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( . . .Back to the Beginning . . .)

The importance of the work of definition, then, should not be doubted. However, the contingency to which the previous quotes point makes it apparent that as critical as that endeavor is, it also requires close study, and deliberative analysis: work that is, in a word, critical. Taylor points out this double entendre, and stresses the importance of both understandings. The first half of his introduction focuses on the various states of decline found at national, cultural, and even individual levels, noting the "repression of local customs" forced by the intrusion of alien institutions. Even while in retreat, though, these same cultures are put into ever-increasing contact with a variety of other peoples, instigated by the on-going process of Euro-American hegemonism, and the concomitant project of technologization. Taylor argues that the resurgence of religion--in its various meanings and forms--can be seen as way of reacting and dealing with these diverse elements. While the initial note of millennialism he strikes sounds overly reductive ("As the millennium approaches, spiritual concerns pervade the personal lives of a growing number of individuals . . ."), he moves away from such simplistic equations, emphasizing instead the hope, and danger, these intertwined phenomena of globalization, modernization, and anti-secularization hold. "The possibility both for mutual understanding and for violent conflict" is present, Taylor states. The more-than-implicit subtext reinforces the importance of avoiding the latter while working for the former.

This, then, is where the critical/analytical side of the equation comes to the fore. To arrive at understanding, there must be a thorough knowledge of the terms to be used. "Thorough," though, should not be taken to mean absolute. Far from it, one's field of knowledge should not be tethered to static definitions, but rather, engaged in a dynamic process that constantly reworks itself as new concepts come to light. As Taylor puts it, "rather than positing a universal grid . . ., critical reflection articulates an incomplete web of open and flexible terms." While the prima facie task of Critical Terms for Religious Studies is to define a very concrete list of twenty-two terms (concepts, words, etc.), more important to Taylor--and all those selected to submit to this work--is that the reader realize the floating, shifting, natures of each. While for understanding to move forward there must be some type of a priori underlying it according to Taylor, that does not negate those assumptions' "cultural relativity," invariably rendering any definition "incomplete."

The essays themselves succeed in making this apparent in varying degrees. While all start with background on the term at hand--including etymology, past and present theoretical approaches, and the like--some handle the transition to broader development with greater aplomb than others. One of the most notable in this regard is Donald S. Lopez's contribution, an essay on "Belief." Considering that this term could well be argued as one of the central battlegrounds on which much of the debate on the veracity and import of religion and the religious is waged--especially in the wave of empiricism and experiment that has grown steadily from the Enlightenment to the present day--this essay "stakes out," as it were, a vital portion of the territory in which the rest of the terms given here must locate themselves. What, for example, is "sacrifice" without "belief" supplying fuel for the fire? Is a "relic" still one without "belief?" For that matter, what about "transgression," "experience," and, not to fall prone to hyperbole, but even "God" without this single word? Lopez, then, has the formidable task of demonstrating what meaning has built up in this foundational concept, and more centrally, how that meaning then shapes, or denies, people's understanding of themselves and their world.

For "belief," the focus falls on its very interiority: belief resists measurement, defies reification as an entity unto itself, yet at the same time seems to lead to tangible events, drives demonstrative acts that sometimes are all too measurable. As Lopez succinctly puts it, "belief is not without its historical effects." To place this into relief, Lopez revisits the dramatic death of Peter of Verona in the 13th century who, it is held, scribed his dying testament, "CREDO," in his own blood--martyred for, and in the process of, evidencing his belief. Lopez, however, wants to go beyond the story as known through art and word. Holding that "statements of belief are not to be judged by the criteria used . . .in semantics but in the practice of one's life," he goes on to show that the evidence gathered there reveals not a straight-forward conflict between the dualism of the Cathars who killed Peter, and the determined monism of the Roman Catholic church for which he was such a forceful advocate. Rather, the "practice" to which Peter puts his belief belies a situation more complex than a single word, and involved as it was in a power struggle between these two forces, fraught with politics and polemic. Lopez demonstrates that before his death, Peter was involved with a project that wrote "belief" in the executed bodies of those that fell victim to inquisitors, and declared "credo" as it absconded with the properties of those who purportedly did not. Bluntly, "the contents of men's and women's minds serv[ed] as the pretext to justify the taking of property and the taking of lives." In the process of trying to transform what he believed--the singular God of the Apostles' Creed--into demonstrable practice--preaching vociferously against those who did not; confiscating goods; arresting, imprisoning, and executing those deemed heretics--Peter also took part in a project of theological alchemy. Peter, along with the Roman Catholic Church, wanted to take the immaterial nature of belief and give it substance. The result? Something vital was lost in the translation, for in the end, "Peter was murdered not for his belief but for his deeds."

To emphasize the gap between the inner world of belief and the outer world to which it gives rise, Lopez jumps in time and place to late 19th-century Ceylon. Despite the twofold distance from 13th-century Italy, a situation similar in its fundamentals is under way. Lopez sets before us a situation where, once again, there is an attempt to reify belief. Indeed, here, the project is even more ambitious, for it is to create "belief" where there was none before. An odd initiative, to be sure, but given its instigator, not altogether surprising. The force behind this religious demarche was none other than the cofounder, partnered with Helena Blavatsky, of what is regarded as modern Theosophy: Colonel Henry Olcott. The two traveled to the Far East in the late 1870's, hoping to affirm Theosophy's ties with the teachings and wisdom of Hinduism and Buddhism. During their travels, Olcott gained a quick affinity for Buddhism, taking in all he could about his new religious path, and still not satiated (Lopez quotes Olcott as having "claimed to have read "15,000 pages of Buddhist teaching."" They, of course, were also all in translation). In all his reading, however, he was aghast to find that he did not come across any single source and codification of Buddhist beliefs. To paraphrase Lopez, that no single source was extant "suggests more about Olcott's assumptions about Buddhism than it does about any deficiencies" within the tradition itself. For as eager as Olcott was to distance himself from Christianity--first in Theosophy, then in Buddhism--he decided to author a version of a decidedly Christian device to forward the (or more appropriately, "his") Buddhist cause. In 1881, Olcott published The Buddhist Catechism. This question-and-answer delineation of true Buddhist "belief" made tangible that which, heretofore, had never been necessitated: a specific and literal system wherein one could validate what in others, or oneself, was proper belief. It would be easy, and not altogether untrue, to say Olcott devised and penned The Buddhist Catechism in a game of theological one-upmanship with the Christian missionaries that permeated Ceylon at the time, utilizing one of their best tools of dissemination to forward Buddhism instead. Lopez would point out that the Euro-Christian connection runs at a deeper and more implicit level: "Olcott's activities in Ceylon appear . . .as the inevitable consequences of an ideology of belief, that is, an assumption deriving from the history of Christianity that religion is above all an interior assent to certain truths."

( . . .The Rest of the Story, Cont'd. . . .)