtue” ascribed to Lao Tsze, is wholly unlike such a composition as Deuteronomy; and the disciples of Confucius carefully refrained from attributing to him any kind of supernatural inspiration in his conversations about social and personal morality. The sacred literature's of India and Israel, however, present many analogies, and emerge out of a wide range of phenomena which have their roots in the practices of the lower culture. The belief that the Powers controlling man's life are willing upon occasion to disclose something of their purpose, has led to widespread rites of divination, which Plato described as the “art of fellowship between gods and men,” and the Stoics defended on grounds of a priori religious expectation as well as of universal experience. Through the dream the living was put into communication with the dead, which sometimes embodied itself in peculiar and pathetic literary forms, such as the Icelandic dream-verses imparted by the spirits of those who had been lost at sea or overwhelmed by the snow; and a whole series of steps leads up from necromancy to prophecy and oracle, as the higher gods become the teachers of men. The gods of revelation are naturally not the highest, since they appear as the interpreters of one superior to themselves. The revealing agency may be only a voice like Aius Locutius, to which the Romans raised a temple; or, like Hermes, he may be the messenger of the gods; or, like Marduk, pre-eminently the god of oracles in Babylonia, he may be the son of Ea, the mighty deep encompassing the earth, source of all Wisdom and culture. To Marduk the prophet-god Nabu in his turn became son, and his consort Tashmit (“causing to hear”) was the personification of Revelation. Egyptian thought ascribed this function to Thoth, who played somewhat different parts in different systems, but emerges as the representative of the immanent intelligence
- ↑ Princeton Review, May 1881, quoted by Tiele, Elements of the Science of Religion (1897), i. p. 42.
- ↑ National Religions and Universal Religions (Hibbert Lectures, 1882.
- ↑ Ency. Brit., 9th ed., art. “Religions”; Elements of the Science of Religion, vol. i. (1897), with some corrections communicated by letter to Professor Chantepie de la Saussaye, Religionsgesch. (3rd ed., 1905), vol. i. p. 11.
- ↑ For a long series of suggested bases of classification see Raoul de la Grasserie, Des Religions Comparées au Point de Vue Sociologique (1899), chap. xii.; cf. further E. von Hartmann, Religionsphilosophie (1888); Siebeck, Lehrbuch der Religionsphilosophie (1893); Dorner, Grundriss der Religionsphilasophie (1903). Siebeck proposed to distribute religions in three grades: (1) Nature-Religions, i.e. those of the lower culture; (2) Morality-Religions in various grades and stages, e.g. Mexicans and Peruvians, Arcadians, Chinese, Egyptians, Hindus, Persians, Germans, Romans, with the Greek religion in the highest rank; (3) Religions of Redemption (Judaism forming the transition from the second group), Buddhism in the sense of world-negation, and, positively, Christianity. Bousset, What is Religion? (1907) reckons Platonism along with Buddhism. For criticism of Siebeck's scheme see Tiele, Elements of the Science of Religion, vol. i. (1897), pp. 62, 65. Pfleiderer, Religion and Historic Faiths (1907), p. 88, recognizes more clearly the difficulty of carrying almost any division through the whole field, without frequent breach of historical connexions.
