By Wilhelm Bousset. Translated by F. B. Low. New York and London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons. 1907. (London: Williams & Norgate.)1
Prof. Bousset tells us that “the object of this little book is” to help us “to understand the meaning of the phenomenon which we call religion” (p. 6). It is the phenomenon which he undertakes to expound; that is to say, he deals directly with the phenomenology rather than with the philosophy or the psychology of religion. In other words, his method is historical. He traces what he conceives to be the history of the development of religions from their beginning in the first vague manifestations of the religious aspirations of man to their culmination, we do not say in Christianity, but in the liberal Christianity of the twentieth century; and through this medium of history he seeks to convey to the reader a conception of what religion is.
Prof. Bousset’s book is, therefore, historical in form. But it is not primarily historical in purpose. As there are some novels which are written “for the novel’s sake,” and some which are written “for a purpose”; so there are some histories which are written for the history’s sake and some histories which are written “for a purpose.” And Prof. Bousset’s history of religions is of the latter class. He does not trace the varied forms of religion which have been prevalent among men merely that he may make these forms known to us; nor even that through them and their sequence he may make the development of religion known to us; nor even that through this development he may make what religion as religion is known to us. His real purpose, dominating his whole undertaking, is that he may make Christianity—naturally, as he conceives Christianity—known to us. The book, therefore, very properly culminates in two long chapters on the Nature and the Future of Christianity, for which in point of fact the whole of the preceding chapters have been written and to which they lead up. In a word, Prof. Bousset’s little book is a study of the nature and prospects of Christianity from the point of view not so much of “comparative religion” or of the “history of the religions,” as of the so-called “comparative-religion” or “history-of-religion” (religionsgeschichtliche) school. It is in other words an attempt to explain Christianity, in its entirety, as a religion among religions, the product like other religions of the religious nature of man.
Prof. Bousset is quite frank and quite emphatic in the expression of his point of view upon the main matter at issue—whether, to wit, Christianity is just a religion among religions, the product, like all other religions, of the religious nature of man. Nor does he wait for his exposition of the course of religious development to suggest this, or to establish it. He announces it already in his Introduction, practically as a postulate; and sets out on his exposition of the course of religious development, therefore, with his goal well in view. The distinction so often drawn between “revealed and natural religion”—as if, forsooth, “the religion of the Old and New Testaments is revealed religion,” and “all others are natural religions, the product of man’s thought or imagination”—is in his opinion thoroughly untenable—“impossible” is his word (p. 8)—and, indeed, “irreligious and Godless” (p. 7). For not only is it not accordant with the principle of historical evolution, but it implies a “narrow-minded and melancholy view of the history of humanity.” This mode of speech is determined by the shock which it gives Prof. Bousset that anyone should suppose God to have allowed “the nations” “to go their own way” without guidance from Him, the implication being that all religion is the product in a sense of “revelation.” Elsewhere his thought swings around the opposite focus of the ellipse. The thinking of men imbued with modern culture, he tells us, “rests upon the determination to try to explain everything that takes place in the world by natural causes; or—to express it in another form—it rests upon the determined assertion of universal laws to which all phenomena, natural and spiritual, are subject” (p. 283). “Historical science,” accordingly, “puts before itself the object of explaning all intellectual events by reference to a universal law” (p. 288). There is, no doubt, always “the riddle of personality and individuality” which enters everywhere into the fabric of history; but this is not the same thing as—or in any way analogous to—the intrusion of a supernatural factor. The “halo of the supernatural” which has in the past “clung around ‘sacred history’ ” has been disrupted. We can now believe only in an evolution of religion shaping itself in accordance with “the universal evolution of civilization,” and it is in consequence no longer possible to “believe in a Divine revelation, in the old acceptance of the term, which restricted revelation to one special province” (p. 289). Thus we see the curve of the ellipse turn back on itself. When we speak of “the natural course of events” and of “the direction of Divine revelation,” we are speaking of one and the same thing, and the upshot of it is that Christianity is no more “revealed” than any other religion and is just as much a product of human thought and imagination as any other religion. It takes its place among other religions as just one of them—the purest form, the highest and most perfect, religion has yet reached: but certainly not the only true religion, “but simply the most complete species of the genus” (p. 9).