Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age

by Robert N. Bellah

  So in developing a typology of religious representations, we must start with the null category of unitive representation-that is, representations that attempt to point to the unitive event or experience. As I develop the typology in the following sections, I will ground the modes of experience and representation in their earliest forms in children and in the modes of apprehension of reality that are more general than religion, but from which religious modes of representation draw. My interest in grounding the modes of representation in the earliest experiences of reality is not only psychological. I don’t want to reduce such modes to childhood levels. They may involve, however, what psychoanalysts call “regression in the service of the ego.” If so, they also involve regression in the service of the world, in its earliest apprehensions.

  Because I will be locating the modes of religious representation in stages of the cognitive development of the child, it is worth pointing out that there is a certain affinity between unitive experience and what Piaget, borrowing from J. M. Baldwin, calls the “adualism” of the child. Piaget says that in this adualism of the early months of life “there does not yet exist any consciousness of self; that is, any boundary between the internal or experienced world and the world of external realities. Freud talked about narcissism but did not sufficiently stress the fact that this was narcissism without a Narcissus.”” I do not mean to imply that unitive experiences are in any simple sense a “return” to early infantile experience, but it may be that possibilities existing then, as in other kinds of early experiences, are never lost but can be reappropriated in much more complex form later on. The view that “nothing is ever lost” can, as we shall see, also be brought to bear on religious history.

  The second mode of religious representation is what I shall call enactive representation, adapting from what Jerome Bruner sees as the earliest form of true representation in the child.22 Religious enactive representation is the bodily acting out of religious meaning, as in bowing, kneeling, eating, dancing. That the modes are not watertight categories but constantly cross each other is indicated by the fact that the unitive event is very much enactive. It is an event in which the whole body participates, along with mind and spirit, again without a sense of bifurcation. Yet the enactive mode does not have to have the same radical quality as the unitive event. It may be a simple gesture, almost unconscious, like crossing oneself for those for whom that gesture has become second nature. Such a gesture may put one in tune with religious reality only slightly and peripherally and may entirely lack any radical implications. Yet even so it also raises the question of the adequacy of such terms as representation or meaning. The gesture is the meaning-it enacts it it doesn’t, or doesn’t necessarily, point to anything else.The enactive mode therefore partakes of the unitive even in its partiality.

  The word “symbol” is at least as dangerous as the words “meaning” and “representation,” not the least because of its numerous, often contradictory usages, yet it is unavoidable in speaking of modes of religious representation. Symbols, in the sense of material or verbal representations, more obviously “stand for” something else than do unitive events or bodily gestures, though unitive events and bodily gestures can be both symbolic and symbolized. Symbols can be, consciously or unconsciously, perceived as such in the very midst of the stream of consciousness of the world of daily life, as we have already seen in the examples of the tree, or water, or a door. But symbols can also be consciously created in drawings, statues, even buildings, in sounds and, of course, in words. When symbols are primarily visual in their appeal, we can speak of iconic symbolization; when they involve sound, they are or verge upon musical symbolization; when they involve words, we can speak of poetic symbolization. A critically important mode of verbal symbolization is narrative, the story or myth (we should remember that mythos is simply the Greek for “story”), which is important in almost all kinds of religion. To show again how the various modes of representation overlap, we can point to dramatic representation where narratives are bodily enacted, often with the accompaniment of visual symbols, such as masks, and of music, vocal and/or instrumental.

  Finally we can speak of the conceptual mode of representation, a form of abstract verbal reflection and argument that follows on and criticizes primary religious actions and representations. Conceptual reflection is present in all religions to some degree but becomes particularly significant in the axial religions, where theory, though still related to ritual and narrative, has to some degree become disembedded. In that there is a cognitive moment, a knowing, in the very heart of the unitive event, we can say that conceptual representation is incipiently present even there, and all symbolic representation gives food for conceptual reflection. But even though conceptual representation is an indelible element in religious reality, it does not, as we have argued, define it.

  Unitive Representation

  Although unitive representation in the pure sense is a null category, the unitive event is of such importance in religion that we need to inquire further how, with the help of actions and symbols, it is represented. The instances we have discussed so far-the accounts of Edwards, Stevens, and Havel-are all from the modern West and may carry excessive experiential-expressive baggage. I want to consider several quite different examples where the element of subjectivity is either absent or much less prominent than we moderns would normally expect.

  Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis, “The Dream of Scipio,” is a doubly removed account of a unitive event.23 Cicero does not claim to have had the experience himself, and Scipio, to whom Cicero attributes it, recounts it as having occurred in a dream. Nonetheless the “Dream” has suggestive attributes common to many such accounts. Scipio says that in his dream he met his father and grandfather in the highest heaven where they now dwell:

  When I gazed in every direction from that point, all else appeared wonderfully beautiful. There were stars which we never see from the earth, and they were all larger than we have ever imagined… The starry spheres were much larger than the earth; indeed the earth itself seemed to me so small that I was scornful of our empire, which covers only a single point, as it were, upon its surface. (6.16)

  Scipio’s vision relativizes the empire, for which, in real life, he bore a heavy political and military responsibility. In the dream he asks his father if he might immediately join him in this beautiful heavenly realm, but his father tells him that the only way to get there is to carry out his earthly duties, but to do so with the vision of the heavens in his mind so that he never forgets the relative significance of things. Among the other things Scipio sees: “almost midway in the distance is the Sun, the lord, chief, and ruler of the other lights, the mind and guiding principle of the universe, of such magnitude that he reveals and fills all things with his light” (6.17). But Scipio does not just see; he hears a “loud and agreeable sound,” which, his father assures him, is the music of the spheres (6.18).

  Cicero’s overwhelming emphasis is on the majesty of the eternal and the relative insignificance of the transient, even though he does not lose sight of the relation between moral action on the earth and one’s eternal fate. Scipio’s subjective reactions are of marginal importance. His sense of the beauty of the heavenly spheres and his scorn for the insignificance of the earth, and even more the empire, are intended to communicate to us the power of the vision, a vision that puts reality in true perspective, rather than anything important about Scipio’s feelings as such. Feeling is not absent, but it is vision more than feeling that represents the unitive event. It is hardly necessary to point out the symbols of the heavens, the sun, and light that “fills all things,” which occur so often in such accounts.

  My next account is also indirect. It tells of three witnesses to a unitive event that they themselves experience as a unitive event. Even if we may presume that the account derives from one or more of the witnesses, it is given in the third person. This is the story of the transfiguration of Christ, found in all three synoptic Gospels (Matthew 17:1-8;
Mark 9:2-8; Luke 9:28-36). In Matthew’s account, Jesus led Peter, James, and John “up a high mountain apart.” There Jesus “was transfigured before them, and his face shone like the sun, and his garments became white as light.” The disciples see Jesus speaking to Moses and Elijah, and then “a bright cloud overshadowed them, and a voice from the cloud said, `This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased; listen to him.’” The disciples fell on their faces, filled with awe, but Jesus said to them, “Rise and have no fear,” and then they saw no one but Jesus.

  To the symbols of the sun and light we can now add height, in this case a high mountain, not the actual heavens as with Scipio or an elevation as Stevens puts it, but a variation on the same theme. I want to emphasize the bare objectivity of the account. The only feeling mentioned is the sense of awe experienced by the disciples. What is most striking is that the Gospels have no interest at all in Jesus’s subjective experience in this remarkable moment. Today we would very much like to know how Jesus felt. One can imagine the television interviewer asking him, “What went through your mind up there on the mountain?” But what the Gospels are concerned with is the truth revealed in the unitive event, not what anyone felt about it.

  In my next example, the issue of subjectivity has become consciously thematized. Ishida Baigan, an eighteenth-century Japanese religious teacher, practiced meditation under the guidance of a Zen monk for a long time. When he was about 40, while nursing his mother, “he opened a door and suddenly the doubts of former years scattered … Fish swim in the water and birds fly in the sky. The Way is clear above and below. Knowing the nature to be the parent of heaven and earth and of all things he greatly rejoiced.” Baigan went to his teacher to recount his experience, but the teacher was not entirely satisfied. He recognized that Baigan had seen something real: “What you have seen is what can be known of how things ought to be.” But there is still a further stage: “The eye with which you saw our nature as the parent of heaven and earth and all things remains. There must be the nature but without the eye. Now you must lose the eye.”

  Baigan returned to the practice of meditation night and day for over a year:

  Late one night, he lay down exhausted, and was unaware of the break of day. He heard the cry of a sparrow in the woods behind where he was lying. Then within his body it was like the serenity of a great sea or a cloudless sky. He felt the cry of that sparrow like a cormorant dividing and entering the water, in the serenity of a great sea. After that he abandoned the conscious observation of his own nature.24

  The symbolic repertory here introduces a number of elements that are related to, but somewhat different from, what we have seen up to this point: the cloudless sky, the great sea, the cormorant. Here the experiences of opening a door or hearing the cry of a sparrow touch off a unitive event. But what is particularly interesting is that this account, though much fuller of subjective experience than that of Cicero or the Gospels, is specifically concerned to get the self out of the experience, to “lose the eye,” as Baigan’s teacher puts it. So once again it is the objective reality, not the subjective “meaning,” that is at the forefront, even though we are in a world much more sensitive to subjectivity than in the other two accounts in this section.

  Finally I would like to consider a quite different kind of unitive event. Up to this point our examples have all focused on single individuals. Only in the transfiguration story have we had a group, and even there the focus is as much or more on Jesus as on the three disciples. But there is no reason why the unitive event cannot occur in a group, cannot be a group experience. According to Emile Durkheim such events were primarily and originally collective. He speaks of “collective effervescence,” as that condition in which people experience a different and deeper reality. Durkheim describes the rituals of the Australian Aborigines: “Commencing at nightfall, all sorts of processions, dances and songs had taken place by torchlight; the general effervescence was constantly increasing.” After describing the ritual events, he gives the following analysis:

  One can readily see how, when arrived at this state of exaltation, a man does not recognize himself any longer. Feeling himself dominated and carried away by some sort of an external power which makes him think and act differently than in normal times, he naturally has the impression of being himself no longer [later Durkheim describes the experience of being literally ecstatic, from the etymological sense of (Greek) ekstasis, “being out of oneself”]. It seems to him that he has become a new being: the decorations he puts on and the masks that cover his face figure materially in this interior transformation, and to a still greater extent, they aid in determining its nature. And as at the same time all his companions feel themselves transformed in the same way and express this sentiment by their cries, their gestures and their general attitude, everything is just as though he really were transported into a special world, entirely different from the one where he ordinarily lives, and into an environment filled with exceptionally intense forces that take hold of him and metamorphose him.25

  Durkheim’s point is that the world of the ritual is quite different from the one “where his daily life drags wearily along.” It is the world of the sacred in contrast to the profane everyday. And, for Durkheim, it is the profound creative and transformative power of society itself that is the reality apprehended in the ritual. We do not at the moment need to give Durkheim’s theory, his conceptual interpretation of religious reality, more than provisional recognition. We will return to it. What is important here is Durkheim’s quite valid insistence that what I am calling unitive events can be and often are collective.

  Enactive Representation

  Jerome Bruner in his Studies in Cognitive Growth has developed a typology of modes of representation in the cognitive development of young children from which, as I have already indicated, I have drawn to develop my own typology. Bruner has no unitive representation; rather his first mode is what he calls enactive representation. Bruner argues that although the child is born with a capacity for visual perception and “the initial form of action is `looking at,”’ it is “the actions of grasping, mouthing, holding, and the like [that] further `objectify’ and `correlate’ the Children first understand objects as extensions of their own bodies. A pencil or a ball is understood in terms of how it can be bodily manipulated. In this early stage of learning, things are “lived rather than thought,” as Bruner quotes Piaget as saying.27 It is only gradually, as Piaget notes, that the child can “hold an object in mind” without holding it in hand. Bruner argues that the idea of enactive representation (rather than simply action) derives from the existence of enactive habits that the child can use to move beyond simple reflex in organizing action. Indeed, as he puts it, “the principle use to which enactive representation can be put [is] the guidance of action itself.“28

  Bruner points out that representations can be thought of in two ways: as representations of something, or as representations for something.29 In modern Western culture we tend to think of representations-symbols in the broadest sense-as something we have in our heads, as something like pictures of external things. But representations as recipes for action, as representations for, may be fundamental even in the case of language. Bruner cites Luria’s emphasis on the “pragmatic function” of speech, as when a child says, “A hole is to dig.“30 Something of this “representation for” quality of enactive representations characterizes all the modes of representation and is perhaps related to the fact that enactive representation is at least subliminally present also in symbolic and conceptual forms of representation. As Bruner says, “The degree to which the child, even after action-free imagery is well developed, continues to depend on some forms of enactive representation is striking.“31 The separation of imagery from the world of action is never complete.32

  The idea of enactive representation as a recipe for action can be illustrated by knot tying or bicycle riding. One can be instructed verbally or by diagrams as to how to tie a knot, but one doesn’t know how t
o tie a knot until one has practiced the knot, until one’s body, one’s sensorimotor system, has learned, the knot. This is even more obvious with bicycle riding, where verbal or diagrammatic instructions are almost useless. Literally one learns to ride a bicycle by riding a bicycle; but the sensorimotor habit of tying the knot or riding the bicycle then becomes a representation of sorts, a recipe for a certain kind of action when that action is called for.

  In the very young child a number of such habits-sucking, grasping, and such-are innate or learned even before a sense of the child as a self separate from the mother-child (or parent-child) totality has yet developed. Seeing and hearing, which later specialize for iconic, linguistic, and other modes of representation, are still embedded in a total sensory matrix in which touching, tasting, biting, urinating, defecating, and crying are all significant. The child’s capacity to recognize a schematic face is linked to the holding, feeding, warming, comforting activities that usually accompany the face. As I have said, this total bodily relation to reality is never lost. Other modessymbolic, conceptual-develop later, which for certain purposes take precedence over the enactive. But because human beings remain corporeal, the product of any form of representation is in part a changed bodily state, a gesture. Significant abstractions have tangible consequences. Enactive representation can become symbolic through what George Herbert Mead called the conversation of gestures.33 The body itself becomes an image and a symbol, and this opens up new representational possibilities.

  Although in most situations enactive representation is combined with other modes of representation in complex ways, I would like for the moment to concentrate specifically on the enactive. Religion by and large has been deeply involved with the body; ritual is always significantly embodied, in ways we will need to consider. In religions of a wide variety of types there is a close relation to curing. Health is a central religious preoccupation and a metaphor for salvation. Birth and death are recurrent religious preoccupations, and the phenomenon of religious rebirth, symbolized by the Australian Aborigines by the ritual passage of adolescent boys through the legs of grown men, is a widespread phenomenon. Eating and drinking, feasting and fasting, are frequent elements in religious ritual.