Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age [Hardcover]

This is a critical, historical sociology of religion of the highest order. Whether you're secular or religious or a bit of both or neither, I highly recommend reading this book.

There is much going on in this text on multiple levels, theoretically and empirically. In brief, it puts into helpful perspective a lot of questions many of us have about religion. You will learn from this book a lot about how some of the major cultural traditions of the world have developed. Robert Bellah has been thinking about the topic at least since 1964 when he published "Religious Evolution" in the American Sociological Review. In a way, Religion in Human Evolution is a general theory of religion; and, while written over the last 13 years, Bellah has been developing his theory of religion for more than 40 years of a distinguished teaching and writing vocation at Harvard and the University of California at Berkeley.

Bellah's approach recognizes the importance but partial independence of all the variables: cultural, biological, social, political, economic, etc. - but his focus is on "religion" broadly and carefully defined.

The book's subject is the way religion creates multiple realities and how those realities interact with the reality of daily life. Bellah begins with "the reality of life in the religious mode" and emphasizes that "religious evolution does not mean a progression from worse to better." Religion adds capacities to our cultural repertoire, so to speak, "but it tells us nothing about how those capacities will be used."

In part, this book is a work of critical retrieval of what in the traditions of ancient Israel, Greece, China, and India might speak to us today. It is also informed by an Enlightenment critique of tradition. It tells a very human, grand story. It helps us to understand - in wide perspective - where we've been and where we might be going and "asks what our deep past can tell us about the kind of life human beings have imagined was worth living." The book is not about modernity. But it holds a mirror up to our modern selves in a vivid comparative-historical perspective that illuminates our modernity and its meaning in a coherent, wholistic way.

A passage from the Analects of Confucius reads: "He who by reanimating the Old can gain knowledge of the New is indeed fit to be called a teacher." Bellah is such a teacher. He treats the ancient religious traditions of Israel, Greece, China, and India not as embalmed museum pieces, but as working traditions in need of reinterpretation - traditions that tell us much about who we are and the world in which we live. For Bellah, reinterpreting these traditions doesn't involve making them mean whatever we wish. It means listening and letting them open our eyes to things we would not see otherwise. Rightly interpreted, they can make us better able to deal with contemporary life. Religion in Human Evolution is such an effort.

*****
"Robert Bellah's Religion in Human Evolution is the most important systematic and historical treatment of religion since Hegel, Durkheim, and Weber... Bellah breathes new life into critical universal history by making ancient China and India indispensable parts of a grand narrative of human religious evolution." -- Prof. Yang Xiao, J. Comparative Philosophy

Bellah's research project, using the insights of biological and cultural evolution to explore the development of religion from as early as the Paleolithic Era, continuing through tribal, archaic, historic, and modern societies, was supported by the John Templeton Foundation. Dr. Robert Bellah's research focuses on the Axial Age, the first millennium BC, when religions developed around the world that transcended the archaic fusion of divinity and kingship. It was a period of great empires in Mesopotamia, Assyria, Babylon, Persia, and Greece declaring the possibility that ordinary human beings could relate directly to a transcendent reality. The results of this research constitute the book, Religion in Human Evolution.

Anthropologists have found that virtually ancient state societies and chiefdoms have been found to justify political power through divine authority. States founded out of the Neolithic revolution, as Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, were theocracies with Chieftains, kings and Emperors performing dual roles of political and religious leaders. This proposes that political authority co-opts collective religious belief to bolster itself. Bellah's work, of exceptional erudition, is a wide-ranging project of distinction in meaning, and expression, that probes our biological past, to discover the kinds of lives that our early human ancestors, have most often thought were worth living.

The study offers what is generally viewed as a forbidden theory of the origin of religion that goes deep into cultural evolution. Bellah's treatment of the four great civilizations of the "Axial Age, in ancient Israel, Greece, China, and India, demonstrates that all these existing religions, were rooted in the evolutionary story he chronicles. The Axial Age is the period from 800-200 BCE when certain inspiring people arose around the world; figures like Buddha, 650 BC, Confucius, 550 BC Socrates, 470 BC, arguably three of the most influential individuals in human history, who have cast shadows on history, and other inspiring leaders who convinced people it made sense to make religion, not war.

But to Bellah, the term and period primarily reflect a turning point in religion, he would deliberately start as far back as one can get to tell a story of multiple successive beginnings. These beginnings of play, ritual, myth, theology, extend to include the beginning of religion. He offers both a general theory of religion as a cultural systems and a full account of his general theory of religious evolution. Religion in Human Evolution, both prophetic and mystic, supports the call for a critical history of religion based on the full spectrum of human culture and traditions. While bands and small tribes possess supernatural beliefs, these beliefs do not serve to justify a central authority, justify transfer of wealth or maintain peace between unrelated individuals.

Randall Collins, author of The Sociology of Philosophies, sums it up eloquently,"Bellah's reexamination of his own classic theory of religious evolution provides a treasure-chest of rich detail and sociological insight. The evolutionary story is not linear but full of twists and variations. The human capacity for religion begins in the earliest ritual gatherings involving emotion, music and dance, producing collective effervescence and shared narratives that give meaning to the utilitarian world. But ritual entwines with power and stratification, as chiefs vie with each other over the sheer length, expense, and impressiveness of ritual."

The Search for God in Ancient Egypt

This is Bellah's greatest work to date. An insightful, brilliant inter disciplinary study of one of the most important developments of humanity. It is not merely a collection of facts which are listed and then analyzed. Rather, Bellah presents us with a coherent explanation of cultural and biological evolution. This erudite work needs to be read and reread to enhance one's appreciation of it. It certainly rivals such authors in similar studies as Durkheim and Weber.
Thank you, Professor Bellah, for another demonstration of what true, authentic scholarship is all about.