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

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 this 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