Compare methods

	Phenomenology of Religion	Comparative Method in Religion
Field	Religious Studies	Religious Studies
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1957	1982
Originator	Gerardus van der Leeuw; Mircea Eliade; Rudolf Otto	F. Max Müller (founder); reconceived by Jonathan Z. Smith
Type	Interpretive-comparative descriptive method	Cross-traditional comparative analysis
Seminal source	Eliade, M. (1957/1959). The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion (trans. W. R. Trask). New York: Harcourt, Brace. ISBN: 9780156792011	Smith, J. Z. (1982). Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN: 9780226763606
Aliases	Religious Phenomenology, Comparative Phenomenology of the Sacred, Eidetic Method in Religion, Study of Hierophanies	Comparative Religion, Cross-Cultural Comparison of Religions, Comparativism in Religious Studies, Science of Religion (Comparative)
Related	3	3
Summary	Phenomenology of religion is an interpretive, comparative method that seeks to describe religious phenomena as they appear to believers and to discern their essential structures, while bracketing questions of whether the beliefs are true. Developed by scholars such as Gerardus van der Leeuw and Rudolf Otto and given its most influential expression by Mircea Eliade - notably in The Sacred and the Profane (1957) - it proceeds through epoché (the suspension of judgment about truth and causal explanation), empathetic description of the phenomenon from within, and eidetic vision, the search for the invariant essence behind diverse instances. Eliade's central concept is the hierophany, the manifestation of the sacred in the profane, and the method assembles such manifestations across traditions - sacred space, sacred time, symbols of the center - into a comparative typology of the forms in which the sacred reveals itself.	The comparative method in religion is the systematic comparison of two or more religious traditions to identify similarities, differences, and patterns, and through them to understand religion more broadly. Founded as a discipline by F. Max Müller in the nineteenth century - who borrowed Goethe's dictum that to know one religion is to know none - the comparative project was sharply rethought in the twentieth, above all by Jonathan Z. Smith. In Imagining Religion (1982) and later work, Smith insisted that comparison is not a natural perception of objective resemblance but a scholarly act: the comparativist must specify the respect in which things are being compared (the tertium comparationis), choose comparanda for a reason, and remain answerable for the differences as much as the similarities. The method thus combines disciplined juxtaposition with explicit theory about why and how a comparison is made.