Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to
the Axial Age
Robert N. Bellah
Harvard University Press £25
(978-0-674-06143-9)
Church Times Bookshop £22.50
BOOKS on religion written by scientists can be severely
provoking. But not this one. This is a big book with big ambitions,
and it was really interesting; so why did it take me quite a while
to read? Partly because it dealt with such big subjects, in a way
that combined science and philosophy. That sounds intimidating,
but it is much more approachable than it sounds, though there was
a great deal of information from different specialisms to
absorb.
Robert Bellah relates studies of animal behaviour, including
ritual and play, to human behaviours. He shows how human evolution
(he takes evolution by natural selection as a given) leads to
humans' gradually acquiring a series of capacities (speech,
hunting, agriculture, literacy, culture, and philosophy), all of
which have an influence on how religions are formed. He looks at
how religious activity unites, enacts, and symbolises the reality
of human existence, to personalise it, and to form it into stories
with meaning - also called 'myths'.
He carries the readers along through new ways of seeing the
familiar - imitation, rhythm, speech, and gesture - all things that
convey meaning outside the careful constructs of argument and logic
which we like to think are guiding our actions and choices.
The book ends with a series of surveys of cultures he calls
"axial" - we might use the term "pivotal" - in human history.
Ancient Israel is set side by side with ancient Greece, China in
the first millennium BC, and ancient India. All four cultures
produced sophisticated and powerful ways of thinking about human
existence and the world around us. All four disseminated those
ideas by means of written texts - the importance of the invention
of literacy is almost impossible to over-emphasise in this respect.
Their writings continue to be studied, and to shape our culture and
our view of ourselves and the world.
The section on how Greek tragedy confronts the problematic
nature of human existence, forcing us to admit to elements of
injustice, chaos, and violence, made me reflect on how Christian
doctrine has usually aimed at ironing out such problems,
systematising right and wrong in a way that has its strengths, but
that cannot answer problems of justice and theodicy adequately. In
Greek myth, problems are presented: some are solved; others are
not.
He ends the book with a powerful call to religious tolerance
based on sympathetic understanding; and with an apocalyptic
warning that we are living through the first era in human evolution
in which a global extinction (several of these have happened in
past millennia, the last c.65 million years ago) will have a
"biotic rather than a physical cause" - by which he means us. We
are still agents of our own destruction, as the prophets of ancient
Israel knew when they proclaimed the word of God to a people who
would not listen.
The ancient Greeks knew, too, that the gulf between our
theoretical understanding of how we ought to live and our actual
behaviours of destruction, aggression, acquisition, and expansion
is unbridgeably wide. But it is not yet time to despair: even now,
he tells us, there is still time to rein in the violence and greed
of states, and to undo the damage that they cause to each other,
and the world we live in.
The Revd Dr Cally Hammond is Dean of Gonville and Caius
College, Cambridge.