OF RELIGIOUS , COMPARATIVE AND SPIRITUAL QUESTS

LUTHER H. MARTIN

From the time when mingled in the Greco-Roman world thinkers have been compelled to evaluate their own beliefs and practices in relation to those of other peoples and races, but it was not until the latter part of the nineteenth century of our era that a serious attempt was made to apply scientific principles to the comparative and historical study of the subject. (W. James 1961 [1902]:15) l.

As is by now well known, the notion of "syncretism" as an analytical category in the academic study of religion derives from J. G. Droysen's nineteenth-century description of Hellenistic culture as "the east and west mixture of people" occasioned by the conquests of in the fourth century B.C. and by his policy of Hellenization which was continued by his successors (Droysen 1980: Vol. 1, Vorzvortzur Zweiten Auflage). Alexander's vision for his imperial- ist ventures might be characterized as the transformation of this "new world society into a world community", an ecumenical reorientation that would involve the transformation of religious as well as social and political life. This characterization might be Alexander's but it is not; it is W. C. Smith's description of what he termed the "funda- mental human problem of our time" (1962: 12-14, emphasis added). Already in his 1962 volume, The of Other Men ( 1989), Smith avers that this "new world order" necessarily involves what he later terms a "world ", the construction of which has been characterized as syncretistic in the sense of diverse religious forms representing a common transcendental reality (Sharpe 1975: 252, 257), a sense reminiscent of Apuleius' neo-Platonically inspired Hymn to (Met. xi, 5), the locus classicus of the notion of syncretism (Hammond and Scullard 1970: 1029). The means whereby this universalistic religious transformation might occur, according to Smith, is through "com- parative religion" (1962: 14, 20). Eric Sharpe locates Smith in a long tradition of comparative study 278

which represents the position that should be pursued in service of constructing a global theology. As Mac Ricketts concludes in his review of Smith's volume, The Faith of Other Men: "The author is to be commended for his attempt to move beyond pure scholarship to [the] 'practical application"' of building a "world community of brotherhood and love" (1965-1966: 745, and cited on the book jacket of W. C. Smith 1962). This tradition, according to Sharpe, stretches from F. Max Muller and Rudolf Otto to Radha- krishnan (272, 283), to which we might now add, Ross Reat, Edmund Perry, Ursula King and Andreas Grünschloss (Reat and Perry 1991; King 1993; Grunschloss 1994). Even Max Muller, one of the first to argue for a scientific character for the comparative study of religion, anticipated a new religion ... for the whole world ... firmly founded on a on the One , the same in the Vedas, the same in the Old, the same in the New Testament, the same in the Koran, the same also in the hearts of . those who have no longer any Vedas or Upanishads or any Sacred Books whatever between themselves and their God. (1884: 80-81)

This goal of seeing in the of differing religions "nothing but names of what [is] beyond all names" is, Muller concluded, "[o]ne of the many lessons" which a comparative study of the historical reli- gions may teach us (1880: 363-364). To give an example from another influential tradition of com- parative religion-the phenomenological/hermeneutical Joachim Wach, in his book, The Comparative Study of Religions, approvingly cites Herbert Schneider's proleptic complaint that the "reconciliation of the spirit of freedom with the spirit of religious devotion or commit- ment [in twentieth-century America] has become a serious problem of public morality" (1958: 7; Schneider 1952: 33). Wach, like Smith, proposes to address this problem through a theology informed by comparative religion. "If", he writes, it is the task of theology to investigate, buttress, and teach the faith of a religious community to which it is committed, as well as to kindle zeal and fervor for the defense and spread of this faith, it is the responsibility of a comparative study to guide and to purify it. (Wach 1958:9)

This purification of the faith, according to Wach, might well involve "the subjection of one's religious faith to a judgement pronounced in the name of some generalized notions" (1958: 9), that is to say, in the name of that syncretism which Wach wistfully remembers to have