Evolutionism and Early Nineteenth-Century Histories of Religions

✍ Scribed by Arthur McCalla

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 1998
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 98 KB
• Volume: 28
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0048-721X
• DOI: 10.1006/reli.1997.0086

✦ Synopsis

Evolutionism influenced the study of religion long before Darwin. Histories of religions feature prominently in the metaphysical philosophies of history of the Romantic period; these philosophies of history, in turn, draw on an essence-anddevelopment concept of evolution constructed within eighteenth-century biological preformationism and theosophy. 1 Preformationist and theosophical evolutionisms posit physiological and spiritual development of humanity. Ballanche and Schelling show how Romantic philosophers of history applied essence-and-development evolutionisms to history, to humanity and to God. For both Ballanche and Schelling, history is the unfolding in time of the essence of humanity; for both, the history of religions provides empirical corroboration for the metaphysical order underlying history. Eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century essence-and-development evolutionism historicized, and thereby reconceptualised, Christian providentialism, soteriology and theodicy. Historians of the study of religions have insufficiently appreciated this fact, both historiographically and methodologically.