Phenomenology of Religion

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.