Preface

On 1 May 2010, the Dutch newspaper Trouw published an essay in which I presented the main argument of my inaugural lecture for the chair of the study of religion, which had been delivered at the University of Groningen on 16 March 2010. The editors of Trouw chose the title “De schepping in vier letters” (“Creation in Four Letters”), because I argued that the metaphor of the four letters constituting the DNA ‘code’ was taken (unknowingly, to be sure) from a long intellectual tradition in Europe, both in philosophy of nature and Kabbalah; by ‘decoding,’ ‘reading,’ and ‘writing’ DNA, the so-called ‘life sciences’ partake in a discourse that is inseparably tied to religious, metaphysical, and esoteric approaches to nature and the cosmos. Thus, the marriage between religion and science may not be a happy one, but the widespread idea that they were divorced sometime in the eighteenth century seems to be untenable.

The readers’ responses to this article were mostly critical. A certain Henk Timmerman from Oegstgeest was outraged and wrote in a letter to the editors on 3 May that if four consonants that “simply indicate chemical entities” are seen as ‘language,’ many other things can be made into ‘language,’ too. More interesting, though, was his response to my remark that it is common in contemporary Europe to “ridicule religious, metaphysical, astrological, homeopathic, or other approaches that are seen as completely irrational.” “What a strange list of terms,” Mr. Timmerman wrote. “Yes, of course, homeopathy, metaphysical approaches, and astrology do not have any scientific value; these are anachronisms that often lead to fraud. But religion? Does religion belong in that list? As a (natural) scientist and a Christian I defy the thoughts of the scholar of religion, von Stuckrad.”

I doubt that Mr. Timmerman will read this book. He may be interested to hear that his irritation is indicative of a complex cultural debate, in which the borders between religion and science on the one hand, and between science and ‘pseudo-science’ on the other, are constantly renegotiated. What makes the ‘pseudo-sciences’ particularly interesting is the fact that they challenge the rational truth-claims of the secular sciences. In their long cultural history, disciplines such as astrology, alchemy, and even magic subscribed in large part to standards of rationality and philosophy of nature; they formulated theories about nature and the cosmos and thus have often been seen as competitors with ‘modern science,’ a concept that was introduced only in the nineteenth century. To be sure, the competition between various cultures of knowledge and the polemics that go with it is not as new as the ‘modern age.’ But the specific constellation in which astronomy is disjunctively separated from astrology, chemistry from alchemy, and science from magic is a European phenomenon of the past three hundred years.

Polemics are always an indication of a problem. The problem with the ‘pseudo-sciences’ is that it has not always been easy to identify the exact difference between discarded and accepted forms of knowledge. What is more, these marginalized forms of knowledge continued to be attractive as an alternative to what was perceived as reductionist knowledge of nature in the sciences. This led to an intricate entanglement of various discourses in the large field of religion, science, and public culture. In the genealogy of the current situation, the institutionalization of knowledge about religion and science in a spectrum of new disciplines around 1900 (from religious studies to Indology and anthropology to psychology and theoretical physics) played an important role. These secular disciplines became the major experts when it comes to what we know about religion, science, and culture. And their representatives engaged in a lively debate not only with one another but also with a non-academic audience that was eager to absorb this knowledge.

The Scientification of Religion attempts to disentangle this complex knot of discourse strands. In a way, it is a follow-up to my Locations of Knowledge (2010), because I am interested here in the further historical development of the discursive constellations I described in that study with regard to the European situation between 1400 and 1700. But this volume also picks up data and considerations I engaged in my book on contemporary shamanism in Europe and North America (Schamanismus und Esoterik, 2003). Finally, the present book is an attempt to apply, as consistently as possible, the discursive approaches to the study of religious and cultural history that I have been working on during the past years. My object of study is not religion or science as a phenomenon that can be defined and then submitted to scholarly analysis; my object of study is the discursive construction of religion and science, i. e., the various meanings that are attributed to religion and science in cultural communication and practice. The meanings that are attributed to these—and related—terms change over time, and it is the advantage of discursive analyses to make these changes visible in their historical contexts.

My analysis follows the changing combinations of discourses that have been operative in our understanding of religion and science since the end of the eighteenth century. I untie the discursive knots that I find in the data and follow their strands in changing constellations up to the end of the twentieth century. This leads me to conclusions and ‘groupings’ (Foucault) of discourse strands that are difficult to match with the simplistic narratives still dominating the debate about religion in secular Europe today. Particularly when it comes to the officially discarded knowledge systems of astrology, alchemy, metaphysics, and magic, we can see that many elements of their discursive systems have been prolonged in secular (and thus accepted) forms of knowledge. The first part of this book reconstructs the changes in these discursive constellations. The second part describes the normative discursive power of academic constructions of knowledge about religion; focusing on several influential academics from both the humanities and the natural sciences, I argue that secular discourses have not only changed the understanding of what religion is, but that they have also produced new forms of religious practice. Taken together, these two levels of analysis form the basis of what I call the scientification of religion, i. e., the transformation and perpetuation of religious discourses as a result of their entanglement with secular academic discourses.

Although my analysis addresses the discursive changes between roughly 1800 and 2000 (with occasional excursions into earlier periods when it seems necessary to explain the prehistory of certain discourses), the most important period for this study turns out to be the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. My regional focus is Germany and Great Britain, with occasional excursions to other parts of Europe and to the United States of America. In this period, the developments that characterize German and British academic culture had decisive influence on other parts of the world, which makes such a focus reasonable, even though the results of my study should of course not be uncritically extrapolated and generalized.

Scientification of religion means that the borders between religion and science are constantly renegotiated in cultural processes. The concept challenges overly simplistic binary constructions, not only between religion and science, but also between etic and emic, professional and amateur, academic and vernacular, as well as between center and periphery. All of these binaries are united in discursive communities that stabilize attributions of meaning to the world around us in mutual dependence.

The major part of this book was written between January and August 2013 during a research stay at the Max Weber Center for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies at the University of Erfurt. It would not have been possible to work through all the material necessary for this research without the excellent support I received in Erfurt. I want to thank all of the other fellows, students, and administrative staff, and particularly Jörg Rüpke, for a stimulating and most pleasant stay. I thank the University of Groningen for granting me eight months of sabbatical leave to finish this project. For a few chapters, I made use of material that was published before. Chapter 1 is a revised version of “Discursive Study of Religion: Approaches, Definitions, Implications,” originally published in Method and Theory in the Study of Religion (25/1 [2013]: 5–25). For Chapter 8, I made use of “‘The Only Game in Town?’ Or: Contested Masters in Modern Western Shamanism,” from Meister und Schüler in Geschichte und Gegenwart: Von Religionen der Antike bis zur modernen Esoterik (edited by Almut-Barbara Renger, 363–382; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2012). I thank the presses for permission to use these publications in the present book.

From the many colleagues who helped me formulate the ideas presented in this book, I want to thank especially Egil Asprem (whose forthcoming book will be a major contribution to the debate about scientification of religion), Ulrike Brunotte, Marjo Buitelaar, Alexandra Grieser, Jay Johnston, Hans G. Kippenberg, Anders Klostergaard Petersen, Kim Knibbe, Jeffrey J. Kripal, Yme Kuiper, Bernd-Christian Otto, Almut-Barbara Renger, Lautaro Roig-Lanzillotta, Dave Vliegent-hart, Laura J. Vollmer, Erin Wilson, and Frans Wijsen.

Thanks to the referees for their diligent and constructive critique, and to De Gruyter for accepting the manuscript for publication and for the excellent handling of the editorial process. I especially thank Alissa Jones Nelson, who invited me to submit the proposal and supported me in the long process from idea to manuscript. Her professionalism, knowledge, wisdom, grace, and humor have had a decisive influence on me and on my work. I will bow down to her on Sunday and salute her when her birthday comes.

Groningen, 20 January 2014

Kocku von Stuckrad