Christian, and Islamic theological self-understanding gener-
ated some comparativist interests in all these monotheistic
theologies—but these were usually colored by traditional
apologetic and polemical concerns. The greatest exception to
this general rule may be found among Islamic thinkers, espe-
cially al-Sharasta ̄n ̄ı (d. 1153), whose treatise The Book of Sects
and Creeds provides a comparative theological analysis from
an Islamic perspective of most of the major religions of the
then-contemporary world. Most Christian theologies, for ex-
ample, did not agree with Tertullian’s implied negative re-
sponse to his famous rhetorical question, “What has Athens
to do with Jerusalem?”
The most common understanding on the part of Chris-
tian theology was that the use of philosophical resources did
not necessitate any assessment of the religions to which these
“pagan” philosophers may have held. For example, the use
of Middle Platonism and Neoplatonism by Christian theolo-
gians emerged at those locations (e.g., Alexandria) where the
relationship of Neoplatonism to the mystery religions and
occult practices was weakest in the ancient world. Hence
theologians like Origen and Clement could appeal to Middle
Platonic philosophy without comparativist analyses of the
explicitly cultic practices sometimes associated with Middle
Platonism and Neoplatonism. The dominant comparative
question for Christian theology (and, in their distinct but re-
lated ways, for Jewish and Islamic theologies) was the rela-
tionship of theology to philosophy, of revelation to reason.
There was little explicit theological interest in comparativist
religious analyses—again save for the traditional apologetic
and polemical treatises on the “pagans.”
Ancient Greece and Rome. Provided that a particular
religion did not interfere with civic order, the ancient Greeks
and especially the Romans were generally more tolerant of
religious differences than were the monotheistic religions.
This tolerance, in certain somewhat exceptional circum-
stances, gave rise to some interest in the fact of religious di-
versity. Among the classical Greeks, the major writer with an
interest in comparativism is undoubtedly the great historian
Herodotos. His work demonstrates remarkable concern with
non-Greek religions (especially the religions of the Egyp-
tians, Persians, and Babylonians), as well as with the religious
diversity within the Greek world itself. As a “comparativist,”
his “syncretist” sympathies are equally clear. His most nota-
ble successor in these interests (especially as regards Egyptian
religion) is Plutarch.
The Stoics were the first in the West to attempt to estab-
lish the existence of common beliefs within the diversity of
beliefs in the ancient world. They did so through their inven-
tion of the term religio naturalis (“natural religion”). The
most famous work of what might be called comparative the-
ology in the ancient world remains Cicero’s famous dialogue
De natura deorum, in which the theologies and philosophies
of the Stoics, Epicureans, and Academics are discussed. (Cic-
ero’s great dialogues encouraged comparativist interest in
later ages as well—witness David Hume’s use of him as a
model for his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion.) The
Stoics also developed allegorical methods of interpreting the
ancient myths and gods (e.g., Zeus interpreted as the sky,
Demeter as the earth). These methods were later employed
by some Jewish (e.g., Philo) and many Christian theologians
as an implicitly comparativist, hermeneutic method of scrip-
tural interpretation. Comparativist interests may also be
noted in the writings of Varro and comparative elements are
evident in texts with other major interests—for example,
Strabo’s Geography and Tacitus’s Germania. In the medieval
period, the outstanding figure with comparativist interests
was the Christian philosopher-theologian Nicholas of Cusa.Early Western modernity. The Renaissance, of course,
occasioned new interest in the works of antiquity, including
the classical mythologies. The most remarkable expression of
this interest can be found in the speculations on the existence
of an original revelation in all religions, in the texts of the
Christian thinkers Marsilio Ficino, Giovanni Pico della Mi-
randola, Giordano Bruno, and others. These men not only
revived the ancient myths for Christian theological purposes
but also argued for the “esoteric tradition” as the common
stream present in all the known religions of both antiquity
and the modern world.
The age of Western exploration in the fifteenth, six-
teenth, and seventeenth centuries stimulated new interest
not only in the religions of antiquity but also in the newly
observed religions of the Americas and those of Asia. The
most remarkable example of an exercise in “comparative the-
ology” during this period remains the work of a Jesuit mis-
sionary to China, Matteo Ricci, whose positive assessment,
on Christian theological grounds, of Confucianism is
unique. Indeed, Ricci’s letters and reports, although unsuc-
cessful with authorities at Rome, were, in the eighteenth cen-
tury, deeply influential upon the interest in Chinese religion
among such thinkers as Leibniz, Voltaire, Christian Wolff,
and Goethe. The comparative theological interests of the En-
lightenment were characteristically addressed to classical
Confucianism (somewhat bizarrely interpreted as eigh-
teenth-century “natural religion”), rarely to Daoism or Chi-
nese Buddhism.
With the advent of historico-critical methods, the com-
parative theological interests of Western thinkers shifted in
both their approach and in the areas of their dominant inter-
est. The Romantic thinkers (e.g., Johann Gottfried Herder)
analyzed distinct cultures as unitary expressions of the
unique genius of particular peoples. This interest encouraged
the development of historical studies for each religion as uni-
tary and unique. Earlier negative assessment by Enlighten-
ment thinkers of what they had named “positive religions”
(as distinct from a presumed common “natural religion”)
yielded, in the Romantics, to a positive comparativist assess-
ment of particular religious traditions and cultures. The si-
multaneous nineteenth-century historical interest in the an-
cient Near East spurred renewed comparativist interest in the
religions of ancient Assyria, Babylonia, and Egypt.9128 THEOLOGY: COMPARATIVE THEOLOGY