Tsadra Foundation: http://www.tsadra.org.
MICHAEL L. WALTER (1987)
FRANÇOISE POMMARET (2005)TIELE, C. P. (1830–1902), Dutch historian of religions.
Cornelis Petrus Tiele studied theology at the University of
Amsterdam and was a Remonstrant minister for twenty years
(1853–1873). During this time he applied himself to the
study of ancient religions and taught himself the Avestan lan-
guage as well as Akkadian and Egyptian. In 1872 he obtained
the Th.D. degree at the University of Leiden; and the follow-
ing year he became a professor at the Remonstrants’ seminary
in Leiden, where he taught the history of religions. In 1877,
Tiele was appointed to the new chair in history of religions
and philosophy of religion at the University of Leiden, in the
faculty of theology. He retired in 1900.
Tiele was a pioneer of the “science of religion” and one
of the first to offer a historical survey of a number of religions
based on the study of source materials. His own research
opened up the religions of ancient Iran, Mesopotamia, and
Egypt, putting the history of religions on a firm philological-
historical basis that was long to be the hallmark of the disci-
pline.
Tiele was much concerned with the broader notion of
a “development” of religion, a notion that was natural at a
time when evolution and progress were accepted ideas. He
saw religion—man’s “disposition of the heart toward
God”—as a distinct province of life that can be found every-
where, and he was convinced that there is a unity and inde-
pendence of religious life underlying all its different external
forms. The gradual development of the human mind in his-
tory implies a parallel development in religion, which is, basi-
cally, a progressive expansion of self-consciousness. Accord-
ing to Tiele, the historical changes of the forms of religion
show a process of evolution in the course of which the “reli-
gious idea” and the religious needs receive an ever fuller and
more perfect expression. The historical forms of religion rep-
resent different stages of this evolution, in particular from
nature religions to ethical religions. The historian of religions
has to compare and classify religious phenomena in accor-
dance with the state and direction of their development.
Tiele sharply distinguished all forms of religion from re-
ligion itself, and his deeper concern in the study of religion
is the question of the real nature and origin of the religion
that “reveals” itself in its manifold forms and phenomena.
He therefore divides the study of religion into two parts. The
first is morphology, that is, the inductive study of the phe-
nomena and their changes and transformations as a result of
a continuing development. This study requires, among other
things, a comparative history of religion.
The second part of the study of religion is ontology, the
study of the permanent element, beyond and through all
changes and passing forms, that is the core and the source
of religion. The real nature of religion is under investigation
here, and this part of the study demands a deductive reason-
ing on the basis of what has been reached by means of induc-
tive “empirical” research. The ontological study contains
both a phenomenological-analytical part, in which the reli-
gious phenomena are studied in each stage of development,
and a “psychological-synthetic” part in which the essence
and origin of religion are investigated; in fact this stage is
philosophical (rather than “psychological”) in nature. For
Tiele historical, phenomenological, and philosophical ques-
tions logically followed from each other. Because Tiele took
as his departure the premise that religion fundamentally is
a general human phenomenon and that the way in which it
has manifested itself as well as the elements of which it is
composed are the same always and everywhere, the study of
permanently recurring phenomena made sense.Tiele’s history of religions may have been somewhat
schematized, but it was dynamic; further, his phenomenolo-
gy had a dynamic character because of his notion of the de-
velopment of the human mind. His insistence that religion
“manifests” itself in the phenomena, and that this manifesta-
tion happens through the activity of the human mind, has
an almost modern, phenomenological flavor, like the idea
that religions are different expressions of that “religion” that
as a tendency slumbers in every person. Religion here is in-
vestigated as a human phenomenon, and the unifying factor
of all religious phenomena is the human mind.BIBLIOGRAPHY
For bibliographic data on Tiele’s person and work, see my Classi-
cal Approaches to the Study of Religion, vol. 2, Bibliography
(The Hague, 1974), pp. 283–286. A noteworthy commemo-
ration by Tiele’s colleague P. D. Chantepie de la Saussaye
was delivered at the Netherlands Royal Academy of Sciences
in 1902 (in Dutch) and republished in the latter’s Portretten
en kritieken (Haarlem, 1909), pp. 82–120.
Three of Tiele’s longer works exist in English translation: Outlines
of the History of Religion, to the Spread of Universal Religions,
7th ed. (London, 1905); History of the Egyptian Religion, 2d
ed. (London, 1884); and his Gifford Lectures, Elements of the
Science of Religion, 2 vols. (Edinburgh, 1897–1899).
New Sources
Molendijk, Arie L. “Tiele on Religion.” Numen 46, no. 3 (1999):
237–268.
Molendijk, Arie L., and Peter Pels, eds. Religion in the Making:
The Emergence of the Sciences of Religion. Leiden, 1998.
Ryba, Thomas. “Comparative Religion, Taxonomies and
19 th-Century Philosophies of Science: Chantepie de la Saus-
saye and Tiele.” Numen 48, no. 3 (2001): 309–338.JACQUES WAARDENBURG (1987)
Revised BibliographyT’IEN SEE TIAN
9192 TIELE, C. P.