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Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age
Religion in Human Evolution is a work of extraordinary ambition―a wide-ranging, nuanced probing of our biological past to discover the kinds of lives that human beings have most often imagined were worth living. It offers what is frequently seen as a forbidden theory of the origin of religion that goes deep into evolution, especially but not exclusively cultural evolution. How did our early ancestors transcend the quotidian demands of everyday existence to embrace an alternative reality that called into question the very meaning of their daily struggle? Robert Bellah, one of the leading sociologists of our time, identifies a range of cultural capacities, such as communal dancing, storytelling, and theorizing, whose emergence made this religious development possible. Deploying the latest findings in biology, cognitive science, and evolutionary psychology, he traces the expansion of these cultural capacities from the Paleolithic to the Axial Age (roughly, the first millennium BCE), when individuals and groups in the Old World challenged the norms and beliefs of class societies ruled by kings and aristocracies. These religious prophets and renouncers never succeeded in founding their alternative utopias, but they left a heritage of criticism that would not be quenched. Bellah’s treatment of the four great civilizations of the Axial Age―in ancient Israel, Greece, China, and India―shows all existing religions, both prophetic and mystic, to be rooted in the evolutionary story he tells. Religion in Human Evolution answers the call for a critical history of religion grounded in the full range of human constraints and possibilities.
776 pages, Hardcover
First published September 15, 2011
158 people are currently reading
2272 people want to read
About the author
Robert N. Bellah
50 books51 followersRobert N. Bellah was Elliott Professor of Sociology Emeritus at the University of California at Berkeley.
Bellah graduated summa cum laude from Harvard College with a B.A. in social anthropology in 1950. His undergraduate honors thesis on “Apache Kinship Systems” won the Phi Beta Kappa Prize and was published by the Harvard University Press. In 1955, he received a Ph.D. from Harvard University in Sociology and Far Eastern Languages and published his doctoral dissertation, Tokugawa Religion, in 1957. After two years of postdoctoral work in Islamic Studies at McGill University in Montreal, he began teaching at Harvard in 1957 and left 10 years later as Professor of Sociology to move to the University of California, Berkeley. From 1967 to 1997, he served as Ford Professor of Sociology.
Other works include Beyond Belief, Emile Durkheim on Morality and Society, The Broken Covenant, The New Religious Consciousness, Varieties of Civil Religion, Uncivil Religion, Imagining Japan and, most recently, The Robert Bellah Reader. The latter reflects his work as a whole and the overall direction of his life in scholarship “to understand the meaning of modernity.”
Continuing concerns already developed in part in “Civil Religion in America” and The Broken Covenant, led to a book Bellah co-authored with Richard Madsen, William Sullivan, Ann Swidler and Steven Tipton. Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life published by the University of California Press in 1985. The same group wrote The Good Society, an institutional analysis of American society, published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1991.
On December 20, 2000, Bellah received the United States National Humanities Medal. The citation, which President William Jefferson Clinton signed, reads:
The President of the United States of America awards this National Humanities Medal to Robert N. Bellah for his efforts to illuminate the importance of community in American society. A distinguished sociologist and educator, he has raised our awareness of the values that are at the core of our democratic institutions and of the dangers of individualism unchecked by social responsibility.
In July 2008, Bellah and Professor Hans Joas, who holds appointments in both the University of Chicago and Freiburg University in Germany, organized a conference at the Max Weber Center of the University of Erfurt on “The Axial Age and Its Consequences for Subsequent History and the Present,” attended by a distinguished group of international scholars interested in comparative history and sociology. At the conclusion of the conference, the University of Erfurt awarded Bellah an honorary degree. Harvard University Press published the proceedings of this conference as The Axial Age and Its Consequences in 2012.
In September of 2011 the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press published Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age, the result of Bellah’s lifetime interest in the evolution of religion and thirteen years of work on this volume.
Preview a book about Robert Bellah by University of Padua, Italy, Sociology Professor Matteo Bortolini.
News and Articles Commenting on Robert Bellah's Passing
Comments on the Passing of Robert N. Bellah by Jeffrey C. Alexander
American Journal of Cultural Sociology, July 31, 2013
Robert Bellah, Sociologist of Religion, Dies at 86
Tricycle, July 31, 2013
In Memoriam: Robert N. Bellah
Pacific Church News [The Episcopal Diocese of California], July 31, 2013
Robert Bellah, 1927-2013
Harvard University Press | Blog, July 31, 2013
The Passing of Robert Bellah
Association for the Sociology of Religion, July 31, 2013
Robert Bellah, preeminent American sociologist of religion, dies at 86 by Yasmin Anwar,
UC Berkeley News Center, August 1, 2013
Remembering Robert Bellah by Jeff Guhin
Jeff Guhin's blog , Thursday, August 1, 2013
Robert Bellah Departs by Mark Silk,
Religion News Service, August
Bellah graduated summa cum laude from Harvard College with a B.A. in social anthropology in 1950. His undergraduate honors thesis on “Apache Kinship Systems” won the Phi Beta Kappa Prize and was published by the Harvard University Press. In 1955, he received a Ph.D. from Harvard University in Sociology and Far Eastern Languages and published his doctoral dissertation, Tokugawa Religion, in 1957. After two years of postdoctoral work in Islamic Studies at McGill University in Montreal, he began teaching at Harvard in 1957 and left 10 years later as Professor of Sociology to move to the University of California, Berkeley. From 1967 to 1997, he served as Ford Professor of Sociology.
Other works include Beyond Belief, Emile Durkheim on Morality and Society, The Broken Covenant, The New Religious Consciousness, Varieties of Civil Religion, Uncivil Religion, Imagining Japan and, most recently, The Robert Bellah Reader. The latter reflects his work as a whole and the overall direction of his life in scholarship “to understand the meaning of modernity.”
Continuing concerns already developed in part in “Civil Religion in America” and The Broken Covenant, led to a book Bellah co-authored with Richard Madsen, William Sullivan, Ann Swidler and Steven Tipton. Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life published by the University of California Press in 1985. The same group wrote The Good Society, an institutional analysis of American society, published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1991.
On December 20, 2000, Bellah received the United States National Humanities Medal. The citation, which President William Jefferson Clinton signed, reads:
The President of the United States of America awards this National Humanities Medal to Robert N. Bellah for his efforts to illuminate the importance of community in American society. A distinguished sociologist and educator, he has raised our awareness of the values that are at the core of our democratic institutions and of the dangers of individualism unchecked by social responsibility.
In July 2008, Bellah and Professor Hans Joas, who holds appointments in both the University of Chicago and Freiburg University in Germany, organized a conference at the Max Weber Center of the University of Erfurt on “The Axial Age and Its Consequences for Subsequent History and the Present,” attended by a distinguished group of international scholars interested in comparative history and sociology. At the conclusion of the conference, the University of Erfurt awarded Bellah an honorary degree. Harvard University Press published the proceedings of this conference as The Axial Age and Its Consequences in 2012.
In September of 2011 the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press published Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age, the result of Bellah’s lifetime interest in the evolution of religion and thirteen years of work on this volume.
Preview a book about Robert Bellah by University of Padua, Italy, Sociology Professor Matteo Bortolini.
News and Articles Commenting on Robert Bellah's Passing
Comments on the Passing of Robert N. Bellah by Jeffrey C. Alexander
American Journal of Cultural Sociology, July 31, 2013
Robert Bellah, Sociologist of Religion, Dies at 86
Tricycle, July 31, 2013
In Memoriam: Robert N. Bellah
Pacific Church News [The Episcopal Diocese of California], July 31, 2013
Robert Bellah, 1927-2013
Harvard University Press | Blog, July 31, 2013
The Passing of Robert Bellah
Association for the Sociology of Religion, July 31, 2013
Robert Bellah, preeminent American sociologist of religion, dies at 86 by Yasmin Anwar,
UC Berkeley News Center, August 1, 2013
Remembering Robert Bellah by Jeff Guhin
Jeff Guhin's blog , Thursday, August 1, 2013
Robert Bellah Departs by Mark Silk,
Religion News Service, August
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December 20, 2025
Robert Bellah's Study Of Religion
The nature and significance of religion never ceases to fascinate. I became interested in reading Robert Bellah's "Religion in Human Evolution" (2011) as a result of a brief discussion on the book in philosopher Charles Taylor's recent work, "The Linguistic Animal" (2016), a study which shares much with Bellah's. Taylor praises Bellah's work for stressing the importance of play in understanding human development and in understanding religion. Taylor writes that play, in Bellah's study, is biologically based in that higher animals, at least, exhibit "play" behavior separate from their needs for food, shelter, or sex. According to Taylor, Bellah "points to the growing importance of play among these higher animals, especially among the young of the species, that is, their tendency to engage in mock fights (dogs) or mock captures (cats chasing a piece of string. There is an obvious analogy with human life, and Johan Huizinga, whom Bellah sites has done much to bring out the importance of play in human culture." (Taylor, p.335) In human culture, even more so than in animal behavior, play is valued for itself -- in games, literature, art, music and --- religion rather than as a means to something else.
Robert Bellah (1927 -- 2013) taught sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, and wrote extensively about the sociology of religion. His "Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic To the Axial Age" is, as Taylor described it, a "trailblazing" work with many insights, the chief of which, for me, was the importance it found in play. Bellah wrote the book over a 13 year period, and it displays astonishing erudition. The book is cross-disciplinary with lengthy, detailed considerations of psychology, cosmology, evolutionary theory, sociology, philosophy, and history, among much else. The book is long, difficult, insightful, and difficult to pin down. It seems to wander and get sidetracked and it is easy to lose the thread of the discussion. The subject of play is discussed in the first several chapters of the book before Bellah, by his own admission, loses sight of its importance in the latter chapters only to return to the subject in his lengthy conclusion, which is far more than a summation of the material that came before.
Bellah offers several provisional definitions of religion, including a definition derived from Emil Durkheim: "religion is a system of beliefs and practices relative to the sacred that unite those who adhere to them in a moral community." But a major theme of the book is the complexity of religion: Bellah argues that religions, in part, grow from their particular cultural settings. The nature of religion can best be seen at the end of a long study rather than at the beginning. Among the goals of the book, shared with the work of Charles Taylor and many others, is exploring the nature of religion in an age where some people believe that science is the sole means of legitimate knowledge. Bellah, of course, fully accepts science. The burden of his book is to argue against scientific reductionism, whether to physics or biology, in favor of an emergentism in which more complex forms of life acquire their own capacities which cannot be reduced simply to the movement or atoms or other component factors. So too, Bellah argues against a hard determinism in favor of the possibility that emerging forms of life gradually develop certain possibilities for free action. The possibility of play comes to the forefront. In the opening chapter of the book, "Religion and Reality" Bellah develops a pivotal distinction between the life of the everyday -- driven by the needs of survival- and a world beyond the pragmatic needs of daily life. As Bellah states, "one of the first things to be noticed about the world of daily life is that nobody can stand to live in it all the time." (p.3) This insight and the entire opening chapter are critical to the book's argument.
Roughly the first half of the book explores the development of religion and ritual through insights derived from psychology and biology. This approach might seem to give a naturalistic tenor to Bellah's approach but that is not his goal. The argument still becomes difficult in places.
After exploring the development of religious impulses through psychology and biology, Bellah turns to show how religion develops in different types of societies. He explores many individual societies and types of societies with a great display of specifics and learning. He examines egalitarian hunter-gathering societies and moves on to large "archaic" societies such as the Kingdom of Hawaii just before European contact or the Kingdom of Egypt. Broadly, Bellah argues that in these early, highly structured archaic states there is a connection and a unity between the political and the divine. The distinctions that moderns tend to make do not develop until later.
The heart of the book consists of four long chapters about the "Axial Age" of about the fifth century B.C.E where four different cultures worked in different ways towards a separation of the human and the divine that remain pivotal to the way we understand ourselves. The four cultures are 1. Ancient Israel; 2. Ancient Greece, 3. China in the Late First Millenium BCE and 4. Ancient India. In each case, Bellah examines in detail the growth of separate, critical way of though from an earlier archaic culture in which religion was not clearly differentiated from human rule. Among the many points Bellah makes is that each case is different and understands religion differently. He wants to argue ultimately for a pluralistic approach to religious life in which individuals can learn from others without thinking that their approach to religion is the best or the only way.
The discussions of the four "Axial Age" cultures are lengthy but a joy to read. There is much to be learned from Bellah's explorations of the Hebrew prophets, Confucius and Mencius, the Buddha in the texts of Theravada Buddhism and the extensive writings of the Hindus both before and after the Buddha, and of the Greek tragedians and --perhaps the figure closest to Bellah's heart -- Plato. With all the discussion which includes history, philosophy, and religion, the biological and psychological discussions in the earlier part of the book seem to get lost, as does the importance Bellah has ascribed to play. The book seems to me to become disjointed and more convincing in parts than as a unified whole.
I learned a great deal from Bellah's insights into cultures that I have studied to some degree -- the Greeks, Indians, and Ancient Israelites -- and about the Chinese, with which I was less familiar. Bellah argues that there are different ways of understanding reality, both the reality studied by science and the reality studied by culture and religion which differ among themselves. He writes early in the book, describing his project: as a "history of histories and a story of stories":
"I have become involved with many of the stories I recount to the point of at least partial conversion. In the extensive work that went into the four chapters dealing with the axial age .... I found myself morose as I completed each chapter, having come to live in a world I didn't want to leave but wanted to go on learning more about. Another way of putting it is that in each case I was learning more about myself and the world I live in. After all, that's what stories do." (p.45-46).
Bellah's book shows a life long love of history, learning, and of different forms of religious feeling and thought. From the earliest to the latest cultures, a theme of the book is that "nothing is ever lost."' If the book is less than fully cohesive, it is an inspiring work which rekindled my own love of the cultures and thinking it describes and encouraged me to learn more. Readers with a serious interest in religion will both struggle with and benefit from Bellah's book.
Robin Friedman
The nature and significance of religion never ceases to fascinate. I became interested in reading Robert Bellah's "Religion in Human Evolution" (2011) as a result of a brief discussion on the book in philosopher Charles Taylor's recent work, "The Linguistic Animal" (2016), a study which shares much with Bellah's. Taylor praises Bellah's work for stressing the importance of play in understanding human development and in understanding religion. Taylor writes that play, in Bellah's study, is biologically based in that higher animals, at least, exhibit "play" behavior separate from their needs for food, shelter, or sex. According to Taylor, Bellah "points to the growing importance of play among these higher animals, especially among the young of the species, that is, their tendency to engage in mock fights (dogs) or mock captures (cats chasing a piece of string. There is an obvious analogy with human life, and Johan Huizinga, whom Bellah sites has done much to bring out the importance of play in human culture." (Taylor, p.335) In human culture, even more so than in animal behavior, play is valued for itself -- in games, literature, art, music and --- religion rather than as a means to something else.
Robert Bellah (1927 -- 2013) taught sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, and wrote extensively about the sociology of religion. His "Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic To the Axial Age" is, as Taylor described it, a "trailblazing" work with many insights, the chief of which, for me, was the importance it found in play. Bellah wrote the book over a 13 year period, and it displays astonishing erudition. The book is cross-disciplinary with lengthy, detailed considerations of psychology, cosmology, evolutionary theory, sociology, philosophy, and history, among much else. The book is long, difficult, insightful, and difficult to pin down. It seems to wander and get sidetracked and it is easy to lose the thread of the discussion. The subject of play is discussed in the first several chapters of the book before Bellah, by his own admission, loses sight of its importance in the latter chapters only to return to the subject in his lengthy conclusion, which is far more than a summation of the material that came before.
Bellah offers several provisional definitions of religion, including a definition derived from Emil Durkheim: "religion is a system of beliefs and practices relative to the sacred that unite those who adhere to them in a moral community." But a major theme of the book is the complexity of religion: Bellah argues that religions, in part, grow from their particular cultural settings. The nature of religion can best be seen at the end of a long study rather than at the beginning. Among the goals of the book, shared with the work of Charles Taylor and many others, is exploring the nature of religion in an age where some people believe that science is the sole means of legitimate knowledge. Bellah, of course, fully accepts science. The burden of his book is to argue against scientific reductionism, whether to physics or biology, in favor of an emergentism in which more complex forms of life acquire their own capacities which cannot be reduced simply to the movement or atoms or other component factors. So too, Bellah argues against a hard determinism in favor of the possibility that emerging forms of life gradually develop certain possibilities for free action. The possibility of play comes to the forefront. In the opening chapter of the book, "Religion and Reality" Bellah develops a pivotal distinction between the life of the everyday -- driven by the needs of survival- and a world beyond the pragmatic needs of daily life. As Bellah states, "one of the first things to be noticed about the world of daily life is that nobody can stand to live in it all the time." (p.3) This insight and the entire opening chapter are critical to the book's argument.
Roughly the first half of the book explores the development of religion and ritual through insights derived from psychology and biology. This approach might seem to give a naturalistic tenor to Bellah's approach but that is not his goal. The argument still becomes difficult in places.
After exploring the development of religious impulses through psychology and biology, Bellah turns to show how religion develops in different types of societies. He explores many individual societies and types of societies with a great display of specifics and learning. He examines egalitarian hunter-gathering societies and moves on to large "archaic" societies such as the Kingdom of Hawaii just before European contact or the Kingdom of Egypt. Broadly, Bellah argues that in these early, highly structured archaic states there is a connection and a unity between the political and the divine. The distinctions that moderns tend to make do not develop until later.
The heart of the book consists of four long chapters about the "Axial Age" of about the fifth century B.C.E where four different cultures worked in different ways towards a separation of the human and the divine that remain pivotal to the way we understand ourselves. The four cultures are 1. Ancient Israel; 2. Ancient Greece, 3. China in the Late First Millenium BCE and 4. Ancient India. In each case, Bellah examines in detail the growth of separate, critical way of though from an earlier archaic culture in which religion was not clearly differentiated from human rule. Among the many points Bellah makes is that each case is different and understands religion differently. He wants to argue ultimately for a pluralistic approach to religious life in which individuals can learn from others without thinking that their approach to religion is the best or the only way.
The discussions of the four "Axial Age" cultures are lengthy but a joy to read. There is much to be learned from Bellah's explorations of the Hebrew prophets, Confucius and Mencius, the Buddha in the texts of Theravada Buddhism and the extensive writings of the Hindus both before and after the Buddha, and of the Greek tragedians and --perhaps the figure closest to Bellah's heart -- Plato. With all the discussion which includes history, philosophy, and religion, the biological and psychological discussions in the earlier part of the book seem to get lost, as does the importance Bellah has ascribed to play. The book seems to me to become disjointed and more convincing in parts than as a unified whole.
I learned a great deal from Bellah's insights into cultures that I have studied to some degree -- the Greeks, Indians, and Ancient Israelites -- and about the Chinese, with which I was less familiar. Bellah argues that there are different ways of understanding reality, both the reality studied by science and the reality studied by culture and religion which differ among themselves. He writes early in the book, describing his project: as a "history of histories and a story of stories":
"I have become involved with many of the stories I recount to the point of at least partial conversion. In the extensive work that went into the four chapters dealing with the axial age .... I found myself morose as I completed each chapter, having come to live in a world I didn't want to leave but wanted to go on learning more about. Another way of putting it is that in each case I was learning more about myself and the world I live in. After all, that's what stories do." (p.45-46).
Bellah's book shows a life long love of history, learning, and of different forms of religious feeling and thought. From the earliest to the latest cultures, a theme of the book is that "nothing is ever lost."' If the book is less than fully cohesive, it is an inspiring work which rekindled my own love of the cultures and thinking it describes and encouraged me to learn more. Readers with a serious interest in religion will both struggle with and benefit from Bellah's book.
Robin Friedman
May 29, 2016
A comprehensive historical analysis of human religion and thought, starting with the animal play and ending with the axial age breakthroughs. The major evolutionary theme being the development from the mimetic to mythic and narrative to the theoretic stage of the axial age. The ability to construct narratives that ultimately led to the development of “theoretic culture”.
More of a descriptive work rather than an analytic one, he considers the religious development from tribal to archaic to axial societies. The author presents anthropological case studies for tribal, archaic and axial age societies. For tribal religion, he considers the hunter gatherer societies from the Amazon, Australia and the America's from precolonial period rather than any prehistoric cases. He considers the precontact Hawaii as a case for the transition from tribal to archaic, and Egypt and Mesopotamia as cases for archaic societies.
The major bulk of the book though is given to dealing with the axial age societies of India, China, Israel and Greece. The transition from mythic narrative to theoretic culture occupies the bulk of this work. “Theoretical” breakthroughs and the evolution of universal ethics.
The scope of this work is grand and ambitious and I'm not doing any justice to it by this short and broken review. This book is clearly a product of a lifetime of research and learning. A very humanistic work on themes that are central to human experience. Highly recommended.
More of a descriptive work rather than an analytic one, he considers the religious development from tribal to archaic to axial societies. The author presents anthropological case studies for tribal, archaic and axial age societies. For tribal religion, he considers the hunter gatherer societies from the Amazon, Australia and the America's from precolonial period rather than any prehistoric cases. He considers the precontact Hawaii as a case for the transition from tribal to archaic, and Egypt and Mesopotamia as cases for archaic societies.
The major bulk of the book though is given to dealing with the axial age societies of India, China, Israel and Greece. The transition from mythic narrative to theoretic culture occupies the bulk of this work. “Theoretical” breakthroughs and the evolution of universal ethics.
The scope of this work is grand and ambitious and I'm not doing any justice to it by this short and broken review. This book is clearly a product of a lifetime of research and learning. A very humanistic work on themes that are central to human experience. Highly recommended.
April 7, 2012
This is strong piece of work. Bellah has assembled an imposing cathedral drawing brick by brick from cosmology, paleontology, archeology, biology, neurology, anthropology, mythology, philosophy, theology, politics, and literature to address the role of religion in human history. I found it very challenging to read and remain engaged with - it took me five months to complete its 606 pages - but I think it will sink in and become part of my thinking on the issues examined.
April 12, 2025
A history of human civilization, and religion's place in it. Small hunter-gatherer tribes have powerful beings that people identify with, whose aspects people take on during rituals. Only when human society evolves kings does religion evolve gods that are worshiped. Bellah is a sociologist. He sees religion's use to legitimate, and to criticize, authority.
Bellah does not see religion's power to build spiritual strength in the faithful. This is a little odd, in someone who's spent his life studying religion: he doesn't see what it's about, what it's for. Indeed, for Bellah, the distinction between philosophy and religion is artificial. Sociologists speak of an "axial age," mid-first milennium BCE, on which history turns. They characterize it as a moment when "thinking about thinking" emerges--when people become "like us." Which seems to mean, the moment when sociologists appear. Bellah's four embodiments of axial thought are: Deuteronomy, Plato, Confucius, Buddha. For "Deuteronomy," Bellah would've written, "Moses"--but he can't find any evidence that the stories of Moses were ever anything but fiction. Bellah is a huge fan of Plato.
Every known human society has gone through a period of human sacrifice. This is when the king has absolute power and is seen as divine. [For Bellah, this is history--but remember, every time a president uses the military, he is demanding human sacrifice of his own, and of the target people.]
Bellah's project is massively ambitious: to give a history of human civilization. He does a pretty good job.
Bellah died in 2013. A brief biography: http://www.robertbellah.com/biography...
Episcopal Bishop of Washington DC Mariann Budde gave the first Robert Bellah Memorial Lecture on Religion in Public Life, 2025.04.09, Berkeley, California. 1h 43 min: about half is the lecture, half questions and answers. Budde's title is, "Following Our North Star in Tumultuous Times." She talks about Bellah's work, relating to religion and current events: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsynD...
Bishop Budde's books: https://www.goodreads.com/author/list...
Bellah does not see religion's power to build spiritual strength in the faithful. This is a little odd, in someone who's spent his life studying religion: he doesn't see what it's about, what it's for. Indeed, for Bellah, the distinction between philosophy and religion is artificial. Sociologists speak of an "axial age," mid-first milennium BCE, on which history turns. They characterize it as a moment when "thinking about thinking" emerges--when people become "like us." Which seems to mean, the moment when sociologists appear. Bellah's four embodiments of axial thought are: Deuteronomy, Plato, Confucius, Buddha. For "Deuteronomy," Bellah would've written, "Moses"--but he can't find any evidence that the stories of Moses were ever anything but fiction. Bellah is a huge fan of Plato.
Every known human society has gone through a period of human sacrifice. This is when the king has absolute power and is seen as divine. [For Bellah, this is history--but remember, every time a president uses the military, he is demanding human sacrifice of his own, and of the target people.]
Bellah's project is massively ambitious: to give a history of human civilization. He does a pretty good job.
Bellah died in 2013. A brief biography: http://www.robertbellah.com/biography...
Episcopal Bishop of Washington DC Mariann Budde gave the first Robert Bellah Memorial Lecture on Religion in Public Life, 2025.04.09, Berkeley, California. 1h 43 min: about half is the lecture, half questions and answers. Budde's title is, "Following Our North Star in Tumultuous Times." She talks about Bellah's work, relating to religion and current events: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsynD...
Bishop Budde's books: https://www.goodreads.com/author/list...
March 30, 2018
Robert Bellah has a strong reach in contemporary sociology and social sciences. Among other things, his cultural analysis of American society is renown for having both sustained and strengthen Tocqueville's warning against democraties' proneness to soft tyranny (an all-encompassing control that settles together with the fall of civic commitment and the withdrawal in privacy).
Religion in Human Evolution is his last œuvre . It is a truly ambitious, remarkable piece of work spawning 13 years of effort.
Chapters 1 & 2 set a broad perspective that discard prior, taken for granted, distinctions (prehistory/history, animal/human, nature/culture). Bellah gives some glimpses on Big Bang Theory and emergence of life scenario ; then contrasts atomistic-pessimistic and emergentist-optimists cosmologies, and merges many stimulating bio-psycho-cultural concepts and hypothesis (niche construction, shared intention and attention, cooperative breeding, nurturance, animal play, enactive and narrative-self, unitive experience).
Chapters 3-9 carefully recollects rituals, myths and narratives, gathered from (roughly) the world over, that coincide with tribal (mimetic), chiefdom, archaic state (mythic), and axial (theoretic) religions.
Tribal-mimetic ones are reconstructed through the ethnographic studies of the Kalapalo (Brazil), Najavo (North America), and Warlbiri (Australia). Bellah shows how the durkheimian collective effervescence bolstered by rituals can rightfully be linked with gestural, prelinguistic communication. Danse, music and transe-state recapture the ways of Powerful Beings, by the mimesis of which group members gathers qua group members, going beyond the ordinary clivages (households and lineages) that pervade their day-to-day life.
Mythic cultures are reconstructed through the recollection of Polynesian cultures (Tokopia and Hawai'i), and of ancient Mesopotamian, Egyptian and Chines cultures (Zhang and west Zou China). While mimetic, tribal cultures were egalitarian (or reverse-hierarchical, following Christoph Boem) – everyone participated in rituals and their preparation – the mythic stage shows the opposite. Only chiefs or priests perform rituals, in separate space. While gestural, music and danse still animate rituals in lineages and tribes, these no longer hold the day at the polity level. Secret speechs and formulas, sustained by sacrifice (be it of animals or of human) and by impressive constructions (temples or graves), underline and magnify the separateness of the Gods and of their human counterparts. Myths are narrative about the advent of order as it currently stands; its advent through the first, distant cohabitation of powerfull-god beings with human, cohabitation where sacred skills and knowledge where transmitted, cohabitation latter to be disrupted by a catastrophe (war, dispute, betrayal). Myths are global, pervasive way to see and act in the world, to produce and reproduce its order. A thinking where things stands in the words and representations itself (god is the word god – at least what is left of it after the orignal split ; saying is doing).
Axial age religions are reconstructed through the studies of ancient Isreal and Judea, of Greece, of India and China in the first millenium before common era. Whereas, in a way that recall Thom Scott-Phillips' argument against Chomsky, ancient cultures appear to be full of ambiguous terms, that hold for countless entities and processes, axial ones are still ambiguity-ridden, but overal, they are on the verge of a collapse toward specializing in many bounded meaning systems (our current iron cage, dixit Max Weber). Axial age is about a legitimation crisis of the state, where a universal ethics is precipitated against the hierarchical particularism of caste, and by theoretic thinking (logical thinking about thinking, propelled in large part by writing).
Preceded by a breakdown of kingdoms through invasion and conquest (echoing Peter Turchin's hypothesis in Ultrasociety: How 10,000 Years of War Made Humans the Greatest Cooperators on Earth) axial age's breakpoint is said to have been posthumous, brought by detached intellectuals, renouncers, who have lived like homeless and mendicant (Buddha, Parmenide, Plato, Aristotle, the isrealite prophets, Confucious' pupils – who where closer to office clerks). Seeing the social whole as if from the outside, preaching the formation of totally new individuals that can both disrupt the current order of things as it stands, and fit the universal dimension of moral (the Heaven mandate, the Dharma, the Reason, the Being, the Will of God), such is the Axial age as a legacy. Forming niches of believers (church, schools, universities), apart from the ordinary – day to day work and struggle, free to entertain and nourish their faith in such an advent of the moral realm without transgressing the order, is one of axial age's long lived consequences.
Chapter 10 is tatamount to Bellah admitting the fact that justifies the blend of admiration and lack of enthusiasm I feel towards . It fall shorts of working its empirical data (maybe not 3-9 but 4-9) following its thrilling perspective (chapter 1 & 2). Bellah admits of not having had enough time to work things out as intentend (niche construction, organism-steered evolution, new cooperation modes, and the like). The link with animal-play (see below) and the religious field is thin – only the images of gods as nurturant are there to recall. Chapter 10 makes justice to this hypothesis of a relaxed field prompted by nurturance and play. On another plan, it verses in a kind of dull acceptance of religious pluralism counteracted by an ecological anxiety (for the 6th extinction that still rages since 100 000, that is, since homo erectus began to make weapon and drive large mammal extinct wherever he went).
I shall be fair in saying that this book goes far beyond the ordinary, typological, abstracted-from-prior abstractions, way that sociologists build meta-narratives. In this regard, its lack could be seen as assets. Bellah certainly do not force datas to comply with one model / hypothesis. Few if any of the ethnographic and literrary cases studied can be said to match clearly with the cultural-cognitive stages borrowed from Merlin Donald (mimetic, mythic, theoretic). Bellah let the variability and in-betweenness nature of animal-human-social facts stands in their own throughout. That may be memorization and abstract un-friendly, but it is honnest and exemplar of a good humanistic science.
More on the perspective (spoiler) :
As mentioned, chapters 1 & 2 set a broad perspective, one of Big History. Such clusters of distinctions as Prehistory/History (the later equated with literacy, urban-setting, agriculture, states and army), Nature / Culture (the later equated with language, rules-norms, institutions) are said to no longer be tenable in the face of state-of-the art psychological and evolutionary researches. An abstract of the Big Bang theory and emergence of life is given as the best available grand narrative to which mankind has come. Atomistic-pessimistic views (Monod, Weinberg) are contrasted with emergentist-optimist ones (Deacon, Kaufman), and even more with religious naturalism. Credit is given to an organism-centered (as opposed to gene-centered) perspective on evolution coherent with Niche Construction. Organisms able to learn from one another through generations can bring about behaviors that modify and create new, enduring environments, which change the selective pressures these organisms are facing. These same pressures favor the morphological, anatomical, physiological and neurological adaptations that best fit the species-specific, created, environment (see Kevin Laland for a recent exposition of this thesis)). Hence organisms are not dispensable vehicles for genes' self-replicating mono-mania, but may be their own main steerer.
Kirschner and Gerhart's ( The Plausibility of Life ) Conserved Core Processes argument is taken as being of central value. Biological evolution does not discard or erase prior, primitive organisational properties, but adds one to another in a richly layered way, so that prokaryot remains basically the same (minus its prior self-sufficient replication) in molecules, which remains in cells, tissues, and so on. Likewise for psychology. At a child's earliest stage of development (following psychologist Jerome Bruner), suject and object, the experiencing subject and that which is experienced are not yet divided. This oneness, unitive experience which later psychological development unfold is never entirely lost. In fact, religion is perhaps best seen as an attempt to gain a double monopoly on the access to the unitive experience in adult, and on its (albeit self-contradictory) representation.
Religion in Human Evolution is presented as an attempt to track religion's transformations in the long run, going back to homo habilis and homo erectus, as replicating the ontogenetic – the individual's psychological stage of development, - and the phylogenetic – the evolutionary, niche-species in the making, emergence of new capacities for shared intentionnality. A position that is familiar to readers of Michael Tomasello.
Bellah provide such view with an extensive array of definitions – types of memories (begining with the ones we share with other mammals, episodic and procedural memories), types or representation (unitive, enactive, symbolic, poetic, narrative, conceptual).
Animal play is taken as an evolutionary forerunner of culture at large (and of rituals in particular). Nurturance allows teens to avoid selective pressures and to postpone engaging in agression, hunting, fleeing and mating. But while these behaviors are unrequired in their proper domain of survival, they are invested in an as-if , playful, way, using faint as behavioral signaling of intent (« I don't really want to chase you, I want to play with you in an as if chasing »), where truly hurting or truly mating turns the game down and out for all concerned. Echoing the Michael Tomasello and Franz De Waal debate, Bellah sees animal play as carrying both shared attention and intention outside utilitarian finality. There is indeed a shared attention and intention going on, but for an internally rewarding activity, not for a mutually productive one like hunting or gathering. Furthermore, animal play seems to have a fairness principle inbuilt in it, since the strongest partner willingly refrain to use his physical avantage to its fullest, but modulate and downgrade it in respect to the other's skill. Species with cooperative breeding like human (see Sarah Hrdy) get nurturance a long way farther compared to their un-cooperative counterparts, hence bolstering a whole new, creative, fair and variation-rich way to trigger and modulate adaptative skills.
Taken as stimulating unitive experience and claiming monopoly over it in the symbolic, representational and cognitive domains, Religion is likely be one of animal-play's most profuse and longlived offspring.
Religion in Human Evolution is his last œuvre . It is a truly ambitious, remarkable piece of work spawning 13 years of effort.
Chapters 1 & 2 set a broad perspective that discard prior, taken for granted, distinctions (prehistory/history, animal/human, nature/culture). Bellah gives some glimpses on Big Bang Theory and emergence of life scenario ; then contrasts atomistic-pessimistic and emergentist-optimists cosmologies, and merges many stimulating bio-psycho-cultural concepts and hypothesis (niche construction, shared intention and attention, cooperative breeding, nurturance, animal play, enactive and narrative-self, unitive experience).
Chapters 3-9 carefully recollects rituals, myths and narratives, gathered from (roughly) the world over, that coincide with tribal (mimetic), chiefdom, archaic state (mythic), and axial (theoretic) religions.
Tribal-mimetic ones are reconstructed through the ethnographic studies of the Kalapalo (Brazil), Najavo (North America), and Warlbiri (Australia). Bellah shows how the durkheimian collective effervescence bolstered by rituals can rightfully be linked with gestural, prelinguistic communication. Danse, music and transe-state recapture the ways of Powerful Beings, by the mimesis of which group members gathers qua group members, going beyond the ordinary clivages (households and lineages) that pervade their day-to-day life.
Mythic cultures are reconstructed through the recollection of Polynesian cultures (Tokopia and Hawai'i), and of ancient Mesopotamian, Egyptian and Chines cultures (Zhang and west Zou China). While mimetic, tribal cultures were egalitarian (or reverse-hierarchical, following Christoph Boem) – everyone participated in rituals and their preparation – the mythic stage shows the opposite. Only chiefs or priests perform rituals, in separate space. While gestural, music and danse still animate rituals in lineages and tribes, these no longer hold the day at the polity level. Secret speechs and formulas, sustained by sacrifice (be it of animals or of human) and by impressive constructions (temples or graves), underline and magnify the separateness of the Gods and of their human counterparts. Myths are narrative about the advent of order as it currently stands; its advent through the first, distant cohabitation of powerfull-god beings with human, cohabitation where sacred skills and knowledge where transmitted, cohabitation latter to be disrupted by a catastrophe (war, dispute, betrayal). Myths are global, pervasive way to see and act in the world, to produce and reproduce its order. A thinking where things stands in the words and representations itself (god is the word god – at least what is left of it after the orignal split ; saying is doing).
Axial age religions are reconstructed through the studies of ancient Isreal and Judea, of Greece, of India and China in the first millenium before common era. Whereas, in a way that recall Thom Scott-Phillips' argument against Chomsky, ancient cultures appear to be full of ambiguous terms, that hold for countless entities and processes, axial ones are still ambiguity-ridden, but overal, they are on the verge of a collapse toward specializing in many bounded meaning systems (our current iron cage, dixit Max Weber). Axial age is about a legitimation crisis of the state, where a universal ethics is precipitated against the hierarchical particularism of caste, and by theoretic thinking (logical thinking about thinking, propelled in large part by writing).
Preceded by a breakdown of kingdoms through invasion and conquest (echoing Peter Turchin's hypothesis in Ultrasociety: How 10,000 Years of War Made Humans the Greatest Cooperators on Earth) axial age's breakpoint is said to have been posthumous, brought by detached intellectuals, renouncers, who have lived like homeless and mendicant (Buddha, Parmenide, Plato, Aristotle, the isrealite prophets, Confucious' pupils – who where closer to office clerks). Seeing the social whole as if from the outside, preaching the formation of totally new individuals that can both disrupt the current order of things as it stands, and fit the universal dimension of moral (the Heaven mandate, the Dharma, the Reason, the Being, the Will of God), such is the Axial age as a legacy. Forming niches of believers (church, schools, universities), apart from the ordinary – day to day work and struggle, free to entertain and nourish their faith in such an advent of the moral realm without transgressing the order, is one of axial age's long lived consequences.
Chapter 10 is tatamount to Bellah admitting the fact that justifies the blend of admiration and lack of enthusiasm I feel towards . It fall shorts of working its empirical data (maybe not 3-9 but 4-9) following its thrilling perspective (chapter 1 & 2). Bellah admits of not having had enough time to work things out as intentend (niche construction, organism-steered evolution, new cooperation modes, and the like). The link with animal-play (see below) and the religious field is thin – only the images of gods as nurturant are there to recall. Chapter 10 makes justice to this hypothesis of a relaxed field prompted by nurturance and play. On another plan, it verses in a kind of dull acceptance of religious pluralism counteracted by an ecological anxiety (for the 6th extinction that still rages since 100 000, that is, since homo erectus began to make weapon and drive large mammal extinct wherever he went).
I shall be fair in saying that this book goes far beyond the ordinary, typological, abstracted-from-prior abstractions, way that sociologists build meta-narratives. In this regard, its lack could be seen as assets. Bellah certainly do not force datas to comply with one model / hypothesis. Few if any of the ethnographic and literrary cases studied can be said to match clearly with the cultural-cognitive stages borrowed from Merlin Donald (mimetic, mythic, theoretic). Bellah let the variability and in-betweenness nature of animal-human-social facts stands in their own throughout. That may be memorization and abstract un-friendly, but it is honnest and exemplar of a good humanistic science.
More on the perspective (spoiler) :
As mentioned, chapters 1 & 2 set a broad perspective, one of Big History. Such clusters of distinctions as Prehistory/History (the later equated with literacy, urban-setting, agriculture, states and army), Nature / Culture (the later equated with language, rules-norms, institutions) are said to no longer be tenable in the face of state-of-the art psychological and evolutionary researches. An abstract of the Big Bang theory and emergence of life is given as the best available grand narrative to which mankind has come. Atomistic-pessimistic views (Monod, Weinberg) are contrasted with emergentist-optimist ones (Deacon, Kaufman), and even more with religious naturalism. Credit is given to an organism-centered (as opposed to gene-centered) perspective on evolution coherent with Niche Construction. Organisms able to learn from one another through generations can bring about behaviors that modify and create new, enduring environments, which change the selective pressures these organisms are facing. These same pressures favor the morphological, anatomical, physiological and neurological adaptations that best fit the species-specific, created, environment (see Kevin Laland for a recent exposition of this thesis)). Hence organisms are not dispensable vehicles for genes' self-replicating mono-mania, but may be their own main steerer.
Kirschner and Gerhart's ( The Plausibility of Life ) Conserved Core Processes argument is taken as being of central value. Biological evolution does not discard or erase prior, primitive organisational properties, but adds one to another in a richly layered way, so that prokaryot remains basically the same (minus its prior self-sufficient replication) in molecules, which remains in cells, tissues, and so on. Likewise for psychology. At a child's earliest stage of development (following psychologist Jerome Bruner), suject and object, the experiencing subject and that which is experienced are not yet divided. This oneness, unitive experience which later psychological development unfold is never entirely lost. In fact, religion is perhaps best seen as an attempt to gain a double monopoly on the access to the unitive experience in adult, and on its (albeit self-contradictory) representation.
Religion in Human Evolution is presented as an attempt to track religion's transformations in the long run, going back to homo habilis and homo erectus, as replicating the ontogenetic – the individual's psychological stage of development, - and the phylogenetic – the evolutionary, niche-species in the making, emergence of new capacities for shared intentionnality. A position that is familiar to readers of Michael Tomasello.
« Many evolutionary biologists think human intelligence grew beyond that of any other species not because we were so clever technologically but because we developed very complex societies and the capacity for shared intention and shared attention that made an entirely new level of cooperation possible » (p.104)
Bellah provide such view with an extensive array of definitions – types of memories (begining with the ones we share with other mammals, episodic and procedural memories), types or representation (unitive, enactive, symbolic, poetic, narrative, conceptual).
Animal play is taken as an evolutionary forerunner of culture at large (and of rituals in particular). Nurturance allows teens to avoid selective pressures and to postpone engaging in agression, hunting, fleeing and mating. But while these behaviors are unrequired in their proper domain of survival, they are invested in an as-if , playful, way, using faint as behavioral signaling of intent (« I don't really want to chase you, I want to play with you in an as if chasing »), where truly hurting or truly mating turns the game down and out for all concerned. Echoing the Michael Tomasello and Franz De Waal debate, Bellah sees animal play as carrying both shared attention and intention outside utilitarian finality. There is indeed a shared attention and intention going on, but for an internally rewarding activity, not for a mutually productive one like hunting or gathering. Furthermore, animal play seems to have a fairness principle inbuilt in it, since the strongest partner willingly refrain to use his physical avantage to its fullest, but modulate and downgrade it in respect to the other's skill. Species with cooperative breeding like human (see Sarah Hrdy) get nurturance a long way farther compared to their un-cooperative counterparts, hence bolstering a whole new, creative, fair and variation-rich way to trigger and modulate adaptative skills.
Taken as stimulating unitive experience and claiming monopoly over it in the symbolic, representational and cognitive domains, Religion is likely be one of animal-play's most profuse and longlived offspring.
August 12, 2019
For the person who understands it, reading Aristotle’s Metaphysics can set off a subliminal dance.
Robert Bellah
In an important sense, all culture is one: human beings today owe something to every culture that has gone before us.
Robert Bellah
The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as in poetry.
Bertrand Russell
Robert Bellah’s lifetime pursuit of scholarly knowledge garnered for him a powerful source of reverence for humanity, and indeed for all of life, cosmos, and soul. Seek and ye shall find as the saying goes, and for a humanist like Bellah there was simply no limitation to how wide he sought. As Alan Wolfe said in his New York Times review of this book: “of Bellah’s brilliance there can be no doubt. The sheer amount this man knows about religion is otherworldly. I never thought I would read a work in the sociology of religion that contained a discussion of prokaryotes and eukaryotes. I now have.”
With commitment to the particulars of any given religion comes identity and belonging, enabling adherents to find security and comfort within the confines of the scripture and ritual that their religion entails. Benefits abound for the devotees, but we also know that religion may lead to inter-religious rivalry, sectarianism, and supremacist attitudes. Willful ignorance and prideful indifference seem to be the norm for our species, prone as it is to tribalism. Perhaps tribalism has simply served us well throughout our evolution. Whereas for scholars like Bellah a constant pursuit to seek and refine knowledge is like its’ own religious endeavor to empathize with man's condition, the masses focus on the self and group centered scope of their daily lives. Is scholasticism a more apt a vessel than religion to shake us out of our provincial proclivities into the embrace of humanity’s universal brotherhood? It certainly seemed so for Bellah.
Religion in Human Evolution begins with a discussion of religion’s psychological and evolutionary framework, citing the well-known work of scholars like Abraham Maslow, famous for his Hierarchy of Needs theory. An atheist may question why religion should even matter at all for a species like ours. Bellah calls attention to how much of life is embodied in religious representations, especially as it relates to what Bellah calls non-ordinary reality. Ordinary reality is the realm in which we fulfill basic deficiencies in our lives by delivering on pragmatic actions that motivate us. Going to work everyday is an illustration of this. Non-ordinary reality is refuge and relief from the real world. Religions consider this non-ordinary reality sacred. Religions represent and connect us to this realm symbolically. As Bellah puts it:
"Without the capacity for symbolic transcendence, for seeing the realm of daily life in terms of a realm beyond it, one would be trapped in a world of what has been called dreadful immanence. For the world of daily life seen solely as a world of rational response to anxiety and need is a world of mechanical necessity, not radical autonomy. It is through pointing to other realities, through beyonding, that religion and poetry, and science too in its own way, break the dreadful fatalities of this world of appearances."
In the instances when Bellah offers definitions for the word religion, a word that appears frequently is symbol: “symbols are basic to religion: religion becomes possible only with the emergence of language”. Bellah tries to persuade his readers that religious experiences are an integral part of life, embodying much more than what we commonly associate with religion. He gives an anecdote about an experience Abraham Maslow once had while attending a graduation ceremony at a university. Maslow had a vision while watching the students coming down the aisle. He imagined an endless procession of great scholarly figures from history, like Socrates and Freud, leading the procession of students at the ceremony. Bellah interprets Maslow’s vision “as an apprehension of the academic procession as a symbol, standing for the true university as a sacred community of learning, transcending time and space. If we no longer glimpse that sacred foundation, the actual university would collapse. If the university doesn’t have a fundamental symbolic reference point that transcends the pragmatic considerations of the world of working and is in tension with those considerations, then it has lost its raison d’etre”.
Bellah is well aware of critiques on religion, which sometimes are predicated on what he calls scientific triumphalism. The technological fruits of science have undoubtedly benefited mankind immensely, but Bellah states that technology can become “the victim of hubris and megalomania”. Scientific understanding must be integrated within other fields of knowledge, such as the humanities. The following excerpts from the book will illustrate his point:
"The Wikipedia article on Verstehen [a term Max Weber coined] describes it as ‘non-empirical, emphatic, or participatory examination of social phenomena’, but there is nothing non-empirical about emphatic examination of social phenomena. Such inquiry involves the effort to put oneself in the place of the person under scrutiny and try to see the world as they do. It is a valid effort to get at one rather central aspect of what is really going on among the people under study. One way of making the distinction between scientific and humanistic methodologies is to say that scientific explanations are concerned with the causes and functions of the activities under study; humanistic understanding is concerned with their meaning. Both kinds of methodologies are required in both science and the humanities".
"Scientific truth, about which I have no doubt, is an expression of scientific practice and has no metaphysical priority over other kinds of truth. When we find [Martin] Buber speaking of an eternal You, who shines through the faces of other humans, sometimes the faces of animals, even at moments through trees, rocks, and stars, it would be easy to try to find a scientific explanation of why he would say that. But such an explanation, which might be true, would in no way refute the truth of which Buber speaks. Science is an extremely valuable avenue to truth. It is not the only one. To claim it is the only one is what is legitimately called scientism and takes its place among the many fundamentalisms of this world."
Religion in Human Evolution elucidates the complex topic of religion in what one scholar said is the “most systematic and historical treatment of religion since Hegel, Durkheim, and Weber”. The same scholar adds that “the generosity and breadth of [Bellah’s] empathy and curiosity in humanity is on full display on every page”. It’s the kind of scholasticism that you can treat like a religious text, because besides the deepest of knowledge it also has a moral compass, a burgeoning sense that knowledge is the power to gain an upper hand on the temptations that drive us towards divisiveness with each other.
Robert Bellah
In an important sense, all culture is one: human beings today owe something to every culture that has gone before us.
Robert Bellah
The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as in poetry.
Bertrand Russell
Robert Bellah’s lifetime pursuit of scholarly knowledge garnered for him a powerful source of reverence for humanity, and indeed for all of life, cosmos, and soul. Seek and ye shall find as the saying goes, and for a humanist like Bellah there was simply no limitation to how wide he sought. As Alan Wolfe said in his New York Times review of this book: “of Bellah’s brilliance there can be no doubt. The sheer amount this man knows about religion is otherworldly. I never thought I would read a work in the sociology of religion that contained a discussion of prokaryotes and eukaryotes. I now have.”
With commitment to the particulars of any given religion comes identity and belonging, enabling adherents to find security and comfort within the confines of the scripture and ritual that their religion entails. Benefits abound for the devotees, but we also know that religion may lead to inter-religious rivalry, sectarianism, and supremacist attitudes. Willful ignorance and prideful indifference seem to be the norm for our species, prone as it is to tribalism. Perhaps tribalism has simply served us well throughout our evolution. Whereas for scholars like Bellah a constant pursuit to seek and refine knowledge is like its’ own religious endeavor to empathize with man's condition, the masses focus on the self and group centered scope of their daily lives. Is scholasticism a more apt a vessel than religion to shake us out of our provincial proclivities into the embrace of humanity’s universal brotherhood? It certainly seemed so for Bellah.
Religion in Human Evolution begins with a discussion of religion’s psychological and evolutionary framework, citing the well-known work of scholars like Abraham Maslow, famous for his Hierarchy of Needs theory. An atheist may question why religion should even matter at all for a species like ours. Bellah calls attention to how much of life is embodied in religious representations, especially as it relates to what Bellah calls non-ordinary reality. Ordinary reality is the realm in which we fulfill basic deficiencies in our lives by delivering on pragmatic actions that motivate us. Going to work everyday is an illustration of this. Non-ordinary reality is refuge and relief from the real world. Religions consider this non-ordinary reality sacred. Religions represent and connect us to this realm symbolically. As Bellah puts it:
"Without the capacity for symbolic transcendence, for seeing the realm of daily life in terms of a realm beyond it, one would be trapped in a world of what has been called dreadful immanence. For the world of daily life seen solely as a world of rational response to anxiety and need is a world of mechanical necessity, not radical autonomy. It is through pointing to other realities, through beyonding, that religion and poetry, and science too in its own way, break the dreadful fatalities of this world of appearances."
In the instances when Bellah offers definitions for the word religion, a word that appears frequently is symbol: “symbols are basic to religion: religion becomes possible only with the emergence of language”. Bellah tries to persuade his readers that religious experiences are an integral part of life, embodying much more than what we commonly associate with religion. He gives an anecdote about an experience Abraham Maslow once had while attending a graduation ceremony at a university. Maslow had a vision while watching the students coming down the aisle. He imagined an endless procession of great scholarly figures from history, like Socrates and Freud, leading the procession of students at the ceremony. Bellah interprets Maslow’s vision “as an apprehension of the academic procession as a symbol, standing for the true university as a sacred community of learning, transcending time and space. If we no longer glimpse that sacred foundation, the actual university would collapse. If the university doesn’t have a fundamental symbolic reference point that transcends the pragmatic considerations of the world of working and is in tension with those considerations, then it has lost its raison d’etre”.
Bellah is well aware of critiques on religion, which sometimes are predicated on what he calls scientific triumphalism. The technological fruits of science have undoubtedly benefited mankind immensely, but Bellah states that technology can become “the victim of hubris and megalomania”. Scientific understanding must be integrated within other fields of knowledge, such as the humanities. The following excerpts from the book will illustrate his point:
"The Wikipedia article on Verstehen [a term Max Weber coined] describes it as ‘non-empirical, emphatic, or participatory examination of social phenomena’, but there is nothing non-empirical about emphatic examination of social phenomena. Such inquiry involves the effort to put oneself in the place of the person under scrutiny and try to see the world as they do. It is a valid effort to get at one rather central aspect of what is really going on among the people under study. One way of making the distinction between scientific and humanistic methodologies is to say that scientific explanations are concerned with the causes and functions of the activities under study; humanistic understanding is concerned with their meaning. Both kinds of methodologies are required in both science and the humanities".
"Scientific truth, about which I have no doubt, is an expression of scientific practice and has no metaphysical priority over other kinds of truth. When we find [Martin] Buber speaking of an eternal You, who shines through the faces of other humans, sometimes the faces of animals, even at moments through trees, rocks, and stars, it would be easy to try to find a scientific explanation of why he would say that. But such an explanation, which might be true, would in no way refute the truth of which Buber speaks. Science is an extremely valuable avenue to truth. It is not the only one. To claim it is the only one is what is legitimately called scientism and takes its place among the many fundamentalisms of this world."
Religion in Human Evolution elucidates the complex topic of religion in what one scholar said is the “most systematic and historical treatment of religion since Hegel, Durkheim, and Weber”. The same scholar adds that “the generosity and breadth of [Bellah’s] empathy and curiosity in humanity is on full display on every page”. It’s the kind of scholasticism that you can treat like a religious text, because besides the deepest of knowledge it also has a moral compass, a burgeoning sense that knowledge is the power to gain an upper hand on the temptations that drive us towards divisiveness with each other.
August 23, 2018
I have a debated long on how to write a review of this book and came up with nothing but jumbled thoughts. This is truly a work to stand in front with nothing but awe. I cannot over-emphasize how much i learned from this book and in which ways it has changed my views and stimulated my thoughts. By spending 13 years working on this book, applying what i can discern from it a prodigious intellect, Robert Bellah has produced as objective analysis of the evolution of religion as can get. He grounds the capacity for religiosity in evolutionary biology through the evolution of play from ‘relaxed fields’ defined as the absence of evolutionary pressures for immediate survival. He then delineates how play later developed as ‘ritual’ was the basis not only of religiosity but rational thought, theory, and science. He discusses the development of religions and culture, inextricably intertwined and affecting each other, through tribal, archaic, and finally axial societies giving vivid and varied examples and details of each. At each stage of development the newer stage never loses what came before but integrates and reformulates its inheritance in novel ways. Ending with possible lessons and practical uses for the future this book has been truly remarkable
September 10, 2023
It’s impossible to cover all of Bellah’s scholarly concerns in this large tome (600 pages) , made up of ten chapters, the first five consisting of general commentary on religion, its reality, and how it has evolved in the production of meaning. The five remaining chapters concentrate on the development of archaic religion to its “axial age” (defined as as the time “when man becomes conscious of being as a whole, of himself and his limitations.”) in ancient Israel, Greece, China, and India, all occurring roughly 500 years before the birth of Christ. I didn’t follow all of Bellah’s dense arguments about how religion has evolved, , but that said, there were plenty of ideas in this book to sustain my interest.
In the introduction Bellah explains his interest in religion, “how religion creates other worlds, and how those worlds interact with the world of daily life.” That is the real subject of the book, how religion calls into question the reality of daily life. It does so, chiefly by employing imaginative poetic techniques. He quotes the poet, Mark Strand, “A poem is a place where the conditions of beyondness and withinness are made palpable.”
Interestingly, as one example of how this happens, he uses the analogy of computer language of “offline” and “online.” Online is the world of daily life, of what is immediately before us, of Darwinian pressures such as “foraging, fighting, fleeing, procreating, and whatever all creatures to to survive.” Offline is “when those pressures are off, and there are other things at work” such as play and dreaming, both of which have important connections with religion.
After these comments in the introduction, rather than a discussion of specific religions, Bellah is interested in the cultural conditions out of which all religions grew, going back to stone age humanity. It is a long process and involves two types of thinking, narrative or story-telling, and reasoning or analysis. It’s here that the axial age becomes important; it’s the beginning point where humans developed the capacity to imagine and work out realities that explain and give significance to mundane happenings. Much of this gets involved with power and authority and the identification of “God” within this process.
One conclusion Bellah reaches is that all the great religions consider their own teachings to be superior as if they alone had discovered the truth This despite the fact that the axial age tended to create universal ethics, Bellah thinks, though, that in the 20th century \ single religions have generally weakened in any their claims to be the “sole vision” of what is true. He mentions Kant’s dream of a world civil society, rather than state-organized societies. If that were to occur, it could be part of a new axial age.
In the introduction Bellah explains his interest in religion, “how religion creates other worlds, and how those worlds interact with the world of daily life.” That is the real subject of the book, how religion calls into question the reality of daily life. It does so, chiefly by employing imaginative poetic techniques. He quotes the poet, Mark Strand, “A poem is a place where the conditions of beyondness and withinness are made palpable.”
Interestingly, as one example of how this happens, he uses the analogy of computer language of “offline” and “online.” Online is the world of daily life, of what is immediately before us, of Darwinian pressures such as “foraging, fighting, fleeing, procreating, and whatever all creatures to to survive.” Offline is “when those pressures are off, and there are other things at work” such as play and dreaming, both of which have important connections with religion.
After these comments in the introduction, rather than a discussion of specific religions, Bellah is interested in the cultural conditions out of which all religions grew, going back to stone age humanity. It is a long process and involves two types of thinking, narrative or story-telling, and reasoning or analysis. It’s here that the axial age becomes important; it’s the beginning point where humans developed the capacity to imagine and work out realities that explain and give significance to mundane happenings. Much of this gets involved with power and authority and the identification of “God” within this process.
One conclusion Bellah reaches is that all the great religions consider their own teachings to be superior as if they alone had discovered the truth This despite the fact that the axial age tended to create universal ethics, Bellah thinks, though, that in the 20th century \ single religions have generally weakened in any their claims to be the “sole vision” of what is true. He mentions Kant’s dream of a world civil society, rather than state-organized societies. If that were to occur, it could be part of a new axial age.
July 2, 2024
Wanna be a cognitive science of religion scholar? Just read this one thoroughly!
Well, I really have not many words enough to speak for this book. This is a -tour de force-. This is a long book on the subject. At first I thought this was just about evolution, I mean, biological evolution, but this book is mostly about cultural evolution, and N. Bellah, a scholar, takes a lot of time and words to explain us about this, concerning many civilizations as examples, such as Hawaii, Ancient China, India, ancient Greece, and Judea, civilizations that had something to do with the 'Axial Age' (500–300 BCE), which refers to the period during which most of the main religious and spiritual traditions emerged in Eurasian societies.
What we are, is ancient civilizations adapted to our needs in 2024 AD. This is the main premise for cultural evolution. Of course, if you are familiar to this kind of books, this is for sure no surprise.
The parts concerning biological (thus behavioral evolution) have to do with our brains, and the ability to play, characteristic of mammals. This is something that has a lot to do with the child playing with Legos (materializing an idea), running, jumping, anything that could have a certain set of "rules" in order to let the game be "egalitarian". This kind of activities set in motion the cerebral structures and body ability to "mimic" and made possible the coordination of movements. This, among other things, created ritual. Rituals are also composed of a set of oral rules, besides bodily movement. Orality, and the human ability to speak is also the basis for the creation of myth, ritual and what now we can call "religion".
The book is extensive, I even had to put aside some parts of it because this was really, dense. I mean, this book took over thirteen years to get finished, and it is the last work of Robert N. Bellah. If you are into the origins of religion, but you really want to understand word by word, of passages from the Torah, from the Bible, the Analects, and even from the Rigveda’s and Upanishads, this is the book. Understanding this book will make you a scholar in cognitive science of religion processes. You have no idea how awesome this book is, and you really must love this subject to complete it.
Well, I really have not many words enough to speak for this book. This is a -tour de force-. This is a long book on the subject. At first I thought this was just about evolution, I mean, biological evolution, but this book is mostly about cultural evolution, and N. Bellah, a scholar, takes a lot of time and words to explain us about this, concerning many civilizations as examples, such as Hawaii, Ancient China, India, ancient Greece, and Judea, civilizations that had something to do with the 'Axial Age' (500–300 BCE), which refers to the period during which most of the main religious and spiritual traditions emerged in Eurasian societies.
What we are, is ancient civilizations adapted to our needs in 2024 AD. This is the main premise for cultural evolution. Of course, if you are familiar to this kind of books, this is for sure no surprise.
The parts concerning biological (thus behavioral evolution) have to do with our brains, and the ability to play, characteristic of mammals. This is something that has a lot to do with the child playing with Legos (materializing an idea), running, jumping, anything that could have a certain set of "rules" in order to let the game be "egalitarian". This kind of activities set in motion the cerebral structures and body ability to "mimic" and made possible the coordination of movements. This, among other things, created ritual. Rituals are also composed of a set of oral rules, besides bodily movement. Orality, and the human ability to speak is also the basis for the creation of myth, ritual and what now we can call "religion".
The book is extensive, I even had to put aside some parts of it because this was really, dense. I mean, this book took over thirteen years to get finished, and it is the last work of Robert N. Bellah. If you are into the origins of religion, but you really want to understand word by word, of passages from the Torah, from the Bible, the Analects, and even from the Rigveda’s and Upanishads, this is the book. Understanding this book will make you a scholar in cognitive science of religion processes. You have no idea how awesome this book is, and you really must love this subject to complete it.
May 4, 2024
This is a highly learned and informative book, from which I learned much. It is, however, in the tradition of those thinkers since Kant who have defended the truth of religion by redefining "truth." Although Bellah's redefinition of truth is quite different from Kant's, owing much to pragmatism, phenomenology, psychology, and narrative theory. Nevertheless, it is, in the end, unsatisfactory.
March 27, 2018
This is a dense book intended for the serious scholar instead of general readers.
If you’re interested in Religious Studies, this book studies why religion is a universal human phenomenon, found in almost all times and regions. Regardless of your belief in a single true religion, why so many religions have existed over time is an important question. Further, this book looks at the evolution of religion through the lens of ritual and social understanding of humans’ relationship with the divine. It does not look at the truth of religious beliefs or evaluate the validity of individual religions or religion in general. Christianity and Islam are not covered at all. The premise should be inoffensive to atheists and religious adherents alike.
The most interesting claim of this book to me is the argument that religious activity is related to play. Both ritual and play, the author argues, occur in a “relaxed field” that takes participants outside day-to-day existence (or, for much of our history, the ongoing struggle for survival). Humans have a psycho-social need for breaks of this kind. In some cases, the author talks of specific rituals “letting off steam,” especially in more oppressive societies.
Play and religious ritual, by taking people outside of daily life, also offer an important opportunity to more objectively evaluate society. This may serve to reinforce social structures, as was seen in archaic societies like Ancient Egypt, or it may critique them, such as occurred in Ancient Judah during the time of the prophets or India during the life of Gautama Buddha.
The author makes a well-researched argument that, if somewhat heavy reading, is ultimately persuasive.
If you’re interested in Religious Studies, this book studies why religion is a universal human phenomenon, found in almost all times and regions. Regardless of your belief in a single true religion, why so many religions have existed over time is an important question. Further, this book looks at the evolution of religion through the lens of ritual and social understanding of humans’ relationship with the divine. It does not look at the truth of religious beliefs or evaluate the validity of individual religions or religion in general. Christianity and Islam are not covered at all. The premise should be inoffensive to atheists and religious adherents alike.
The most interesting claim of this book to me is the argument that religious activity is related to play. Both ritual and play, the author argues, occur in a “relaxed field” that takes participants outside day-to-day existence (or, for much of our history, the ongoing struggle for survival). Humans have a psycho-social need for breaks of this kind. In some cases, the author talks of specific rituals “letting off steam,” especially in more oppressive societies.
Play and religious ritual, by taking people outside of daily life, also offer an important opportunity to more objectively evaluate society. This may serve to reinforce social structures, as was seen in archaic societies like Ancient Egypt, or it may critique them, such as occurred in Ancient Judah during the time of the prophets or India during the life of Gautama Buddha.
The author makes a well-researched argument that, if somewhat heavy reading, is ultimately persuasive.
January 2, 2013
The grand sweep of the book is breathtaking. Unfortunately, Bellah fell into the trap of authors who have enjoyed their research too much -- it was largely descriptive and did not live up to its analytical promise.
If you're looking for a one book review of the literature on the religious impulse in biological evolution, the modern academic understanding of the development of Judaism through to the later prophets, a history of Greek social and political development and how it led to Plato and Aristotle, the foundations of the various Chinese schools of thought including Confucianism, Daoism, and Mozi, and the development of Hinduism and the Buddhist split, then this is the book for you.
If you're trying to gain an understanding of the role religion played or how it was affected by the axial revolution, this can help. It's not front and center, though.
If you want to truly understand why the axial age is so significantly different from the archaic and hunter-gatherer, you'll need to work a lot harder to get that information. Yet, Bellah states that this is the typology that he's trying to develop.
If you're looking for a one book review of the literature on the religious impulse in biological evolution, the modern academic understanding of the development of Judaism through to the later prophets, a history of Greek social and political development and how it led to Plato and Aristotle, the foundations of the various Chinese schools of thought including Confucianism, Daoism, and Mozi, and the development of Hinduism and the Buddhist split, then this is the book for you.
If you're trying to gain an understanding of the role religion played or how it was affected by the axial revolution, this can help. It's not front and center, though.
If you want to truly understand why the axial age is so significantly different from the archaic and hunter-gatherer, you'll need to work a lot harder to get that information. Yet, Bellah states that this is the typology that he's trying to develop.
October 15, 2017
Thirteen years in the making, and finished two years prior to his death, Professor Bellah's 600-page tome is, I think, a contemplation on the tension between the universalistic and the particularistic; the egalitarian and the hierarchical; the mythic and the mimetic; the empirical and the theoretical. The main backdrops are Greece, Israel, China, and India during the second half of the first millennium BCE, the so-called Axial Age. He discusses religious and ideological evolution in their sociopolitical contexts with insights and flair, and his profound erudition is obvious. His pet narratives of "play" and "flow" can be a bit straining but by no means detract from the main analyses. Reading it a second time has been very rewarding. Five stars.
May 6, 2020
An incredibly dense historical text on the entanglement of religion and the development of society. This is not an easy read and is written in a very academic style that does not appear to be intended for the average reader. It is also a complete overload of information that really should be carefully read over a period of weeks instead of days, as I did. However, all that being said, it was quite interesting and informative, especially for someone like myself who has never been involved in religion. Although I've always been aware of the connection between religion and human development, I don't think that I ever realized how intimately connected they were.
August 15, 2012
This book takes much effort to read but the reader is rewarded, at least in my case, with a much improved understanding of how religion and society have changed together through the part of history covered in the text.
I was particularly impressed with how an ethical view of the world developed quite differently in different parts of the world but certainly bears a very common thread. Another thread I found very informative was how different cultures justify behaviors which are outside their moral framework.
Indeed no matter what part of the world we are from we are all human.
I was particularly impressed with how an ethical view of the world developed quite differently in different parts of the world but certainly bears a very common thread. Another thread I found very informative was how different cultures justify behaviors which are outside their moral framework.
Indeed no matter what part of the world we are from we are all human.
October 7, 2024
Spectacular survey of the sociological underpinnings of the various stages of religious thought and behavior throughout human history (and pre-history). I learned many new features of cultures including aboriginal Australians, Hawaii, Ancient Greece, Israel, China, and India. Bellah’s definition of “religion” is intentionally very broad and captures many practices that many people may not conventionally consider relook. Nevertheless, I was compelled by the description of the process and relations between episodic, mimetic, narrative, and theoretic practice. I don’t know enough about religious studies to know whether his terms are widely accepted.
October 3, 2025
This work represents the culmination of a long period of interest in an evolutionary view of religious development over the long durée, with Bellah’s first publication on this subject coming in his 1964 article, “Religious Evolution,” wherein he first develops his theoretical model. Here he attempts to delineate a macrohistory of religion in terms of five evolutionary stages. For Bellah, these stages are not discrete but accumulative, with each earlier stage persisting in certain ways within the newly evolved dispensations of the successive stages, a recurring theme in his work. Conversely, he also emphasizes that the later evolutionary forms of religion “already exist in some sense in the religious system” of the earliest forms of religion. His schema involves the evolutionary stages of 1) primitive, 2) archaic, 3) historical, 4) early modern, and 5) modern religion. While he hints at a full book length treatment even as far back as this article, this work would not come until almost half a century later. In Religion in Human Evolution, he updates the terminology of his stages in renaming the “primitive” – which is certainly loaded with unfortunate and unintended associations – with “tribal” religion, and replacing the “historical” with Jaspers’ “axial age,” indicating the earliest textual or literate phase of religions, where Bellah finds, with Jaspers, pivotal cross-cultural transformations in the evolution of human religiosity. While Jaspers mostly lurked in the background of the other theorists, in Bellah there is the most sustained reconsideration of Jaspers’ axial theory, integrated into his evolutionary model.
He also limits his analysis in this work to the first three stages – the tribal, archaic, and axial - with a proposed treatment of the final two – the early modern and modern – unfortunately never coming to fruition prior to Bellah’s passing in 2013. However, much of Bellah’s other work has focused on the transformations of religion in the modern and contemporary period, especially toward forms of noninstitutionalized “civil religion” permeating individual and social life. Here we will examine Bellah’s theory as proposed in Religion in Human Evolution, though I will also give some attention to the contemporary persistence of these earlier stages in modern culture. For one, Bellah is perhaps the only thinker considered here who has connected his macrocosmic deep-historical account to the analysis of modern religiosity, if only briefly, with Farmer et al. ending their model of the commentarial engine with the 15th century collapse of manuscript traditions, and Witzel and van Binbsergen’s models terminating mostly in the early centuries of the common era. But like these other thinkers, he is also looking to the deep past to shed light on our contemporary situation, and sees “big history,” of which his work is an instance, as a necessary corrective to the threat posed by pervasive cultural-historical amnesia in wide swathes of present humanity. To lose access to the past is to foreclose hope for the (human) future.
His method is influenced by Max Weber’s notion of “ideal types,” in which specific representative examples are given for each phase of religion discussed. Thus, his theory’s macrocosmic dimensions are achieved via the construction of particular stages and the examination of a number of examples from each phase, a method which, though it cannot be totally exhaustive or encyclopedic, does still aim at universal inclusion through this representative sampling. Insofar as he seeks to describe the earliest evolutionary phases of human religion, his theory is also macrocosmic in terms of its search for origins, in this case those of religion as such, which are found not only in its earliest forms but additionally in the processes of animal and mammalian evolution.
For the tribal stage he selects Australian Aboriginal religion, particularly the Walbiri, the Amazonian Kalapalo, and the North American Navajo. The latter represent for him a kind of transitional case of development toward the next phase, the archaic, and also show a degree of influence from the somewhat archaicized Pueblo culture, who at that time had been influenced by contact with the fully archaic (in Bellah’s view) Mesoamerican civilizations. In terms of Witzel’s findings, and those of the geneticists he relies on, the Walbiri would represent the Gondwana populations who first migrated out of Africa and who have been in relative isolation from Laurasian populations until the 19th century. The Kalapalo are representative of the fist wave of Laurasian migrants into the Americas, while the Navajo, part of the Na-Dene language family, migrated much later into the continent around 10,000 years ago.
Bellah’s vision of religious evolution is significantly oriented around the social conditions of the cultures involved at each stage, defining them according to the dominant modes of social interaction and structuring. The tribal stage is thus characterized as being fundamentally egalitarian, with a relative lack of hierarchy and of societally institutionalize forms of dominance, though not lacking, as in the animal world, some forms of dominance in the social realm. But individual expressions of exaggerated tendencies toward dominance are heavily regulated by the tribal moral community through the collective enforcement of powerful norms which “negatively sanction despotic behavior and protect the family,” a kind of active “reverse dominance hierarchy.” Like the tribal groups, the powerful beings that are the focus of religion and ritual in these systems exhibit the same kind of egalitarian relationships. In many cases they are seen as ancestors of humanity, whose myths depict them as having shaped the features of the natural world. They are powerful but do not control or rule over the natural world, but are subject to it in a way similar to human beings. Human beings participate through ritual in the identities and activities of these beings.
For the archaic stage of religion, Bellah draws his examples from pre-contact Hawaii – representing the transition from tribal to archaic state - and the Bronze Age cultures of Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Shang and Zhou era China. Mesoamerica would also fit his model as an archaic early state, but the data were insufficient for their inclusion. In such societies, in which agriculture and early states have developed, the earlier tribal egalitarianism has given way to societies characterized by class hierarchies, especially that of the priesthood and ruler(s). The ruler(s) become the focus of religious ritual, acting as the more or less sole conduit to the world of divinity. The powerful beings of tribal religion are transformed into gods who control the natural world and are worshipped rather than participated in. They also exhibit the same kind of hierarchical relationships that exist in society, with pantheons headed by divine rulers.
Finally, the axial period – by far the most extensively treated stage – is represented by four cases: ancient Israel, Greece, China, and India. Unlike the other stages which seem to be more independent of absolute temporal dating – the tribal examples being relatively recent or contemporary but without the necessary social and civilizational features which would attend archaic transformation and the Hawaiian archaic example being much later (18th century) than the other Bronze age cases – these axial civilizations are all located within the same temporal vista, first defined by Jaspers, of 800 to 200 BCE. For Bellah, the changes in the essential religious structure are attendant upon societal changes and conditions which call forth greater levels of complexity in the sphere of religion – bigger, more complex societies which have developed novel representational and mental capacities necessitate more complex religious forms which reflect these developments. Among these social factors are population size and density, technological developments like literacy, forms of political organization, class hierarchy, monetary systems, and so on. The axial transformations in particular exhibit social and cognitive changes related to the development of full rather than craft literacy (as in archaic cultures) and the concomitant development of theoretical reflection on existing religious myths and the social hierarchies justified by them. Those who undertook such reflection and subsequent reimagination of the mythic worlds were religious virtuosos whose social critiques were underpinned and inspired by powerful visionary experiences that transcended and relativized the cosmos. In place of archaic class dominance and inequality, they emphasized universal ontological and ethical truths whose origins transcended phenomenal reality, establishing in this respect a pattern of dualistic cosmologies such as have been described in Farmer et al.’s model of bifurcation (chapter one) and van Binsbergen’s “absolute transcendence” (chapter three).
Such developments in the religious sphere are, like biological evolution, oriented toward greater complexity and greater freedom of organisms, both individual and social. “At each stage the freedom of personality and society has increased relative to the environing conditions,” he writes, as “the relation of man to the conditions of his existence has been conceived as more complex, more open and more subject to change and development.” He defines evolution as:
“a process of increasing differentiation and complexity of organization which endows the organism, social system or whatever the unit in question may be, with greater capacity to adapt to its environment so that it is in some sense more autonomous relative to its environment than were its less complex ancestors.”
Yet these environmental pressures are not the whole story, because this evolutionary process also works by modifying, not abandoning what came before. The process is aggregative, forming an undivided whole, though one qualified by various dominant stages with their attendant cultural reformulations. Yet unlike Witzel, Bellah does not track specific mythemes genetically, nor like van Binsbergen, does he posit diffusion as a significant factor in the common features he finds in various stages of religious evolution. Like Farmer et al., he recognizes the role of the cultural realm, but not, like them, in terms of the information environment alone but rather in terms of the general prevailing social conditions. Bellah also recognizes, as we saw with Witzel and van Binsbergen, the way his treatment of big history itself implicitly verges into the realm of myth, in this case the macrocosmic myths of origins and quasi-encyclopedic wholeness. All history is conceived in a similar way in its being remembered from the vantage point of the present – “history is our myth” – and refers to what he and others are doing as essentially “mythistory.” There is a sense in which we carry the cultural history of evolutionary development within us, such that even the most temporally distant cultural worlds considered are in some way more familiar than we realize. Bellah thus sees himself as engaging in a kind of Platonic anamnesis or remembering of what has been forgotten, not from the world of forms but from the human past.
He also limits his analysis in this work to the first three stages – the tribal, archaic, and axial - with a proposed treatment of the final two – the early modern and modern – unfortunately never coming to fruition prior to Bellah’s passing in 2013. However, much of Bellah’s other work has focused on the transformations of religion in the modern and contemporary period, especially toward forms of noninstitutionalized “civil religion” permeating individual and social life. Here we will examine Bellah’s theory as proposed in Religion in Human Evolution, though I will also give some attention to the contemporary persistence of these earlier stages in modern culture. For one, Bellah is perhaps the only thinker considered here who has connected his macrocosmic deep-historical account to the analysis of modern religiosity, if only briefly, with Farmer et al. ending their model of the commentarial engine with the 15th century collapse of manuscript traditions, and Witzel and van Binbsergen’s models terminating mostly in the early centuries of the common era. But like these other thinkers, he is also looking to the deep past to shed light on our contemporary situation, and sees “big history,” of which his work is an instance, as a necessary corrective to the threat posed by pervasive cultural-historical amnesia in wide swathes of present humanity. To lose access to the past is to foreclose hope for the (human) future.
His method is influenced by Max Weber’s notion of “ideal types,” in which specific representative examples are given for each phase of religion discussed. Thus, his theory’s macrocosmic dimensions are achieved via the construction of particular stages and the examination of a number of examples from each phase, a method which, though it cannot be totally exhaustive or encyclopedic, does still aim at universal inclusion through this representative sampling. Insofar as he seeks to describe the earliest evolutionary phases of human religion, his theory is also macrocosmic in terms of its search for origins, in this case those of religion as such, which are found not only in its earliest forms but additionally in the processes of animal and mammalian evolution.
For the tribal stage he selects Australian Aboriginal religion, particularly the Walbiri, the Amazonian Kalapalo, and the North American Navajo. The latter represent for him a kind of transitional case of development toward the next phase, the archaic, and also show a degree of influence from the somewhat archaicized Pueblo culture, who at that time had been influenced by contact with the fully archaic (in Bellah’s view) Mesoamerican civilizations. In terms of Witzel’s findings, and those of the geneticists he relies on, the Walbiri would represent the Gondwana populations who first migrated out of Africa and who have been in relative isolation from Laurasian populations until the 19th century. The Kalapalo are representative of the fist wave of Laurasian migrants into the Americas, while the Navajo, part of the Na-Dene language family, migrated much later into the continent around 10,000 years ago.
Bellah’s vision of religious evolution is significantly oriented around the social conditions of the cultures involved at each stage, defining them according to the dominant modes of social interaction and structuring. The tribal stage is thus characterized as being fundamentally egalitarian, with a relative lack of hierarchy and of societally institutionalize forms of dominance, though not lacking, as in the animal world, some forms of dominance in the social realm. But individual expressions of exaggerated tendencies toward dominance are heavily regulated by the tribal moral community through the collective enforcement of powerful norms which “negatively sanction despotic behavior and protect the family,” a kind of active “reverse dominance hierarchy.” Like the tribal groups, the powerful beings that are the focus of religion and ritual in these systems exhibit the same kind of egalitarian relationships. In many cases they are seen as ancestors of humanity, whose myths depict them as having shaped the features of the natural world. They are powerful but do not control or rule over the natural world, but are subject to it in a way similar to human beings. Human beings participate through ritual in the identities and activities of these beings.
For the archaic stage of religion, Bellah draws his examples from pre-contact Hawaii – representing the transition from tribal to archaic state - and the Bronze Age cultures of Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Shang and Zhou era China. Mesoamerica would also fit his model as an archaic early state, but the data were insufficient for their inclusion. In such societies, in which agriculture and early states have developed, the earlier tribal egalitarianism has given way to societies characterized by class hierarchies, especially that of the priesthood and ruler(s). The ruler(s) become the focus of religious ritual, acting as the more or less sole conduit to the world of divinity. The powerful beings of tribal religion are transformed into gods who control the natural world and are worshipped rather than participated in. They also exhibit the same kind of hierarchical relationships that exist in society, with pantheons headed by divine rulers.
Finally, the axial period – by far the most extensively treated stage – is represented by four cases: ancient Israel, Greece, China, and India. Unlike the other stages which seem to be more independent of absolute temporal dating – the tribal examples being relatively recent or contemporary but without the necessary social and civilizational features which would attend archaic transformation and the Hawaiian archaic example being much later (18th century) than the other Bronze age cases – these axial civilizations are all located within the same temporal vista, first defined by Jaspers, of 800 to 200 BCE. For Bellah, the changes in the essential religious structure are attendant upon societal changes and conditions which call forth greater levels of complexity in the sphere of religion – bigger, more complex societies which have developed novel representational and mental capacities necessitate more complex religious forms which reflect these developments. Among these social factors are population size and density, technological developments like literacy, forms of political organization, class hierarchy, monetary systems, and so on. The axial transformations in particular exhibit social and cognitive changes related to the development of full rather than craft literacy (as in archaic cultures) and the concomitant development of theoretical reflection on existing religious myths and the social hierarchies justified by them. Those who undertook such reflection and subsequent reimagination of the mythic worlds were religious virtuosos whose social critiques were underpinned and inspired by powerful visionary experiences that transcended and relativized the cosmos. In place of archaic class dominance and inequality, they emphasized universal ontological and ethical truths whose origins transcended phenomenal reality, establishing in this respect a pattern of dualistic cosmologies such as have been described in Farmer et al.’s model of bifurcation (chapter one) and van Binsbergen’s “absolute transcendence” (chapter three).
Such developments in the religious sphere are, like biological evolution, oriented toward greater complexity and greater freedom of organisms, both individual and social. “At each stage the freedom of personality and society has increased relative to the environing conditions,” he writes, as “the relation of man to the conditions of his existence has been conceived as more complex, more open and more subject to change and development.” He defines evolution as:
“a process of increasing differentiation and complexity of organization which endows the organism, social system or whatever the unit in question may be, with greater capacity to adapt to its environment so that it is in some sense more autonomous relative to its environment than were its less complex ancestors.”
Yet these environmental pressures are not the whole story, because this evolutionary process also works by modifying, not abandoning what came before. The process is aggregative, forming an undivided whole, though one qualified by various dominant stages with their attendant cultural reformulations. Yet unlike Witzel, Bellah does not track specific mythemes genetically, nor like van Binsbergen, does he posit diffusion as a significant factor in the common features he finds in various stages of religious evolution. Like Farmer et al., he recognizes the role of the cultural realm, but not, like them, in terms of the information environment alone but rather in terms of the general prevailing social conditions. Bellah also recognizes, as we saw with Witzel and van Binsbergen, the way his treatment of big history itself implicitly verges into the realm of myth, in this case the macrocosmic myths of origins and quasi-encyclopedic wholeness. All history is conceived in a similar way in its being remembered from the vantage point of the present – “history is our myth” – and refers to what he and others are doing as essentially “mythistory.” There is a sense in which we carry the cultural history of evolutionary development within us, such that even the most temporally distant cultural worlds considered are in some way more familiar than we realize. Bellah thus sees himself as engaging in a kind of Platonic anamnesis or remembering of what has been forgotten, not from the world of forms but from the human past.
March 11, 2022
This book was so good I read it twice. This is the author’s magnum opus. Coalescing six decades of cultural and religious studies, he finished the book 2-years before he died at age 86 in 2013.
“As society became more complex,” writes Bellah, “religions followed suit, explicating, in their own way, the enormous differences between social strata that replaced the basic egalitarianism of forager tribes.” Egalitarianism was, however, a form of dominance, “the dominance of what Rousseau would have called the general will over the will of each. The hunter-gather band is not, then, the family enlarged; rather it is the precondition of the family…” This is not to assume hunter-gatherers lived in paradise: “hunter-gatherers often had homicide rates higher than our inner cities,” although “war seems to be correlated with economic intensification…[and] an increase in economic surplus…does correlate with the growth of hierarchy and domination,” he writes. This economic intensification came with the Agricultural Revolution and the demise of our hunter-gatherer ancestors. After that, religion keeps having to catch up with changes in society. Religion as an innovation becomes a psychological compensator for too much change.
Bellah breaks this evolution into three phases he calls the mimetic (gestural communication), mythic, and theoretic (modern religions). All this springs from what he calls episodic culture, what neuroscientists call episodic memory: “I hit a nut like this one with a stick. It broke the nut. I got the meat. Let’s try that again.” The evolution of cognition requires Bellah to begin with our mammalian ancestors via studies of their mental processes by primatologist Frans de Waal and others; paleo-anthropological examinations of our hominid line of erectus, habilis, and early sapiens by Ian Tattersal’s clan; the sociological ruminations of Max Weber, Emile Durkheim and their troop; and finally, neuroanthropologists like Merlin Donald. Bellah’s march of societies are subdivided into Neolithic tribal, archaic states (Mesopotamia and Egypt), and Axial Age states of Israel, Greece, India, and China.
It came as quite a surprise to me that “In the Beginning” there were no gods. Or so it appears. Spirits of the dead, animal powers, even of plants, but no gods. As human numbers grew thanks to ag, and got more unruly, the chief was invented who became the intercessor between the people and what we might call incipient gods as part of a new and asymmetric relationship; spirits suddenly worshipped. This was followed by divine-kings who fused the powers of spirit beings, nature, and society; a step in the simplification and coalescence of the countless powers loose on the world. The absolutizing of religious ideology, human sacrifice, and war were the sole prerogative of this type of king. What Bellah terms a “a U-shaped curve of despotism—from the despotic apes to the egalitarian hunter-gatherers to the reemergence of despotism in complex societies…”
In the face of the new and intense Assyrian warfare of complete irradiation and deportation of survivors on the heels of the Late Bronze Age Collapse, the axial way was a turn inward to find a way out: meditation (Buddha), prayer (Jewish prophets), analysis (Greek philosophers). With Israel, Greece, India, and China as the axil age cultures, we find new innovations in religion built on incremental steps of the past while still possessing some of their features. In Israel, we find a temperamental Yahweh not unlike Sumer’s Enlil, who eventually becomes universal to all creation, an idea seeded by the late Pharaohs. With concerns for justice as seen in Hammurabi’s law code, and with the later advent of Christianity, we find a developing concern for the individual as seen before in New Kingdom Egypt (1550-1070). “If we see the Moses story narrative, not as a historical account,” writes Bellah, “but as a character for a new kind of people, a people under God, not under a king, an idea parallel to Athenian democracy though longer lasting, then we might see Moses as a kind of ‘transitional object,’ as a way for a people who knew only monarchical regimes to give up the king and begin to understand what an alternative regimen might be like.”
With the retreat of democracies around the world, I couldn’t help wonder if we’re making another U-turn back to our primate origins. Notice how Bellah’s description of usurpers in ancient times sounds like our own: “For an upstart to become a legitimate ruler there must be a reformulation of the understanding or moral community and new ritual forms to express it so that despotism becomes legitimate authority and therefore bearable by the resentful many who must submit to it…” Sound familiar?
A remarkable book that answered a thousand and one questions and generated many more.
“As society became more complex,” writes Bellah, “religions followed suit, explicating, in their own way, the enormous differences between social strata that replaced the basic egalitarianism of forager tribes.” Egalitarianism was, however, a form of dominance, “the dominance of what Rousseau would have called the general will over the will of each. The hunter-gather band is not, then, the family enlarged; rather it is the precondition of the family…” This is not to assume hunter-gatherers lived in paradise: “hunter-gatherers often had homicide rates higher than our inner cities,” although “war seems to be correlated with economic intensification…[and] an increase in economic surplus…does correlate with the growth of hierarchy and domination,” he writes. This economic intensification came with the Agricultural Revolution and the demise of our hunter-gatherer ancestors. After that, religion keeps having to catch up with changes in society. Religion as an innovation becomes a psychological compensator for too much change.
Bellah breaks this evolution into three phases he calls the mimetic (gestural communication), mythic, and theoretic (modern religions). All this springs from what he calls episodic culture, what neuroscientists call episodic memory: “I hit a nut like this one with a stick. It broke the nut. I got the meat. Let’s try that again.” The evolution of cognition requires Bellah to begin with our mammalian ancestors via studies of their mental processes by primatologist Frans de Waal and others; paleo-anthropological examinations of our hominid line of erectus, habilis, and early sapiens by Ian Tattersal’s clan; the sociological ruminations of Max Weber, Emile Durkheim and their troop; and finally, neuroanthropologists like Merlin Donald. Bellah’s march of societies are subdivided into Neolithic tribal, archaic states (Mesopotamia and Egypt), and Axial Age states of Israel, Greece, India, and China.
It came as quite a surprise to me that “In the Beginning” there were no gods. Or so it appears. Spirits of the dead, animal powers, even of plants, but no gods. As human numbers grew thanks to ag, and got more unruly, the chief was invented who became the intercessor between the people and what we might call incipient gods as part of a new and asymmetric relationship; spirits suddenly worshipped. This was followed by divine-kings who fused the powers of spirit beings, nature, and society; a step in the simplification and coalescence of the countless powers loose on the world. The absolutizing of religious ideology, human sacrifice, and war were the sole prerogative of this type of king. What Bellah terms a “a U-shaped curve of despotism—from the despotic apes to the egalitarian hunter-gatherers to the reemergence of despotism in complex societies…”
In the face of the new and intense Assyrian warfare of complete irradiation and deportation of survivors on the heels of the Late Bronze Age Collapse, the axial way was a turn inward to find a way out: meditation (Buddha), prayer (Jewish prophets), analysis (Greek philosophers). With Israel, Greece, India, and China as the axil age cultures, we find new innovations in religion built on incremental steps of the past while still possessing some of their features. In Israel, we find a temperamental Yahweh not unlike Sumer’s Enlil, who eventually becomes universal to all creation, an idea seeded by the late Pharaohs. With concerns for justice as seen in Hammurabi’s law code, and with the later advent of Christianity, we find a developing concern for the individual as seen before in New Kingdom Egypt (1550-1070). “If we see the Moses story narrative, not as a historical account,” writes Bellah, “but as a character for a new kind of people, a people under God, not under a king, an idea parallel to Athenian democracy though longer lasting, then we might see Moses as a kind of ‘transitional object,’ as a way for a people who knew only monarchical regimes to give up the king and begin to understand what an alternative regimen might be like.”
With the retreat of democracies around the world, I couldn’t help wonder if we’re making another U-turn back to our primate origins. Notice how Bellah’s description of usurpers in ancient times sounds like our own: “For an upstart to become a legitimate ruler there must be a reformulation of the understanding or moral community and new ritual forms to express it so that despotism becomes legitimate authority and therefore bearable by the resentful many who must submit to it…” Sound familiar?
A remarkable book that answered a thousand and one questions and generated many more.
December 21, 2024
3.5 stars. 4 stars for the substance, 3 stars for the style. This one took me a while to get through.
April 9, 2021
Wow, there are few scholars in the world who could carry out a project like this. I'd like to read it from cover to cover, but for now I just had to skim it for the argument.
Notes:
Definitely want to have a short treatment of each of the four undisputed Axial Age regions: Israel, Greece, India, China. I think most people are unlikely to know much about more than one of these areas, and they are certainly not likely to see comparisons between them.
Axial religions as ends in themselves, aspirations towards an ideal society.
Axial religions as tools, strategies to achieve non-religious goals.
Briefly consider Merlin Donald’s 4 stages of human culture: episodic, mimetic, mythic, theoretical
What has ensued since the Axial age? A mixture of breakthroughs and breakdowns throughout time. The ideal is always before us, beyond us.
What made an Axial Age possible? Some degree of unease about the state of the world. Some kind of relaxed field in which people had sufficient time and energy to pursue something other than their subsistence. Renounced "work" as it was given to them and introduced certain elements of "play" in their utopian visions. Often quite serious play, but with many joyful moments.
In all four axial age movements, each was harshly critical of existing social-political conditions.
The axial transitions themselves were probably not simply parallel, though connections between them are hard to determine, but in subsequent history they all deeply influenced each other.
Religions don't differ so much in giving different answers to the same questions as in asking different questions.
Notes:
Definitely want to have a short treatment of each of the four undisputed Axial Age regions: Israel, Greece, India, China. I think most people are unlikely to know much about more than one of these areas, and they are certainly not likely to see comparisons between them.
Axial religions as ends in themselves, aspirations towards an ideal society.
Axial religions as tools, strategies to achieve non-religious goals.
Briefly consider Merlin Donald’s 4 stages of human culture: episodic, mimetic, mythic, theoretical
What has ensued since the Axial age? A mixture of breakthroughs and breakdowns throughout time. The ideal is always before us, beyond us.
What made an Axial Age possible? Some degree of unease about the state of the world. Some kind of relaxed field in which people had sufficient time and energy to pursue something other than their subsistence. Renounced "work" as it was given to them and introduced certain elements of "play" in their utopian visions. Often quite serious play, but with many joyful moments.
In all four axial age movements, each was harshly critical of existing social-political conditions.
The axial transitions themselves were probably not simply parallel, though connections between them are hard to determine, but in subsequent history they all deeply influenced each other.
Religions don't differ so much in giving different answers to the same questions as in asking different questions.
November 22, 2020
Loved this. For someone with such a huge knowledge he is very self-deprecating.
Major insights for me - religion and politics have developed in parallel over the ages. You may be able to formally or legally separate religion from state, but you cannot disconnect at a cultural development level.
Sadly, the book finishes its historic review 2,500 years ago. It would surely have been a wonderful opportunity to see the same writer analyse what has happened since. However, in many ways the point that he has chosen to end it is crucial. The time when societies begin to think about thinking. Religion begins to be an intellectual exercise in addition to the ceremonial etc.
Drawback of the book is the sheer immensity of its depth. It was hard for me to carry all of the different societies that Bellah reviewed in the second half, but the book was worth it even taking this into account.
Major insights for me - religion and politics have developed in parallel over the ages. You may be able to formally or legally separate religion from state, but you cannot disconnect at a cultural development level.
Sadly, the book finishes its historic review 2,500 years ago. It would surely have been a wonderful opportunity to see the same writer analyse what has happened since. However, in many ways the point that he has chosen to end it is crucial. The time when societies begin to think about thinking. Religion begins to be an intellectual exercise in addition to the ceremonial etc.
Drawback of the book is the sheer immensity of its depth. It was hard for me to carry all of the different societies that Bellah reviewed in the second half, but the book was worth it even taking this into account.
April 25, 2021
This is extremely well written and detailed. Can not take that away from Bellah. He does a good job at respectfully discussing religious origins too without offending. You don't need to be an athiest to appreciate this. However, it is hard going, and that's an understatement. I would say Bellah wrote this with theology scholars in mind instead of general readers and might struggle to engage some people. Took me a while to get through and by the time I got to the end had forgotton the beginning !
Want to read
August 3, 2012Interesting interview with author in Hedgehog Review.
http://iasc-culture.org/THR/THR_artic...
http://iasc-culture.org/THR/THR_artic...
June 3, 2025
This book sets out to trace the very origins of spiritual thought. It's a profound undertaking, but one that invites a healthy dose of critical amusement. One of the first things you notice is just how much of the early evolution of religion is based on little more than Bellah's imagination. We're talking about the "mimetic" and "mythical" stages, where the evidence is so sparse, it feels like we're deriving complex theories from a handful of dust motes, some interpretative guesswork on the meaning of a few cave paintings, and some pop psychology from someone who most certainly is not a psychologist. This makes for a grand narrative built on what can generously be called educated guesswork. Perhaps this can be called a fascinating intellectual exercise, but it is most definitely not the most robust scientific foundation.
Then there's the conceptual contortion act: the blending of biological and cultural evolution. Bellah tries to meld the two, but it often feels like he's trying to fit a square peg of social theory into a round hole of genetic progression. It's an admirable attempt to unify disparate fields, but the theoretical glue holding it all together sometimes feels a bit… sticky.
And Bellah's not shy about stepping into the realm of the "meta-scientific." He often ventures beyond what hard data can support, delving into philosophical musings that feel more like a spiritual (but not religious) rumination than a strictly academic inquiry. It's as if the book isn't just about evolution, but is, in itself, an evolutionary experience for the reader, guiding us through a higher plane of abstract thought.
Perhaps the most perplexing aspect is how Bellah seems to accept his own conclusions a priori. He builds his case by primarily citing scholars who conveniently agree with his perspective, politely ignoring any dissenting voices. It's like a one-sided debate where only the agreeable participants are invited to speak. You'll also find him using observations of small, near modern societies like the Navaho and Polynesians as direct models for what prehistoric peoples were like. This isn't quite as bad as using a modern LARP group to understand Neanderthal rituals... but its close.
His interpretation of Axial Age thinkers also has a modern twist. He often reads contemporary psychological and philosophical nuances into ancient minds, making them sound remarkably like us. It's an anachronistic lens that, while interesting, probably wouldn't make sense to the actual historical figures. And here’s a curious point: while he critiques Judaism and Christianity with a sharp, overly critical eye, Eastern philosophies like Taoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism seem to glide through his analysis largely unscathed, presented almost as idyllic ideals. It's an uneven and biased hand, to say the least.
Ultimately, Religion in Human Evolution has an ambitious aim. But it doesn't hit the target.
Then there's the conceptual contortion act: the blending of biological and cultural evolution. Bellah tries to meld the two, but it often feels like he's trying to fit a square peg of social theory into a round hole of genetic progression. It's an admirable attempt to unify disparate fields, but the theoretical glue holding it all together sometimes feels a bit… sticky.
And Bellah's not shy about stepping into the realm of the "meta-scientific." He often ventures beyond what hard data can support, delving into philosophical musings that feel more like a spiritual (but not religious) rumination than a strictly academic inquiry. It's as if the book isn't just about evolution, but is, in itself, an evolutionary experience for the reader, guiding us through a higher plane of abstract thought.
Perhaps the most perplexing aspect is how Bellah seems to accept his own conclusions a priori. He builds his case by primarily citing scholars who conveniently agree with his perspective, politely ignoring any dissenting voices. It's like a one-sided debate where only the agreeable participants are invited to speak. You'll also find him using observations of small, near modern societies like the Navaho and Polynesians as direct models for what prehistoric peoples were like. This isn't quite as bad as using a modern LARP group to understand Neanderthal rituals... but its close.
His interpretation of Axial Age thinkers also has a modern twist. He often reads contemporary psychological and philosophical nuances into ancient minds, making them sound remarkably like us. It's an anachronistic lens that, while interesting, probably wouldn't make sense to the actual historical figures. And here’s a curious point: while he critiques Judaism and Christianity with a sharp, overly critical eye, Eastern philosophies like Taoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism seem to glide through his analysis largely unscathed, presented almost as idyllic ideals. It's an uneven and biased hand, to say the least.
Ultimately, Religion in Human Evolution has an ambitious aim. But it doesn't hit the target.
September 23, 2025
Wanna be a cognitive science of religion scholar? Just read this one thoroughly!
Well, I really have not many words enough to speak for this book. This is a -tour de force-. This is a long book on the subject. At first I thought this was just about evolution, I mean, biological evolution, but this book is mostly about cultural evolution, and N. Bellah, a scholar, takes a lot of time and words to explain us about this, concerning many civilizations as examples, such as Hawaii, Ancient China, India, ancient Greece, and Judea, civilizations that had something to do with the 'Axial Age' (500–300 BCE), which refers to the period during which most of the main religious and spiritual traditions emerged in Eurasian societies.
What we are, is ancient civilizations adapted to our needs in 2024 AD. This is the main premise for cultural evolution. Of course, if you are familiar to this kind of books, this is for sure no surprise.
The parts concerning biological (thus behavioral evolution) have to do with our brains, and the ability to play, characteristic of mammals. This is something that has a lot to do with the child playing with Legos (materializing an idea), running, jumping, anything that could have a certain set of "rules" in order to let the game be "egalitarian". This kind of activities set in motion the cerebral structures and body ability to "mimic" and made possible the coordination of movements. This, among other things, created ritual. Rituals are also composed of a set of oral rules, besides bodily movement. Orality, and the human ability to speak is also the basis for the creation of myth, ritual and what now we can call "religion".
The book is extensive, I even had to put aside some parts of it because this was really, dense. I mean, this book took over thirteen years to get finished, and it is the last work of Robert N. Bellah. If you are into the origins of religion, but you really want to understand word by word, of passages from the Torah, from the Bible, the Analects, and even from the Rigveda’s and Upanishads, this is the book. Understanding this book will make you a scholar in cognitive science of religion processes. You have no idea how awesome this book is, and you really must love this subject to complete it.
Well, I really have not many words enough to speak for this book. This is a -tour de force-. This is a long book on the subject. At first I thought this was just about evolution, I mean, biological evolution, but this book is mostly about cultural evolution, and N. Bellah, a scholar, takes a lot of time and words to explain us about this, concerning many civilizations as examples, such as Hawaii, Ancient China, India, ancient Greece, and Judea, civilizations that had something to do with the 'Axial Age' (500–300 BCE), which refers to the period during which most of the main religious and spiritual traditions emerged in Eurasian societies.
What we are, is ancient civilizations adapted to our needs in 2024 AD. This is the main premise for cultural evolution. Of course, if you are familiar to this kind of books, this is for sure no surprise.
The parts concerning biological (thus behavioral evolution) have to do with our brains, and the ability to play, characteristic of mammals. This is something that has a lot to do with the child playing with Legos (materializing an idea), running, jumping, anything that could have a certain set of "rules" in order to let the game be "egalitarian". This kind of activities set in motion the cerebral structures and body ability to "mimic" and made possible the coordination of movements. This, among other things, created ritual. Rituals are also composed of a set of oral rules, besides bodily movement. Orality, and the human ability to speak is also the basis for the creation of myth, ritual and what now we can call "religion".
The book is extensive, I even had to put aside some parts of it because this was really, dense. I mean, this book took over thirteen years to get finished, and it is the last work of Robert N. Bellah. If you are into the origins of religion, but you really want to understand word by word, of passages from the Torah, from the Bible, the Analects, and even from the Rigveda’s and Upanishads, this is the book. Understanding this book will make you a scholar in cognitive science of religion processes. You have no idea how awesome this book is, and you really must love this subject to complete it.
June 1, 2013
Judul Buku :
Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age
Pengarang : Robert N,Bellah
Tebal : 744 hal.
Cara pandang Robert N. Bellah dalam melihat agama dimulai dari hal
yang paling sederhana yaitu teori tentang agama sipil. Dua kata
agama dan sipil bersanding menyiratkan sebuah arti bahwa hubungan
antara agama dan masyarakat sama-sama memiliki nilai yang bertaut satu
dengan yang lain. Agama , bagi Robert N.Bellah tidak memerlukan suatu
keterlibatan dunia supernatural sama sekali. Masyarakat-lah yang
melahirkan agama dan mati atau tidaknya agama tergantung pada
masyarakat sipil. Pertanyaan berikutnya muncul apakah agama berguna
tanpa adanya pengikut. Gelutan pemikiran Bellah ini tidak main-main.
Ia menguraikan temuannya dalam buku Religion in Human Evolution: From
the Paleolithic to the Axial Age, 2011 yang berbeda dengan buku-buku
karya sebelumnya yang hanya mengandalkan perspektif sosiologis. Dalam
buku setebal 744 halaman (bisa lebih tebal untuk edisi hard cover) ,
Bellah menggabungkan pendekatan interdisipliner untuk membidani agama
dari kerahiman peradaban manusia.
I
Sebagaimana manusia yang merupakan spesies yang berevolusi , peradaban
yang dilahirkannya juga berevolusi. 3 proses yang ditekankan dalam
buku Bellah ini adalah pertama , evolusi kosmik yang dimulai dari Big
Bang yang menciptakan kompleksitas jagat raya dengan rentang 4,5
milyar tahun lalu . Kedua , evolusi biologis , dimana spesies –spesies
dari yang paling simpel seperti bakteri hingga yang paling kompleks
seperti manusia melanglang buana menguasai Bumi silih berganti. Ada
yang beradaptasi dan bertahan , ada juga yang musnah merupakan sebuah
keniscayaan hukum alam. Ketiga, adalah evolusi sosio kultural dimana
manusia disini menjadi tolak ukur penggerak peradaban seperti
menciptakan pemikiran –pemikiran, nilai-nilai moral , budaya , bahasa
dan juga mode produksi. Ketiga bentuk evolusi ini tidak bisa dilihat
terpisah namun berinteraksi secara integratif. Memasukkan sains
evolusi inilah salah satu argumen multidisipliner yang dilakukan
Robert N. Bellah dan akan banyak lagi argumen multidisipliner lain
yang disajikan dalam buku ini.
II
Bentuk argumen yang kedua , Robert N. Bellah mengandalkan argumen
psikologi evolusioner. Tindak -tanduk yang dilakukan manusia ketika
menjalani sebuah agama tidak bisa dilepaskan dari apa yang kita kenal
dengan ritual. Ritual disini dimaknai sebagai sebuah kegiatan untuk
menyalurkan nilai-nilai komunal dan juga sebagai sarana relaksasi dari
tekanan instingtif yang dikenal sebagai struggle of existence .Pada
tahap berikutnya, rasa lega dan bebas stress ini ingin dialami kembali
oleh makhluk-makhluk bernyawa, dan keinginan ini terpenuhi dalam
kegiatan bermain (play). Bermain adalah suatu kegiatan rekreatif, yang
bebas dari Darwinian pressure “the struggle for existence” (atau
“survival of the fittest”). Bermain adalah suatu kegiatan yang
berlangsung di “relaxed field” atau “relaxed selection”. Argumen bahwa
ritual agama memiliki efek-efek ekstatik dan relaksasi ini banyak
ditemukan dalam teori pemikir-pemikir sebelumnya seperti misalnya Karl
Marx yang punya semboyan terkenal bahwa 'Agama adalah candu bagi
masyarakat'. Bellah menamakan kegiatan ini sebagai apa yang kita kenal
dengan 'play' (bermain). Dalam ritus 'play' , terciptalah sebuah
bonding , empati dan proteksi. Play adalah awal dari ritus religius
dan Bellah tidak memisahkan hal ini. Sebuah argumen yang berani,
menantang dan bisa bikin ormas agama blingsatan, tetapi kalau ditilik
secara lebih jauh lagi, pendekatan ini justru menguatkan hakikat dari
ritus. Ritus religius berevolusi secara psikologis dari hal yang
sederhana sebagai sarana relaksasi menjadi sebuah sarana bernilai
tinggi yaitu mengikatkan manusia dengan sesamanya dan juga dengan
hakikat Transenden. Ritus religius berevolusi melalui nilai yaitu
sebuah nilai yang bersifat religius dihadirkan . Patut digarisbawahi,
pemahaman ritus religius inilah berlaku pada spesies homo sapiens
(manusia).
III
Argumen multidisipliner lain yang dikemukan oleh Robert N.Bellah
adalah Bellah membagi evolusi sosial-kultural dalam 4 tahap:
kebudayaan episodik (atau unitif), kebudayaan mimetik (atau enaktif),
kebudayaan mitik (atau simbolik), kebudayaan teoretik (atau
konseptual). Dalam kebudayaan episodik, manusia belum mampu berpikir
reflektif atau dapat dikatakan berpikir instingtif untuk bertahan
hidup sebagai sebuah spesies . Pada tahap mimetik, manusia
berinteraksi lewat mimik dan bahasa isyarat lain (tak harus
non-verbal), mengembangkan kemampuan dan skill lewat peniruan. Dalam
zaman mitik lahirlah mitos dan metafora yang memiliki fungsi untuk
mengupas misteri jagat raya, manusia hidup bersanding dengan dunia
natural yang biasa kita kenal sebagai dunia yang membidani lahirnya
kepercayaan animisme , dinamisme , shamanisme ,atau paganisme.
Kebudayaan teoretik baru lahir pada zaman Axial. Teolog terkenal yang
fokus pada zaman Axial seperti Karen Armstrong misalnya memiliki
argumen bahwa disini manusia memiliki kemampuan berpikir reflektif.
Jika Karen Armstrong dalam bukunya A History Of God menjelaskan
panjang lebar mengenai munculnya agama-agama Samawi dan pertanyaan
mengenai dunia adikodrati yang melahirkan dasar teologi dari Yahudi,
Kristiani , Islam. Bellah mengambil sampel dalam Zaman Axial dari 4
peradaban besar seperti Israel Kuno dengan segudang nabi-nabinya ,
Yunani dengan barisan filsufnya , Cina dengan filsuf , dan
pendeta-pendeta India yang menanyakan yang hakiki. Karena Zaman Axial
lekat dengan budaya berpikir reflektif , maka tidak dapat dipungkiri
antara pemikiran seringkali beradu satu sama lain. Integral dalam hal
pertanyaan, partikular dalam hal jawaban.
IV
Ketiga catatan di atas yang membuat pemikiran Bellah ini menarik untuk
dipelajari. Bellah disini menyediakan sebuah alternatif dalam melihat
agama. Niat Bellah dalam menulis buku ini adalah menciptakan ruang
dialog antara agama dan sains yang seringkali bertentangan padahal
dapat dimaknai secara menyeluruh. Bellah disini memberlakukan
argumennya sebagai seorang sosiolog agama. Bagi Bellah, dunia
adikodrati tidak berpengaruh sama sekali atau turut andil atas
lahirnya agama-agama dunia. Kesan pertama kali ketika menyelesaikan
buku Bellah adalah buku ini kaya akan definisi, asyik dibaca karena
tuturan bahasanya yang tidak terlalu ilmiah terutama ketika memasuki
bab-bab pertengahan. Buku ini menuntun kita untuk berani menjelajah
sejarah peradaban manusia sebagai sebuah spesies yang cerdas. Rasanya
wajar kalau menyejajarkan teori Bellah sebagai sebuah teori untuk
membuka cakrawala pandangan kita tentang agama.
Referensi :
Untuk memahami tentang agama sipil , bisa dicari dalam karya Robert
N.Bellah yang berjudul Civil Religion
A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam
Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age
Pengarang : Robert N,Bellah
Tebal : 744 hal.
Cara pandang Robert N. Bellah dalam melihat agama dimulai dari hal
yang paling sederhana yaitu teori tentang agama sipil. Dua kata
agama dan sipil bersanding menyiratkan sebuah arti bahwa hubungan
antara agama dan masyarakat sama-sama memiliki nilai yang bertaut satu
dengan yang lain. Agama , bagi Robert N.Bellah tidak memerlukan suatu
keterlibatan dunia supernatural sama sekali. Masyarakat-lah yang
melahirkan agama dan mati atau tidaknya agama tergantung pada
masyarakat sipil. Pertanyaan berikutnya muncul apakah agama berguna
tanpa adanya pengikut. Gelutan pemikiran Bellah ini tidak main-main.
Ia menguraikan temuannya dalam buku Religion in Human Evolution: From
the Paleolithic to the Axial Age, 2011 yang berbeda dengan buku-buku
karya sebelumnya yang hanya mengandalkan perspektif sosiologis. Dalam
buku setebal 744 halaman (bisa lebih tebal untuk edisi hard cover) ,
Bellah menggabungkan pendekatan interdisipliner untuk membidani agama
dari kerahiman peradaban manusia.
I
Sebagaimana manusia yang merupakan spesies yang berevolusi , peradaban
yang dilahirkannya juga berevolusi. 3 proses yang ditekankan dalam
buku Bellah ini adalah pertama , evolusi kosmik yang dimulai dari Big
Bang yang menciptakan kompleksitas jagat raya dengan rentang 4,5
milyar tahun lalu . Kedua , evolusi biologis , dimana spesies –spesies
dari yang paling simpel seperti bakteri hingga yang paling kompleks
seperti manusia melanglang buana menguasai Bumi silih berganti. Ada
yang beradaptasi dan bertahan , ada juga yang musnah merupakan sebuah
keniscayaan hukum alam. Ketiga, adalah evolusi sosio kultural dimana
manusia disini menjadi tolak ukur penggerak peradaban seperti
menciptakan pemikiran –pemikiran, nilai-nilai moral , budaya , bahasa
dan juga mode produksi. Ketiga bentuk evolusi ini tidak bisa dilihat
terpisah namun berinteraksi secara integratif. Memasukkan sains
evolusi inilah salah satu argumen multidisipliner yang dilakukan
Robert N. Bellah dan akan banyak lagi argumen multidisipliner lain
yang disajikan dalam buku ini.
II
Bentuk argumen yang kedua , Robert N. Bellah mengandalkan argumen
psikologi evolusioner. Tindak -tanduk yang dilakukan manusia ketika
menjalani sebuah agama tidak bisa dilepaskan dari apa yang kita kenal
dengan ritual. Ritual disini dimaknai sebagai sebuah kegiatan untuk
menyalurkan nilai-nilai komunal dan juga sebagai sarana relaksasi dari
tekanan instingtif yang dikenal sebagai struggle of existence .Pada
tahap berikutnya, rasa lega dan bebas stress ini ingin dialami kembali
oleh makhluk-makhluk bernyawa, dan keinginan ini terpenuhi dalam
kegiatan bermain (play). Bermain adalah suatu kegiatan rekreatif, yang
bebas dari Darwinian pressure “the struggle for existence” (atau
“survival of the fittest”). Bermain adalah suatu kegiatan yang
berlangsung di “relaxed field” atau “relaxed selection”. Argumen bahwa
ritual agama memiliki efek-efek ekstatik dan relaksasi ini banyak
ditemukan dalam teori pemikir-pemikir sebelumnya seperti misalnya Karl
Marx yang punya semboyan terkenal bahwa 'Agama adalah candu bagi
masyarakat'. Bellah menamakan kegiatan ini sebagai apa yang kita kenal
dengan 'play' (bermain). Dalam ritus 'play' , terciptalah sebuah
bonding , empati dan proteksi. Play adalah awal dari ritus religius
dan Bellah tidak memisahkan hal ini. Sebuah argumen yang berani,
menantang dan bisa bikin ormas agama blingsatan, tetapi kalau ditilik
secara lebih jauh lagi, pendekatan ini justru menguatkan hakikat dari
ritus. Ritus religius berevolusi secara psikologis dari hal yang
sederhana sebagai sarana relaksasi menjadi sebuah sarana bernilai
tinggi yaitu mengikatkan manusia dengan sesamanya dan juga dengan
hakikat Transenden. Ritus religius berevolusi melalui nilai yaitu
sebuah nilai yang bersifat religius dihadirkan . Patut digarisbawahi,
pemahaman ritus religius inilah berlaku pada spesies homo sapiens
(manusia).
III
Argumen multidisipliner lain yang dikemukan oleh Robert N.Bellah
adalah Bellah membagi evolusi sosial-kultural dalam 4 tahap:
kebudayaan episodik (atau unitif), kebudayaan mimetik (atau enaktif),
kebudayaan mitik (atau simbolik), kebudayaan teoretik (atau
konseptual). Dalam kebudayaan episodik, manusia belum mampu berpikir
reflektif atau dapat dikatakan berpikir instingtif untuk bertahan
hidup sebagai sebuah spesies . Pada tahap mimetik, manusia
berinteraksi lewat mimik dan bahasa isyarat lain (tak harus
non-verbal), mengembangkan kemampuan dan skill lewat peniruan. Dalam
zaman mitik lahirlah mitos dan metafora yang memiliki fungsi untuk
mengupas misteri jagat raya, manusia hidup bersanding dengan dunia
natural yang biasa kita kenal sebagai dunia yang membidani lahirnya
kepercayaan animisme , dinamisme , shamanisme ,atau paganisme.
Kebudayaan teoretik baru lahir pada zaman Axial. Teolog terkenal yang
fokus pada zaman Axial seperti Karen Armstrong misalnya memiliki
argumen bahwa disini manusia memiliki kemampuan berpikir reflektif.
Jika Karen Armstrong dalam bukunya A History Of God menjelaskan
panjang lebar mengenai munculnya agama-agama Samawi dan pertanyaan
mengenai dunia adikodrati yang melahirkan dasar teologi dari Yahudi,
Kristiani , Islam. Bellah mengambil sampel dalam Zaman Axial dari 4
peradaban besar seperti Israel Kuno dengan segudang nabi-nabinya ,
Yunani dengan barisan filsufnya , Cina dengan filsuf , dan
pendeta-pendeta India yang menanyakan yang hakiki. Karena Zaman Axial
lekat dengan budaya berpikir reflektif , maka tidak dapat dipungkiri
antara pemikiran seringkali beradu satu sama lain. Integral dalam hal
pertanyaan, partikular dalam hal jawaban.
IV
Ketiga catatan di atas yang membuat pemikiran Bellah ini menarik untuk
dipelajari. Bellah disini menyediakan sebuah alternatif dalam melihat
agama. Niat Bellah dalam menulis buku ini adalah menciptakan ruang
dialog antara agama dan sains yang seringkali bertentangan padahal
dapat dimaknai secara menyeluruh. Bellah disini memberlakukan
argumennya sebagai seorang sosiolog agama. Bagi Bellah, dunia
adikodrati tidak berpengaruh sama sekali atau turut andil atas
lahirnya agama-agama dunia. Kesan pertama kali ketika menyelesaikan
buku Bellah adalah buku ini kaya akan definisi, asyik dibaca karena
tuturan bahasanya yang tidak terlalu ilmiah terutama ketika memasuki
bab-bab pertengahan. Buku ini menuntun kita untuk berani menjelajah
sejarah peradaban manusia sebagai sebuah spesies yang cerdas. Rasanya
wajar kalau menyejajarkan teori Bellah sebagai sebuah teori untuk
membuka cakrawala pandangan kita tentang agama.
Referensi :
Untuk memahami tentang agama sipil , bisa dicari dalam karya Robert
N.Bellah yang berjudul Civil Religion
A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam
August 27, 2022
"The reality of archaic civilization was centralization of political power, class stratification, the magnification of military power, the economic exploitation of the weak, and the universal introduction of some form of forced labor for both productive and military purposes. As against these undeniable realities we must also cite the major achievements of archaic society: the maintenance of peace within the realm, more productive agriculture, the opening of markets for long-range trade, and significant achievements in architecture, art, and literature. But equally important was, with the help of a literate elite, a new effort to give political power a moral meaning. The archaic king was almost always depicted as a warrior, as a defender of the realm against barbarians on the frontiers and rebels within; as such he embodied a powerful element of dominance. But he was also seen, and probably increasingly as archaic societies matured, as the defender of justice, in Mesopotamia and Egypt as the good shepherd, in Western Zhou as father and mother of his people. Gods as well as kings were increasingly thought of not only as dominant but also as nurturant. The very appeal to ethical standards of legitimacy for both gods and kings, however, opened new possibilities for political and theological reflection. In the axial age a new kind of upstart, the moral upstart who relies on speech, not force, would appear, foreshadowed as we have seen, by voices already raised in archaic societies."
June 11, 2020
Most of this isn't about "religion", his understand is both to broad and narrow, but socio-political aspects in the emergence of the "axial age" more generally, which isn't a concept I totally believe in anyways. There's a ton of good citations in this but a lot of crappy post-structuralist and kinda pseudo-sciencey stuff as well.
A lot of mushiness with words like this.
I am aware that the position I am taking will make me liable to the accusation of Orientalism, of “essentializing” caste. If such a charge implies that I view all “Oriental” societies as inegalitarian, that is obviously not the case: Chapter 8 describes the profound egalitarianism of classical Chinese civilization. I am convinced that Islamic societies are also profoundly egalitarian. Of course, here I speak of ideology, as I do in the case of India-in practice no society since the hunter-gatherers has been very egalitarian. And even in ideology neither Chinese nor Islamic societies were egalitarian when it came to gender.
A lot of mushiness with words like this.
April 11, 2019
A very special and unique piece of work. That combines various branches of science put into one, for the sake of one subject that engulfs many things that all have one thing in common. They have all touched and impacted people’s lives for centuries, and religions that altered the very course of history and human civilization. Shedding the light on evolution in a different way. Such an eye-opening piece of work.
September 7, 2019
A very thorough study of how religion developed over the period in the sub-title. It's importance, in my opinion, is that it takes the objective view of a social scientist to unfold how much religion, and so religions, holds in common, which proves both fascinating and, if read openly, hopeful in healing the fractures we have created. This is a very long book, but Bellah's approachable writing style together with the insights provided make the effort worthwhile. Highly recommended!
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