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An Ethology of Religion and Art

Drawing from the ethology of art and the cognitive science of religion this
book proposes an improved understanding of both art and religion as behav-
iors developed in the process of human evolution. Looking at both art and
religion as closely related, but not identical, a more coherent definition of
religion can be formed that avoids pitfalls such as the Eurocentric character-
ization of religion as belief or the dismissal of the category as nothing more
than false belief or the product of scholarly invention.
The book integrates highly relevant insights from the ethology and an-
thropology of art, particularly the identification of “the special” by Ellen
Dissanayake and art as agency by Alfred Gell, with insights from Ann Taves,
among others, who similarly identified “specialness” as characteristic of reli-
gion. It integrates these insights into a useful and accurate understanding and
explanation of the relationship of art and religion and of religion as a human
behavior. This in turn is used to suggest how art can contribute to the devel-
opment and maintenance of religions.
The innovative combination of art, science and religion in this book makes
it a vital resource for scholars of Religion and the Arts, Aesthetics, Religious
Studies, Religion and Science and Religious Anthropology.

Bryan Rennie is a Professor of Religion and Philosophy in the Religion

Faculty at Westminster College, USA.
Routledge Studies in Religion

Religion, Modernity, Globalisation

Nation-State to Market
François Gauthier

Gender and Orthodox Christianity

Edited by Helena Kupari and Elena Vuola

Music, Branding, and Consumer Culture in Church

Hillsong in Focus
Tom Wagner

Transformational Embodiment in Asian Religions

Subtle Bodies, Spatial Bodies
Edited by George Pati and Katherine Zubko

Media and the Science-Religion Conflict

Thomas Aechtner

Freethought and Atheism in Central and Eastern Europe

The Development of Secularity and Non-Religion
Edited by Tomáš Bubík, Atko Remmel and David Václavík

Holocaust Memory and Britain’s Religious-Secular Landscape

Politics, Sacrality, and Diversity
David Tollerton

An Ethology of Religion and Art

Belief as Behavior
Bryan Rennie

For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.

com/religion/series/SE0669
An Ethology of Religion
and Art
Belief as Behavior

Bryan Rennie
First published 2020
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2020 Bryan Rennie
The right of Bryan Rennie to be identified as author of this work
has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical,
or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or
retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks
or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record has been requested for this book

ISBN: 978-0-367-35467-1 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-429-33161-9 (ebk)
Typeset in Bembo
by codeMantra
Contents

List of figures vii

Acknowledgements ix

PART I
Theorizing religion and art 17

3 The cognitive science of religion: an artless art 36

4 Skill and the sacred: redefining art, redefining religion 57
5 Beauty and religion. Seeing the world better 81
6 Art and the sacred 107
7 Wisdom and the personality of reality 139
8 What is art (and religion) for? What do they do? 160

PART II
Applying the theory 185

9 Divination: the vanishing point of religion 187

Index 283
Figures

1.1 La Trahison des Images by René Magritte (1928–1929) 3

5.1 The development of perspective from the 13th to
the 17th century 84
5.2 America’s Most Wanted and America’s Most Unwanted; France’s
Most Wanted and France’s Most Unwanted; and Iceland’s Most
Wanted and Iceland’s Most Unwanted by Vitaly Komar and
Alexander Melamid (1994) 91
5.3 Fountain by Marcel Duchamp (1917) 97
6.1 Portrait of Rembrandt van Rijn (1650) 110
6.2 Visual Signal-to-Noise 123
6.3 Kanisza Figures 124
6.4 The General’s Family by Octavio Ocampo (1990) and the
Wittgensteinian “Duck/Rabbit” 126
9.1 Yuk’e [Wen Tong 1018–1079] paints bamboo 198
10.1 Natural rock formations suggest living beings 216
10.2 Göbekli Tepe 218
10.3 Çatalhöyük 220
12.1 Images of Interiority 249
13.1 I am Howard Finster a Stranger from Another World 268
13.2 The Street is in Play, Banksy 270
Acknowledgements

All quotations from Alfred Gell’s Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, © Alfred Gell 1998) are reproduced with
permission of the Licensor through PLSclear.
Extensive material from Ellen Dissanayake, What Is Art For? © 1988 is re-
printed with the generous permission of the University of Washington Press.
All quotations from On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction
by Brian Boyd, Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University
Press, Copyright © 2009 by Brian Boyd are given with the generous permission
of Harvard University Press.
The image of René Magritte, “The Treachery of Images (This is Not a Pipe)
(La trahison des images [Ceci n’est pas une pipe])” is © 2019 C. Herscovici
and used with the permission of the Artists Rights Society (ARS), New
York. Digital Image © [2019] Museum Associates/LACMA. Licensed by
Art Resource, NY. © ARS, NY, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los
Angeles, California, USA.
The image of Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain is © Photo © Tate Gallery,
London and is used by permission of Tate Images.
Octavio Ocampo’s The General’s Family is reproduced with permission from
Visions Fine Art: Publisher/Agent/Representative for Octavio Ocampo USA.
The drawing and photograph of the Bison from the Salon Noir in Niaux,
France, are used with the generous permission of Jean Clottes.
The artist’s impression of the building of Göbekli Tepe © National Geo-
graphic is used with the permission of National Geographic images.
The image of the anthropomorphic pillar from Göbekli Tepe is used with
the generous permission of the Göbekli Tepe research staff of the German
Archaeological Institute.
The cover of If Jesus Lived Inside My Heart by Jill Roman Lord, illustrated
by Amy Wummer, is reproduced by generous permission of the Hachette
Book Group.
The image of I am a Stranger from Another World by Howard Finster is used
with the kind permission of the John F. Turner Collection © Photograph by
M. Lee Fatherree.
x Acknowledgements
Lyrics from Bob Dylan’s The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll are reprinted
by permission of Special Rider Music. Copyright © 1964, 1966 by Warner
Bros. Inc.; renewed 1992, 1994 by Special Rider Music. All rights reserved.
International copyright secured. Reprinted by permission.
I would like to acknowledge the invaluable support and encouragement
that I received from Jeff Kripal, Norman Girardot, and Ann Taves. I hope
that the inevitable errors in this book, which are entirely my own responsi-
bility, are not a disappointment to them. My colleague and neighbor, Russ
Martin, kept me going when my own faith in this project threatened to
fail me.
Last, my wife and my partner in all that I do, Rachela Permenter, deserves
more than I can ever acknowledge in writing. I hope that I behave accordingly.
1 General introduction1

Good sense is the most evenly shared thing in the world, for each of us thinks
he is so well endowed with it that even those who are the hardest to please in
other respects are not in the habit of wanting more than they have.
(Descartes, Discourse on Method, 27)

Religion as a content area rivals good sense as a faculty. Even those who are
the hardest to please in other respects are not in the habit of wanting to know
more than we already know about it, but readily come to firm conclusions
and set behaviors concerning religion … and thereby hangs a tale. The ini-
tial thesis of this work is simple enough. It is that the history and philosophy
of religion and the history and philosophy of art are critically in need of
integration and mutual consideration. This is not to state that religion and
art are “the same thing” (or “things” at all). Clearly, they are not. They are
two discrete abstract nouns, and there are sustainable distinctions to be made
between them. There can be art objects and events that are unconnected
with institutional religion, and there may be religious activities that lack all
artistry. On the other hand, the objects and activities of the material culture
to which these two abstract nouns refer, both past and present, are so inextri-
cably interconnected that it is imperative to our understanding of each that
we cease the futile and damaging attempt to tell their stories as if they were
entirely distinct. Since the Renaissance, and particularly since the Protestant
Reformation, the insistence in the modern, Western, European, Christian, or
post-Christian world on conceiving religion and art as fundamentally dissim-
ilar has been carried forward with remarkable tenacity. However, with the
recent and increasing emphasis on the material culture of religion and with
cognitive and evolutionary insights into both religion and art (and with the
introduction of some long-overdue humility and self-awareness in the West),
it is increasingly apparent that this distinction and the conceptions of art and
religion associated with it are fatally flawed. An Ethology of Religion and Art:
Beauty, Belief, and Behavior clarifies and justifies these claims and draws out
some of their implications and entailments, resulting in an understanding of
art and religion and their relationship that is detailed, accurate, and, I hope,
extremely useful.
2 General introduction
What’s the problem?
I first started thinking seriously about the problematic relationship of religion
and art when I began teaching an undergraduate course of that name in 2005.
Not that I hadn’t thought about it before—I had thought about it enough to
know that it worried me. Religion alone is a deeply problematic concept and
the many attempts to define it have never proven satisfactory. Combined with
the equally ill-defined concept of art it constitutes a “two-body” problem in
which the behavior of one imprecise variable is unpredictably influenced by
the dynamics of another that is equally elusive. It is common knowledge that
religion and art are inextricably bound up with one another so as to be almost
inseparable prior to the Renaissance and across the world. A huge proportion
of everything that is identified as “art,” culturally from Angkor Wat to the
Ziggurats, and chronologically from Göbekli Tepe to the Crystal Cathedral,
has overtly religious themes. As Barbara DeConcini, one-time president of
the American Academy of Religion, put it:

there are important connections between religion and art: both are ori-
ented toward meaning, and both deal in universal human values—both
are fundamental to being human. What is more, religion and art share
remarkably similar discourses. Each works primarily through story, im-
age, symbol and performance.
(1991, 2)

The German theologian, philosopher, and biblical scholar Friedrich Schlei-

ermacher (1768–1834) insisted in 1799 that “religion and art stand beside one
another like to friendly souls whose inner affinity, whether or not they equally
surmise it, is nevertheless still unknown to them” (1958, 158). In the 19th
century, the Danish philosopher and author Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855)
felt that art had only recently achieved integrity and autonomy from religion.
He also believed that art had gone too far and was beginning to become a
substitute for religion. Sacred and profane inspiration were for him funda-
mentally incomparable, and he thought that if the Christian tradition were
seen as an aesthetic phenomenon, then it was in danger of being explained
away (1940). In The Sacred Shrine: A Study of the Poetry and Art of the Catholic
Church (1912) the Finnish philosopher Yrjö Hirn (1870–1952) argued that the
early equivalents of religion and art existed seamlessly blended together in the
earliest stages of their development. In Sacred and Profane Beauty (Vom Heiligen
in der Kunst, 1957), the Dutch phenomenologist of religion Gerardus Van der
Leeuw (1890–1950) argued that the arts and religion began in a state of orig-
inal unity, each art, and religion itself, only later achieving its own integrity
and autonomy (2006). More recently, Marcia Brennan, in a fascinating work,
Curating Consciousness: Mysticism and the Modern Museum (2010), has indicated
the continuing, if concealed, consanguinity of art and religion by arguing
that art museums remain places of mystical experience, suggesting that even
 General introduction 3

Figure 1.1 La Trahison des Images by René Magritte (1928–1929). Los Angeles
County Museum of Art. © C. Herscovici/Artists Rights Society (ARS),
New York. Digital Image © [2019] Museum Associates/LACMA. Li-
censed by Art Resource, NY. © ARS, NY, Los Angeles County Museum
of Art, Los Angeles, California, USA.

modern art never really separated itself from the complex mystical traditions
that preceded it.
The Biblical Second Commandment orders that

you shall not make for yourself a graven image, whether in the form
of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or
that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or
worship them.
(Exodus 20.1–17)

This has often been taken as driving a wedge between art and religion,
making them undeniably distinct. Yet, as David and Linda Altshuler con-
vincingly point out (1984), early Jewish synagogues were by no means be-
reft of art. Their conclusion is that the Commandment is an organic unity
composed of two halves. It is not a prohibition of art per se, but a prohibition
of “bowing down and worshipping” our own representations—a warning,
I would argue, against “the treachery of images”—that is, against mistaking
the representation for the thing represented.
It would be a mistake to assume that such a caveat would be too sophisti-
cated for early Hebrew authors. They were equally, if differently, sophisticated
as any anatomically modern humans. David Lewis-Williams, a scholar of both
the contemporary San art of South Africa and Paleolithic cave painting, warns
us that even the artists of Paleolithic images may have had no intention to
represent physical, empirical items but specifically to represent “spirit beings”
(2002, 194). While the visions were real as visions, they were not real in the
sense of representing “a real bison,” that is, a physical, flesh and blood being.
If Paleolithic artists could exercise such sophistication, it is no stretch of the
4 General introduction
imagination to argue that the writers of the Second Commandment did, too.
The essence of the idolatry they sought to avoid is taking the representation to
be the thing it represents, treating the pointing finger as the moon.
How, then, are art and religion related? As one walks into the bizarrely
folded and convoluted edifice that has grown up on the foundation that is the
confluence of religion and art (I can’t help but think of the edifice as a Frank
Gehry marvel), the entrance is littered with crumpled handbills. Pick them
up, unfold them, smooth out the creases, and they turn out to be warnings:
John Dixon counsels us that “[n]early every attempt that has been made to
incorporate art into the study of religion or to account for art theologically
has to some degree done violence to one or the other, either by distortion or
impoverishment” (1983, 78). David Chidester says that

as soon as we say, “Religion and Aesthetics” we are caught in a problem.

It would seem that we are bringing together two relatively separate and
independent entities: two separate areas of human activity, two separate
subject fields … into some arbitrary juxtaposition.
(1983, 55)

James Elkins has said, “I can’t think of a subject that is harder to get right,
more challenging to speak about in a way that will be acceptable to the many
viewpoints people bring to bear” (2004, ix), and Elkins observes that, for some
people, the word “religion” can no longer be associated with the ideas of art.
“Talk about art and talk about religion have become alienated one from the
other, and it would be artificial and misguided to bring them together” (x). Yet
there is, arguably, a “field” of the study of religion and art. In 1991 DeConcini
told us that “Religion and art has been a ‘field’ in the sense that one can study
it in graduate school and find positions teaching it in colleges only since the
1950s” (1991, 323), but 13 years later, David Morgan was still asking, “is there,
in fact, a history of art and religion as a field of study? … has ‘art and religion’
been a discreet and circumspect topic of enquiry?” He concludes that it is “pre-
sumptuous” to see the study of art and religion as a distinct field (2004, 17).
Trying to teach the subject(s) seemed a nightmare of haunting, ill-defined
behemoths lurking just out of sight, eternally vanishing into the mists of ig-
norance. When I first taught the course, I took Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of
the Snark, in which the Bellman, who captained the hunt, had a map that was
“a perfect and absolute blank,” as the leitmotiv. In Carroll’s immortal words:

… beware of the day,

If your Snark be a Boojum! For then
You will softly and suddenly vanish away,
And never be met with again!

… and each Snark threatened to be a Boojum. The whole complex threat-

ened to be so far from anything that could be dealt with reliably and ration-
ally, especially by a single individual, that it seemed inevitably to lead to such
 General introduction 5
pretentious nonsense that one’s every opinion could evaporate (or sublime)
before the righteous scorn of one’s colleagues. I soldiered on, buoyed up by
the indefatigable enthusiasm of my students and their apparently unshakea-
ble conviction that I knew what I was talking about. The best single book
I could find on the subject, Diane Apostolos-Cappadona’s anthology, Art,
Creativity and the Sacred: An Anthology in Religion and Art, was first published
in 1984 and contains articles that, albeit extremely valuable, date from the
1930s and 1940s and are thus ignorant of developments that are more recent.
It is also a graduate-level text. I supported my students as best I could and
helped them through the readings and provided as many more as I could find
that might enlighten them (and me) concerning the relationship of religion
and art. Apostolos-Cappadona’s book is immensely helpful as an introduc-
tion to the problem, but it raises more questions than it answers, being full
of suggestive, somewhat breathless, indications that art in religion enables
“the expression of the inexpressible” and “vision of the invisible.” It is almost
universally agreed that art permits the artist to express and the audience to
apprehend that which is otherwise inexpressible and beyond apprehension.
There are also obvious implications as to the nature of the invisible that is
thus revealed. It is not simply that invisible agents such as gods and spirits
become available to experience through the media of sculpture or painting
or as elements of narrative (although this is far from unimportant). It is the
universal, the infinite, “the undifferentiated continuum,” the transcendent,
the structure of reality, ultimate reality, or the truly real, that is somehow
made available to the bodily senses. Thomas Franklin O’Meara claims that
“art suggests a mode of subjectivity that not only rejects the technocracy of
words but which unleashes, bestows, and discloses the more of Presence”
(206). O’Meara quotes the German Idealist philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm
Joseph Schelling (1775–1854) as saying that “Beauty is the infinite presented
in the finite” (1978, 208). Similar statements occur throughout the volume:
according to the sculptor, Stephen De Staebler, “[i]f you strip away all the
doctrines and dogmas, religion becomes a very precarious relationship be-
tween a frail and finite reality and a sense of all-present infinite reality” (26).
F. S. C. Northrop calls this

apprehending the undifferentiated continuum in and through the imme-

diately apprehended differentiated continuum … this mode of knowing
not only apprehends the immediately sensed world of “differentiated”
objects and feelings, but—in and with that—the underlying “undiffer-
entiated,” sacred unity that empowers and is the ground for everything.
(1946, 315–358, 394–404, as quoted by Richard Pilgrim 1984, 138)

O’Meara also says that

the aesthetic illustrates human theological interpretation of divine rev-

elation. The aesthetic modality is a basic fact of experience. Aesthetics
can describe religion, revelation, faith, and thinking about faith with
6 General introduction
the strength and clarity equal to the categorical style…[Aesthetics] does
not presume that theology or life is mainly word, syllogism, myth, or
symbol.
(205)

In the same volume, Paul Tillich talks of “the deceptive character of the sur-
face of everything we encounter which drives one to discover what is below
the surface. … The truly real which cannot deceive us… Ultimate reality
is expressed in artistic forms” (220). Effective art reveals “the breathing of
the universal in the particular,” according to the catalog of the exhibition
“Bernard Leach: 50 years a Potter” (Leach 1961, 88 quoted by Cecilia Davis
Cunningham, 9). “The transcendent appears through art,” according to
Langdon Gilkey (1984, 189). O’Meara says that for Schelling art is “a realiza-
tion of absolute consciousness. It is an access to the structure of reality—past,
present, and future. Art, like philosophy, is revelation” (1978, 209–210).
But what on earth does all this mean? Isn’t it just sublime nonsense? Does
it express anything other than the writers’ love of art? How can one explain
it? Is the Snark a Boojum or not? Clearly, art is being assumed to perform
what is usually thought of as the central function of religion—to reveal the
otherwise unknown nature of the “really real,” the sacred, the invisible world
or cosmic order, which determines the ultimate value of our behavior. The
present volume proposes to explain how it does so.
I initially picked up an Ariadne’s thread provided by phrases such as Paul
Ricoeur’s “disclosure of new modes of being, of new forms of life, gives to
the subject a new capacity for knowing himself ” (quoted in DeConcini 1991,
325) and John Dixon’s “the worshipper returns to his own circumstances
not so much better informed about the nature of the common life as pre-
pared to see the ordinariness of things radiant with the faith” (1984, 288).
Apostolos-Cappadona has also edited an anthology of articles by historian
of religion, Mircea Eliade, on the subject of religion and art (Eliade, 1986),
and such phrases are reminiscent of Eliade who, in his discussion of reli-
gious symbols, had said that symbols allow people to “become conscious”
of alternative modalities of the real. They “disclose to us a perspective from
whence things appear different.” They “make the immediate reality ‘shine’”
(1986, 6). Eliade is often accused (among other things) of being a “closet
theologian,” and an obfuscatory mystic who simplistically accepts the reality
of transcendental agencies and whose understanding of religion is, therefore,
incoherent (McCutcheon 2001). I do not believe this to be the case, as I will
explain in detail in Chapter 6, but the problem remains: how can one make
coherent sense of such claims? How are religion and art related?
Elkins points out that “there is almost no modern religious art in museums
or in books and art history” (ix) and it is, perhaps, from the apparent disap-
pearance of religion from modern art that we should take some clues. While
I agree that talk about art and talk about religion have become alienated from
one another, I disagree strongly that “it would be artificial and misguided
 General introduction 7
to bring them together” (Elkins, x). It is telling that, while Elkins recog-
nizes that he accepts a very particular definition of art for a very particular
reason—“in order to avoid having to say what art should be about, or even
what it has been about.” He defines art as “whatever is exhibited in galleries
in major cities, bought by museums of contemporary art, shown in bien-
nales and the Documenta, and written about in periodicals such as Artforum,
October, Flash Art, Parkett or Tema Celeste” (1). This is what is often termed
“the institutional definition of art.” Ellen Dissanayake and the ethologists of
art who are principal contributors to my argument fundamentally reject it.
While such a definition sufficed for Elkins’ particular purpose in that volume,
it has very particular consequences. This institutional definition of art has its
own virtues and can be, and often is, invoked as an ostensive definition of the
class (I will say more about the nature and types of definition in a following
chapter), it simply assumes the fundamental discontinuity of art and religion
and thus provides no possible response to the questions raised by most of the
aforementioned authors concerning the indisputable connections between the
two. Religion and art may have become alienated, but they had some earlier
relation, even in the modern West, and they still do in much of the world
as they did throughout history. It is necessary and extremely instructive to
consider that relationship.
Tracing the relation of religion and art throughout human history may
be like trying to trace the trajectory of two sparks through an ongoing ex-
plosion. I was much encouraged while struggling to understand the art of
divination in the Yijing when I came across Richard Smith’s assertion that
“an impossible task is nonetheless worth undertaking if the topic is interesting
enough” (2008, xii). Art and religion are certainly interesting enough, and
their relation may not, in the end, be impossible to disentangle. No-one can
be fully expert in all aspects of such an inquiry and a certain dilettantism is
unavoidable. It is necessary to take risks to construct novel and creative hy-
potheses that can be further inspected, tested, and, if not falsified, gradually
improved upon. A sensible limitation to a specific genre, geographical area,
or historical period, with a concomitant narrowing of the relevant material, is
an advantage that this study cannot have. My analyses in the following chap-
ters stray into various fields in which I am not entirely expert and so will be
vulnerable to the readings of specialists in each area. I am not an evolutionary
biologist or geneticist—my appeals to those fields are made to support the co-
herence and viability of the understanding of art and of religion that I eluci-
date here rather than claiming to have unlocked the genetic code of religion.
I am attempting to write for readers of different backgrounds and I hope
that my peers in the history and philosophy of religion will find something
of use and value in the following speculations about religion in general. I also
hope that students will be able to use the book to improve their understand-
ing of the nature and interrelation of religion and art. Finally, I hope that the
general reader with an interest in either religion or art will benefit from the
book. With these things in mind, I can only call for an initially charitable
8 General introduction
reading,2 tolerant of failure to refer to all of the relevant literature, which
allows the larger understanding to emerge. This study emerges from the aes-
thetics of religion, a subset of the philosophy of religion. It is, however, a
philosophy of religion broadened along the three axes suggested by Kevin
Schilbrack (2014), who proposed that a philosophy of religion that is ade-
quate to its task (and not artificially restricted to problems of philosophical
theology appropriate only within the Western monotheistic traditions) must
be expanded along the axis of alternate religious traditions, the axis of lived
as opposed to merely literate or intellectual religion, and the axis of other
disciplines that study of religion. I entirely agree, and the following chapters
seek to achieve a perspective that draws on the whole panoply of religious
behavior, on a wide variety of disciplines, and on lived religion as a matter
of human behavior and physical activity rather than abstract doctrine and
disembodied thought.3
Given these caveats, an initially “artistic” approach that is necessarily cre-
ative is more appropriate than an attempt to be entirely prosaic, categorical,
or pseudo-scientific. The braiding of an argument, no matter how prosaic
and categorical the language employed, is a creative process, the art of which
should not be underestimated.4 It is also necessarily historical to some ex-
tent. The study of religion properly constitutes a history and philosophy of
religion,5 and I cheerfully count myself among those who insist on the cre-
ative nature of historiography. Nineteenth-century conceptions of science
still haunt the contemporary understanding of history, but to quote Hayden
White,

as a discourse about things no longer perceivable, historiography must

construct, by which I mean imagine and conceptualize, its objects of
interest before it can proceed to bring to bear upon them the kinds of
procedures it wishes to use to “explain” or “understand” them.6

The discourse before you fully intends to be creative and I hope that it proves
imaginative.

What’s the solution?

While this study is not itself science, it does use some of the findings of sci-
ence. My intention is to investigate and elucidate the relationship between
art and religion as behaviors and to do so I will apply techniques and concepts
proper to “ethology.” This will, therefore, be an ethology rather than an
aesthetic of religion. Ina Wunn’s entry in the second edition of the Macmil-
lan Encyclopedia of Religion describes the ethology of religion (Wunn 2005).
Wunn is a distinguished German scholar of religion with doctorates in both
natural history and the history of religion who has written extensively on
the ethology of religion. According to her Habilitationsschrift of 2002, she
practices Religious Studies (Religionswissenschaft) as “an interdisciplinary field
 General introduction 9
situated between the Humanities and Sciences [which] focuses primarily on
the study of religious behaviour from the perspective of evolution theory.” 7
An increasing number of scholars in the Anglophone world are beginning
to adopt the same approach to Religious Studies as an evolutionary and be-
havioral enterprise. Ethology is a biological study of behavior, emphasizing
that the physiological basis of behavior has evolved and should be studied as
an aspect of evolution. Its roots can thus be traced directly to Darwin, and
to some extent, it overlaps other disciplines such as sociobiology, behavioral
ecology, evolutionary psychology, human anthropology, and consciousness
studies (Wunn 2005, 2867). Scholars who have applied this approach to reli-
gion include Walter Burkert (1983, 1996), Frits Staal (1989), Weston La Barre
(1972), Marvin Harris (1977, 1997), Robert Bellah (1970), and Roy Rap-
paport (1999). The whole movement that is generally termed the cognitive
science of religion (CSR), being primarily the application of evolutionary
psychology to the topic of religious behavior, constitutes a very significant el-
ement of the ethology of religion. Its proponents, from Scott Atran to David
Sloan Wilson, can be counted as ethologists even though they seldom use the
term.8 It is in the ethology of art that the term has come into its own.
Although ethology is the study of evolved behaviors, it must be distin-
guished from behaviorism. Behaviorism, properly speaking, is a group of
doctrines related by their metaphysical concerns over dualism and their
epistemological concerns over the status of mental terms and entities (Fla-
nagan 1995). As it became increasingly radical, especially as expressed by
B. F. Skinner (1904–1990), and sought to reject all reference to consciousness
and all “mentalistic terms,” such behaviorism was increasingly and right-
fully rejected. However, the fact that the word “behaviorism” is most often
associated with this extreme, impractical, and widely scorned position did
not prevent the greater part of the more reasonable principles of Skinner’s
precursor, J. B. Watson (1878–1958), from being absorbed into psychology
(Harzem 2004). The study of behavior constitutes a powerful focus without
any need to deny the intentional states characteristic of mental phenomena
associated with them. It does, as we will see, have certain implications about
the nature of those states.
For my purposes the evolving unit is the human species with behavioral
traits as part of its phenotype, rather than conceiving of religions, or some part
of religious traditions such as rituals, as themselves evolving units.9 Early the-
orists who proposed “evolutionary” theories of religion, such as E. B. Tylor
(1832–1917), R. R. Marett (1866–1943), and J. G. Frazer (854–1941), failed
fully to understand or to apply a properly biological evolutionary under-
standing to religion and not only assumed religions themselves to be evolving
units but also understood evolution as “a process of progressive development”
rather than “the adaptive modification of organisms through time by means
of natural variability and selection” (Wunn 2003, 391). This assumption rei-
fies religions and reduces the evolutionary approach to a rather inappropriate
metaphor instead of pursuing an actual ethology. It is my hope, building on
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