CHRISTIANITY AND SYMBOLIC REALISM 107 IS THE SOCIOLOGY OF RELIGION POSSIBLE ? A REPLY TO ROBERT BELLAH BENJAMIN NELSON The Graduate Faculty New School for Social Research Prosessor Bellah appears to cut the ground from under the scientific study of religion by insisting that all “scientific” efforts to advance the understanding of religion through sociology or psychology have regularly proven—and must regularly prove—failures. It is precisely the most influential studies of religion by the most renowned social scientists which reveal themselves on close gaze to be reductionisms of one or another form; all such views treat religion as a derived—epiphenomenal— rather than as a prime and primary spiritual—noumenal—reality. If Bellah is right, Marx, Durkheim, Freud—and there were many others—sought to explain religion without first getting hold of the reality of religion. Access to the reality of religion, Prof. Bellah continues, is only available to those who collectively participate in the reappropriation of the religious symbols. Here he avows his debt to the teachings of Paul Tillich, Mircea Eliade, and Norman O. Brown. Our world, Bellah adds, may now be at one of the most critical passes in its history. In our preoccupation with science, we have cut ourselves off from the power of the redeeming symbol. It is not even possible for science to claim a peculiar access to truth or probability. Michael Polanyi correctly insists on the inexorable subjectivity of all perception and judgment, Bellah explains. The sentence of Bellah’s which strikes me as most questionable and which I am, therefore, most strongly driven to question initially, seems innocent enough on its face: “Religion is one for the same reason that science is one—though in different ways—because man is one” (my italics). I answer with the same directness. Man as such—generic, substantial Man—can. hardly be the proper subject of any social science. We have no way of getting at Man’s ultimate essence, except to see men at work in all of their surroundings, and against all the horizons of their experiences and expressions. Sociology and psychology are at their best when they deal with men rather than Man as such. Whether this be the case or not, I would question the statement that science is one because man is one. Science, as it hap- pens, only becomes one because the method of science is one. Logic is one—whether Man is one or not. We are not helped in our grasp of this issue by our current social-psychological images of “science.” Leading sociologists notwithstanding, science is not a system of action nor is it a sector of a system of action. Science comprises signs, symbols, agreed- upon procedures. sentences, which more or less accurately, more or less plausibly, with more or less warrant, declare, describe, explain, and predict certain states of affairs. When we speak of the scientific study of religion we do not mean an activity carried on by This statement represents the substance of open discussion of Robert Bellah’s address, remarks offered during the period allowed for108 JOURNAL FOR THE SCIENTIFIC STUDY OF RELIGION a certain sort of person, whether a religionist or scientist; we mean an activity in which unfaltering respect is maintained for protocols and rationales of evidence. Every man, whoever he be, is indeed the man he is. In the realms of generic exis- tence, it does not so greatly matter whether he be an humble biologist in a remote laboratory, a pathbreaking innovator in some field of some corner of genetics, or a Nobel prizewinner in physics. Insofar as he is a man in the everyday spheres, he may be com- monplace, frivolous, vulgar, base, foolish, blind, corrupt, senseless. His characteristics in no way define—whether to falsify or validate—the science he and other scientists intermittently gestate. What constitutes science are not a scientist’s outpourings of feeling or extrajudicial opinions, but the relationship between the sentences he declares and some state of affairs. The failure to see this point clearly has been one of the most serious limitations in the way many current investigators have been thinking about the sociology of science. One does not learn about science, as distinguished from scientists, by charting the movements of physicists in research laboratories or scrutinizing the sequence of listed authors in scientific papers for confirmation of the charmingly described “Mat- thew effect.” One finds out about science by doing and investigating science or by testing, replicating, or refining experiments and proofs. One could very readily draw up a list of scientists who at the very moment, indeed, of greatest creativity were in puzzling, even tremulous, psychological states. Their feelings have little to do with the establishment of their results. Their work claims the name of science when it proves to be congruent with the available evidence, consistent with known facts, and plays its part explaining or predicting determinate patterns of events. There is yet another aspect of Bellah’s argument which I find worrisome. When he asserts that the world now finds itself in its sad pass precisely because since the seven- teenth century it has delivered itself to the dominance of science and has turned away from full and collective participation in symbolic realities, he in effect questions whether there can be a neutral way by which we can gain access to scientific truth about religious behavior and belief. Again, as in a number of my previous writings, I appeal to a maxim of Piaget which was borrowed from the great Emile Durkheim. “Logic,” said Piaget,” is the morality of thought; morality, . . . the logic of action.” However we may choose to interpret either Durkheim or Piaget—I would myself want to qualify their view somewhat—it is evident to me that both thought and action have to be continually justified in terms of relevant rationales, logics, and moralities. On Bellah’s reading, thought becomes true when individuals passionately enter into a state of truth. Cold second-order logic is for Bellah evidently the enemy of the only true logic, the Logos—the collective participation in symbolic realities. Bellah brings us back full circle—to Gnosis and the Gnostics. I would add the following points in the hope of avoiding confusion: My view would deny to no man the right or the duty to express himself with total authenticity on every occasion to which he feels called upon to respond. There is nothing about the notion of science which is to be understood as imposing a constraint upon an individual to act to the very limits of his power in promotion of those causes they hold most dear or in ways which seem to express them most completely. So far as I can tell, there is no way by which anyone choosing to understand anything can be neglectful of the fact that all of us have such existences as we have. We all dwell in worlds of one sort or another. We all have the experiences of our worlds and we all, in one way or another, do actually give vent to or create expressions of one or another sort. There is nothing in what I have said which would suggest thatCHRISTIANITY AND SYMBOLIC REALISM 109 our existences are simple functions of our social locations, that our experiences are no more than the stimulus-sets of this time and place, that our expressions are direct derivations of current patterns of existence or experience. Before too long I hope to have a chance to document another point about Bellah’s proposal. His call leaves historians and sociologists of religious belief and behavior with very little work to do. The tenuousness of his interest in the myriad historic embodi- ments of the religious life is suggested by the names which compose his honor roll— Paul Tillich and Norman O. Brown. In the case of the former, it is instructive to observe how quickly Tillich forfeits Bellah’s support by undertaking to offer substance—ontological and historical alike— for his core religious symbols. Unable to abide the location of the religious in the his- toric actual, Bellah necessarily conceives the religious to remain in the sphere of the intrapsychic, which he largely equates with the “symbolic.” Bellah’s deepest commitment is to the notion of the collective inner light. Religious experiences are, above all else, miracles of incandescent illumination. All that has hitherto been in darkness is now become light and all that was before uncreated be- comes created. This image of religious experience is too exclusive to allow sociologists or historians to give meaning and shape to the character of the changing historical religious experiences and expressions they are summoned to study. It is, therefore, no surprise that Bellah does not look at religions as the historian or sociologist does. The one transcendental religion is that made luminous by the redeem- ing symbols of Paul Tillich and Norman O. Brown. Not so oddly this religion chances to be a variant of “inner light”? Protestant Christianity. In the case of Brown, I have elsewhere had occasion to observe that his inwardness is so comprehensive that it wholly escapes the necessity of contact with the “gloomy actual,” as the revered Johann Huizinga would say. The academic study of religion must continue to be scientific or in fact it will not be a study of anything. It saddens me that Professor Bellah now seems to be offering his support to an ill-founded claim, already become a ruling cliché throughout the world, namely, one which asserts that there is no ground whatever for a separation between subject and object. What this claim overlooks is that the subject involved in scientific utterance is not the individual person—whether the scientist or the ordinary man, whether in sickness or in health, whether in psychosis or sanity. The subject is actually the logical subject, a sentence, a sign, a proposition—whether it is spoken or written by any person of whatever creed, color, nation, status, sex, occupation. A logical subject is simply an utterance—as Abelard long ago surmised. From the point of view of the Scientific study of religion, realia sunt nomina, the critical fact is the relationship between. a sentence and some state of affairs, which was allegedly described by the sentence. The sign and the thing signified are not one. In science, if we wish to get at the realia we must go by way of the nomina, The scientific study of anything is a study in which there is a consistent, consecutive, continuous review of all sentences advanced by anybody in relation to all states of affairs which are alleged or can indeed be expressed. What has led us to the spread everywhere of faulty understandings in these matters? It is because of the deepening autism of our ways of thought under the impact of our widening crisis. As our rifts have grown, so has there grown our reluctance to accord the status of “reality” to the objects which offend or constrain us. We rebel against the possibility that the “equations” or “concepts” which map our notions or express the relationships among us acquire or describe a reality beyond our emotional states or Passing opinions. “Primary process” cancels out the “social reality” principle. Our10 JOURNAL FOR THE SCIENTIFIC STUDY OF RELIGION egocentrism remorselessly drives sociology into the arms of social psychology. We are now trapped in the egocentric predicament, a notion which was, as some here will recall, explored with great doggedness in these environs by Prof. Ralph Barton Perry.1 I stress these points at the present time for many reasons not directly confronted by Bellah. As I read the evidence, the world from one pole to the other is beset in every land by the incredible thrust of collective processes. The turmoils of our time are not to be understood purely, or even mainly, in terms of the political differences of Right and Left, or the conflicts of generations or those under 30 and those over 30. What we are everywhere witnessing is the vast expansion in the size and turbulenge of the social molecule. Chiliastic hopes born of deep despair compel people to come together in a sort of “sacramental union” for the purpose of constituting a single mystical body, in which each is fused with all others in united will and to one commitment. Vast numbers of people feel themselves overpowered, drawn to act as vibrant parts of teem- ing aggregates. In this state uncontrollable urges to achieve instant actualization result in a sense of trance; a new power is achieved to perform self-justifying spontaneous collective actions felt to demolish the barriers in the way of the advent of New Being. These feelings and images ought not to seem wholly new to students of the history of religion. The craving for incorporation in the mystical body was exceedingly strong in the Middle Ages; efforts to create fellowship of undividedness has been a mark of all totalizing groups—whether they have been established churches, insurgent sects, or irridentist nations. Professor Bellah’s criticisms of the scientific study of religion are in my judgment an instance of this expanding dedication to fused collective consciences and conscious- ness. If I hesitate to follow Professor Bellah’s lead, it is because I am put off by a critical bit of evidence on which I have the following prediction: Wherever across the world a claim is made that we will all equally find our way out of our difficulties by all equally and at the same time and in all respects joining together in the full reappropriation of the collective symbols, we have reasons to suspect that we are about to be inundated by one or another form of unanimistic totalism. Our distraught century has already had more than its share of movements of this sort. We are not now—and, indeed, so far as we remain “‘individuals”—never will find it possible to be parts of the same collective, each having equal access to the same redeeming symbols. To belittle the role of reason at this juncture hardly seems a helpful way of building a better future. From the very start reason’s role on the generic life of social groups has been very fragile. What man of the world does not know that reason is too narrow, too fleeting, too insubstantial a basis on which to rear great collectivities? The families of 1, Fuller documentation of central themes broached in the above paragraph will be found in my following papers: ‘Sociology and Psychoanalysis on Trial: An Epilogue.” Psychoanalysis and the Psychoanalytic Review 49, no. 2 (1962): 144-60. “Comment on Herbert Marcuse’s ‘Industrialisierung und Kapital- ismus,” Max Weber und die Soziologie heute, Verhandlungen des 15. Deutsch en Soziologentages, ed. Otto Stammer, im Auftrage der Deuts- chen Gesellschaft fur Soziologie (Tubingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1965), pp. 192-99 (originally delivered at Heidelberg Univ. on 30 April 1964). “Introductory Comment on Norman O. Brown’s ‘Apoca- lypse: The Place of Mystery in the Life of the Mind,’” Harper's Magazine, May 1961: 46-49. “Scholastic Rationales of ‘Conscience,’ Early Modern Crises of Credibility, and the Scientific-Technocultural Revolutions of the 17th and 20th Centuries,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 7, no. 2 (1968): 157-77. “Conscience and the Making of Early Modern Cultures: The Protestant Ethic beyond Max Weber,” Social Research 36, no. 1 (1969): 4-21.CHRISTIANITY AND SYMBOLIC REALISM ill men regularly have had to have their roots in soil deeper than that of the precarious rules of reason. It is, therefore, no surprise that attacks upon deliberate reason and theoretical reason are regularly found in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries wherever there occurs a thrust of collective political process. No less in Sorel than in Marx, no less in Nietzsche than in Dostoyevsky, no less in our “Cultural Revolution” than in that of Mao! The so-called “Rationalized Consciousness of the West” is being stricken in favor of the “Collective Unconscious of the East.” Professor Bellah seems to miss the wider implications of his critique for the future of science and civilization. Above all else, the idea of a scientific study of religion requires anumber of linked admissions. There are neutral zones which are open to all, whatever their race, color, creed, status, occupation; there is, in fact, a treasury of understand- ings and awareness which have been warranted and guaranteed; there are procedures which do have a claim to a certain reliability; there are, indeed, truths that, in the memorable words of Joseph Needham, “‘are at home under any meridian; the common. light and inheritance of every race and people.” It matters only slightly how these truths have been attained. Some of these truths have been declared by men in the midst of lucky chances and others have indeed been arrived at only after great mental doubts and perplexities. What matters, above all, is that we shall continue to maintain neutral spaces which are essentially devoted to the investigation and testing of sentences in respect to states of affairs. One does not become a better man, one does not necessarily become a more religious man, by establishing sentences in accordance with the canons of the scientific study of religion. Of one thing, however, we can be sure, that the propositions declared in the horizons of the scientific study of any subject have a greater likelihood of being accepted everywhere by all men of good will, whatever their “faith-commitment” or ethnic origin. A last remark about the wider implications of Bellah’s remarks for the structure of civilization: Give up the idea of neutral zones; give up the idea of probable—or at least arguable—statements answerable to the central rationales of opinions and acts, and we lose the notion of a continuing treasury and cultural repository of rationales, ratios, rules of reciprocity and equities in regard to all human thought and action. Thad not expected to speak for so long, and I would certainly assume that Professor Bellah has understood the spirit in which I have spoken. The difference between us is plain. He is committed to the view at this time that we need, above all, to recover our relations to the religious unconscious from which we have been uprooted. I have no need to deny that the ring of truth sounds loud at many points in his remarks—but I would also admit that some of his statements seem to me to involve distressing excess. Ican only hope that he will agree with my conviction that conscious argument among men is no less productive of truth than unconscious agreement. Argument must go on in the form of the confrontation of statement and counterstatement—one against another in relation to states of affairs which are independent of their own subjects. The world is not my idea: the world is not even our idea—Professor Bellah’s and mine. The world is what it will be discovered to be by all of us pursuing truth in accordance with the canons of warranted assertability. The sacrifice of the legitimate demand for rationales is too high a price to pay for a new integration. Indeed, how new would an “integration” so achieved truly be?Copyright of Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion is the property of Blackwell Publishing Limited and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. 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