Author: Guy G Stroumsa
Publisher: Harvard University Press, 2010
Price: £25.95 (hardback)
Isbn: 9780674048607

Religion can be danger­ous. It tends to fly passenger aeroplanes into skyscrapers, blow up buses full of schoolchildren and dislocate the shoulders of people who aren’t confident about the metaphysics of the Nicene creed. And yet it is ubiquitous. Unbelief is biologically almost impossible. We can’t root religion out of our own heads, and we certainly can’t root it out of the badlands of Somalia and Afghanistan. For our own safety and sanity, religion needs to be studied seriously and urgently.

We know something about it already, of course. But it would be unwise to rely and act on that knowledge without tracing its origin. It might have been contaminated. The lens through which we see religion may be danger­ously distorted. This is where Guy Stroumsa’s book comes in. He contends, persuasively and readably, that our current comparative approach to religious phenomena has three main historical roots.

The first was ethnology. Mission­aries sailed to the benighted heathen of the Americas and Asia bearing Bibles, butt­oned boots and a huge cargo of self-satisfaction. The boots didn’t fit the wide feet of the unsaved, the Bible didn’t translate very well into languages made for monkey-hunting and ayahuasca séances, and the self-satisfaction, though faring better than the boots, took some knocks. The mission­aries realised that their congregation were not spiritual virgins, but brought a long and deep history of wild epiphany and systematic theo­logy to the weekly handouts of bread and catechism. The mission­aries would have to study in order to convert.

The second was the intellectual cosmopolitanism that came with the Renaissance. If you were sitting in Florence reading The Bacchæ, it was hard to maintain the delusion that the Pope was the first person to show any interest in God. And it might even cause you to wonder if there was a connection between eating the body of Dionysus on an Attic mountain and eating the body of Jesus in the Basilica di Santa Maria.

The third was the Reform­ation. If you are going to react tumult­uously against something, you need to know something about the thing you are rejecting,  if only to ensure that your insults are accurate and hurtful.

These three roots entwine and sprout others (for example, the now self-sustaining interest in the neurobiology of religion). Stroumsa maps their relationship with elegance, insight and a splendid intolerance of cant. This is a major new landmark in the intellectual landscape. It will help us to keep our bearings as we navigate around our own feelings towards religion and religions.