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Method in the History of Religions
By Paul O. Ingram

"The notion that the historian of religions should seek disinterested, impersonal, descriptive knowledge about religious 'matters of fact' understood as existing independently of concrete persons should be outrightly rejected as an inadequate metaphor. . . . No methodology is developed prior to the process of understanding and discovery . . . for method is essentially a way of interpreting the implications of insights which have their roots in the tacit forms of inarticulate knowledge."

MIRCEA ELIADE has warned us that the history of religions as a scholarly discipline is rapidly approaching the end of a creative epoch.¹ The chief sign of the times that this is true is the fact that methodology, primarily understood as a technology for understanding, has become a sub-discipline. Methodology has become an object of scholarly inquiry in and of itself and is viewed as an issue of ultimate concern, apart from the actual doing of research on religious experience.

The result is that the task of understanding the innumerable ways in which we have encountered and expressed "the Sacred" has assumed a secondary position of importance to developing a unified systematic and scientific method appropriate for organizing data into coherent patterns of understanding.

We seem to be entering a period of scholasticism in which major scholarly effort is directed toward writing papers about papers about the methods of scholars whose views of the nature and meaning of religious experience and the methods by which they arrived at their conclusions are the important issues. In other words, the tendency is not to write about religious experience in its historical manifestations in

Paul O. Ingram is Assistant Professor of Religion at the Pacific Lutheran University, Tacoma, Washington. He has also taught at Simpson College, Indianola, Iowa, and in 1968-69 he spent a year in Japan as a Danforth Fellow. He is a graduate of Chapman College and the Claremont Graduate School. Dr. Ingram has published articles on the history of religions in such journals as JapaneseJournal of Religious Studies, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, and Numen.
¹ Mircea Eliade, "Crisis and Renewal in History of Religions," History of Religions, Vol. 5, No. I (Summer 1965), p. 5.

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some coherent way, but about the technology of how to deal with our empirical data.²

Our current situation is beautifully illustrated by an account, recorded in the Chuang Tzu, of a dialogue between the Taoist sage, Chuang Tzu, and his friend, Hui Tzu, who personifies the notion of methodology as technplogy.

Chuang Tzu and Hui Tzu were taking a leisurely walk along the Hao River. Chuang Tzu said, "The fish are swimming at ease. This is the happiness of the fish."

"You are not a fish," said Hui Tzu. "How do you know it is happiness?"

"You are not I,` Chuang Tzu said. "How do you know that I do not know the happiness of the fish?"

Hui Tzu said, "Of course I do not know, since I am not you. But you are not a fish, and it is perfectly clear that you do not know the happiness of the fish."

"Let us get at the bottom of the matter," said Chuang Tzu. "When you asked how I knew the happiness of the fish, you already knew that I knew the happiness of the fish, but asked how. I knew it [while walking] along the river.³

Hui Tzu's problem is our problem in the History of Religions. We, like him, have transformed the problem of understanding into a problem of technique. At the same time, like Hui Tzu, we have perhaps unconsciously raised the real issue of methodology, which is philosophical and epistemological: how do I know that I know?

Briefly stated, I hope to establish three points: (1) methodology understood as the development of a systematic set of rules, that is as a technology which must be applied to the data of human experience in order that it can be understood, should be rejected by all disciplines of scholarly inquiry; (2) methodology is essentially an issue of metaphysics and epistemology, and it must be approached as such by the historian of religions; and (3) because all methodologies are essentially metaphoric in nature, no methodology is ever developed apart from the actual doing of scholarly inquiry. A method of inquiry is never prior to its application to a problem, but evolves along with the process of inquiry and understanding itself.

I

History of religions (Religionswissenschaft ) has traditionally defined its task as that of understanding and articulating the totality of the human religious experience in all of its historical manifestations.⁴ Those who are professionally involved in this discipline under-

² For example, Joachim Wach spent most of his scholarly career writing about methodological problems in terms of the proper techniques to be applied to the empirical "data" of religion. See also Mircea Eliade and Joseph M. Kitagawa (eds.), The History of Religions: Essays in Methodology (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1959) and Joseph M. Kitagawa (ed.), The History of Religions: Essays in the Problem of Understanding, Vol. I of Essays in Divinity, ed. Jerold C. Brauer (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1967).
³ Wing-tzit Chan (trans.), A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), pp. 209-210.
⁴ Cf. Joachim Wach, "The Place of History of Religions in the Study of Theology,"

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stand the task as nothing less than showing how strong, how weak, and how enduring in ever new ways religion has manifested itself in experience, both creatively and destructively, externally through what Joachim Wach called the "theoretical, practical, and sociological expressions" of "subjective religious experience."⁵ It is therefore implicitly assumed that the outward expressions of religious experience-its language, cultic acts, and cultural and sociological expressions-are the symbolic codes which point beyond themselves to the religious reality they at the same time at least partially embody. Another way of stating this, the way I personally prefer, is that all outward expressions of religious experience are metaphorical ways of "figuring" the world and the human experience of the world. Whatever else it may be, religious symbolization is part of the religious experience itself, and the experience would be incomplete without its symbolic expressions.

Acceptance of this task does not erase the fact that there are obvious problems concerning how it is possible to understand a religious tradition other than one's own, or indeed whether this is at all possible.⁶ There are, first of all, well known quantitative difficulties. The sheer amount of material at our disposal is simply too vast for any single historian of religions to manage. We are therefore forced to depend upon the research of various experts in the more specialized fields of religious studies, such as ethnology, philosophy of religion, psychology of religion, sociology of religion, theology, anthropology, as well as upon the insights of the specialized studies of specific religious traditions such as Islamic studies, Buddhist studies, Indian studies, and Japanese studies. In other words, in an age of specialization, history of religions has self-consciously defined itself as interdisciplinary.

Besides the quantitative difficulties, there are also qualitative problems having to do with the uniqueness of foreign inwardness, which is always inherent in the expressions of religious experience in traditions other than one's own. Just how is it possible to "get into" these traditions so that they can be articulated to others who likewise do not share in the experience without falsification? How can we bridge the historical and cultural gaps between our history and culture, and the

Types of Religious Experience (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), p.7; Joseph M. Kitagawa. "The Making of a Historian of Religion," Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Vol. 36, No. 3 (September 1968), pp. 199-200, and "The History of Religions in America," The History of Religions: Essays in Methodology, pp. 18-20; and Mircea Eliade, "History of Religions and a New Humanism," History of Religions, Vol. 1, No. I (September 196 1), pp. 1-8.
⁵ Joachim Wach, Sociology of Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), pp. 19-34.
⁶ Wilfred Cantwell Smith has noted that if it is not possible to understand, at least partially, religious experience other than one's own, then of course history of religions has no justification for its existence. I regard his treatment of this problem as the best statement of the issues involved. See "Comparative Religion: Whither and Why," The History of Religions: Essays in Methodology, pp. 31-58.

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history and culture embodied in the religious traditions we are trying to understand and interpret? These questions and others are not at all unique to the history of religions. All scholarly disciplines are burdened with the same problems relating to their specific areas of concern, so that the history of religions is rather typical in this regard.

In spite of these difficulties, historians of religions are agreed that at least partial understanding is possible.⁷ Understanding is always a matter of degree and is possible because the expressions of religious experience seem to allow something of their inner meaning to shine through for those who know how to look. How much understanding is gained, its degree and quality, depends upon the skill, luck, sensitivity, the intuitive power and the sympathy, of the individual inquirer.⁸

Presupposed here, of course, is the notion that all human beings share common human characteristics which serve as the foundation for one religious person's understanding of another. Something in common is present, it is assumed, even though there is no agreement as to the nature of this "something," because it is essentially a philosophical issue. It is also assumed that a non-religious person, if there is such a being, is thereby prevented from attaining any meaningful understanding of religion since religion is rejected on principle.⁹

The solution to these methodological issues does not lie in the development of procedural rules and techniques suitable for doing religious studies. What is at issue is the philosophical perspective from which we encounter and interpret what we study. That is, we must have some notion about the nature of reality, the "way things are," and about the nature of religious experience before we can study and interpret the meaning of various expressions of religious faith. At the very least, we must have a tacit notion of what we are talking about before we can talk about it explicitly. This is why, in my opinion, the issue is philosophical, for whatever else religion is, it is a "vision" of the "way things are" in terms of "value."¹⁰ It involves a perception

⁷ Cf. Joachim Wach, "The Meaning and Task of the History of Religions (Religions-wissenschaft)," The History of Religions: Essays in the Problem of Understanding, pp. 8-11.
⁸ This obvious but often overlooked point has been given its most sensitive treatment by Wilfred Cantwell Smith. See his essay, "Comparative Religion: Whither and Why," op. cit., pp. 31-50. Cf. Gordon E. Pruett, "History, Transcendence, and World Community in the Work of Wilfred Cantwell Smith," Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Vol. 41, No. 4 (December 1973), pp. 573-590.
⁹ The point of departure for history of religions is that whatever else it may be, religion cannot be understood in terms of non-religious factors. Thus all forms of reductionism which seek to "explain" religion in terms other than itself must be rejected on the grounds that such theories explain nothing by explaining religion away. Included here, for example, would be certain forms of Freudian and Marxist reductionisms. See Robert Bellah, "Transcendence in Contemporary Society," Beyond Belief (New York: Harper and Row, 1970), pp. 196-207.
¹⁰ While I find difficulty with many of the specific elements in Whitehead's philosophy and with his specific views of religion, I do find his philosophical perspective a meaningful one from which to approach and interpret human experience in the world. For Whitehead's notion of religion as a vision of the way things are in terms of value, see Process and Reality (New York: Macmillan, 1967), pp. 519-533 and Religion in the Making (New York: Meridian Books, 1960), pp. 13-28.

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of the nature of reality that is prior to its acting out by means of the various types of religious expressions.¹¹

In order to elucidate the meaning of religious experience, as Joseph M. Kitagawa has noted,¹² most historians of religions are either "historically oriented" or "phenomenologically oriented." "Historically oriented" scholars tend to be concerned about "what really happened" and the "actual becoming" of particular religious phenomena, so that the data of religion are dealt with in historical connections with other religious and cultural contexts. "Phenomenologically oriented" scholars are more likely to search for the "structures" common to all forms of religious experience by looking for similarities, analogies, and homologies. Thus, the data of religion are dealt with "cross-sectionally" and "typologically" without regard to historical and cultural contexts.

Kitagawa has also rightly noted that the history of religions requires hermeneutic that in some way will harmonize the insights of both approaches into a more comprehensive view of religious experience. But neither "phenomenology" nor an "historical approacb" nor a "hermeneutic unifying the insights of both" is possible under the Cartesian philosophical assumptions with which most of us at present operate.

We cannot, of course, do our work without a prior notion of what it is we are seeking to understand. The problem is not one of getting rid of our interpretive framework, but one of reflectively and creatively using our interpretive framework as a point of departure so that we can say something about religious experience that relates to concrete people. At the same time, we must keep in mind the fact that our interpretive framework will change as we do our work. The point is that we will always have an interpretive framework that implies an over-all philosophical world-view and epistemology.

II

Let me make explicit my tacit notion of what it is I think I am talking, writing, and teaching about, not in the sense of a definition, since religion is not a thing that exists apart from embodiment in the experience of human beings. For after all, can very much depend upon a definition of "religion?" Can definitions tell people whether or not they are religious? If so, why is it that religious persons do not seem to worry about the definition of what it is they are doing? Inevitably, one suspects that the issue here is more fundamental than a problem of semantics. Many notions of religion are possible and legitimate so long as they are consistently, coherently, and non-dogmatically used. With this in mind, I will try to present four factors which, when I perceive

¹¹ Cf. Whitehead, Religion in the Making, pp. 138-139.
¹² Cf. Joseph M. Kitagawa, "Primitive, Classical, and Modern Religions: A Perspective on Understanding the History of Religions," The History of Religions: Essays in the Problem of Understanding, pp. 39-41.

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them to be conjoined together, spontaneously cause me to think and speak of religion.

The first factor of religion is that it is a vision of the world, of the way things really are," which is not given in ordinary sensory experience. Historically, the religious vision has usually included entities superior or beyond the natural world, that is, gods, God, spirits, and other forms of entities. On the other hand, the religious vision may also be understood as a change of perspective about the nature of the world, and one's own deepest self, from unenlightened to enlightened knowledge. Thus it is that some religious traditions can be atheistic, such as Theravada Buddhism, some forms of Mahayana Buddhism and Hinduism, and philosophical Taoism. But whenever human nature is understood to imply soul, spirit, Buddha Nature, Brahman-Atman, or something other than that which which is accessible to ordinary sensory experience, we stand on the fringes of religion.

The second factor which I believe to be present in religion involves a sense of absoluteness. For the religious person, there is something, or perhaps many things, the value and validity of which is not measurable or attainable merely by means of the ongoing flux of the pragmatic concerns of daily life. The religious person senses, because of a vision of the way things are, a dimension of value which does not require anything other than itself for its justification, and therefore cannot be reduced to anything other than itself. Thus the religious person "perceives" or "comprehends," even though not able to fully articulate it, a reality having concurrent social and moral obligations.¹³ There is some goal to be obtained, individually and/or socially, which transcends the relativities of all other purposes. The sense of absoluteness is what I interpret Eliade to mean by the "Sacred" and what Rudolf Otto meant by "the Holy."

The third factor which I find present in religion is that all of its expressions of absoluteness are necessarily and always symbolic. In fact, all religious traditions express the sense of the sacred in more or less standardized forms of outward action, public or private, although there is also a good deal of spontaneity with regard to the creation of new forms of expressions. The religious person's perception of a supreme reality, or power, or excellence beyond everyday concerns is acknowledged, talked about, and celebrated.

The fourth factor which I find present in religion is interest in psychic or spiritual states. If what I am seeking to alter is a purely out-

¹³ It can be argued that nothing we know can be precisely and completely articulated. In fact, Michael Polanyi so argues in his discussion of the "tacit component" of all knowledge in Personal Knowledge (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1964), pp. 71-87.

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ward condition, such as the political or economic structures of society, I am not likely to think in terms of religion, although it is certainly possible that religious concerns can and should be involved in social and economic reform. But when one is seeking to attain a psychic or spiritual condition of a qualitative sort different from what is now experienced individually and/or socially, we are encountering religion.

When all of these factors are present in some form of interaction, I find myself spontaneously thinking of religion. On the other hand, when only one is present, I am likely to think in terms of non-religion. When two or more are conjoined together, I am often unsure how to classify what I have encountered. But at the very least, what humanity has called "religion," and what I would prefer to call "religious faith" or "religious experience" (stressing the adjectival nature of our subject matter), is what significantly binds values together for an individual. It is a vision according to which an individual is linked to those basic resources of life, both within and without, which give a sense of worth and meaning. Religious faith is a comprehensive life-orientation involving both "objective" factors (the numerous symbolic expressions of religious faith) and "subjective" factors (the religious vision itself), which for the religious person are never separated but always conjoined together.

Here lies the central methodological problem of any scholarly inquiry concerning religion. The implicit and explicit definitions used, the measuring techniques employed, the presence or lack of presence of religious faith on the part of the investigator-in fact, all of our devices expose factors which contribute to our conclusions-conclusions that are intended to express the "way things really are." This is precisely where the problem of phenomenological studies lies. Its avowed goal of understanding the "way things really are" apart from most, if not all, presuppositions is more often than not taken to mean a description of a reality that stands independent of and external to any single person. Phenomenology has been taken to mean the setting forth of the "facts" of religious experience in isolation from concrete embodiment in historically and culturally conditioned religious human beings. This "objective truth" is thought to be exposed when a number of persons, in principle any number, arrives at the same descriptive conclusions by using the same phenomenological techniques and procedures. The model for objectivity here is Cartesian-knowledge established by disinterested cognition of real "facts" existing independently of the knower and which are indeed in no way affected by their being known.

What I am objecting to is the notion of objectivity presupposed by not only phenomenology but also by "historically oriented scholars." I am not rejecting empirical, deductive, or inductive procedures in the study of religion. I am rather proposing that the notion of objectivity that has infected the western intellectual tradition since Descartes

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needs to be reformulated according to a model of knowledge as "personal." I am suggesting that, as a problem of epistemology, objectivity means: (1) self-consciousness on the part of the researcher of the limitations and possibilities inherent in the particular tacit and explicit presuppositions of the interpretive framework; (2) an emphasis upon the particularity of a given religious expression or collection of expressions; and (3) "personal knowledge" as a more adequate model for understanding the "way things really are."

III

Elizabeth Sewell has raised an interesting epistemological point ("Method," in her language) in noting that human thought is essentially metaphoric in nature and structure.

Thought is never, despite appearance, a detached activity or product of the brain nor even a sole and pure relation between intellect and phenomena. It is always involved with man's living self as a whole, and in turn is a constituent element in man's continuous self-construction, be it individual or communal, at any given time or place.¹⁴

In other words, the way we think, which is methodology, and our way of being in the world are bound together in a relation of mutual reciprocity. "As we think, which is method, and what we are, which is Man, stand in an 'as-so-and-so' relation to one another, a relation of resemblance and cause and effect.¹⁵ How we think determines what we think we are and what the world was, is, and can become.

It is for this reason that methodology is an epistemological problem, and not merely a question of developing technical skills for the actual performance of scholarly investigation. Because this is so, the historian of religions cannot deal with the issues that are involved merely as historian of religions. At this point, we must become philosophers. It must be noted, however, that I do not wish to imply by this statement that we must become professional philosophers. The task of the historian of religion is not to make normative value judgments about the "truth" or "falsehood" or adequacy of the religious traditions being studied. At the same time, we do have a philosophical task to perform before we can do our work, namely, that of making explicit the tacit philosophical and epistemological framework from which we are doing our work. We must also justify, as philosophers, why we are doing our work from a particular philosophical-epistemological perspective. In my view, the history of religions is neither a purely descriptive discipline nor solely a normative discipline, but contains elements of both.

I understand the metaphoric structure of methodology to mean the operation of the human mind whereby we select and combine symbolic images through which we "read" or "figure" what is going on in

¹⁴ Elizabeth Sewell, The Human Metaphor (South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press, 1964), pp. 11 - 12.
¹⁵ Ibid., p. 15.

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the world. My point may become clearer by briefly considering one aspect of the "machine metaphor" which, in the west, still predominates in both the popular mind and in all scholarly disciplines of inquiry from the humanities to many of the natural sciences.¹⁶

No method of knowing and no form of knowledge is simply impersonal knowledge of the operations of a machine-like universe existing in isolation from the knowing person. If such were the case, the dualism between knower and known, subject and object, religious experience and religious symbol, could not be overcome, and therefore we could in fact know nothing. This has been recently pointed out by the scientist-philosopher Michael Polanyi, who to my mind has demonstrated that all knowledge, including scientific knowledge, is personal to the core.¹⁷

This notion should be of great interest to the historian of religions. Our "instruments," our methods of thinking and doing, are extensions of ourselves as mind-body. They are never the affirmation of the self as a "thinking substance" existing independently of the objective world, as is presupposed by Descartes' cogito ergo sum, nor are they an equating of the self as a thinking machine whose thought is impersonal knowledge about a mathematically precise machine-like external universe. All thought and knowledge, consequently, is ultimately dependent upon thinking persons being committed in "lonely faith"¹⁸ and responsibility to selected instruments, their way of thinking. Once more, this activity involves believing in and expressing the "tacit component" of all human thought about anything, which also has its roots in bodily activity and in the inarticulate skill of the human mind.¹⁹ In this sense, thought becomes conceived of as an integral human activity, something akin to the "groping" (a term which Polanyi shares with Teilhard de Chardin) or the striving of even the lowest of organisms.

It is obvious, of course, that any epistemological position, like the one just outlined, involves a metaphysical position. Metaphysically, the view that knowledge is personal implies an organic metaphor for figuring the "way things are" in human experience, for the notion of organism implies the interrelatedness of things. The entities of the universe must share some form of interrelation before knowledge as such is possible, and it seems to me that an organic metaphor is most suitable for interpreting this. In point of fact, such a metaphor is now

¹⁶ See E. A. Burtt, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science (Garden City: Doubleday, 1932), pp. 205-302; 303-325 for a description and analysis of Descartes' method, his attempt to work out a comprehensive account of the mathematical structures and operations of the material universe in which man and his interests are read out of nature, and how through Newton the modern age has assumed the Cartesian metaphor as its way of "figuring" the world impersonally.
¹⁷ Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1964), pp. 49-50.
¹⁸ Sewell, op. cit., p. 29.
¹⁹ Polanyi, op. cit., pp. 69-77. Also see his The Study of Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959), pp. 11-39.

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in the process of legitimization through the work of many of the natural scientists,²⁰ as well as by developments in process philosophy since Whitehead. Within this context, "organism" should not be taken to mean any organism, but rather the most complex, active, and powerful organism which is at once body and mind and which extends itself through language. Seen through such an organic metaphor, the world is not a collection of "pill-like atoms," insulated bodies, and isolated minds. It is nearer the truth to think of all organizations, biological, social, and even of matter, as open systems of interrelations which are interpenetrated by other systems. We do not live in and experience an amorphous world, but a universe of open forms and possibilities. This view of the world, which I believe is now replacing the machine metaphor of the Cartesian world view, is also a rejection of all forms of dualism.²¹ In terms of methodology, we are, since Descartes, accustomed and perhaps conditioned to regarding the separation of the observer from what is observed, the knower from the known, as one of the necessary requirements for objective knowledge. In so doing, we are perhaps already out of date, for even in the natural sciences, the formal exclusion of the observer from the observed is on the way out.²² The humanities and the social sciences in general, and the history of religions in particular, should follow suit.

IV

If, following Michael Polanyi, all knowledge contains a "tacit component," and if, according to Elizabeth Sewell, methodology is a metaphoric way of figuring the world, we may ask what implications these principles may have for the study of the history of religions.

First of all, the notion that the historian of religions should seek disinterested, impersonal, descriptive knowledge about religious "matters of fact" understood as existing independently of concrete persons should be outrightly rejected as an inadequate metaphor. We must cease to understand our task as objective analysis, on the Cartesian model, of empirically given phenomena in the rather vain hope of abstracting the universal elements which all concrete religions must share for them to be called "religions." Such abstractions have

²⁰ Cf. Alexander Koryé, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1957); Albert Einstein and Leopold Infeld, The Evolution of Physics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1938); R. B. Braithwaite, Scientific Explanation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968); H. Butterfield, The Origins of Modern Science (New York: Macmillan, 1957), pp. 210-234; A. R. Hall, The Scientific Revolution (Boston: Beacon Press, 1954); and Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962).
²¹ See Whitehead's remarks on dualism in Adventures of Ideas (New York: New American Library, 1960), pp, 192-193. For his more rigorous critique of dualism, see Process and Reality, pp. 95-126.
²² This is the opinion of Potanyi, at least. See Personal Knowledge, pp. 132-203. Also see Whitehead's remarks concerning the theory of relativity and the quantum theory in Science and the Modern World (New York: New American Library, 1960), pp. 106-126.

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nothing to do with religious experience by the very fact that they are not embodied in religious human beings.

Secondly, methodology has been tacitly and explicitly understood in the history of religions, since Max Muller, as basically a technology for manipulating "religious data" into precise, intelligible patterns that can be understood by anyone who followed the same technical procedures. Our task as "scientific" interpreters of religious experience was taken to be that of developing a "method" of doing research appropriate to our specific data. If something was encountered with which our methodology could not deal, the tendency was to ignore it or to deny that what was encountered was "religion." At best, such new problems were regarded as merely a matter of making procedural adjustments in the methodology that was employed.

The epistemological assumptions underlying these notions are fundamentally mechanistic, and they are based upon a bifurcation of knower and known, religious "fact" (empirically given) and religious experience. Another way of phrasing this is that our current concern with the relatively external side of religious experience has taken precedence over concern with the inner meaning of religious expression and the inner dynamics of religious faith. The machine metaphor of Cartesian epistemology is simply not appropriate to our subject matter. Religious experience cannot be approached as a problem of engineering, for like art and poetry, religious experience flows from the inner life of persons existing in the world, creating its forms only to express insights and then transcending them.

The inner life of the religious person always remains in control of the outer life, and forever finds it necessary to go beyond the forms it creates. Indeed, the inner life of religious experience creates its forms of expression only to destroy them, for religious faith is always in process of becoming. It is never static, and it is for this reason that I believe that understanding this process requires an interpretive framework based upon a process metaphysic, a model of knowledge as personal, and a notion of methodology as metaphor.

Thirdly, methodology is a philosophical-epistemological issue for all disciplines of inquiry, and not merely a problem of working out a technical procedure that can be adequately applied to one's data. Consequently, the historian of religions must begin as a philosopher by making tacit philosophical and epistemological assumptions explicit. We must not try to "bracket" off these assumptions in some form of phenomenological suspension, for this is not possible. We must recognize them, take responsibility for them, and articulate them within the context of a coherent interpretive framework while knowing that no interpretive framework is absolutely valid or totally adequate.

It is necessary to do our philosophical homework before we can do our work as historians of religions, for, as Polanyi puts it, "the power

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of our conceptions lies in identifying new instances of certain things that we know. The function of our conceptual framework is akin to our perceptive framework which enables us to see ever-new objects as such, and to that of our appetites which enable us to recognize evernew things as satisfying to them."²³

Fourthly, our knowledge of religious experience, as for our knowledge of anything, is in principle finite, partial, and unfinished. We live in an openended universe of on-going process where nothing is finished while it is alive. We can have only partial glimpses of the truth, glimpses which are conditioned by our perspectives, abilities, and training. For this reason, the notion of objectivity should be abandoned, for it is not in fact "objective" because its image of a static, substantial universe falsifies "the way things are." Knowledge is not obtained by impersonal observation of "matters of fact" existing independently of and uninfluenced by the observer. It is rather an ideal, a hope, in Polanyi's words, an "overcoming of the disabilities of bodily existence even to the point of conceiving a rational idea of the universe which can authoritatively speak for itself,²⁴ at least for a short time.

Fifthly, no methodology is developed prior to the process of understanding and discovery. Rather, all methodology evolves during the process of articulate inquiry, for method is essentially a way of interpreting the implications of insights which have their roots in the tacit forms of inarticulate knowledge. The process of discovery begins as an insight which is made explicit for a disciplined scholar who begins to develop its implications. But making the tacit explicit in any discipline of inquiry is always done in accordance with one's philosophical and epistemological orientation, which is also likely to undergo change during the process of research and reflection.

V

As an example of this process, a few brief remarks concerning the process of discovery in the natural sciences may be appropriate. In the natural sciences, it is the awareness of "anomaly," that is, the discovery of unexpected phenomena through the procedures of accepted scientific inquiry, that plays the chief role in the emergence of new natural phenomena, such as the "discovery" of oxygen or of X-rays.

The awareness of anomaly is also a prerequisite for all acceptable changes in scientific theory. Newton's theory of light and color originated in the discovery that none of the existing scientific theories of his day could account for the light spectrum. Newton's theory of light was replaced by the wave theory because of the growing concern of the scientific community about the anomalies in relation to defraction and

²³ Polanyi, op. cit., p. 103.
²⁴ Ibid., p. 5.

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polarization effects in Newton's theory. Thermodynamics as a scientific theory was created out of the collision of two nineteenth century physical theories, and quantum mechanics from a variety of problems surrounding blackbody radiation, specific heats, and the photoelectric effect.

It has been argued that the emergence of new scientific theories is generally preceded by a long period of profound professional insecurity within the scientific community. This insecurity is generated by the persistent failure of the puzzles and anomalies which occur in accepted scientific theory to come out as they are expected. That is, the failure of existing scientific rules and theories is a prelude to a search for new rules and theories.²⁵

The process of "discovery" in the history of religions is very similar to that of the natural sciences. For example, it was not Eliade's methodology alone which led him to his insights concerning the dialectic of the "Sacred and the Profane" and the paradigmatic functions of myth. Eliade's work began with an inarticulated insight into the nature of the Sacred as opposed to the Profane which he tacitly held because of his own sensitivities, training, and awareness that existing theories about religion and the methods of studying religion were not adequate vehicles for explaining the dynamics of the Sacred as he "discovered" it. His methodology, his way of studying and interpreting religious experience, in other words, evolved as he tried to make explicit his tacit insights.

Discovery and insight are always prior to methodology. In other words, we do not simply seize truth, especially religious truth, by the mere application of a methodology. Truth and insight often seize us in spite of our previously held methodologies. Like the process of discovery in the natural sciences, it is our awareness of the inadequacy of old theories and methods which leads to awareness of "anomalies," and then to "discovery." It is only then that we can articulate the meaning of what has "seized us" in some systematic and coherent method.

²⁵ Kuhn, op. cit., pp. 68-69.