A Third Reformation?: R. C Zaehner and Charles Davis on World Religions

Extract

“. . . . the old certainties are gone, and so departments of religion are springing up like toadstools throughout our demented Anglo- Saxon world. The less we believe, the more we talk about what other people believed. Are we really interested, or are we just kidding ourselves ?’

Thus, forcefully, the Spalding Professor of Eastern Religion and Ethics at Oxford. Certainly the fashionable currency of quasireligious mysticism, the resort to the private and aggressively anti-modern can, along with aestheticism and sexual liberation, remind one of the 1890s. Incense and beads abound; the lush, the exotic and the febrile. And Professor Zaehner reminds us that meditation takes time, and time takes unearned income, and is thus open to the same criticism as psycho-analysis. But it is not difficult to disengage from his testy remarks about washing machines and televisions, and his fine disdain for modern theology, matters which are of a substantial, complex and even hopeful contemporary relevance.

It has often been noted how imperialism helped produce anthropology and has left an abiding mark upon it. Imperialism also helped produce the enormous mass of philology, scholarship and translation which to this day means that a Hindu or Buddhist will probably turn to an European edition of, or critical commentary on, his own scripture. The study of religion shared also in the unreflexive nature of anthropology. The very confidence of imperialism inhibited, with a few exceptions, the open evaluation of the subversive problem of other religions—except as utopias, chinoiserie, or, in the hands of critics, a means of dismissing all religion as primitive.