THE DEGENERATION PARADIGM IN THE WESTERN STUDY OF WORLD RELIGIONS

Evan M. Zuesse

PRECIS

Western scholarship has primarily interpreted other religions to be in a state of de­ cline. Typically, the past traditions of non-Christian religions have been elevated as their culminations, while present forms are viewed as declining shadows of former glorious tradi­ tions. The derivation of the hypothesis of decadence is traced to "the Western experience of colonialism and imperialism," during which even the most liberal interpreters were con­ vinced of the superiority of their own culture. The confrontation of missionaries and scholars with religion in India provides a case in point. But everywhere we encounter the "white man's burden" syndrome-the moral imperative of converting all non-Western cul­ tures to the superior Western prototype. Evidently, viewing the unique responses of other cultures to similar problems has been threatening to the faith in the efficacy of our own Western responses. Other factors produced the judgment that non-Western cultures were degenerate: (1) The theological concept that only Christianity was endowed with a special "supernatu­ ral" grace, that "other" cultures were merely "natural," was considerably evident, especially in nineteenth-century perspectives on Chinese and Indian cultures. (2) Later, the same Indian scriptures were elevated as a "primordial revelation" by poets and philosophers of the Romantic period. (3) Nationalism also had considerable influence, illustrated particu­ larly by nineteenth-century German intellectuals. (4) "A literary, textual approach to cul­ ture" constituted another factor producing the "degeneration paradigm." This approach led to numerous misunderstandings as is discussed, and ultimately to a denumanization of non-Western cultures. (5) "The formative Christian polemic against its mother-religion Juda­ ism" provides an even "deeper source for degeneration assumptions," by providing a model for every future religious "contest." A dualistic interpretation of the essence of religion underlies the hypothesis of degen­ eracy and, if applied universally to all viable religions, would have to include Christianity itself. The author states that "a revulsion from the living present and actual human beings is built into degeneration theories." The past is glorified and the present, vilified-this phe­ nomenon is interpreted as common to all religions and culture, as an essentially "human" characteristic. But Christianity intensified it into a We-Theyism which terminated in the elevation of itself as the realization of all other religions and cultures. Other religions have also activated the "degeneration paradigm" and have pictured themselves as the terminus of a religio-cultural evolution, as is illustrated. However, the paradigmatic approach reflects false and "inauthentic" consciousness.

In the last pages of this excellent study of The Practice of Chinese Bud­ dhism: 1900-1950 (Cambridge, MA, 1967), Holmes Welch draws attention to a paradox. He has just finished demonstrating the extraordinary vitality and depth

Evan M. Zuesse has been an assistant professor in the Department of Religion at Case Western Reserve University since 1975, following six years at Allegheny College in Mead- ville, PA. Prior to that he taught in Israel. Dr. Zuesse holds a B.A. from Dartmouth College, and an M.A. and PhJD. (1971) from the University of Chicago Divinity School, where he specialized in African and primitive religions and methodology. He is the author of several articles on ritual structures, published in Numen, History of Religions, and the Journal of the American Academy of Religion.

15 16 Journal of Ecumenical Studies of contemporary monastic Buddhism in China, at least up to the Communist take-over, yet, as his citations from leading modern authorities remind us, for three centuries it has been commonly thought in Sinological scholarship that Buddhism has degenerated in the modern period and is both dying and distorted, especially in the monasteries. In this view even the most recent authorities have concurred. Nevertheless, it is obviously untrue; Welch's whole work demon­ strates that.1 It might be possible to explain this anomaly solely in terms of the idiosyn- cracies and particularities of Sinological research if a similar kind of judgment had not been made of other religions. But, in fact, we find the same classifica­ tion applied everywhere, so we are not actually dealing here with a peculiarity of scholarship in one field. Whether it is Theravada, Mahayana, or Mantrayana Buddhism; Hinduism; Islam; Shinto; Confucianism; or even localized religions such as we find in Africa, Oceania, and elsewhere—Western scholarship has come to much the same conclusion: the religion in question might well have had a glorious past, but at present it is in a state of decadence, weakness, and confu­ sion. The "golden age" occurred well before the first extensive Western contact was made in the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries, perhaps, or the pristine vision of the founders of the religion has long since been deformed and diluted (if not betrayed) by ritualism, priestcraft, loss of creativity, or other historical happenstance. Every religion has a few Western defenders, however, who especially in the past decade or so (like Welch in regard to Chinese Buddhism) have tried to suggest that the "degeneration" motif is unjustified, and that there is still au­ thentic spiritual power even in the traditionist sectors ofthat religion. But there is something that is felt to be paradoxical and surprising about such assertions even now, in the face of the universality of the degeneration judgment from the Enlightenment period (when non-Western cultures were first seriously encoun­ tered) till the present. Yet, objectively considered, it would seem highly unlikely and improbable that all non-Western religions were simultaneously in the depths of decadence at the time the West first made contact with them. We may, of course, suppose that some hidden law or rhythm of human history caused this universal decadence and corruption, of the same nature as Jasper's "Axial Age" of religious creativ­ ity. But there are those who are not satisfied with a mystical, existential, or materialistic dialectic, for whom the near unanimity of the judgment suggests that it could at no period be relied upon as such. At least as a hypothesis, it will be admitted that it simplifies our task of explaining degeneration judgments if we had only one phenomenon to explain (Western attitudes), instead of an infinity of unrelated ones (all world cultures, each with its unique history).

Further detailed discussion of this seeming anomaly can be found in Holmes Welch, The Buddhist Revival in China (Cambridge, MA, 1968), chap. 11, "Christian Stereotypes and Buddhist Realities," and chap. 12, "The Meaning of the Revival," pp. 222-270. The Degeneration Paradigm 17

It ought not to occasion surprise that paradigms can so profoundly affect even the most scholarly and objective research, as is su^ested here. To mention only one* instance, the rise in the modern period of a multitude of Western nationalisms, each with its native scholarship developing its own theory of his­ tory, of folk-soul, of political rights, etc.-but with each nationalism's scholar­ ship conflicting on essential points with rival views—has had a humbling impact on modern historiography, at least in its theoretical constructions, its philosophy of history. It is even possible to view the history of science as a history of conflicting paradigms, as Thomas Kuhn has demonstrated in The Structure of Scientifc Revolutions (Chicago, 1970). We can go further. Precisely in the area of religion we are the most subject to what may be termed "deep" paradigms (applying Chomsky's "deep structures" terminology): models of reality which pervasively shape our perceptions into a "grammar" applying not only to our­ selves but also to other selves and other possible universes as well. These struc­ tures are "deep" not only in their rootedness but also in their necessary tacit- ness; they are and must be too real to doubt, for only if they reside at such a depth can they be applied to all the raw material of experience, including the encounter with alien cultures, and make a "grammar" out of that experience which is self-validating. In a very true sense, to come to know these paradigms is to doubt them, for by raising them to consciousness and "knowing" them we remove them from the deep level of certainty at which they must operate to be effective. It would be an error to suppose that such symbolic models are sustained by merely one motivation or cause. They exist at a deep level precisely due to their multivalency, which gives them support on every plane of culture. Every reference to them evokes a host of subterranean echoes which reinforce and confirm their power and truth. Inner psychic complexes of varying etiology and outer social structures chime together and find their unity in such symbolic models, while the unison of these disparate elements gives the symbol too great a meaning to be rationally comprehended. The unison confirms the paradigm even as the paradigm confirms and maintains its elements. An analysis of a paradigm, therefore, must also be an archeology, in which layer after layer of meaning and psycho-social reference is penetrated, and a complicated history is unraveled. The first thing we notice, then, about the judgments concerning the decay of alien cultures is that these views of the "Third World" arose during the Western experience of colonialism and imperialism. The Westerners who traveled in .those distant realms, the missionaries, colonial administrators, and other literati reporting to the West on Eastern and "savage" religions did not arise out of a vacuum. Even the most liberal of them were sure of the perfection of their own Western-educated opinions and beliefs. Thus, to take only one instance, in India during the period of liberalism under Warren Hastings (late eighteenth century), the study of Indian religious texts, customs, and local languages was encouraged, and Fort William College was established in Calcutta to teach civil servants the glories of Indian antiquity and the uses of Indian laws, while Sir 18 Journal of Ecumenical Studies

William Jones founded an "Asiatick Society" and a journal m Bengal which became the fount of Indomania in Europe during this period.2 Yet these, and also the native colleges that were later established for Hindu intelligentsia, the books of translations from the sacred Sanscrit scriptures into the vernaculars, and much else were not out of admiration for actual living Hinduism (the leaders of which sharply criticized the Western initiatives), but for the most ancient past. Above all, they were to wean Hindus from medieval or more recent religious cults, from living, traditional Hinduism, which was roundly condemned as corrupt and degenerate. These aims were quite sincere, and they were explicitly expressed, so that we are not left in doubt about the motives ofthat generation. For many British scholars and civil servants of this time, to attack the ritualism and arrogance of the Brahmans, and to stress the decadence of the profuse religious life of con­ temporary Bengal was to aid the Hindus in throwing over medieval obscurant­ ism; it was, for these Protestants, a species of anti-Popery, which they viewed as absolutely necessary to the hoped-for "Bengal Renaissance."3 The anti-Catholic theme (so strong at the time in English politics and literature) emerges often in their more popular writings and in juvenilia. Reviving the classical literature of India and educating Hindus in it was the way to break the hold of the priests, just as it had been in Renaissance Europe. According to one student won over to Hinduism by H. T. Colebrooke (the successor to Sir William Jones) and the missionary William Carey (the instructor in Indian cultures at Fort William Col­ lege):

We may confidently hope that the same happy consequences [as in Europe] would be the result arising from the translation of Sanscrit

The instance of the European encounter with India is particularly fascinating and will be referred to frequently in the following pages, precisely because of the generosity that often characterised this European response, which casts the negative influence of the degen­ eration paradigm into even sharper relief. The encounter with India has also been volumi­ nously analyzed. For some representative studies of the English response, see C. F. Andrews, Renaissance in India: Its Missionary Aspect (London, 1912); G. D. Bearce, British Attitudes towards India (Oxford, 1961); P. J. Marshall, ed., The British Discovery of Hinduism in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1970); and E. Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India (Oxford, 1959). Useful studies of the German response include R. Gérard, L'Orient et la pensée romantique allemande, Thesis, Université de Paris (Nancy, 1963); P. T. Hoffman, Der indische und der deutsche Geist, von Herder bis zur Romantik: Eine literarhistorische Dar­ stellung, Inaugeral Dissertation, Eberhard-Karls-Universität zu Tübingen (Tübingen, 1915); and A. L. Willson, A Mythical Image: The Ideal of India in German Romanticism (Durham, NC, 1964). On the encounter with Asian cultures generally, see V.-V. Barthold, La décou­ verte de Γ Asie (Paris, 1947); R. Schwab, La renaissance orientale (Paris, 1950); and, for facts but not much insight, D. Lach, Asia in the Making of Europe (Chicago, 1965-). On Sir William Jones, consult his 13-volume Works (London, 1807). 3 Detailed documentation can be found in B. A. Boman-Behram, Educational Contro­ versies in India: The Cultural Conquest of India under British Imperialism (Bombay, 1943); D. Kopf, British Orientalism and the Bengal Renaissance: The Dynamics of Indian Moderni­ zation, 1773-1835 (Berkeley, 1969); and D. P. Sinha, The Educational Policy of the East India Company in Bengal to 1854 (Calcutta, 1964). The Degeneration Paradigm 19

works; particularly as it is supposed that they contain many contra­ dictions concerning their present Deities and Devotions. When these circumstances shall have been made manifest to the people, it is not possible that they might forsake and relinquish many of their foolish and idolatrous prejudices and when once this chief obstacle is re­ moved, they might progressively advance in the pursuit of knowl­ edge and learning. . . .4

The "chief obstacle," of course, was traditional religion as such. This is what above all was felt to prevent the Enlightenment of Indians, and their capitulation to the intellectual and social supremacy of the colonial rulers. Precisely the degenerate state of the Asians made the colonialism and missionizing of the Europeans a moral imperative. It was far from being merely for the sake of power and filthy lucre. There was a higher, spiritual necessity, part even of the telos of history: the advent of the European powers was a providential occur- ance. As Colebrooke, the outstanding British Indologist of his generation (first to "discover" and to describe in detail the Vedas), put it in his inaugural address to the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland as its president, in 1823:

To those countries of Asia, in which civilization may be justly conceived to have had its origin, or to have attained its earliest growth, the rest of the civilized world owes a large debt of gratitude, which it cannot but be solicitous to repay; and England, as most advanced in refinement, is, for that very cause, the most beholden; and, by acquisition of dominion in the East, is bound by a yet closer tie.5

It was, therefore, a part of the "white man's burden" for liberals, even as for Evangelical Christians, to undertake to discredit the religious leaders and priests of the various religions they encountered. The Brahmans of India; the monks of Ceylon and Burma; the mandarins, monks, and shamans of China—all came in for the most intense opprobrium for their impervious resistance to and scorn for Christianity and Western culture, for their supposed ritualism and "Pharisaic hypocrisy," and for their formalism, externalistic religiosity, superstition, false morality, etc. Astonishing is the repeated insistence that the priests of the cul­ ture in question knew their religion to be false and empty sham, but kept this knowledge from the masses in order to extend and deepen their power over them. The grip that these charlatans had on the masses had to be broken, as missionaries and administrators were to complain with ever more hopeless ac­ cents throughout the nineteenth century.

A. B. Tod, "On the Translation of Sanskrit," Primitiae Orientales (1804), as quoted by Kopf, op. cit., p. 103. Also see Note 8, below. 5H. T. Colebrooke, Miscellaneous Essays, 2 vols. (London, 1837), I, p. 3. 20 Journal of Ecumenical Studies

The extent to which such ideas had become the established currency of British thought by the middle of the century can be gauged by the long descrip­ tion of religion in the article "Hindustan," in the eighth edition of the Encyclo­ paedia Britannica. Here we read:

The sacred books of the Hindus, though they inculcate generally all the moral duties of justice, mercy, and benevolence, yet seem, like every other system of false religion, to give the first place to the ceremonial law; and accordingly the devotion of the Hindus consists in mere outward observances, and is not inconsistent with the most scandalous crimes. ... In almost all the religious traditions of the world we find traces of the Scripture revelation, however corrupted; and the Hindu system seems to have borrowed, and to have greatly extended, the typical impurities of the Mosaic law.6

But the authors, after exposing in detail the priests' ritual practices, including human sacrifice, go on to affirm that the Hindus are not after all an innately depraved people, but are merely in "a low state of civilization, and a state of thraldom to a base superstition and to the dominion of priests under which the social virtues are blighted in the bud, and give place to selfishness and vice."7 Lest it be thought that such attitudes were exceptional (notwithstanding their appearance in an Encyclopaedia Britannica article), let us recall that even H.H. Wilson, who was perhaps the foremost student of contemporary Hindu cults at mid-century, directed many of his restrained and careful studies at aspiring missionaries, and endorsed such hair-raising descriptions of Hindu cul­ ture as James Mill's History of British India (1858).8 But we would be wrong if we concluded that a conscious Realpolitik influ­ enced such painfully imperialistic attitudes, at least in the majority of cases. The very universality of the degeneration argument, and its continual repetition up to the present (after empires have crumbled) even in regard to cultures never under colonial rule, are sufficient to demonstrate this. It is true that strong, traditionalistic leaders would always prevent the complete psychic capitulation

E. Thornton and D. Buchanan, "Hindustan," in The Encyclopaedia Britannica, 8th ed. (London, 1856), Vol. 11, p. 468. 7Ibid., p. 473. ^Vilson's attitude obtrudes even in his "objective" studies, and is perhaps most self­ consciously emphatic in the lectures on "Religious Practices and Opinions of the Hindus" addressed to an audience of aspiring missionaries at Oxford in 1840; here Wilson advises his students, for example, that Hindus should be taught to criticize their scriptures through a direct acquaintance with them, for "until the foundation is taken away, the superstructure, however crazy and rotten, will hold together" (H. H. Wilson, Essays and Lectures on the Religions of the Hindus, collected and edited by Reinhold Rost, 2 vols. [London, 1861], Vol. 2, pp. 79-80). Wilson also devoted himself to expanding and annotating, and reissuing, the very work he acknowledged to be a major cause of the increasing British contempt for Hinduism, James Mill's History of British India (in the 10-volume, London, 1858, version). The Degeneration Paradigm 21 of the masses to their Western rulers, and that they had to be discredited. But underlying this was the sincere belief that the Western, Christian-like way (if not outright Christian way) was the only viable way for the modern age. Evangelicals called for complete apostasy from the traditional religions, of course, but the goals of the liberals were perhaps not less radical in the final analysis. Even today it is a common habit to treat "modernization" and "Westernization" as equiva­ lent terms. The challenge to non-Western cultures is seen as one of a necessary accommodation to the superior force of "modernity" (Westernism), to avoid a complete eclipse. To suppose that these cultures have in their traditional forms both the avenues and power to deal with problems of nationalization, industrial­ ism, and the scientific method is to pose a real challenge to our own lives.Our particular kind of cultural response to these problems might then not be the inevitable or best ones that we suppose them to be. Every culture likes to see itself as providing the best possible responses human beings might conceivably make to life. This tendency operates at least as strongly in the West as it does in other cultures. To discover that there are other religions as grand even in their least Western forms as our own, and perhaps even more adaptable to moderniza­ tion without losing intense spirituality, is to sense a challenge to our own reli­ gions and traditions that we almost instinctively seek to avoid confronting. The resistence and even revulsion expressed toward those Europeans who "go native" can only be seen in this light. An early instance was the Lutheran missionary Ziegenbalg in the early eighteenth century who adopted many Indian customs, and who wrote home that the people of Malabar "were often more moral than Christians by their upright life"; a Lutheran Church official wrote back angrily that "the missionaries were sent out to exterminate heathenism in India, not to spread heathen nonsense all over Europe!"9 Something of the same response, even more intimate and violent in fact, is felt by those Asians and Africans who have internalized Western judgments in their education, at great cost "Westernizing" themselves. We must not be sur­ prised if they echo the same judgments as their European mentors with a special vehemence, founding "reform" movements in their religions critical of the tradi­ tional leaders and ideas and nostalgic for an archaic golden age of ethical mono­ theism, living naturally harmonious lives quite without ritual or cult, and guided solely by the kind of rational, "enlightened" leadership they view themselves to be. In this manner they discover in their own religion's essence a faith conform­ ing to a vague, generalized, and idealized Christianity, but arising from the national sôul autochthonously. So one may understand, for example, the Hindu reform groups, the Brahmo and Arya Samaj; such political and cultural re­ formers in China as K'ang Yu-Wei (whose momentary accession to power in 1898 shook traditionalist China), Wang T'ao, T'an Ssu-T'ung, and even the Chinese Nationalist movement's leaders in varying degrees; while in Africa, this

9Kopf, op. dt., p. 52. 22 Journal of Ecumenical Studies response has directed the efforts of such intellectuals as J. B. Danquah or, today, John Mbiti, among others.10 There are yet other factors creating the assumption in the West that other living cultures were "degenerate." A wide variety of viewpoints could be in­ cluded in the overarching conception that natural things bereft of the invigorat­ ing spirit must inevitably corrupt. The classical theological expression of this idea was in the writings of Augustine and Aquinas, to the effect that since Christianity alone was the recipient of "supernatural" grace, all other religions were merely "natural" and participated in the stasis and decay of nature. Later epochs were to redefine "nature," but this dominating conception can be seen in them all: on the one hand, the authentic history of the West; on the other, the natural civilizations that blossomed and withered outside of history. Even the Enlightenment critique of Christianity repeated these axioms in opposing the "natural" wisdom of the Chinese (especially archaic China) to the historical, revealed religion of the West. Both Jesuits and Deists from their varying perspec­ tives reflected the same attitudes, comprehensible only in light of the contempo­ rary European culture. The contradictions in this view were not perceived. Archaic China became a model of that paradox, natural civilization and, even if that legacy was found to be corrupted in later Chinese religion, for a while Chinese porcelains, silks, tapestry designs, and wise sages offering criticisms of European culture in imaginary philosophical dialogues were all the rage. Part of the fascination of China, in fact, lay in its reputed stasis throughout thousands of years, its only change being a slow decay (such as comes to all natural things), while in Europe there had been the tumult and anxious crises of true history.11 In a similar way India followed China as the object of an ever-deepening passion on the part of some later Enlightenment intelligentsia; India was at first, therefore, praised for the agreement (as it was supposed) of its earliest Vedic religion with Enlightenment philosophy. The fervor of this certainty gave rise to one of those complicated jokes on humankind that history abounds in. So determined were the early missionaries of Enlightenment persuasion that India

For useful documents see W. T. de Bary, general ed., Sources of Indian Tradition, 2 vols. (New York, 1958), Vol. 2, chap. 20 and 21; and W. T. de Bary, ed., Sources oj Chinese Tradition, 2 vols. (New York, 1960,1964), Vol. 2, pp. 55-73, 87-91. In referring to J. B. Danquah, The Akan Doctrine of God (London, 1944), and J. Mbiti, Concepts of God in Africa (New York, 1970), I wish in no way to cast any doubt upon their obvious scholarship and needed correction to overly prejudiced European scholarship. On trends in African intellectual life during the colonial period, see R. W. July, The Origins of Modern African Thought (New York, 1967). The Enlightenment vision of China has been well researched; see H. Bernard, Le père Mattieu Ricci et la société chinoise de son temps (Tientsin, 1937); H. Honour, Chinoiserie: The Vision of Cathay (London, 1961); Lach, op. cit.; Κ. S. Latourette, A History of Chris­ tian Missions in China (New York, 1929); A. H. Rowbotham, Missionary and Mandarin: The Jesuits at the Court of China (Berkeley, 1942); and A. Reichwein, China and Europe: Intellectual and Artistic Contacts in the Eighteenth Century (New York, 1925); in general, see G. F. Hudson, Europe and China (London, 1931). Also see note 1 above. The Degeneration Paradigm 23 had degenerated from a noble past in which flourished rational-ethical beliefs only needing Christianity for perfection, that they could not wait for the Vedas themselves to be made available. Since the "cunning and hypocritical Brahmans" would not divulge the secrets of the Vedas either to Westerners or to the illiter­ ate lower castes, the missionaries composed a Veda, the "Ezour Vedam, " in which the secret essence of Hinduism could at last be disclosed to prospective converts. This fascinating document was the distillation of natural religion, and was used heavily in the polemic against the Hinduism and Brahmans of contem­ porary India. Now it happened that this Ezour Vedam came to the attention of Voltaire, who with intense delight accepted it as the authentic document of the primordial revelation, unsullied by the self-serving priestly inventions that so corrupted in his view both the scriptures and the institutions of Judaism and Christianity in his own Europe. He enrolled himself in the pure faith revealed in this document, which so put to shame the priestly decadence of both the West and contemporary India.12 Not even Voltaire's cutting wit could possibly have devised a more satiric exposé of himself than the one history contrived for him. Irony pervades the entire history of the Western confrontation with non- Christian cultures, however. With the movement of European intellectual fashion away from a rationally ordered "nature" to one continually in flux, open as is the human heart to the pulse of the infinite, the view of non-Western cultures changed too. Now the Vedas were praised by their Western enthusiasts for their sublime nature poetry, their polytheistic symbolization of the infinite powers of nature, and so on. The very mythology which previously had been excoriated as the fruit of the distorted imaginations of decadent priests was now ennobled as the primordial revelation, especially as interpreted through the Upanishads. For a while it was this "Indian" wisdom, with its rich mythology ultimately dissolv­ ing into a vast monism, which drew like a lodestone the leading European Romantic poets and philosophers. Some hoped to mine there a new myth, a new poesy, a new world view, just as in former times the Greek culture had invigor­ ated Medieval art and thought. Distance from and a general ignorance of India sustained such hopes for a time, but acquaintance with authentic Hinduism finally helped bring the infatuation to an end. When, for example, Friedrich Schlegel, whose adolescent enthusiasm at the discovery of Indian wisdom en­ couraged him to write in a messianic mode about the coming transformation of the spiritually barren, decadent West, actually came to know about the religious

See F. Von Adelung, An Historical Sketch of Sanscrit Literature (Oxford, 1832), pp. 75ff.; and Gérard, op. cit., pp. 263-264. For Voltaire's motivations, see Voltake (pseud. for F. M. Arouet), La Philosophie de l'histoire, edited by J. H. Brumfitt, Studies on Voltaire and the Enlightenment, 28 (Geneva, 1963); and the remarks by Marshall, op. cit., pp. 45ff., and by A. Hertzberg, The French Enlightenment and the Jews (New York, 1968). The search for the "primordial document" of revelation in non-Jewish cultures was an obsessive one during this period, and represented an attempt to "de-Judaize" Christianity, according to Gérard, op. cit. (see especially his comments on Herder, pp. 65-66). This is a typically hermetic goal, interestingly enough. 24 Journal of Ecumenical Studies world of contemporary India, he left his Indomania in disgust and converted to Catholicism. The medieval period now served for him the role idealized India had.13 When discussing the important role cultural developments in the West had on images entertained of non-Western cultures, we should not ignore the impact on nationalism itself. For Schlegel, as for many other especially of the German intellectuals of the nineteenth century who followed him, the earliest texts of India preserved in their original form the Indo-European spirituality, the Ger­ manic Aryan heritage, which had been entirely obscured by the intrusion of the Mediterranean historical cultures. India was still largely authentic, however; for Herder, the first German philosopher of national historiography, as for the early Schlegel, India—despite all temporal signs of decay—participated in the homeo­ stasis of nature, and was symbolized by a yogin floating on a lotus flower over infinity. It was Schlegel who developed Sir William Jones' suggestions further in demonstrating the close linguistic affinity between Sanskrit and the ancestor- tongues of the European languages. To discover archaic Indian spirituality was to recover the German soul and the European destiny. The theme was elaborated on by later writers. Friedrich Creuzer developed a philosophy of history in­ debted to Herder, Schlegel, and others, integrating into it the explicit suggestion that Judaism was merely a distorted version of the earlier pure monotheism of most ancient India; the "priestly nationalism" of the Hebrews reduced the true God Brahma to Abraham, while Saraswati became Sarah (these etymologies had previously been offered by Sonnerat in the early eighteenth century).14 It be­ came the German mission to purify Western culture of its historical corruptions by discovering its own authentic archaic spirituality. Though politically divided and impotent, therefore, the historical destiny of Germany was more spiritual and grand than that of, for example, the opportunistic English, according to Auguste Schlegel.15 The study of ancient India had a political aspect to it, therefore. It is very noticeable that, while German scholarship has from the first tended to stress the most archaic literary texts and their analysis to arrive at a definition of the Indo-European "soul," British scholarship has contributed to our understanding of contemporary India, an understanding (as Auguste Schlegel recognized) needed for colonial rule. Though scholars of either group might

In addition to the relevant studies in note 2, F. Schlegel is discussed in G. Höpfner, Die indischen Studien Friedrich Schlegels im Zusammenhang seines Denkens, Dissertation, Friedrteh-Wflhelms*Universitat (Breslau, 1921); and in J.-J. Anstett, La pensée religieuse de F. Schlegel (Paris, 1941). 14 F. Creuzer, Symbolik und Mythologie der Alten Völker, Besonders der Griechen, 2nd expanded ed., 6 vols. (Leipzig & Darmstadt, 1819-23), Vol. 1, p. 570; Vol. 5, pp. 5-6. Also see Wilson, op. cit., p. 109. 1 Auguste-Wilhelm Schegel, Réflexions sur Vétude des langues asiatiques (Bonn & Paris, 1832); also see Schwab, op. cit., pp. 53, 96-97; and Gérard, op. cit., pp. 129-148. The Degeneration Paradigm 25 highlight the degeneration of modern Hinduism, therefore, they might do so for rather different reasons. A further major contributor to a degeneration paradigm of non-Western cultures was a bias toward a literary, textual approach to culture. In large part this seems due to the classical education, heavily philological in orientation, that all cultured Europeans had to undergo. To this must be added the impact of the Protestant Reformation on a civilization already explicitly based on a text, a Scripture. Fidelity to that text became a rallying-cry in early modern Europe, inspiring the development of historiography as a scholarly discipline,16 and providing a standard from which to judge other cultures. The motivation of the Reformation historians was to get behind recent history, to return to the original text, but if everyone acknowledged that Europe had had a meaningful history, this was not so with the natural civilizations of the rest of the world who had merely degenerated. It was enough in order to understand such a pyramidal civilization as India, ruled by its literate elite, to consult the classic texts. There dwelt the inner core of the civilization, its vitality, however much the modem Brahmans and folk cults may deviate from it. To know its present-day rules, one need only translate the Code of Manu, vague "thousands" of years old. Its authentic religion could be found in its aboriginal Vedas. Reform movements in India, inspired by such attitudes in leading scholars as F. Max Müller, have come to regard the Vedas as a kind of Gospel, in the process of excluding from true Hinduism almost all of Hindu history. Social structure, too, in being understood from a literary point of view, was really misunderstood; Indologists viewed caste, for example, as simple, static, and rigidly hierarchical, and linked this oppressive structure to a supposed Indian "pessimism" and "fatalism." It is only in the most recent decades that the inadequacies of these assumptions are being fully realized.17 It is not accidental that the more realistic comprehension of the historical complexity and richness of Indian culture is coming about through the intensive field research of anthro­ pologists, whose approach has always been "contextual" rather than "tex­ tual."18 The first period of Indological research in the West was in any case domi­ nated by philology. Its greatest fruit, whiph in large measure founded the disci·' pline of modern philology, was the demonstration of the kinship of Sanskrit to the European languages, especially the more archaic ones. But another conse­ quence of the method was to reduce the study of Hindu scriptures to that of a

J. T. Shotwell, "History," m The Encyclopaedia Britannica, 14th ed. (London and New York, 1929,1930), Vol. 11, pp. 595-596. 17Cf. B. S. Cohn, "Notes on the History of the Study of Indian Society and Culture," in Structure and Change in Indian Society, Milton Singer and Bernard Cohn, eds. (Chicago, 1968), pp. 6-8. 18On these terms, see M. Singer, When a Great Tradition Modernizes: An Anthropologi­ cal Approach to Indian Civilization (New York and London, 1972). 26 Journal of Ecumenical Studies dead language. And the result was no doubt inevitable that texts came to be seen as "truer" than living, complex human beings within a contradictory multitude of intricate religious cults. It was natural to see in those unmanageably varie­ gated cults and beliefs a degeneration from the timeless texts. It could be argued, of course, that the Hindus also ultimately saw themselves and their society, and even reality itself, as static, timeless, and spaceless, as one with nature and outside of history. This is, in fact, not true as such for many Hindus, but in any case such an objection does not explain why very similar kinds of stereotypes were current in Europe about, for example, the very historically-minded Chinese, or the very temporally-oriented, theistic Zoroastrians, or the Muslims. The proper approach to these cultures imbedded in nature was the textual one, and in every case the living versions of these societies were found to have degenerated from their golden past. Only with the coming of the historical, colonializing West did real history begin. Most pre-World-War-II "world history" textbooks naively reflect this point of view. But the corollary to all this is that the only true humanity is European or part of its history. The "nature-peoples" {Naturvölker, a term still common in German ethnology) who inhabit the non-Western world, not knowing history, also cannot know the variety and creative deviation from literary texts that most take for granted for the West. All people in nature-cultures conform single- mindedly to the values and models of their literary classics (or in the important instance of "illiterate" cultures, to the mythic archetypes which are functionally equivalent). If they do not so conform, it is because of a basically a-temporal "degeneration" which is simultaneously an inauthenticity, historical, human variety is for them a fall into meaninglessness.19 For in the static texts is their meaning. The view of culture implied here is one which sees it as precarious, one-dimensional, inhuman. Such narrowly textual, spiritually uncreative cultures have never existed, we may be sure, for all have been created and sustained by human beings in all their rich creativity and contradictoriness. However liberal the particular doctrine of degeneration, therefore, we are forced to the same conclusion that its consequence is the dehumanization of the culture and its people. When living Hindus violated a purely literary appreciation of their cul­ ture, they were dismissed as merely degenerate, superstitious forms of some ideai text; village and regional varieties of Hinduism and even the major sectarian movements of medieval Hindu history were thus disposed of. So were all at­ tempts to put Hinduism pragmatically to work in new forms in the modem

This flaws many Romantic theories of religion, and even phenomenological ap­ proaches, if they do not take care; Jungianism is often guilty of this, as well, but the clearest instances in contemporary ethnology are those of the Kulturmorphologie school stemming from Frobenius. In the view of its present leader, Adolf Jensen, modern tribal peoples, "nature-folk" (Naturvölkern), are almost universally degenerate, and only the scholar can penetrate to the original true meaning of their myths and world*views; see Jensen, Myth and Cult among Primitive Peoples, trans, by Marianna Tax Choldin and Wolfgang Weissleder (Chicago, 1963), pp. vii-viii, and passim. The Degeneration Paradigm 27 period of change. For, ironically, the same viewpoint that urges the "reform" of a spirituality, to remove from it its adventitious "applications" in society to everyday human life, strips from it on principle any way of engaging itself deeply and structurally in modernization. The choice of options as presented to the Indians, Chinese, Africans, and others interested in modernizing was radical­ ly simplified: either return to the archaic past of your classical texts or myths, or embrace Western values wholesale. In any other direction lay decadence, corrup­ tion, inauthenticity. The false dilemma has tormented and scarred many in modernizing non-Western societies, if we are to believe the mémoires of their spokespersons. It is possible to discern a yet deeper source for degeneration assumptions, in which we return to the very roots of Western spirituality. Just as the Protestant conflict with Catholicism could become archetypal in the Indian colonial situa­ tion, so to an even deeper degree the formative Christian polemic against its mother-religion, Judaism, could provide a historical model for every later reli­ gious contest. Here we find a degeneration theory elaborated whose terminology will affect the theological self-understanding and the worldview of Christianity indelibly. For example, Luther discerned in the Catholicism of his own day and in its priests a certain "Judaic" or "Pharisaic" tendency to confuse law with grace, faith with works, and outer institutions with inner spirituality; so he charged the church with degeneration and corruption.20 And the church, accus­ tomed to accusing deviant movements within Christendom of "Judaizing," re­ turned the compliment.21 This standardized way of dealing with religious other­ ness, both internal and external, offered in addition a reassuring triumphalistic note; the humiliated presence of Judaism in the West as the only non-Christian religion was further evidence of the providential right of Christianity over other religions, at least ultimately. The "manifest destiny" of the West, one may say, was embodied first of all and most archetypally in its religion. Two examples will illustrate the prejudged quality and wishful thinking characteristic of this level of Western response. In the late sixteenth century, Father Joseph de Acosta remarked:

¿üCf. J. Dillenberger, ed., Martin Luther: Selections from His Writings pp. 103-109, 240-248, for instances; of course the entire theology of Luther is built on these anti-Semitic assumptions, and it is mere apologia to pretend that his late, virulent outbursts against the Jews were aberrations. 21 So the Arians, Pelagians, Nestorians, Cathars, early Unitarians (Socrnians), and, in the Eastern Orthodox Church, the Iconoclasts (and their opponents!) were labelled. Today the same dynamic finds now Communism "Jewish," then Capitalism; nativists call international­ ism "Zionist" while Third Worlders define "Zionism" as imperialistic nationalism. Studies of the Christian roots of this moral disease might begin with J. Isaacs, The Teaching of Con­ tempt, trans, by H. Weaver (New York, 1964); J. Parkes, The Conflict of the Church and the Synagogue (Cleveland, 1961), and the same author's Antisemitism (London, 1963); A. T. Davies, Anti-Semitism and the Christian Mind: The Crisis of Conscience after Auschwitz (New York, 1969); and Rosemary Ruether, Faith and Fraticide (New York, 1974). 28 Journal of Ecumenical Studies

There are great signes and arguments amongst the common sort of the Indians, to breed a beleefe that they are descended from the Jews; for commonly you will see them fearfull, submisse, ceremoni­ ous, and subtill in lying.22

Two centuries later, Abbé Dubois was constrained to add:

One is perpetually struck by the numerous points of resemblance between the manners and customs of modern Brahmins and those of the Pharisees, with which we have become acquainted through the Holy Scriptures. Their lives are full of the same affectations, they share the same dread of defilement, there are the same continual ablutions and bathings, the same scrupulous attention to the out­ ward observance of the law, the same frequent fasts, etc. ; but all this is tainted by overweening pride, ostentation, and hypocrisy. What St. Matthew says of this sect (xxiii.27) might certainly be applied without injustice to the Brahmins of India.23

Abbé Dubois probably did not know of de Acosta's remarks, however, for not only did two centuries separate the two writers, but their descriptions applied to entirely different peoples; de Acosta was attempting to understand the natives of America, so over-eagerly identified with the Indians, while Dubois was a mission­ ary in India itself. The radical difference in the cultures and religions involved, however, could not be guessed by the essentially stereotyped reactions of the two authors. The "Indian" is the same one, submitted to the same structure in both accounts. As Abbé Dubois reminds us, the New Testament already advances the claim against Judaism and especially against its religious authorities that it is degener­ ate and fossilized. Yet it has been suggested that the incessant anti-Judaism of certain portions of the New Testament and of the early church Fathers reflected a much more active and vital Judaism, able to attract large numbers of proselytes with its spirituality in the first Christian centuries than has been admitted either then or since.24 It is certainly not irrelevant that the most intensive attack against the Jewish religious leaders in the Gospels, Mt. 23 (cited by Dubois

Joseph de Acosta, Natural and Moral History of the Indies (1588), as quoted by M. T. Hodgen, Early Anthropology in the Sixteenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Philadelphia, 1964), p. 313. 23 J. A. Dubois, Hindu Manners, Customs and Ceremonies, trans, by Henry K. Beauchamp, 3rd ed. (Oxford, 1928), p. 269, n. 1. 24 R. L. Wiîken, "Judaism in Roman and Christian Society," The Journal of Religion 47, 4 (1967), and idem, Judaism and the Early Christian Mind (New Haven, 1971); and B. Bamberger, Proselytism in the Talmudic Period (New York, 1939, 1968). It becomes clear from these and other studies, in fact, that this conflict involved two distinct univer- salisms, and not a contest between a universalism on the one hand and a particularism or exclusivism on the other, as still is often maintained. The Degeneration Paradigm 29

above), was an attack against their proselytizing vigor at its core. To assert that their apparent spirituality is only apparent, indeed is mere outward ritualism and is inwardly dead, became the Christian strategy and the model for other con­ frontations as well. It shaped Christian theology deeply.25 An allied tactic one encounters from time to time is to compare the positive aspects of the other culture to Israelite culture and religion (with the conse­ quence that this will be fulfilled in Christianity), and unacceptable aspects of the culture to the discredited Judaic culture and spirituality (with the obvious conse­ quence that this must be abolished). The first is pre-Christian and "leads to" Christianity; the latter is post-Christian and supposedly is constituted by the rejection of God (i.e., Christ).26 In a very real sense, non-Western cultures have suffered from the extension of anti-Semitic stereotypes to them. Pharisees still walked unhumbled in India and in Ceylonese monasteries, Parsee temples, and Confucian courts. Even more deeply, we can see in this the working of certain very basic and of course quite sincere views on the nature of religion. True spirituality has to do with faith, inner feelings, sublime devotional bliss, and personal salvation, while false spirituality is concerned with works, outward ceremonial, communal af­ firmation, even worse, with magic and the selfish desire for children, crops, health, and success. Real spirituality is of course of the spirit, false therefore of the flesh; the former is fulfilled, according to a modern secularized version, in "expressive" commemoration of an insight into reality, some "saving" vision, while the inauthentic latter is "manipulative," seeking to "apply" those insights as mere tools to cater to the lower human appetites.27

2 5 See the studies mentioned in Note 21. In regard to Eastern Orthodoxy, G. P. Fedotov, The Russian Religious Mind (New York, 1946, 1960), p. 91, remarks con­ cerning the Russian Byzantinist theologians that, "rather appallingly,... they are engrossed by the problem of Judaism. They live in the opposition of Old and New Testament, of Law and Grace, of the Jewish and gentile Church. It is the only theological subject which is treated, by Russian authors at length, with never-tiring attention." The Reformation, too, breathes this ultimately Paulinian atmosphere, sharpening its attack against (Jewish) Law and "outer works" on behalf of grace and faith. The theological consequences of first- century polemic remain vividly paradigmatic in both Eastern and Western Christendom, in short. 26 Sudi distinctions are hardly to be found, now, outside of missionary literature, but occasionally they do still crop up, as in H. W. Turner, "A Typology for African Religious Movements," Journal of Religion in Africa 1, 1 (1967): 8-10. His view of "Judaistic" types of religious movements bears no resemblance to the self-understanding of traditional Juda­ ism; he actually contrasts "Judaistic" movements unflatteringly with "Hebraic" type move­ ments, which, he insists, are commendable spiritualities preparing the way for a full Chris­ tianity. 27 One of the great excellencies of the British functionalists anthropology was the dismissal in that field of such dichotomies; however, they occasionally resurface, as in the influential article by Robin Horton, "A Definition of Religion, and Its Uses," Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 90 (1960); note the pivotal and explicity harsh reference to the "Pharisees" (p. 204) and to Judaism (p. 218), contrasting both hostüely to Christianity. Jensen, op. cit., bases his entire system on the opposition between Expressive and Manipula- 30 Journal of Ecumenical Studies

The provinciality and inadequacy of such attitudes is only now becoming evident to students of the history of religions. Inevitably, these attitudes must treat almost all religions—as actually practiced (including Christianity)-as degen­ erate. A strict body-flesh dualism is unknown to most other religions, and so is the Christian definition of sin as carnality. Religions in Africa, Oceania, and South and East Asia assume (as do Christian saints who believe God responds to prayers for the sick or desperate) that the Real is benevolent and actively enters into the fabric of everyday bodily life-that reality alters in accordance with the divine, and that this physical world is part of divine reality. To act on faith is to express that faith. "Magical" and pragmatic cult is really a way of affirming the divine and its power; application and expression are one. In such religions, cult provides the means both to live humanly in the world and to transcend it. Both are areas of dignity.2 8 A striking consequence, at any rate, of such Western theories at their deep­ est level is that they result in the rejection of most world religious phenomena as they are actually presented in human cultures. Degeneration theories always locate the glory of a given culture far in the past; the living human present of that culture, with all its pulsing complexity and contradictoriness, its otherness, and its physical challenge, is denied or condemned. In short, a revulsion from the living present and actual human beings is built into degeneration theories. What can be assimilated and approved by the particular theorist is located in a distant past Golden Age, which was far simpler, more harmonious, more comprehensi­ ble—and therefore less human—than the full, complex present. An instance of the logic of such*a dynamic caught in the making, as it were, can be seen in a letter Richard Wagner wrote in 1858 to Mathilde Wesendonck:

A while ago the Countess A. announced a "little figure" that would soon arrive for me. I didn't understand her, and meantime finished reading Koppen's History of the Religion of Buddha. An unedifying book: instead of sterling features from the oldest legends, which I tive aspects, and they appear elsewhere as well, for example, in Weberian-influenced sociol­ ogies of religion. 28 Our views of "magic" have always reflected miscomprehension of the role such phenomena play in religion. We commonly think "magic" to be opposite to "religion," or at best a lesser form of spirituality. Yet Christ is lauded as a great magician in the Gospels, walking on water, reviving the dead, multiplying bread loaves, blighting a fig tree with a curse, and exorcising demons into suicidal pigs. None of these acts relate to faith-healing, as modern apologetes would like to argue; precisely these acts (not to mention the empty tomb) demonstrated for the Apostles and the early church that Christ was truly spiritual and possessed an immediate link to God, that Christ was transcendentally divine. It is clear that we must rethink our attitude to "magic" to take account of such a complete fusion of spiritual and material, which we find as well in other religions. These brief observations must necessarily be only suggestive; for a more detailed discussion of the interrelationship be­ tween "application" and "expression," see my "Taboo and the Divine Order," Journal of the American Academy of Religion 42, 3 (1974): 482-503, and my "Meditation on Ritual," forthcoming in the same journal. The Degeneration Paradigm 31

expected, for the most part a mere account of development in girth, which naturally turns out more and more repellant, the purer and sublimer is the core. After being so thoroughly disgusted by a de­ tailed description of the ritual as last established, with its relics and preposterous simulacra of the Buddha, the "little figure" arrives, and proves to be a Chinese specimen of one of these sacred effigies. My adhorence was great.... One has too much trouble in this distor­ tion-loving world to hold one's own against suchlike impressions, and keep unwarped the pure-beheld ideal. . . . Nevertheless, in spite of the Chinese caricature, I have succeeded in keeping pure to myself the son of Çakya, the Buddha.29

Such a longing for the ideal and sense of the repulsiveness of the living present and actual human beings is without doubt not solely Western at all, but one of the universal motifs of human culture.30 Even within particular societies, we find again and again strong beliefs in an archaic Golden Age, an Edenic or at least more sacred period when all humankind lived in accordance with certain ideals of the culture. Time and the human condition were there abolished, as it continues to be periodically for those who recapitulate the lost state through recitation and cult. The ostensibly real present is thus translated into another sublime sphere, where it is secondary or irrelevant. We find piercingly moving formulations of this deep-rooted and finally spiritual urge already in the most isolated and least technologically developed societies, such as the Australian Aborigines or the Pygmies of the Congo. For the Australians, for example, all existence is permeated by a nostalgia for the primordial time, the Eternal Dream Time of the totemic ancestral heroes; the cult is largely the reactualization of that creative dream, and its reenactment.31 Much the same sense of the fallen- ness of the present reality from an archaic ideal epoch can be found in the Hindu doctrine of the four yugas, in which we learn that we are now in the last and most decadent age, the Kaliyuga. The brutality of the age is made the reason for following spiritual paths that are more emotional and easier than those of nobler

As quoted by G. Welbon, The Buddhist Nirvana and Its Western Interpreters (Chi­ cago, 1968), pp. 178-179. The similarity, for example, between the "primitivism" of classical antiquity and that of the late Enlightenment is striking; compare A. O. Lovejoy and G. Boas, Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity (Baltimore, 1935), or R. P. Festugière, La revelation d'Hermes Trismégiste, 4 vols. (Paris, 1950), Vol. I, pp. 1-44, with E. A. Runge, Primitivism and Re­ lated Ideas in Sturm und Drang Literature, Dissertation, John Hopkins University (Balti­ more, 1946). 31See M. Eliade, Australian Religion (New York, 1973), and his references. Remark­ ably similar analyses of this "nostalgia" in religion can be found in the independent studies of M. Eliade, Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return (New York, 1959); G. van der Leeuw, "Primordial Time and Final Time," in Man and Time: Papers from the Éranos Yearbooks, Vol. 3, ed. by Joseph Campbell, Bollingen Series, 30 (New York, 1957); and P. Cohen, "Theories of Myth," Man 4, n.s. (1969): 343, 349ff. 32 Journal of Ecumenical Studies times, just as for Japanese Buddhism our present existence in the age of the utter degeneration of the Dharma, the Nappo, calls for drastic remedies. But the Taoists of the third century, B. C, already were filled with the longing for the yet more ancient time when peace lay so strong on humankind that neighbors did not even stir to meet at all {Tao-Te Ching, 80); the nostalgia gave rise to numerous millenial movements in later China. It was his pessimistic view of his age that led Confucius to turn to earlier ages and study and edit the classics; indeed, we may well say that without such a view of time and the present no civilization would preserve its own classics, no religion would establish a canon limited to works of a certain past era, nor would there be any worship of founders of religions or of culture heroes. We must conclude, therefore, that this revulsion from living humanity and the present is deeply human and even productive of much in culture. Where the Western version of this pattern appears to differ is in its tendency not only to historicize its Golden Age (and to identify the fruit of that Golden Age uniquely with itself), but to identify the Fall and stagnation of humanity in polemical reference to actual, other societies. Unlike most other cultures, formative Chris­ tianity insisted on associating the condition of the Fall not with itself, but with its opponents. From the beginning, there entered into a temporal classification a further "We-They" dichotomy not present, or not so fundamental, in other cultures. Since a progressive revelation had been brought to absolute fulfillment in the rise of Christianity, we do not even find in the Christian scriptures the severe prophetic self-criticism characteristic of the earlier Jewish scriptures, a self-criticism which contributed to a significant modification of an analogous "We-They" dichotomy present in ancient Israel.32 A single road to salvation, and the Christian mandate to bring all cultures to it, sharpened the dichotomy into a singularly polemical cutting edge. The end-point in the development of all other religions, who could only have stagnated or decayed from some prior stage

It was not only the prophetic self-criticism that helped to modify an exclusivistic concept of salvation in ancient Israel, but also a remarkable tendency to insist at various points that "the righteous of aU nations have a share in divine redemption" (as the accepted Rabbinic formula has it, enunciated in Tosifta Sanhédrin, XIII, 2). Thus Melchizedek, Enoch, Noah, and even Balaam, among others in early Israelite history, and the entire books of Job (traditionally said not to have been a Jew), Jonah, and Ruth witness that other peoples and cultures can experience God directly and know God truly. Yet there can be no doubt that this attitude is countered by many very harsh biblical denunciations of neighboring religions as "idolatrous" and in fact degenerate, and this viewpoint ended up having the greater persuasiveness for Christianity. It is necessary to add, however, that the Israelite reproaches of "idolatry" are generally directed in reality to the apostasy of fellow Jews from the direct worship of God, and not to followers of other religions as such. In this spirit even the Talmudic tractate Abodah lar ah aims less to describe other faiths than to assure that Jews do not confuse their own religion with them; in the later Christum medieval use of this text as a major source concerning "idolatry," the more tolerant Talmudic discussions of other religions had no influence. Within Judaism, however, the two tendencies struggled together throughout the medieval period. See J. Katz, Exclusiveness and Tolerance: Studies in Jewish-Gentile Relations in Medieval and Modern Times (London and New York, 1961). The Degeneration Paradigm 33 in the unilinear evolution of humankind, was Christianity. However, though the West has tended to apply degeneration theories with particular emphasis and consistency to historical societies other than itself, it is not wholly unique in this. There are other religions and societies that have developed structures that are not too different, though never are they as central and clearly defined as in Christianity. When Mahayana Buddhism, for example, in anchoring its teachings in the historical founder of Buddhism, sought to displace Theravada through the doctrine of upaya, Buddha's "skill in means," the result was an evolutionary scheme in which all other teachings were merely stages culminating in Mahayana. Theravada (and even more non-Buddhist reli­ gions) was a lower and more selfish path that could only encompass the outer husk of Gautama's message. But since both Theravada and Mahayana might still in Mahayana countries be practiced in the same monasteries, and were regarded as viable options even for the same person at different periods in his or her life or choices for members of the same family, the "We-They" dichotomy had to remain incompletely developed; both traditions were, after all, still part of the same religion. A little more sharply, since now we have to do with genuinely different religions, the Taoists formulated their response to the entry of Buddhism to China. Perhaps even in this influenced by Buddhism categories such as upaya, the Taoists developed the theory that when their legendary founder Lao-Tsu left China through the Western Gate, he travelled to India and using the powers of an Immortal appeared in that land as Siddharta Gautama, teaching a watered-down version of Taoism suitable to the Indian's more limited comprehension. The commentaries that later Buddhist sages added to that teaching only represented further distortions and misunderstandings of that simplified message, but this is what the Buddhists newly arrived in China were proclaiming as Truth! Many of the teachings of the two religions could in fact be seen as similar through the distorting lens of mistranslation and miscomprehension, and koA, matching Taoist with Buddhist ideas, was an important medium through which Buddhism became acclimated in China. The Taoists, making use of such methods and theories, could both condemn Buddhist teachings and be deeply influenced by them for, in accepting certain teachings as "really" Taoist, the Taoists insensibly moved closer to Buddhism even while criticizing the "foreign" nature of the religion.33 The paradoxical nature of this response appears again in modern Chinese history, where we find the basic structure being applied again by the Chinese to Western science. The first Jesuits in China in the seventeenth century, as is well known, made themselves useful and even necessary to the Imperial Court by their ability to predict the celestial phenomena thought to govern the emperor and his empire. By 1700, a few amateur mathematicians among the Court

33See E. Zürcher, The Buddhist Conquest of China (Leiden, 1959); and K. Ch'en, Buddhism in China: A Historical Survey (Princeton, 1964), pp. 48-53,62-69. 34 Journal of Ecumenical Studies mandarins had accepted and worked with Western methods, leading them to the restructuring of the traditional mathematical sciences. But, according to these men, and the K'ang-hsi Emperor their patron, the fundamentals of European astronomy and mathematics had originated in ancient China; obscure statements in classical literature "documented" the spread of the art to lesser barbarians just as it was dying out in its original home. By the mid-China dynasty this doctrine had been extended to all Western learning (and can still be encountered today). It gratified conservatives, yet once it was established the intensive introduction of Western ideas was possible; foreign science was not utterly heterodox after all.34 Modernization had become merely a matter of self-purification from a decadent past, a "remembering" of a yet more primordial and authentic past, an anamnesis. The remarkably similar Hindu response to the Western intrusion has already been mentioned. Hindu intellectuals have even been able to criticize Western "deviations" from aboriginal truth, in claiming for India an earlier and more spiritual understanding of science than in the materialistic West. Such beliefs are widespread in India today. One also often encounters the belief that Jesus spent his young adulthood learning at the feet of gurus in India teachings which were subsequently obscured or misunderstood in the West. In the same way some modernizing African intellectuals have attempted to assert a prior spiritual right to Western cultural creations, occasionally even affirming that Western religion is merely a degenerate version of the teachings of the Black Moses and Christ. Modernizing Muslims have for their part been tempted to claim for Islam a primordial creativity and originality in world cul­ ture, including the Western. However expressed, the functions the degeneration paradigm serves are remarkably similar. It permits both defensive and offensive strategies (including in the term also latent, not fully conscious, tactics) in the tense atmosphere of culture contact. Depending on the particular culture's power relation to the one regarded as "decadent," one or the other mode of the paradigm is emphasized. But in any case, the charge that a given culture has "degenerated" serves to negate the fully humanity and presentness of that culture. Richness and human ambiguity now become signs of decay, placed under the judgment of an ideal which is projected into the past. Degeneration theories are, in short, the expres­ sion of a recalcitrant and demanding idealism. Yet in a deeper sense we may say that this idealism is a particular version of a general and essential characteristic of consciousness: to become aware, we

The above paragraph is indebted to the review by N. Sivin of Wang P'ing, Hsi-fang Li-suan-hsueh chih Shu-fua (The Introduction of Western Astronomical Sciences in China), Monograph No. 17, Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica (Taipei, 1966), in the Journal of Asian Studies 29, 4 (1970). For a rich analysis of the complexity of the Chinese response to the West, see J. R. Levenson, Confucian China and Its Modern Fate (Berkeley, 1958,1964,1965). The Degeneration Paradigm 35 must exceed the given, go behind it, and make out of it a symbolism, or indeed take a position over against the world and, in a sense, counter the "thereness" of the given with the ethereally fragile universes of the possible. It is as part of this fundamental impetus of consciousness and of self-consciousness (so desperately scrutinized by Sartre, Heidegger, Max Scheler, and the phenomenologists) that the present is deprived of its fullness and becomes merely a shadow of past and future. The profound irony of consciousness is already suggested by this move­ ment, for by seeking release from the embodied temporal condition through a trans-temporal nostalgia for perfection, a crushing sense of time and its inexora­ ble decay is first generated. This paradox is also evident in the dilemma pre­ sented by degeneration paradigms: always straining for ideals and thus achieving humanity, one turns and rejects precisely that humanity. Still, it is possible to insist that there is nothing in consciousness that irrevo­ cably requires expression just in degeneration theories. It may be a necessity of consciousness to penetrate beyond given actualities to transcendent generalities, to thought freed of immediate sensory experience, but the reification of Self and Other that we find in the paradigms we have been studying must be regarded as the failure of thought, as false (and even "inauthentic") consciousness. Here the attempt to understand ends in stripping other human beings of their own reality, and makes them serve as shadows in one's own intellectual system. The cognitive failure is also a moral one. A genuine compassion is impossible when we ignore the humanity and fullness of being of other persons and cultures and spiritual­ ities. The general observation applies with force here, that one of the hardest (and thus rarest) accomplishments is to understand truly that another human being really exists.

Study and Discussion Questions 1. Summarize what is meant by the "degeneracy paradigm." 2. What problems does the author see in paradigms, generally? Discuss. 3. In what period of our development did the degeneracy paradigm originate, and what is its significance? 4. How does the British confrontation with Indian religion illustrate the significance of this era? 5. Discuss why a viable culture's response to "modernity" is perceived to be such a threat to Western scholars. 6. What factors give rise to the degeneracy hypothesis? 7. What are the factors behind the textual approach to culture and its intensification of the degeneracy interpretation? 8. What views on the nature of religion underlie the degeneracy hypothesis? 9. Why does the degeneracy paradigm inevitably lead to dehumanization? 10. What does the author conclude about the universality of the Golden Age nostalgia approach? Comment on his analysis. ^s

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