The scholarly discovery of religion in early modern times

Early modernity brought many deep changes to the status of religion in Western European countries. The Reformation constitutes obviously the major parting line for the transformation of religious attitudes in Europe. In the following pages, I shall not seek to analyze the transformations of Christian ritual and theology. Rather, I shall focus on the very conception of religion, and on the new vistas for a comparative study of the religions of the world, vistas opened up by a number of early modern scholars, both Catholics and Protestants. These scholars took as the subject of their studies many different religious phenomena, past and present, from societies close and afar. Often deciphering texts, or communicating with natives, in difficult languages, these early modern scholars, who were usually working alone, without the comfort of an academic institution, succeeded in establishing the grounds for the modern, comparative study of religion. In order to fully understand this complex phenomenon, we must start, before the Reformation, with the great discoveries of the late fifteenth and of the early sixteenth century. These offer an obvious terminus a quo, while the French Revolution provides a convenient terminus ad quem. Traditionally, the modern, comparative, and historical study of religion is perceived as having started with the establishment of specialized chairs in a number of European universities. To my mind, this new discipline started much earlier, long before institutional frameworks were established - and therefore, long before comparative religion, or the “science of religion,” could be taught to a body of students. In a sense, the defining moment for the modern, non-theological study of religions starts with its intellectual conception rather than with its academic birth. In his big book on the conditions and the nature of religion in the modern world, A Secular Age, the philosopher Charles Taylor insists on the fact that the very idea of religion in 1500 (in Western Europe) was strikingly different from what it is in the twenty-first century.