Apresentação do dossiê

A Teologia e as Ciências da Religião possuem uma origem comum na história do mundo acadêmico; compartilham caminhos semelhantes e contém, no interior de suas reflexões, um mesmo objeto de reflexão, a saber, o fenômeno sagrado. Ainda assim, a Teologia e as Ciências da Religião se diferem metodologicamente: enquanto disciplinas do conhecimento humano, a Teologia parte do pressuposto da atitude de fé, enquanto a Ciências da Religião, de modo geral, parte do pressuposto da consciência da fé. Mesmo que para a Área 44 de avaliação da CAPES ambas se inserem num mesmo espaço didático, faz-se importante notar a identidade e especificidade de cada área, sobretudo na própria Ciências da Religião, cujas discussões remontam as contribuições mais antigas de, sobretudo, Chantepie De La Saussaye e Max Müller, no século XIX, bem como as mais variadas vertentes, como a história da religião, a fenomenologia da religião e os estudos dos textos sagrados revisitados pela fortuna crítica da literatura. Com isso, o dossiê Epistemologia das Linguagens da Religião apresenta, a despeito do debate entre Teologia e Ciências da Religião continuar ativo, uma série de trabalhos com a intenção de reler autores e métodos, contemplando a especificidade da Ciências da Religião que lida com a linguagem e as ideias envolvidas nas diferentes expressões do ser.

A alegoria em J.R.R. Tolkien: entre as Ciências da Religião e a filosofia perene

O ensaio On Fairy-Stories de J.R.R. Tolkien (1892-1973) é resultado da conferência de 1939 para a Universidade de St. Andrews e revisado para publicação em 1947. Neste texto, Tolkien dialoga com duas figuras importantes para as Ciências da Religião, Max Müller (1823-1900) e Andrew Lang (1844-1912). O primeiro é um dos fundadores da ciência da religião, a partir de suas pesquisas em filologia, enfatizando as relações entre linguagem, mito e religião. O segundo foi antropólogo e folclorista, igualmente discutindo as relações entre mito e religião. Neste diálogo, Tolkien estabelece críticas a ambos, fundamentalmente relativas à concepção de alegoria, e indica uma proposta teórica que resgata elementos da filosofia perene, enfatizando elementos de Platão, Aristóteles, Agostinho e Tomás de Aquino.

MAX MÜLLER E A CIÊNCIA DA RELIGIÃO

Editorial

Rajnarayan Basu and His “Science of Religion”: The Emergence of Religious Studies through Exchanges between Bengali and Christian Reformers, Orientalists, and Theosophists

This article explores the genealogy of the “science of religion” developed by the Bengali intellectual Rajnarayan Basu (1826–1899). One of my central aims is to demonstrate that a “science of religion,” or Religionswissenschaft in the sense of Friedrich Max Müller, has emerged within a global context that was actively shaped by “non-Western” actors. To this end, I will focus on exchanges between the Indian reform movement of the Brahmo Samaj, Christian Unitarians, Transcendentalists, orientalist scholars, and members of the Theosophical Society. All these actors were concerned with the origin of religion, its modern meaning, and its function in shaping the future of society. Building on an analysis of the global exchanges revolving around these issues, special attention is paid to the inherent tensions between religious universalism and a nationalist insistence on “true religion,” which directly pertains to contested demarcations between reform and revival, or modernity and tradition.

Max Müller, Charles Darwin and the science of religion

The science of religion, as a discipline distinct from theology emerging in the 19th century, from the beginning was closely related to the discourse on Darwinism. This article focusses on Max Müller, known as ‘The father of Comparative Religion’, who was involved in the Darwinian discourse, compared with Jane Ellen Harrison who emphasised the impact of the theory of evolution, approaching, however, the ‘scientific study of religion’ from a different viewpoint.Contribution: From a historical point of view, this article discusses the relationship between different strands in Religious Studies (Religionswissenschaft), and, also, touches upon the relationship between Religious Studies and Theology.

Those Who Hoped

This chapter explores the relationship between the proliferation of artificial languages and literary cosmopolitanism at the turn of the century: both strove to promote ideas of world citizenship, universal communication, and peaceful international relations. The two most successful artificial languages of this period, Volapük and Esperanto, employed literature, literary translation, and the periodical medium to create a new type of cosmopolitan literacy intended to quench divisive nationalisms and to challenge Herder’s theories on the link between national language and individual identity. Starting with Henry James’s lampooning of Volapük in his short story ‘The Pupil’ (1891), the chapter charts the uneasy relationship between literature and artificial language movements. Ludwik L. Zamenhof, the creator of Esperanto, stressed the importance of literary translation for his utopian ideal and used original literature to explore the complex affect of his cosmopolitan identity. The chapter closes with an analysis of the growth of the Esperanto movement in turn-of-the-century Britain, focusing on its overlap with literary, artistic, and radical circles, on contributions by Max Müller, W. T. Stead, and Felix Moscheles, and on the 1907 Cambridge Esperanto World Congress.

Oscar Wilde’s World Literature

This chapter reads Oscar Wilde’s writings and career through the prism of world literature. The idea of world literature, originally formulated by Goethe in the 1820s, only gained wider currency in Britain at the end of the century, thanks to the influence of the English Goethe Society and its first president, Max Müller. Shortly after the establishment of the Society, in ‘The Critic as Artist’ (1891), Wilde drew on Goethe’s idea of world literature as the cornerstone for a liberal cosmopolitanism that celebrates cultural difference and sexual tolerance. Wilde’s interest in world literature found a practical outlet in Salomé (1893). The early reception of Salomé illustrates Wilde’s privileged yet precarious position between Britain and France: on both sides of the Channel his Symbolist drama was criticized from nationalist perspectives.

Semitic Religion and Sacrificial Ritual

We now turn to the broader intellectual context during the final three decades of the century, when sociology and anthropology were moving to the fore of the scene, often pushing philology backstage, as the preferred approach to the study of religion. As we shall see, the stakes, which were high, showcase at once ambivalent attitudes towards Judaism and the precarious status of Jewish scholars. The standing of Jewish scholars in the comparative and anthropological tradition reflects the strategy chosen by some among them (not always in a reflexive, conscious way) to overcome this precarious status. Both the comparative and the anthropological method permitted them to circumvent the traces of Christian theology which they correctly detected in more traditional, philological approaches to the study of the monotheist systems. Our three main protagonists here are Max Müller, Julius Wellhausen, and William Robertson Smith.