Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age by Robert N. Bellah (PDF)

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Religion in Human Evolution is a work of extraordinary ambition―a wide-ranging, nuanced probing of our biological past to discover the kinds of lives that human beings have most often imagined were worth living. It offers what is frequently seen as a forbidden theory of the origin of religion that goes deep into evolution, especially but not exclusively cultural evolution.How did our early ancestors transcend the quotidian demands of everyday existence to embrace an alternative reality that called into question the very meaning of their daily struggle? Robert Bellah, one of the leading sociologists of our time, identifies a range of cultural capacities, such as communal dancing, storytelling, and theorizing, whose emergence made this religious development possible. Deploying the latest findings in biology, cognitive science, and evolutionary psychology, he traces the expansion of these cultural capacities from the Paleolithic to the Axial Age (roughly, the first millennium BCE), when individuals and groups in the Old World challenged the norms and beliefs of class societies ruled by kings and aristocracies. These religious prophets and renouncers never succeeded in founding their alternative utopias, but they left a heritage of criticism that would not be quenched. Bellah’s treatment of the four great civilizations of the Axial Age―in ancient Israel, Greece, China, and India―shows all existing religions, both prophetic and mystic, to be rooted in the evolutionary story he tells. Religion in Human Evolution answers the call for a critical history of religion grounded in the full range of human constraints and possibilities.

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: Review This book is the opus magnum of the greatest living sociologist of religion. Nobody since Max Weber has produced such an erudite and systematic comparative world history of religion in its earlier phases. Robert Bellah opens new vistas for the interdisciplinary study of religion and for global inter-religious dialogue. (Hans Joas, The University of Chicago and the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies, Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg)This is an extraordinarily rich book based on wide-ranging scholarship. It contains not just a host of individual studies, but is informed with a coherent and powerful theoretical structure. There is nothing like it in existence. Of course, it will be challenged. But it will bring the debate a great step forward, even for its detractors. And it will enable other scholars to build on its insights in further studies of religion past and present. (Charles Taylor, author of A Secular Age and Dilemmas and Connections)Robert Bellah’s Religion in Human Evolution is the most important systematic and historical treatment of religion since Hegel, Durkheim, and Weber. It is a page-turner of a bildungsroman of the human spirit on a truly global scale, and should be on every educated person’s bookshelves. Bellah breathes new life into critical universal history by making ancient China and India indispensable parts of a grand narrative of human religious evolution. The generosity and breadth of his empathy and curiosity in humanity is on full display on every page. One will never see human history and our contemporary world the same after reading this magnificent book. (Yang Xiao, Kenyon College)This great book is the intellectual harvest of the rich academic life of a leading social theorist who has assimilated a vast range of biological, anthropological, and historical literature in the pursuit of a breathtaking project. Robert Bellah first searches for the roots of ritual and myth in the natural evolution of our species and then follows with the social evolution of religion up to the Axial Age. In the second part of his book, he succeeds in a unique comparison of the origins of the handful of surviving world-religions, including Greek philosophy. In this field I do not know of an equally ambitious and comprehensive study. (Jürgen Habermas)Religion in Human Evolution is a work of remarkable ambition and breadth. The wealth of reference which Robert Bellah calls upon in support of his argument is breath-taking, as is the daring of the argument itself. A marvellously stimulating book. (John Banville, novelist)Bellah’s reexamination of his own classic theory of religious evolution provides a treasure-chest of rich detail and sociological insight. The evolutionary story is not linear but full of twists and variations. The human capacity for religion begins in the earliest ritual gatherings involving emotion, music and dance, producing collective effervescence and shared narratives that give meaning to the utilitarian world. But ritual entwines with power and stratification, as chiefs vie with each other over the sheer length, expense, and impressiveness of ritual. Archaic kingdoms take a sinister turn with terroristic rituals such as human sacrifices exalting the power of god and ruler simultaneously. As societies become more complex and rulers acquire organization that relies more on administration and taxation than on sheer impressiveness and terror, religions move towards the axial breakthrough into more abstract, universal and self-reflexive concepts, elevating the religious sphere above worldly goods and power. Above all, the religions of the breakthrough become ethicized, turning against cruelty and inequality and creating the ideals that eventually will become those of more just and humane societies. Bellah deftly examines the major historical texts and weighs contemporary scholarship in presenting his encompassing vision. (Randall Collins, author of The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change)In this magisterial effort, eminent sociologist of religion Bellah attempts nothing less than to show the ways that the evolution of certain capacities among humans provided the foundation for religion…[Readers] will be rewarded with a wealth of sparkling insights into the history of religion. (Publishers Weekly 2011-08-08)Bellah’s book is an interesting departure from the traditional separation of science and religion. He maintains that the evolving worldviews sought to unify rather than to divide people. Poignantly, it is upon these principles that both Western and Eastern modern societies are now based. What strikes the reader most powerfully is how the author connects cultural development and religion in an evolutionary context. He suggests that cultural evolution can be seen in mimetic, mythical, and theoretical contexts. (Brian Renvall Library Journal 2011-08-01)Religion in Human Evolution is not like so many other “science and religion” books, which tend to explain away belief as a smudge on a brain scan or an accident of early hominid social organization. It is, instead, a bold attempt to understand religion as part of the biggest big picture–life, the universe, and everything…One need not believe in intelligent design to look for embryonic traces of human behavior on the lower rungs of the evolutionary ladder. [Bellah’s] attempt to do just that, with the help of recent research in zoology and anthropology, results in a menagerie of case studies that provide the book’s real innovation. Not only the chimps and monkeys evoked by the word “evolution” in the title, but wolves and birds and iguanas all pass through these pages. Within such a sundry cast, Bellah searches for a commonality that may give some indication of where and when the uniquely human activity of religion was born. What he finds is as intriguing as it is unexpected…Bellah is less concerned with whether religion is right or wrong, good or bad, perfume or mustard gas, than with understanding what it is and where it comes from, and in following the path toward that understanding, wherever it may lead…In a perfect world, the endless curiosity on display throughout Religion in Human Evolution would set the tone for all discussions of religion in the public square. (Peter Manseau Bookforum 2011-09-01)Ever since Darwin, the theory of evolution has been considered the deadly enemy of religious belief; the creation of Adam and Eve and the process of natural selection simply do not go together. In Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age, the sociologist Robert Bellah offers a new, unexpected way of reconciling these opposites, using evolutionary psychology to argue that the invention of religious belief played a crucial role in the development of modern human beings. (Barnes and Noble Review 2011-09-14)Of Bellah’s brilliance there can be no doubt. The sheer amount this man knows about religion is otherworldly… Bellah stands in the tradition of such stalwarts of the sociological imagination as Emile Durkheim and Max Weber. Only one word is appropriate to characterize this book’s subject as well as its substance, and that is “magisterial.” (Alan Wolfe New York Times Book Review 2011-10-02)An audacious project…Religion in Human Evolution is no simple effort to “reconcile” religious belief with scientific understanding, but something far more interesting and ambitious. It seeks to take both religion and evolution seriously on their own terms, and to locate us within the stories they tell about the human condition in a way informed by the best emerging research on both terrains…The result is a grand narrative written in full understanding of the failures and limitations of recent grand narratives. Religion in Human Evolution is a magnum opus founded on careful research and immersed in the “reflective judgment” of one of our best thinkers and writers…This is a big book, full of big ideas that demand sustained attention and disciplined thought. But in my view it repays a reader’s effort in full…For over half a century, Robert N. Bellah has set his extraordinary mind out on the frontiers of human knowledge and has written back to make that knowledge accessible to the educated reader. This remarkable book finds him nearing the close of a long and fruitful life, and generously giving it back to us in love. (Richard L. Wood Commonweal 2011-10-21)Religion in Human Evolution is a near-exhaustive examination of the biological and cultural origins of religion…Bellah gleefully plunges into the past, from the Big Bang to the first millennium B.C. in Israel, Greece, China, and India. For him, cosmology, cosmogony, mythology, ontogeny, and phylogeny all belong in the same chapter, or in some cases, the same paragraph, right alongside Hegel, Dawkins, and an astounding array of writers, scientists, sociologists, and philosophers. Although the tome stops short in the first millennium (leaving the last few thousand years for other scholars, or a future volume), its overall narrative does not feel incomplete. Expect to spend a long time reading this book–and expect to see the world differently when you finish. (Benjamin Soloway The Daily 2011-09-18)One might best see this work as an attempt to do for the 21st century what the great sociologist of religion Max Weber did for the 20th in treating Judaism, China and India. (Pheme Perkins America 2011-10-17)You can’t accuse Robert Bellah of thinking small. The University of California, Berkeley, sociologist set out to cover “from the Palaeolithic to the Axial Age” and he does. (The Axial Age ran from about 800 BC to 200 BC when the first major religions got going.) The result is a deeply thoughtful discussion of how evolution and religion went hand in hand, each influencing the other, from humanity’s earliest days. It’s like a chat with a great thinker who takes one engaging tangent after another. (Leigh Dayton The Australian 2011-11-26)Religion in Human Evolution is an immensely ambitious book on a topic only a scholar of Robert Bellah’s stature could dare to tackle. It attempts no less than to explain human biological as well as cultural evolution in one sweep, beginning with early hominids and ending with the “axial age.” Bellah engages evolutionary biology as well as cognitive psychology for the framing of his argument. This is a courageous move of transcending conventional disciplinary boundaries, for which he should be applauded…With Religion in Human Evolution Robert Bellah has given us a marvelous book written with the wisdom of age as well as youthful enthusiasm. Having discovered the importance of play in human evolution rather late in the writing process, Bellah nevertheless must have internalized it much earlier. All these rich chapters on ancient Israel, Greece, China, and India convey a certain playfulness and intellectual joy, which carry his narrative often beyond the needs of his argument, but stimulate and enrich the reader immensely. (Martin Riesebrodt The Immanent Frame 2011-12-05)This book could really be regarded as Robert Bellah’s “State of the Species” address, after a life of scholarship and reflection. It is about everything: the nature of knowledge and meaning, and the history of our deepest yearnings and practices, as expressed in our religions. Posterity will decide whether he has succeeded, but the effort is magnificent in its own right. We all speak of doing difficult, disciplined, interdisciplinary thinking. Well, folks, this is what it looks like, down on the ground. (Merlin Donald The Immanent Frame 2011-12-05)Robert Bellah’s magnum opus does far more than just satisfy. It provides a transformative and thrillingly interdisciplinary account of the evolution of religion itself…So expert and simultaneously readable is Religion in Human Evolution–a model of academic writing–that it effectively banishes the paltry efforts of Daniel Dennett and Pascal Boyer and Robert Wright. (Scott Stephens Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Religion and Ethics blog 2012-02-10)Bellah’s reexamination of his own classic theory of religious evolution provides a treasure-chest of rich detail and sociological insight. The evolutionary story is not linear but full of twists and variations. The human capacity for religion begins in the earliest ritual gatherings involving emotion, music and dance, producing collective effervescence and shared narratives that give meaning to the utilitarian world. But ritual entwines with power and stratification, as chiefs vie with each other over the sheer length, expense, and impressiveness of ritual. Archaic kingdoms take a sinister turn with terroristic rituals such as human sacrifices exalting the power of god and ruler simultaneously. As societies become more complex and rulers acquire organization that relies more on administration and taxation than on sheer impressiveness and terror, religions move towards the axial breakthrough into more abstract, universal and self-reflexive concepts, elevating the religious sphere above worldly goods and power. Above all, the religions of the breakthrough become ethicized, turning against cruelty and inequality and creating the ideals that eventually will become those of more just and humane societies. Bellah deftly examines the major historical texts and weighs contemporary scholarship in presenting his encompassing vision. (Randall Collins, University of Pennsylvania)The new magnum opus of a great contemporary sociologist…Bellah is one of those rare social scientists who not only studies the origins of our religions but who also participates in an active Christian congregation in his University of California neighborhood. Because he appropriates so wide a range of contemporary evolutionary sciences, in the 600 pages of this book a reader is likely to experience a great depth of gratitude for our debts as humans to our ancient lineages–to all the beings who are responsible for the explosion of our fellow species on our earth…If we read this book, adherents of every modern religion–especially Jews, Christians, and Muslims–will find vast new reasons for gratitude for our ancestors human and extra-human. We meet in these pages eloquent summaries of how the evolution of the human mind may be the greatest mystery of all. (Donald Shriver Tikkun 2012-04-30)Insightful and magisterial, it is the crowning achievement of a brilliant scholar who is sympathetic to religion and deeply attuned to the problems of modernity…[Bellah] draws on scientific explanations and historical facts to present and support a new multistranded theory of religion, one that places the human pursuit of meaning squarely in the context of our social history, which in turn rests in the context of our biological and cosmological evolution. (Linda Heuman Tricycle 2012-06-01)Religion in Human Evolution is an immense work; it would merit description as the achievement of a lifetime, were it not actually Bellah’s second such achievement…What does it amount to? Quite a lot, actually: effectively, a history of the world up to about 2,000 years ago. The book has a James Michener-esque scope, proceeding effectively from the Big Bang forward. The only comparisons I can come up with are Hegel’s magisterial but fragmentary notes for his Lectures on the Philosophy of Religions, or Weber’s monumental works on the Sociology of World Religions (which got through China and India and ancient Israel, but no further). Bellah is definitely playing major league sociology…Both in the scale of its ambition, and in the degree to which that ambition is realized, this is a book that will outlast its critics…Each moment in his account invites further reflection, deeper immersion in the realities under study, a richer, more empathetic comprehension of what it is like to be these people. For all these reasons, I hope that future work in evolutionary theory and religion will learn from Bellah’s example. (Charles Mathewes American Interest 2012-07-01) About the Author Robert N. Bellah was Elliott Professor of Sociology, Emeritus, at the University of California, Berkeley.

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐UPdate 2: As I reflect on this book (and I see there is another to come, with Hans Joas) I am struck by the confusingly bad scholarship of this dumbkopf nullity of a book, due to work done on wrong assumptions. It is forgivable to be confused by the Axial Age, it is an enigma, requiring a special kind of systems analysis to grasp.What is less understandable is Bellah’s snobbish and academic hoitytoity failure to consider the probable solution to the problem demonstrated in World History and The Eonic Effect (link below), with as shorter version in the newly releases Descent of Man Revisited. The failure to cite this book at this point is suspicious. Why is Bellah so afraid of this book? Answer: it challenges the reigning paradigm of Darwin, which is taboo, and Bellah seems to have become the master of academic sophistry needed to make Darwinism and interpretations of the Axial Age compatible. The result is the muddle of evolutionary psychology imposed on the evolution of religion, none of which makes any sense.

⭐The Axial Age is the great clue to the macroevolutionary process, MACRO, and also, most probably, to the earlier emergence of man. And it is certainly a clue to the evolution of religion, but not in the way Bellah misconceives it._____________________I promised to update this review (below) at the point where the author’s real thesis became clear. But it is obvious that the author’s thesis is so muddled that he cannot quite get his bearings with the stupendous phenomenon of the Axial Age, among other things. The author simply doesn’t know what he is talking about and cannot arrive at a clear thesis as to his material. The book joins the long list of scholarly failures to make any sense of this phenomenon of the Axial period (what to say of any insight into the Paleolithic evolution of religion).The key idea is off the mark: The idea that behind religious evolution lies the behaviorism of play is typical of the ‘clutching at straws’ to arrive at a theory. I think the core of the problem is the confusion over Darwinian evolutionary theory which can’t be used to explain world history, least of all the Axial Age. As far as I can tell the author is ambivalent about Darwin’s theory, and constantly cites borderline critics, without actually adopting anything like a critical stance. Any account of the evolution of man must explain what happened to ‘man’ as he became ‘homo sapiens’ with a soul, a complex instrument of consciousness able to reach higher octaves of enlightenment, complex language, an ethical sense and the potential ‘will’ to realize that, and much else. You can’t omit your subject matter if you subject is the evolution of religion. The current academic/scholarly pretense that evo-psych has replaced all this with reductionist Darwinism is nonsense.Darwinism hasn’t a clue about any of this, and endless dawdling over evolutionary psychology has become an obsessive waste of time for the scholarly community.The whole effort to deal with the ‘evolution of religion’ is thus a failure step one, and all we get is endless blather on the whole question. That is a pity since it is precisely the phenomenon of the Axial Age that can give us a clue to the mystery of the evolution of religion, and the evolution of man in general, we suspect. The key to the Axial Age is to see that it is part of a larger pattern of macroevolution in world history, and that this can show us a precious glimpse of how religions (and civilization in general) evolve. Once we adopt a ‘system dynamics’ approach, the puzzle starts to solve itself and we see that our normal division of history and evolution is misleading: the two are braided together, and meta-genetic, and what we see in the Axial Age, taking its place in the larger pattern uncovered in history, gives us a hint about how the earlier so-called ‘Great Explosion’ might have happened.In the earlier notes below I cite the work World History and The Eonic Effect whose analysis of the issue of evolutionary dynamics in relation to history (and the Axial Age) might help those tryng to deal with this phenomenon of the Axial Age to get their bearings. It is impossible, once seen, to backtrack from the insights on the ‘eonic effect’ in that book. You might disagree with much that is claimed in that approach, but the basic demonstration of a non-random pattern in world history, and its signature as ‘evolution of some kind’, can help to forestall any more academic wild goose chasing on this subject. But, as this book shows, the fear of directly attacking Darwinism makes any steps in the right direction turn into the kind of annotated hemmming and hawing we see here.The basic point is that the Axial Age shows a macroevolutionary driver evolution operating in a directional (perhaps teleological) process of evolutionary developmental induction. The evidence for this, once we see the Axial Age in context, is so massive that we can no longer indulge the usual Darwinian charade of Social Darwinist ideology.The Old Testament, we should note, gives an indirect indication of this in its perception of a higher power in world history. That that insight was not even theistic (pointing to the unspeakable ‘name’ of the unnamable, IHVH) should remind us that the Israelites sensed the Axial Age and saw a higher action in world history. That that acton should be called ‘evolution’ in a precise pattern now visible of developmental sequential logic is a vindication of those mystery men behind the Israelites and their prophets had of vision of the evolution of religion, one that stood before and beyond the rapid decline into theism that history records in the wake of the Axial Age.The Axial Age is a reminder that real evolution happens so fast that we fail to see it at all in deep time, and the data of the Axial Age give us a direct glimpse of the real thing in action, beyond the sterile speculations over natural selection that now dominate the field.Previous review:——————–This is a massive book I am still studying, one filled with some novel perspectives, among them that rarity: scholarly acknowledgment of the existence of the Axial Age. There is so much that is of fascinating interest that one could/should resolve to spend a good period of time going over the rich details. But there is an instant problem here. For better or for worse, if you mention ‘evolution’ and the ‘Axial Age’ in one breath, it is easy to close in for the ‘kill’ if author’s motives are murky and/or he is too ‘scare d cat’ to challenge Darwin. So for that reason, suspicions aroused, I can easily begin a preliminary review of the overall aspect of the book, a review to be revised and extended perhaps. The book deserves commendation for even mentioning this data on the Axial Age. And it is good to raise the issue, but fatal also. As most scholarly propagandists probably realize, to even mention the subject means the jig is up, make as many mistakes as you wish, but the data will come to demand a real analysis, one that will endanger current paradigms. So in that sense I praise this fine book for its lesser audacity: the jig is up, and it is only a matter of time before the question of the Axial Age and its revolutionary implications become clear.I could be wrong. Karen Armstrong almost succeeded in completely asphiaxiating this topic, and as a result the jig wasn’t up. It is almost taboo to even refer to this phenomenon. But unfortunately, as with Karen Armstrong’s The Great Transformation, one is reminded of the classic barb: ‘we have not come to praise Caesar, but to bury him’. The scholarly community, if it can’t suppress this data, will absorb it into something that will confuse it completely, as with Karen Armstrong’s book, a tour de force that summoned up the ‘Axial Age’ and left the subject beyond recognition.Bellah’s book seems like a more sophisticated version of this tactic. Is this fair?The first question must be, has Bellah perused John Landon’s book

⭐and resolved to produce his own take and/or save the world from that underground text, and without any reference to it (and such reference being the end of one’s public reputation)? It is hard to believe the author is not aware of, and wary of, that book with its comprehensive view of the Axial Age. Which book demands a larger pattern of ‘axial ages’, a new view of historical evolution, evolution in history, and thence of the descent of man, and, yes, the ‘evolution’ of religion, which is not Darwinian. The Axial Age shows us precisely the kind of ‘macrovevolutionary’ process at work in both the evolution of religion and of civilization. You cannot compromise with Darwinism once you grasp what is happening with the Axial Age.And this makes us ask, what is Bellah’s take on Darwinism? Examine this book and you will have a hard time knowing where Bellah stands on the question of Darwin’s theory: plus and minus are most cleverly braided together in one unified sophistry of scholarly legerdemain, far more polished than Karen Armstrong’s idiotic venture here.I can see Bellah’s problem: evolutionary psychology is a hopeless mess on religion, but to say so is risky, and indirect methods are required. I can’t really determine his stance (there is even a reference to natural selection, which is fogged out), and that is unfortunate, because the suggestion is still left that in the final analysis the Axial Age is just a smorgasbord of cuteness, not the real insight into global teleological macroevolution that the data demands.That’s thrown out as a caution as I continue to study the book, which is well worth reading, and which has many interesting takes. Unlike too many books on the Axial period, this one gives a real discussion of the Greek Axial, not shunting it to one side in a kind of ‘generalized age of revelation’ treatment of religion.The real Axial Age is an elusive totalizing process that rises beyond religion to the whole question of civilization, and from there to the question of evolution as such. The data must force us to suspect that Darwinism is totally off the mark, and that real ‘evolution’ shows this kind of discontinuous near planetary top-down process that operates metagenetically. That is the kind of heresy that drives people to cover up what the Axial Age is showing us.In the nonce, as I study this book further, it must be seen as a remarkable innovation (beyond that of WHEE already cited) attempting to do justice the original insights of Karl Jaspers (who did not however seem to understand his own book on the Axial period). No doubt the impudence of Bellah in writing a book on the Axial period will cause the book to be ignored. We will see. In the worst case it will join the underground of post-Jasperian historiographies.Let me say that harsh judgments here can be unfair. Grasping the Axial Age is NOT easy, and requires a new mode of thought. Bellah goes part way here, what more can we expect?Much more to be said here: we can continue the discussion over time.John LandonWorld History and The Eonic EffectCivilization, Darwinism, and Theories of Evolution.

⭐Robert Bellah attempts in this work to provide a “deep history” of religion, one that probes beyond the limits of recorded history, in an attempt to trace the evolutionary origins of the capacities that lie at the root of religion, and provide a synopsis of the interconnected and non-linear history of social and religious evolution up to the axial age. Since the axial age is defined as the period of history when our “cultural world and the great traditions that still in so many ways define us, all originate” (269) the book is really an attempt to trace religion from its earliest evolutionary precursors up to modern times, though the book ends before the development of Christianity and Islam. This is an ambitious project, and an exciting one, and perhaps even a necessary one, but I did not feel this book was successful in living up to its promise.The book can be divided into roughly three sections. The first section is comprised of the first two chapters entitled “Religion and Reality” and “Religion and Evolution.” In the chapter on “Religion and Reality” Bellah provides a preliminary definition of religion, based on the definition offered by Clifford Geertz, and he attempts to describe the relationship between religion and everday practical reality. Using the theories of Alfred Schultz and Abraham Maslow he tries to get at the distinctiveness of religion by drawing contrasts between the world of “practical or pragmatic interest” and “non-ordinary reality”, on the one hand, and what Maslow called “D-Cognition” (short for deficiency-cognition) and “B-Cognition” (short for being-cognition) on the other.In the chapter on “Religion and Evolution” Bellah discusses the notion of conserved core-processes (processes that have origins deep in evolutionary history and are conserved throughout later mutations, like metabolism), the evolutionary origins of empathy and play, and he introduces Merlin Donald’s three-stage theory of human cognition and cultural evolution. Merlin’s theory is one of the primary structuring principles of the book. Bellah’s history of religion begins with tribal religions, in which mimetic culture, where meanings are enacted through bodily movement and song, is primary, proceeds through the religions of archaic states where narrative and mythospeculation transform earlier mimetic culture, and terminates in the axial age where theoretic culture further transforms inherited narratives and mythologies.The second section of the book is comprised of the middle three chapters which are devoted to religious history in mimetic and mythological cultures. The history proceeds from the largely mimetic, and roughly egalitarian, societies of the Kalapalo Indians up to the mythological and hierarchical socieities of ancient Egypt and Shang and Western Zhou China. Bellah peppers his narrative with case histories of the Kalapalo Indians, the Navaho, the Tikopia of Polynesia and the Hawaiians among others. In each case history Bellah attempts to analyze the forces operative in the creation, maintenance and transformations of social institutions and he attempts to tie those to developments in religious thought and practice.The third section of the book is comprised of the last four chapters of the book and it consists in a fairly detailed analysis of the four axial civilizations: Ancient Israel, Ancient Greece, Ancient China, and Ancient India. In these chapters, Bellah attempts to define in each case what the “axial breakthrough” actually consisted of and he attempts to tie those breakthroughs to the social conditions that prevailed at the time. This last section is over half of the book and seems to be the primary subject of Bellah’s book. The primary question Bellah seems to be addressing is: What accounts for the breakthrough to theoretic or critical thought and to an ideal standpoint in religion from which a criticism of existing social structures becomes possible?While Bellah offers plenty of interesting insights along the way the book suffered from many flaws. The first section of the book, where Bellah seems to lay the groundwork for a “theory of religion” in the true sense, plays very little role in the more historical sections of the book, with the exception of Merlin Donald’s theories. The notions of non-ordinary reality, B versus D cognition, core conserved processes and empathy do not really appear after the first two chapters (the last mention of “conserved core processes” is page 87, for example). Even the notion of play, which reappears in the conclusion, plays virtually no role in the historical sections, and it is never entirely clear how all of these concepts relate to religion in the proper sense. Readers who are looking for a new “theory of religion” that explains the evolutionary origins of religion, its adaptive or non-adaptive functions, and the causal relations between religion and other forms of social life are going to be disappointed.The book seems to lack a theoretical core. Bellah points to many fascinating correlations. For example, the historical and social context for the rise of the prophets in ancient Israel. However, it is never clear whether the causal arrow is supposed to run from material social relations to religious ideology or the other way around. I saw a panel on Bellah’s book online, at which Bellah was present, and he seemed to admit that he ignored the issue of causality because it was just too difficult to determine which way the causal arrow runs but, in my opinion, science is inseparable from the search for causal mechanisms and it is worth putting forward a causal story even if the story turns out to be wrong. The causal stories that Marx or Durkheim tell about religion are probably wrong, at least in some respects, but they both had a theoretical core – that took a stance on causality – and made it possible to criticize their theories and develop alternative theories. Bellah’s analysis seems to me to lack such a core and I think it suffers for that. I think being wrong would have been more interesting than not taking a stance on the issue at all.I was disappointed in the lack of theory but even the descriptive historical sections of the book fell short of what I was expecting. Much of the book is simply Bellah summarizing the work of other scholars. It is possible to learn something from these summaries but I constantly felt like my time would have been used more effectively by simply reading Bellah’s sources (which I intend to do). Bellah spends a fair amount of his time getting into esoteric scholary debates. For example, in the chapter on China, Bellah gets into the debate about whether ren or li was more important in Confucian philosophy. It was not at all clear to me that reaching a decision on that question was all that important for Bellah’s overall argument. It felt like Bellah was getting sidetracked and I think the narrative would have been better served if Bellah had spent more time going into the essentials of Confucian philosophy and the relationship between its tenets and social institutions at the time. This would have made the chapter a more satisfactory introduction to the subject for people like me who are not already well versed in ancient Chinese history and philosophy.Finally, I have to make a final comment about something that I just found bizarre. In the conclusion of the book Bellah raises what I think is an interesting question: What place does a metanarrative have in his analysis? Bellah is rightfully somewhat suspicious of metanarratives and one virtue of his book is that his history of religion is not a linear history of “progress”. However, Bellah argues that metanarratives are essential for our pragmatic engagements in trying to bring about a better world (599). I agree with all of this, but then Bellah goes on to say that the “primary practical intent” of his work is that humans need to “wake up” to the ecological crisis we are currently facing in the form of a sixth great extinction event. While I am in full sympathy with this “practical intent” it seems to me to come totally out of left field.Bellah’s book is about the history of religion, and the first time this ecological crisis is even mentioned is on page 602 (the book itself is 606 pages long), so it is not at all clear to me how anyone reading this book could ever have gotten the idea that the primary practical import of the whole thing had to do with our need to address our current ecological crisis or how this concern could possibly serve as a coherent metanarrative tying everything in the book together. This is perhaps a minor point but I think the bigger issue is: this book seemed to me to be a giant hodge podge. Bellah just threw everything he had in without worrying about whether it was coherent. The fact that he claims, at the very end of his story, that the major practical import of a book on the sociology of religion is inspiring us to take action regarding our current ecological crisis seemed to me to illustrate this bigger issue.I realize some very intelligent people reviewed this work very positively so any reader of this review will have to put my opinion into the scales with much weightier opinions. I am thinking of Charles Taylor and Jurgen Habermas in particular. I have a great deal of respect for both of them and partially out of deference to them I made every effort to wring whatever I could out of this book. I began re-reading sections early on because I was not getting as much out of the book as I expected based on the glowing reviews and I felt like I must be missing something, but eventually it began to feel like I was trying to wring water out of a stone. Ultimately, what this book gave me is a series of topics I would like to study in more depth, and a list of books to get me started, which is not nothing, but is a lot less than I expected.

⭐The work is a notable scholarly achievement of serious research for which the author is commended. It is with sadness that the book is dedicated in memory of his wife and then the author died this July 2013. Initially, I was concerned that Bellah’s work being sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation and his referenced remark to Paul Tillich who had taught him that Christianity is not “belief in the unbelievable” that Bellah was promoting a religious agenda. Templeton Foundation is to religion as the Discovery Institute is to creationism or American Petroleum Institute as to climate change. In fact, Christianity is “unbelievable” and simply a myth as all religions! However, working my way through Bellah’s extensive work did not reveal a Christian Apologist’s view, as best I could determine. I question the author’s view of science as simply stories, as myths. Bellah does credit Richard Dawkins as being a gifted science writer “when he is not bashing religion.” In view of the calamitous impact of religion on the human experience, one could argue it needs bashing! As Richard Dawkins stated “Religion is about turning untested belief into unshakable truth through the power of institutions and the passage of time.” As well, Richard Dawkins said “Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.” All religions are the result of myth, legends and fables which Bellah describes from Tribal to the Axial Age! As Voltaire said, “Those who can make you believe in absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” I certainly agree with Bellah that we are in the midst of the sixth great extinction event! It takes dedicated effort, but worth the read!

⭐This is an absolute gem; full of insights. Despite its great size it is immensely readable. The range of erudition Bellah summons is remarkable. All those words like “magisterial” and “magnum opus” which are rather abused these days are amply earned by this book.

⭐When once asked of God why not have just one religion. Her answer was that all religions are precious. Why? Wouldn’t it be because they are all seeking to understand the greatest mystery in the universe? Love. What it is and what it isn’t. The essence of it is though, that it’s an infinite constant that will always be while existence is having an experience. Only love can command the particles of infinity which have memory and retain experience.

⭐Robert Bellah has a strong reach in contemporary sociology and social sciences. Among other things, his cultural analysis of American society is renown for having both sustained and strengthen Tocqueville’s warning against democraties’ proneness to soft tyranny (an all-encompassing control that settles together with the fall of civic commitment and the withdrawal in privacy).Religion in Human Evolution is his last œuvre . It is a truly ambitious, remarkable piece of work spawning 13 years of effort.Chapters 1 & 2 set a broad perspective that discard prior, taken for granted, distinctions (prehistory/history, animal/human, nature/culture). Bellah gives some glimpses on Big Bang Theory and emergence of life scenario ; then contrasts atomistic-pessimistic and emergentist-optimists cosmologies, and merges many stimulating bio-psycho-cultural concepts and hypothesis (niche construction, shared intention and attention, cooperative breeding, nurturance, animal play, enactive and narrative-self, unitive experience).Chapters 3-9 carefully recollects rituals, myths and narratives, gathered from (roughly) the world over, that coincide with tribal (mimetic), chiefdom, archaic state (mythic), and axial (theoretic) religions.Tribal-mimetic ones are reconstructed through the ethnographic studies of the Kalapalo (Brazil), Najavo (North America), and Warlbiri (Australia). Bellah shows how the durkheimian collective effervescence bolstered by rituals can rightfully be linked with gestural, prelinguistic communication. Danse, music and transe-state recapture the ways of Powerful Beings, by the mimesis of which group members gathers qua group members, going beyond the ordinary clivages (households and lineages) that pervade their day-to-day life.Mythic cultures are reconstructed through the recollection of Polynesian cultures (Tokopia and Hawai’i), and of ancient Mesopotamian, Egyptian and Chines cultures (Zhang and west Zou China). While mimetic, tribal cultures were egalitarian (or reverse-hierarchical, following Christoph Boem) – everyone participated in rituals and their preparation – the mythic stage shows the opposite. Only chiefs or priests perform rituals, in separate space. While gestural, music and danse still animate rituals in lineages and tribes, these no longer hold the day at the polity level. Secret speechs and formulas, sustained by sacrifice (be it of animals or of human) and by impressive constructions (temples or graves), underline and magnify the separateness of the Gods and of their human counterparts. Myths are narrative about the advent of order as it currently stands; its advent through the first, distant cohabitation of powerfull-god beings with human, cohabitation where sacred skills and knowledge where transmitted, cohabitation latter to be disrupted by a catastrophe (war, dispute, betrayal). Myths are global, pervasive way to see and act in the world, to produce and reproduce its order. A thinking where things stands in the words and representations itself (god is the word god – at least what is left of it after the orignal split ; saying is doing).Axial age religions are reconstructed through the studies of ancient Isreal and Judea, of Greece, of India and China in the first millenium before common era. Whereas, in a way that recall Thom Scott-Phillips’ argument against Chomsky, ancient cultures appear to be full of ambiguous terms, that hold for countless entities and processes, axial ones are still ambiguity-ridden, but overal, they are on the verge of a collapse toward specializing in many bounded meaning systems (our current iron cage). Axial age is about a legitimation crisis of the state, brought by a universal ethics, detached of hierarchical particularisms, and by theoretic thinking (logical thinking about thinking, propelled in large part by writing).Preceded by a breakdown of kingdoms through invasion and conquest (echoing Peter Turchin) axial age’s breakpoint is said to have been posthumous, brought by detached intellectuals, renouncers, who have lived like homeless and mendicant (Buddha, Parmenide, Plato, Aristotle, the isrealite prophets, Confucious’ pupils – who where closer to office clerks). Seeing the social whole as if from the outside, preaching the formation of totally new individuals that can both disrupt the current order of things as it stands, and fit the universal dimension of moral (the Heaven mandate, the Dharma, the Reason, the Being, the Will of God), such is the Axial age legacy. Forming niches of believers (church, schools, universities), apart from the ordinary – day to day work and sleep, free to entertain and nourish their faith in such an advent of the moral realm without transgressing the order, is one of axial age’s consequences.Chapter 10 is tatamount to Bellah admitting the fact that justifies the blend of admiration and lack of enthusiasm I feel towards . It fall shorts of working its empirical data (maybe not 3-9 but 4-9) following its thrilling perspective (chapter 1 & 2). Bellah admits of not having had enough time to work things out as intentend (niche construction, organism-steered evolution, new cooperation modes, and the like). The link with animal-play (see below) and the religious field is thin – only the images of gods as nurturant are there to recall. Chapter 10 makes justice to this hypothesis of a relaxed field prompted by nurturance and play. On another plan, it verses in a kind of dull acceptance of religious pluralism counteracted by an ecological anxiety (for the 6th extinction that still rages since 100 000, that is, since homo erectus began to make weapon and drive large mammal extinct wherever he go).I shall be fair in saying that this book goes far beyond the ordinary, typological, abstracted-from-prior abstractions, way that sociologists build meta-narratives. So its lack could be seen as an asset. Bellah certainly do not force datas to comply with one model / hypothesis. Few if any of the ethnographic and literrary cases studied can be said to match clearly with the cultural-cognitive stages borrowed from Merlin Donald (mimetic, mythic, theoretic). Bellah let the variability and in-betweenness nature of animal-human-social facts stands in their own throughout. That may be memorization and abstract un-friendly, but it is honnest and exemplar of a good humanistic science.

⭐You can see the deep influence of Emile Durkheim on him. Furthermore, the classic “On Morals and Society” by Durkheim has in its latest edition an intro by Robert Bellah. It can get a little dense for moments but dissecting such a topic within the sociological structures that developed over the centuries, any minimal details left can make a big difference.

⭐It was Xmas gift

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