Durkheim’s notion of the ‘sacred’, he approvingly referred to Schleier-
macher’s On Religion, which the German theologian Rudolf Otto had re-edited
in 1899 (Söderblom 1913: 731–32). Otto himself, in his bestseller The Idea
of the Holy(1917), an ‘almost unclassifiable’, ‘introverted, fragmentary’ text
(Raphael 1997: 3, 5), argued that the holy ‘is a category of interpretation and
valuation peculiar to the sphere of religion’ (Otto 1958: 5). In order to get at
‘the meaning of “holy” above and beyond the meaning of goodness’ (Otto
1958: 6), he coined the term ‘numinous’ for a specific ‘state of mind’ which
is ‘perfectly sui generisand irreducible to any other’, one that can only be
invoked, not taught (Otto 1958: 7). As a result, religious experience became
the basic premise and privileged data for the study of religion (Raphael 1997;
Alles 2005).
Throughout much of the twentieth century ‘the sacred’ and ‘the holy’
remained corner-stones of the vocabulary of religious studies (Colpe [ed.]
1977). Major theoreticians included Roger Caillois (1913–1978), Mircea Eliade
(1907–1986), and Julien Ries, who continued the kind of inquiry initiated by
Eliade but gave it a historical-comparative turn (Ries 1978–1986, 1985, both
accounts culminating in Christianity).
Most scholars nowadays reject the notions of the holy and the sacred as
key concepts in the study of religion. Nevertheless, one finds some attempts
to rethink them (Colpe 1990; Anttonen 1996; Gantke 1998).
The emergence and institutionalization of the study of religion:
the 1870s to the 1990s
By the first half of the nineteenth century, at the latest, religion had become
the subject of a wide range of scholarly enterprises in Britain, France, Germany,
and some neighboring countries. The increasing influx of empirical data
necessitated efforts to classify, categorize, critique, and interpret the ‘raw data’.
This development is part and parcel of the general process described as the
‘scientification’ of learning. In the form of methodical and partly mechanical
empirical research, scholarship turned into a dynamic and open process
focusing on questions rather than on answers (Schnädelbach 1983: 88–117).
This also entailed professionalization, specialization, diversification, and the
formation of a canon of academic scientific disciplines operating with a specific
set of legitimate methods (Schnädelbach 1983: 96–97).
Although this chapter focuses on the study of religion as a specialized,
‘compartmentalized’, and ‘departmentalized’ academic subject, the scientific
study of religion has also been advanced in a variety of other humanistic and
social sciences that were gaining recognition in the nineteenth century, such
as theology, philosophy, diverse branches of philology, classical studies,
1111
2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
1011
1
2
3111
4 5 6 7 8 9
20111
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
30111
1
2
3
4
35
6
7
8
9
40111
42222
3
411
WESTERN EUROPE
19
