The Criterion of the Religious Life

Abstract

E VIDENCES of organized religious ritual go back some twenty-five thousand years into the distant past. How much farther these developed forms may be eventually traced, one may only hazard opinions. Enough has been disclosed of the life of ancient men to make clear that members of the human race, even at the lowest stages of culture, experienced religious emotions and gave form to the religious response. The history of religious cultures, therefore, presents a vast complexity of human behavior and institutional form which has come to be designated religious. The historian takes this wealth of varying forms descriptively without attempting to evaluate it. His task is primarily that of recording and understanding the phenomena of the various cultures which, in the language of these respective peoples, have been considered imperatively sacred to accepted custom and worthy of promotion. This distinctively descriptive nature of the historian's role in religion has not always been clearly recognized or accepted, even by the historian himself. The conflict among scholars, for example, as to whether distinction shall be made between magic and religion, which has assumed such prominence in the literature of the history of religions, illustrates the point. The pertinence of this distinction turns upon the question: Is the task at hand descriptive or evaluative? The study of religions began with the comparative interest and only gradually assumed a disciplined, historical method. The historian of religion does not set magic over against religion. Rather, he speaks of the elementary forms of the religious life in contrast to rites and institutions of the culture religions. The philosopher of religion assumes the further and more hazardous task of interpreting religious phenomena with a view