Explain the intellectualist theories of religion? 20 marks
Answers
Ideas about the origin and development of religion were initially based on the reports of missionaries and adventures about the nature of religion among the primitives. For example, Depresses (1760) advanced a theory that religion had its origin in fetishism (belief in magical fetishes or objects): The Portuguese sailors had 30 reported that the coastal Negro tribes of West Africa worshipped inanimate things and animals. Comte (1908) took up this theory and wrote that in due courses Fetishism was replaced by Polytheism. This theory was superseded by the ghost theory and the soul theory.
These latter theories are known as intellectualist theories of religion, because both assume that the primitives are rational being, although their efforts to explain natural phenomena are somewhat crude. Before proceeding to discuss the intellectualist theories, we should, however, take note of another very strong theory about the origin of religion.
This belonged to the nature-myth school which had to be challenged before the ghost and soul theories could be popular.’ In terms of the chronology of ideas on religion, the nature-myth school came before the above-mentioned theories.
(1) The Nature-Myth School:
Nature-Myth school was a German School, dealing with Indo-European Religions. According to it, ancient Gods were universally personifications of natural phenomena. Max Muller, a German linguist, propounded this theory. In his opinion grand natural objects gave people a feeling of the infinite as well as acted as symbols of the infinite. The people thought of celestial bodies, such as, moon, start, dawn and their attributes in terms of metaphor and symbol.
With the passage of time, the symbolic representations came to have an independent identity and became separated from that which they represented. The attributes or the symbols became personified as deities.
The human beings and nature stand in a relationship of awe, wonder and terror etc. Early human beings were unable to understand or explain the world of nature. They ended up worshipping it out of fear and awe. According to Muller, the Religion of early man can be studied by looking into linguistic Etymological meaning of the name of Gods and legends associated with them. Max Muller’s contemporaries, Herbert Spencer, Edward Tylor and Andrew Lang were the main critics of nature-myth theories. They criticized the Philological and Etymological approach to Religion.
(2) The Ghost Theory:
Unlike Max Muller, Herbert Spencer and Edward Tylor focused their attention on Religious behaviour of the primitives. In their opinion, primitive societies offered an evidence of the earliest forms of Religion. Spencer published his views in 1882, eleven years after Tylor had published his book Primitive Culture in 1871.
In his book, The Principles of Sociology, Spencer (1876-96) discuss primitive beliefs. He shows that the primitives were rational though with a limited quantum of knowledge. They made reasonable, though weak, inferences with regard to natural phenomena. They observed sun, moon, clouds and stars come and go, and got the notion of visible and invisible conditions. Likewise, they get the idea of a person’s duality from dreams.
The dreams are real life-experiences by the primitives. The dream-self moves about at night while the shadow-self acts by the day. Sleep is temporary loss of sensibilities. The death is a longer period of insensibility. This idea of duality is extended by them to animals, plants and material object.
The appearance of dead persons in dreams is the evidence of temporary after life. This leads to the conception of a supernatural being in the form of a Ghost. The idea of Ghosts grows into the idea Gods and the Ghosts of ancestors become divine beings. The ‘ancestor worship is the root of every Religion’.
The prevalence of the idea of Ghosts of ancestors or other superior beings becoming divinities among the primitives in many parts of the world, shows that Spencer’s theory has some plausibility.
(3) The Soul Theory or Animism:
The word anima, a Latin word means Soul. Sir Edward Tylor’s theory of Animism considers both the origin and “development of Religion”. The Ghost theory explains the origin of Religion in the idea of Ghosts. The Animism or the Soul theory says the same thing in terms of the idea of Soul.
According to Tylor, experiences of death, disease, visions and dreams lead the primitives to think about the existence of immaterial power, i.e., the Soul. Thereafter, this idea of Soul is projected on to creatures other than human and even to inanimate objects. The Soul exists independent of its physical home in the body. Tylor’s definition of Religion is that Religion originated from a belief in spiritual beings.
Substantive (or essentialist) theories that focus on the contents of religions and the meaning the contents have for people. This approach asserts that people have faith because beliefs make sense insofar as they hold value and are comprehensible. The theories by Tylor and Frazer (focusing on the explanatory value of religion for its adherents), by Rudolf Otto (focusing on the importance of religious experience, more specifically experiences that are both fascinating and terrifying) and by Mircea Eliade (focusing on the longing for otherworldly perfection, the quest for meaning, and the search for patterns in mythology in various religions) offer examples of substantive theories.
Functional (and in a stronger form t) theories that focus on the social or psychological functions that religion has for a group or a person. In simple terms, the functional approach sees religion as "performing certain functions for society"[7] Theories by Karl Marx (role of religion in capitalist and pre-capitalist societies), Sigmund Freud (l origin of religious beliefs), Émile Durkheim (social function of religions), and the theory by Stark and Bainbridge exemplify functional theories. This approach tends to be static, with the exception of Marx' theory, and unlike e.g. Weber's approach, which treats of the interaction and dynamic processes between religions and the rest of societies
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