Phenomenology of Religion

The phenomenology of religion seeks to describe the typical forms and meanings of religious phenomena as they appear to believers, bracketing questions of their truth or causal origin.

Definition

An approach that classifies and interprets the recurrent structures of religious experience and expression, suspending judgement on their validity.

Scope

This topic surveys the descriptive and typological project associated with Rudolf Otto, Gerardus van der Leeuw, and Mircea Eliade, including its central notions of the sacred, hierophany, and the holy, and the influential criticisms that it was ahistorical and covertly theological. The treatment characterizes the approach and its disputes without endorsing claims about a universal sacred or the reality of religious objects.

Core questions

• What are the recurrent forms through which the sacred is said to manifest?
• Can religious phenomena be described 'from within' without presupposing their truth?
• Is the category of the sacred a discovery or a scholarly projection?
• How does phenomenology relate to history and explanation in studying religion?

Key theories

The numinous and the holy

Rudolf Otto's analysis of the holy as a non-rational experience of the 'numinous'—a mystery that is at once awe-inspiring (tremendum) and fascinating (fascinans)—irreducible to ethics or doctrine.

The sacred and hierophany

Eliade's claim that the sacred manifests itself in the profane world through 'hierophanies', and that religious life is structured by the opposition of sacred and profane space and time.

History

Rooted in Otto's The Idea of the Holy (1917) and systematized in van der Leeuw's Religion in Essence and Manifestation (1933), the phenomenology of religion reached its widest influence through Eliade at Chicago after 1957, before being criticized from the 1970s onward by Smith and others as insufficiently historical and implicitly theological.

Debates

Whether phenomenology of religion is covertly theological

Critics argue that positing a universal 'sacred' and describing it 'on its own terms' smuggles in theological assumptions and detaches phenomena from their historical contexts.

Key figures

• Rudolf Otto
• Gerardus van der Leeuw
• Mircea Eliade
• Jonathan Z. Smith

Seminal works

• otto1917
• vanderleeuw1938
• eliade1957

Frequently asked questions

What does it mean to 'bracket' the truth of religion?

Borrowed from philosophical phenomenology, bracketing (epoché) means setting aside the question of whether religious claims are true in order to describe how the phenomena are experienced and structured.

What is a hierophany?

In Eliade's vocabulary, a hierophany is any manifestation of the sacred in an ordinary object, place, or event, through which the sacred becomes accessible within the profane world.