Exploring Religion in a Biological Landscape

Now and then an author, as if in a bad dream, may be tempted to do the most devastating review of his own work himself, the weaknesses of which are clear to his mind. A book such as Creation of the Sacred is open to attack from almost every side, combining, as it does, philo logical-historical interpretations with the evolutionary perspectives of biology and constant reference to human society in general. This is to abound in uncontrolled generalizations, undemonstrable hypotheses, and lingering pitfalls at every move. I am grateful to the editors of MTSR for having brought together a group of constructive critics who, while pointing out assumptions that have to be questioned and additional questions that have to be asked, rather broaden the per spective through contributions from their own fields of competence and open up the prospect that experts of biology and psychology might finally agree with an historian's approach. Through discussion with specialists in other fields, personal limita tions will come out more distinctly. There are blank spots even within my professional area, as Robert Phillips points out. Teaching Greek civilization, literature, and philosophy for 30 years, I have made efforts to get some firsthand knowledge of the ancient Orient, but neglected the Etruscan and the Roman side. It was also impossible to do justice to all the sources in their context at every instance—for Alexander's relation to Zeus Ammon, I followed the remark of Clitus as reported by Plutarch (Alexander 50), but did not discuss either di verging testimonies or modern controversies. It is more disturbing to find how many important books on general issues did not come to my attention in time, including Pascal Boyer's approach from cogni tive psychology. I may get some consolation, though not an excuse, from the fact that many of these books have appeared after the original delivery of the Gifford Lectures, which took part early in 1989. Anyhow, there is no denying the fact that I have some roots in the philological-historical tradition of nineteenth-century scholarship; hence orientations as progressive or regressive recede as against

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• Asceticism, Religion, and Biological Evolution

  Johannes Bronkhorst•Method & Theory in the Study of…•2001

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