Robert Bellah
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Robert Bellah
Robert Neelly Bellah (1927–2013) was an American sociologist of religion, educated at Harvard (where he studied with Talcott Parsons) and long-serving as Elliott Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley (1967–1997). His major works include Tokugawa Religion (1957), the essays "Religious Evolution" (1964) and "Civil Religion in America" (1967), The Broken Covenant (1975), the co-authored bestseller Habits of the Heart (1985), and his final magnum opus, Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age (2011). Bellah is arguably the most influential American sociologist of religion of his generation: he single-handedly rehabilitated evolutionary theorizing about religion after its mid-twentieth-century retreat, and his concept of "civil religion" remains a standard tool for analyzing the religious dimensions of national life. His continued relevance is visible in ongoing debates over the Axial Age, the cognitive science of religion, secularization, and the religious grounding of public life.
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In his 1964 essay "Religious Evolution," Bellah laid out his preliminary theory.[1] Defining religion as "a set of symbolic forms and acts which relate man to the ultimate conditions of his existence," he argued that what evolves is the religious symbol system — not God, not religious man, but the cultural apparatus through which humans represent ultimate reality. Evolution, for Bellah, meant "a process of increasing differentiation and complexity of organization" that endows a system with greater adaptive capacity and autonomy relative to its environment. On this basis he posited five ideal-typical stages — primitive, archaic, historic, early modern, and modern — each marked by a more differentiated symbolization: primitive religion knows a single mythic cosmos ("the Dreaming") in which ritual participants identify with ancestral beings; archaic religion develops true cult (gods, priests, sacrifice, divine kingship) within a hierarchically ordered but still monistic cosmos; historic religion (emerging across the Old World in the first millennium BCE) breaks through to transcendental dualism, world rejection, and salvation; early modern religion (the Protestant Reformation) collapses religious hierarchy and declares salvation available to every believer in worldly life; and modern religion, after Kant, collapses dualism itself and makes the individual responsible for his own symbolism. Bellah insisted the stages were not inevitable, not a ranking of truth or value, and never wholly superseded — but the scheme's directional logic (compact to differentiated) and its culmination in liberal Protestant-inflected modernity drew sustained criticism for covert teleology and Eurocentrism.
The Revised Theory: Religion in Human Evolution (2011)
In his final book Bellah rebuilt the theory on new foundations.[2] The stages are now tribal, archaic, and axial, and they are grounded not in Parsonsian differentiation but in the biological and cognitive evolution of the human species, drawing on Merlin Donald's sequence of cultural evolution: episodic, mimetic, mythic, and theoretic culture. Religion originates in embodied capacities we inherit from our mammalian ancestry — empathy, cooperation, and above all play, which opens the "relaxed field" in which ritual becomes possible.[3] Tribal religion (Kalapalo, Australian Aborigines, Navajo) is mimetic and mythic — ritual enacts meaning bodily, myth narrates it orally. Archaic religion arises with chiefdoms and kingships, joining meaning to power in the figure of the god-king. The Axial Age (first millennium BCE: Israel, Greece, China, India) sees the breakthrough of theoretic culture — graphic invention, external memory, and theory construction — which for the first time makes criticism of tradition possible: "New models of reality... are propounded as a criticism of, and alternative to, the prevailing models. We are in the age of criticism."[4]
The Typology of Religious Representation
Threaded through the book is a fourfold typology of religious representation, adapted from Jerome Bruner's developmental psychology.[5] Each type is a progressively more differentiated way of representing reality:
- Unitive representation — the "null category": the unitive event (oneness with reality, the dissolution of the subject–object boundary) cannot itself be represented; symbols can only point to it paradoxically, as in negative theology's void and silence.[6]
- Enactive representation — the bodily acting out of religious meaning: bowing, kneeling, dancing, eating; reality is "lived rather than thought," understood as an extension of the body.[7]
- Symbolic representation — myth, image, and narrative, which "assimilate" reality to human needs and integrate inner and outer, self and world.[8]
- Conceptual representation — clear definition and accurate observation, methodically combined through logic, which render a decentered world of objects independent of the subject.[9]
What Is Evolving
What evolves, on the 2011 account, is the human capacity for representation itself — the ability to think about, model, and represent reality ever more adequately and accurately, a thing that leads to consider power over nature. Each new mode adds a capacity without discarding earlier ones: "though he speaks of stages, earlier stages are not lost, but only reorganized under new conditions"[10] — the book's governing principle that "nothing is ever lost." The trajectory runs from bodily enactment through symbolic narrative to conceptual thought, whose distinctive power is to "render knowledge" (episteme) as opposed to mere opinion (doxa): "When logic and observation are methodically combined, they render knowledge, episteme as the Greek philosophers put it, as opposed to doxa, opinion."[11] Religious evolution is thus the growth of representational capacity — humans become able to model the cosmos narratively, then to criticize and remodel it theoretically. Bellah is careful to add that new capacities imply no moral ranking: "Religious evolution does add new capacities, but it tells us nothing about how those capacities will be used."[12]
Summary Table: Stages of Evolution and Types of Representation
| Level | What (what is represented) | How (how it is represented) |
|---|---|---|
| Stages of Religious Evolution (2011) | ||
| Tribal | A single mythic cosmos — ancestral beings, "the Dreaming," the group as continuous with nature | Mimetic and mythic: enactive ritual participation (dance, sacrifice, identification with ancestral beings) plus oral narrative myth |
| Archaic | One hierarchically ordered cosmos with gods, priests, and the divine king at its apex; social stratification mirrored in the divine order | Cultic: organized worship and sacrifice, priesthoods, divine kingship; myth systematized with the aid of early writing (craft literacy) |
| Axial | A transcendent realm beyond the empirical world; the self before ultimate reality; universal ethics | Theoretic culture in dialogue with mythic: texts, external memory, analytic argument, theory, criticism, second-order thinking |
| Typology of Religious Representation (Ch. 1) | ||
| Unitive | The unitive event itself — oneness, the ground of all representation, beyond the subject–object split | Strictly unrepresentable ("a null category"); pointed to only paradoxically — negation, emptiness, silence, the void |
| Enactive | Reality as extension of the body; objects understood through bodily manipulation | Bodily enactment: gesture, posture, ritual action — meaning "lived rather than thought" |
| Symbolic | Reality assimilated to inner needs, wishes, and feelings; integration of self and world | Symbols, images, myth, and narrative (symbolic play, storytelling) |
| Conceptual | A decentered, "decontextualized" world of objects independent of subjects — reality "really there" | Clear definition and accurate observation combined through logic and demonstration; renders knowledge (episteme) |
Bellah on the Superiority of the Conceptual Stage
Despite his explicit disclaimers that evolution is not progress "from worse to better," nevertheless there is a clear epistemic one. What evolves here is humanity's ability to accurately and adequately represent reality as it is. Not a human being, but molecules an atoms in motion. Not God in/as the sun, as Kepler believed, but atomic fusion under conditions of high pressure. Bellah repeatedly characterizes conceptual/theoretic representation as an achievement of a higher order — more powerful, more adequate, and uniquely capable of yielding knowledge:
- "Narrative, with its capacity to reach into our bodies and reformulate our identities, individually and socially, also contains, in its womb so to speak, conceptual possibilities. But the attainment of conceptual representation is an achievement in its own right."[13]
- "Concepts are based on clear definition and accurate observation, so that they are concepts of something definite. When logic and observation are methodically combined, they render knowledge, episteme as the Greek philosophers put it, as opposed to doxa, opinion. Knowledge is based on demonstration; narrative does not demonstrate; rhetoric can persuade but not demonstrate."[14]
- "Conceptual representation renders possible a world of objects independent of subjects, a world that is 'decontextualized.' This is part of the enormous power of conceptual representation, the ability to manipulate objects without being disturbed by subjective impulse, wish, or whim."[15]
- The religious 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."[16]
- "It will be my argument that the axial breakthrough involved the emergence of theoretic culture in dialogue with mythic culture as a means for the 'comprehensive modeling of the entire human universe.'"[17]
- The axial civilizations are "in several ways 'more developed' than the societies that preceded them," marked by "new developments in the realm of thought... that [Momigliano] sums up with the significant term 'criticism.'"[18]
- "Religious evolution does add new capacities, but it tells us nothing about how those capacities will be used."[19]
Footnotes
- ↑ Robert N. Bellah, "Religious Evolution," American Sociological Review 29, no. 3 (1964): 358–74.
- ↑ Robert N. Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011).
- ↑ Note relaxation, not having to worry about the practical realities and ongoing threat of Capitalist society, also makes possible Connection. Play is something children still have space for. By adulthood, the qualities of consciousness favoured by capitalist have, owing to a Toxic Socialization process carried out in the home and at school, been repressed and replaced with what Bellah might characterize as the "conceptual" consciousness of the more evolved western mind.
- ↑ Arnaldo Momigliano, quoted in Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution, 268.
- ↑ Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution, 13–40.
- ↑ Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution, 13–15.
- ↑ Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution, 18–21.
- ↑ Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution, 22–37.
- ↑ Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution, 37–40.
- ↑ Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution, xviii.
- ↑ Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution, 38.
- ↑ Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution, xxiii.
- ↑ Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution, 37.
- ↑ Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution, 38.
- ↑ Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution, 38.
- ↑ Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution, xviii.
- ↑ Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution, 273.
- ↑ Momigliano, quoted in Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution, 268–69.
- ↑ Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution, xxiii.
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