Staal's gauntlet and the queen

Abstract

There was a time when theology was queen of the sciences . When the study of religions emerged in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, theology was supposedly left behind in the quest for a humanistic understanding. In retrospect we can now see that, despite new nomenclatures, neither comparative religions, nor the phenomenology or history of religions were able to untie the apron strings of the long tradition of Christian thought about its own foundations and practices . The burning questions for the new science of religion had to do with : (1) myth and the origin of belief in (the) god(s) ; (2) ritual and the efficacy of its performances; and (3) history with its link to the problem of hermeneutic . Only recently has it dawned on us that these interests and the several theories of religion they have nurtured bear a striking family resemblence to the Christian theological enterprise . `Religion' has been thought of on the Christian model, and a Christian understanding of religion has been used to interpret the meaning of myths and rituals around the world . For some reason religionists (those who study mainly religion in contrast to ethnographers and cultural anthropologists who do not have that luxury) have found it extremely difficult to think about myth and ritual without imagining religion . The current quest for a humanistic approach has taken up this very issue and includes critical analyses of the history of the study of religion as well as proposals for redescription and redefinition in liaison with the human sciences . Books of importance in this regard include J . Samuel Preuss' Explaining Religion (Yale, 1987), Ivan Strenski's Four Theories of Myth (Iowa, 1987), Hans Penner's Impasse and Resolution (Lang, 1989), and the work of Jonathan Z . Smith, especially his two most recent publications, To Take Place (Chicago, 1987) and Drudgery Divine (London and Chicago, 1990) . Frits Staal's startling study of ritual, mantras and the human sciences should be read along with these, for it renders a radical critique of traditional assumptions that still underly the study of (the history of) religion, and it offers an explanation of ritual that does not require any recourse to the scholarly notions of myth, meaning and religion . Ritual, according to Staal, can be described as 'rulegoverned activity' . And the rules are, as the title of the book indicates `without meaning' .