The Eternal Religion: Critique of Human-Centered Theories of Religion
In Frazer’s The Golden Bough, religion is treated as a means toward which humans come to understand and manipulate nature. In this view, religion evolves out of magical thinking and finds its resolution in science. “Magic… rests on an erroneous conception of the nature of things; religion professes to deal with unseen beings whose aid it invokes… and science seeks to discover the exact relations of things.” Religion, on this account, is derivative of social and cultural development.
Conversely, William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience treats the psychological dimension of religious experience in the individual and posits that religious institutions are, in some sense, a codification of what are ultimately unique individual experiences.
For Frazer, religion develops as a matter of something realized in social development; for James, it relies on the experience of the individual, and anytime it becomes more than that, he appears to see it as a tainted form of what was originally transmitted. In the former case, religion would seem to be a mere cultural product. In the latter case, it is something purely subjective and in some sense always escapes codification. James claims, “The intellectualism in religion which I wish to discredit pretends to be something… belief that formulas are true can never wholly take the place of personal experience… There is in the living act of perception always something that glimmers and twinkles… which will not be caught in conceptual terms… In the religious sphere… belief that formulas are true can never wholly take the place of personal experience.” In short, Frazer treats religion as secondary to culture, while James treats culture and institution as secondary to personal religious insight. Both approaches consider religion as something essentially arising from man himself rather than from the divine. What is presupposed by both, then, is that the divine in and of itself is either irrelevant or contaminant in producing a truly neutral view of the production of religion. Is it possible Frazer and James are two sides of the same dialectical coin?
Conversely, in the view of Mircea Eliade, a consideration toward what is encountered in religious experience—the sacred—is indispensable for understanding religion. “Man becomes aware of the sacred because it manifests itself, shows itself, as something wholly different from the profane… From the most elementary hierophany… we are confronted by the same mysterious act — the manifestation of something of a wholly different order, a reality that does not belong to our world.” In this perspective, human experience is always interpreted in relation to what is revealed, rather than serving as the source or measure of religious reality. What, then, has been revealed?
If the sacred is real and self-manifesting rather than constructed, then the earliest strata of religious consciousness should stand in closer proximity to that manifestation than later elaborations. On this view, religious history is not primarily a story of progressive clarification but of increasing distance from an originating disclosure. What presents itself at the beginning of history would therefore possess a privileged explanatory status, not by fiat, but because degeneration, fragmentation, and reinterpretation presuppose something first received. Any account of religion that ignores this possibility silently assumes what it claims to demonstrate.
The ubiquity of certain elements across religions—ritual sacrifice, metaphysical explanations, transcendent personalities, and ethical codes—has largely been dismissed as the product of evolutionary psychology or sociology, as previously shown. It is worth considering some implications of this view. One observation is that human beings, faced with a wide variety of contexts, appear to converge on strikingly similar moral and ritual patterns. Some may attribute this to common a priori structures of the human mind, yet it remains remarkable that such diverse cultures consistently focus on similar objects of fascination. This explanation presupposes that these patterns arise purely from internal processes rather than as responses to something encountered externally. In our view, religion emerges both from something within humans—a yearning for resolution—and from engagement with what is encountered.
Some religions gain a wide following because they speak to a deep resonance in those proselytized, while others appeal only to a select few. Likewise, some religious systems endure largely unchanged, while others must continually adapt to persist within the communities that carry them. If religion were merely a human construct, how can we account for this difference—that some traditions remain remarkably stable, whereas others evolve constantly? Explaining stability as mere stubbornness is unconvincing. Instead, we would be better served viewing falsehood as the type of view requiring continual compensatory modification to remain intelligible and motivating across generations. A religion that does not adapt to survive and be transmitted is forgotten—unless, of course, it is inherently well-suited and requires no alteration to endure.
We posit, contrary to the purely human-centered view of religious production, that there was an initial delivery of divine religious content. The way successive communities received this content—their attitudes toward it and toward the deliverer—resulted in varying degrees of preservation, alteration, or loss across the diaspora of human cultures throughout history. With this framework, it becomes possible to account for several observations: (a) religions are strikingly similar while still exhibiting important differences, (b) some traditions endure far longer than others, and (c) these patterns reflect successive generations of humanity either remembering or forgetting, transmitting or abandoning, and preserving or perverting both the spirit and ritual of the original content.
But again we must ask: what has been revealed? Too often in religious studies, those attempting to explain religion are themselves irreligious or seek to obscure their own biases. We, however, are transparent about our presuppositions. Our view aligns with the traditional Christian understanding, as articulated by the Church Fathers, which holds that the revelation of creation—including the events of Genesis—is both historical and spiritually true. The Genesis narratives, far from being purely allegorical, require interpretation as historical events to maintain their spiritual significance, as argued by Fr. Seraphim Rose in Genesis, Creation, and Early Man.
Assuming this perspective, Biblical characters Cain and Abel illustrate two contrasting approaches to the religious deposit entrusted to man at the beginning of time. Cain represents a religion carried out incompletely, insincerely, begrudgingly, or without due reverence, with compromised elements. Abel, by contrast, represents religion enacted with the fullness of one’s being, in which the ritual is preserved, honored, and executed according to its intended purposes and spirit, ultimately achieving its proper end. In Cain’s approach, the purpose of religion remains unfulfilled and is often discarded by participants as ineffective, deemed in need of amendment, or, if performed, carried out in a rote manner that abridges or alters it at convenience. In Abel’s approach, everything capable of being preserved is maintained and, insofar as there are worthy recipients, faithfully transmitted.
From this perspective, it is not difficult to understand why human cultures across history exhibit both similarities and divergences in religious practice. What is often mistaken for a common “core” underlying all religions could be reinterpreted through our theory as rather one eternal religion—the religion of YHWH—preserved or contorted by humans to varying degrees over time. In the Christian view, these distortions arise from idolatry, the act of replacing the proper object of worship, God, with some object of human desire. Another aspect that is indispensable for understanding the nature of this religion is its anti-syncretic nature. The religion is one in which pure and impure elements cannot coexist. If impurities—unsanctioned practices—find their way into the worship, then the object of worship recedes. We derive this idea from a variety of sources, but two chief points of interest are to be found in Leviticus 10, the chapter in which Nadab and Abihu are consumed for offering “strange fire” to the Lord, and also Christ’s insistence to the Samaritan woman at the well that far from the two worshipping a “common core” of the God of Jacob, their practice differing only slightly in accessory details, the woman at the well in all actuality did in fact “not know what [she worshipped], for salvation is of the Jews.” The words of Christ here point then to the attitude for the essential doctrine of anti-syncretist understandings of the true religion in our theory. Syncretism, then, fails not because diversity itself is bad, but rather as a result of changing the orientation of worship. After all, slight deviations in our starting points, even by a single degree, can land long journeys far from their target destination.
Why do we assume degradation rather than clarification? The short answer is we don’t assume there isn’t any case in which clarification is offered. According to St. Augustine, “The New is in the Old concealed, the Old is in the New revealed.” In other words, we would simply maintain that clarification can only take place within a tradition which has resisted degradation—has “persevered,” so to speak—making it more capable of receiving further clarification on what had been formerly only intimated darkly. For “he who is faithful in little will be faithful in much.”
