Phenomenology of Religion

The phenomenology of religion is an approach that seeks to describe religious phenomena as they present themselves to believers, deliberately setting aside (or "bracketing") the question of whether their objects are real, in order to grasp the recurring essences and structures of religious experience. Borrowing its method and its key term (epoche, the suspension of judgment) from the philosophical phenomenology of Edmund Husserl, it aims at an empathetic, descriptive understanding of what the sacred is like from the inside, rather than explaining religion away in social, psychological, or evolutionary terms. Its landmark work is Rudolf Otto's The Idea of the Holy (1917), which identified the core of religious experience in the encounter with the "numinous", the mysterium tremendum et fascinans, the awe-inspiring, overwhelming, yet compelling mystery that is the felt presence of the "wholly other."

The Romanian-born historian Mircea Eliade developed the approach influentially, analyzing recurring structures across religions, the distinction of sacred and profane space and time, the "hierophany" or manifestation of the sacred, the symbolism of the center and of cosmic renewal. The phenomenological approach has been criticized for assuming a universal "essence" of religion and for a method that can float free of history and social context, and much of the field has moved toward more historically and culturally grounded study. But its enduring contribution is its insistence that religion must first be understood on its own terms, as it is lived and felt, before it is explained.

The method's central move is a suspension. The investigator sets aside the question of whether a religious claim is true, and also the question of what social or psychological function it serves, in order to describe what the phenomenon is like for the person who lives it. The technical term is bracketing, borrowed from philosophy, and its purpose is to prevent explanation from replacing description before description has happened.

That discipline produced real results. Rudolf Otto's account of the numinous, of an experience of the holy that is simultaneously overwhelming and attractive and is not reducible to morality, remains widely read. Later writers built extensive typologies of religious phenomena on the same basis.

The criticisms are now the mainstream position. Bracketing was said to smuggle in a theology rather than avoid one, because treating the sacred as a distinct kind of thing that must be described in its own terms is itself a substantive claim, and one many traditions would not make. Comparison across periods and cultures assembled material stripped of the history that gave it meaning, so that a rite from one century and a text from another were set side by side as instances of a type. And the essences described had a way of resembling the describer's own tradition.

The result is that few scholars now describe themselves this way, while the underlying instruction, describe before you explain, has been absorbed into ethnography.