Religion

The study of the world's religious traditions is coincident with the political and economic expansion of Western Europe.

The Jesuit missionaries of the 17th century included, especially, the Italians Matteo Ricci in China and Roberto de Nobili in India, and the Spaniard St Francis Xavier in Japan. During the 18th century great interest was aroused among Western scholars and philosophers by the first Latin translations of Confucian and Daoist texts by the Jesuits. For a time Chinese culture was idealized, especially by the Deists, who found in it proof of their thesis that morality could flourish without dogmatic religion. Pioneers in this field included the German philosophers Johann Gottfried von Herder and G. W. F. Hegel and the British philologist Friedrich Max Müller. Their work was followed by that of the British philosopher Edward Caird in The Evolution of Religion (1894), the Dutch theologian Cornelius Petrus Tiele in Elements of the Science of Religion (1897-1899), and the American philosopher and psychologist William James in Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), the first serious study of the psychology of religion.

In the 19th and 20th centuries notable specialized contributions to the study of comparative religion were made in Chinese studies by the French scholar Noël Julien, called Stanislas Julien, and the Jesuit missionary Leon Wieger; in Buddhist studies by the Dutch Indologist and philologist Jan Hendrik Kern and the British Orientalist Thomas William Rhys Davids; in the study of the Vedanta by the German philosopher and Sanskrit scholar Paul Deussen; in Daoist and Confucian studies by the British missionary and Sinologist James Legge; and in studies pertaining to India by the British Sanskrit scholar Sir Monier Monier-Williams.

Much of the early work in comparative religions was undertaken by missionaries seeking points of agreement between alien faiths and Christianity, and also ways of demonstrating the superiority of Christianity. Other work was accomplished by philologists whose interest lay in the linguistic form rather than the content of the sacred writings of other cultures. The growing conflict between religion and science in the Western world during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, however, resulted in widespread dissatisfaction with fundamentalist types of Christian belief. This dissatisfaction led in turn to a more sympathetic attitude to other faiths. In the present century, study of the ways of liberation in particular has made enormous strides, greatly assisted by the work of such outstanding Asian scholars as the Indians Surendra Nath Dasgupta and Sir Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, the Japanese Daisetzu Teitaro Suzuki and Junjiro Takakusu, the Chinese Fung Yu-lan, and the Sri Lankan Ananda Coomaraswamy.

In the three decades before his death, the name of the Romanian-born American historian of religions Mircea Eliade became almost synonymous with comparative studies. He investigated the “sacred” in beliefs, rites, and religious experiences of all peoples and cultures.