Wood, Richard L.

English

University of New Mexico

University of New Mexico
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10-11-2011
From the Beginning
Richard L. Wood
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Wood, Richard L.. "From the Beginning." Commonweal, October 11, 2011 (2011). https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/soc_fsp/9
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Bellah begins by exploring “daily 
life,” the world of work, of striving, of 
meeting needs, and providing for the 
future. Much of what we value in human 
existence occurs here; yet, if not relieved 
by other realities, daily life also repre-
sents a “dreadful immanence” which 
saps the human spirit. While showing 
how art, science, and other pursuits 
help us transcend the burdens of daily 
life, Bellah goes on to note that religion 
represents the predominant way human 
communities have traditionally escaped 
this dreadful immanence. “Escaped” is 
not quite the right word to describe the 
very “this-worldly transcendence”—both 
deeply personal and political—that re-
ligion can promote. At the heart of such 
transcendence lies the mystical expe-
rience of God (or, for secularists, the 
cosmos); of personal well-being despite 
frank honesty about the world; of being 
“struck by love” amidst the harshness of 
reality. In such moments, Bellah notes 
by way of an evocative translation of 
Plato, the soul “draws near to and makes 
love to reality.” 
Such unitive experiences permeate 
not only the consciousness that is rooted 
in our embodied selves, but the symbols 
and stories that help us see and find 
meaning in the world, and, more ab-
stractly, the concepts that help us make 
sense of it. These varieties of human 
consciousness developed over the long 
evolution of humans from earlier spe-
cies. Bellah draws on cognitive neuro-
scientist Merlin Donald to suggest how, 
2 million years ago or so, our distant 
ancestors began to transcend mere fixa-
tion upon the present—that is, episodic 
consciousness—through “mimetic cul-
ture,” imitating sounds and rhythms to 
communicate with one another. Over 
eons, this mimesis may have generated 
a proto-language that Bellah, borrow-
ing a term from evolutionary psycholo-
gist and neuroscientist Stephen Brown, 
calls “musilanguage.” A crucial break-
through comes with the subsequent 
Throughout a long and illustrious career, the sociologist Robert N. Bellah has been helping Ameri-
cans make sense of their world. While 
Bellah’s scholarly work has focused on 
specialized understandings of the role of 
religion in society, Commonweal readers 
will recognize him for works that have 
reached a broad audience concerned 
about the direction of American so-
ciety. Indeed, Habits of the Heart and 
The Good Society, co-written by Bellah, 
were among the most widely read criti-
cal reflections on American culture and 
institutions published in recent decades. 
Now, late in his life, Bellah weighs 
in with an audacious project: to locate 
our human condition within the two 
great narratives of the human experi-
ence, religion and evolution. Religion in 
Human Evolution is no simple effort to 
“reconcile” religious belief with scien-
tific understanding, but something far 
more interesting and ambitious. It seeks 
to take both religion and evolution seri-
ously on their own terms, and to locate 
us within the stories they tell about the 
human condition in a way informed 
by the best emerging research on both 
terrains. Bellah spent thirteen years 
systematically reading that research in 
order to address perennial questions: 
Who are we humans? How can we best 
understand our contemporary place in 
the world? The result is a grand narra-
tive written in full understanding of the 
failures and limitations of recent grand 
narratives. Religion in Human Evolution 
is a magnum opus founded on careful 
research and immersed in the “reflective 
judgment” of one of our best thinkers 
and writers. 
Richard L. Wood
From the Beginning
Religion in Human 
Evolution
From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age
Robert N. Bellah
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 
$39.95, 784 pp.
Breathing 
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Spirituality
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some way can save one another.
Deep communion and deep compas-
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This, says Richard Rohr, is one of the
great discoveries of the Twelve Step
Program. He makes a case that the
Twelve Steps relate well to Christian
teaching and can rescue any of us
who are drowning in addiction and
may not even realize it—and we are
all addicted in some way. 
To survive the tidal wave of compul-
sive behavior and addiction, Chris-
tians must learn “to breathe under
water” and discover God’s love and
compassion.
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emergence of symbols, stories, and 
full language, eventually generating 
“mythic culture” at the predawn of 
human history (perhaps a hundred 
thousand years ago). Finally, during 
the f irst millennium BCE—and 
initially only in a handful of places 
around the world—comes  a further 
cultural breakthrough, to a “theo-
retic culture” based on an ability 
to generate concepts and symbols 
that hold existing understandings up 
to criticism and present alternative 
possibilities to them.
Crucially, for the book’s argument 
and for any of us who take both evo-
lution and religion seriously, Bellah 
draws on the evolutionary concept of 
“conserved core processes” to argue that 
nothing is ever lost in this cultural evo-
lution; instead, all levels of culture, from 
episodic to mimetic to mythic and theo-
retic, remain present and real parts of 
the modern human person and society. 
Thus, spiritual experience via contem-
plation or communion, the embodiment 
of religious feeling in music or dance, 
and the carrying of religious meaning 
in symbols and stories are no mere ret-
rograde products of evolutionary dead 
ends, but rather realities that continue to 
express fundamental dimensions of the 
human. This view holds rich implica-
tions for Bellah’s analysis of the evolving 
role of religion in society. His core argu-
ment holds that as some tribal societies 
evolved from their relatively egalitar-
ian structures into hierarchical ones, 
religion underwent a transformation. 
The human-like qualities of mythic 
figures in tribal religions gave way to 
more distant gods, to whom people had 
little or no direct access except through 
mediating figures such as priests. These 
ritual leaders were tied to the rigidly 
hierarchical socio-political structures 
of their societies; indeed, the rituals 
they led were in part a means of enact-
ing—and legitimizing—existing power 
arrangements.
Bellah goes on to analyze how and 
why a further cultural breakthrough 
occurred around the four “axial” re-
ligions that shape the lives of billions 
of people today—and, through their 
theoretic cultures, gave rise to con-
temporary scientific thought. Several 
figures loom large: the social proph-
ets of ancient Israel; Plato, Confucius, 
and Mencius; and the Buddha with 
his origins in Upanishad Vedic culture. 
These extraordinary figures and their 
associated movements elaborated upon 
the symbols and myths of previous reli-
gious systems to create ways of thinking 
that could transcend and criticize those 
systems’ fusion of religious symbolism 
and political power. As a consequence, 
for the first time human culture began 
to develop alternatives to the rigid social 
hierarchies of archaic societies. The 
result, two thousand years later, is the 
world we inhabit today, in which sci-
ence, urban industrial society, the vast 
consumer culture it has generated, and 
the axial religions and their offshoots all 
compete for cultural influence. 
This is a big book, full of big ideas that demand sustained attention and disciplined thought. But 
in my view it repays a reader’s effort in 
full. Full disclosure: Bellah was a key 
mentor during my doctoral studies in 
sociology almost two decades ago, and 
remains today a colleague and friend. 
Readers will have to discern whether 
this friendship distorts my judgment 
about Religion in Human Evolution. 
Certainly, it is not a perfect book. Its 
intellectual ambition occasionally leads 
to speculative insights that only future 
research will be able to judge; more 
troublesome for some readers will be 
the analytic detail and theoretical rigor 
of certain sections. Yet despite these 
obstacles, Bellah’s clear writing and 
acute insight ultimately carry the day. 
It may surprise some to find this 
serious and weighty work turning 
at its end to an insistence on the 
centrality of play, both today and 
throughout human evolution. Play 
relieves the dreadful immanence 
into which work draws us; conceived 
as ritual and liturgy, it allows us to 
transcend daily life. Bellah offers 
meditations on the role of beauty 
in science (he interestingly ties in 
our looming global ecological crisis) 
and on the urgent need for adher-
ents of all religious traditions to move 
beyond tolerance and generate some-
thing akin to true mutual care. Catholic 
readers will appreciate that, in calling 
for mutual appreciation across tradi-
tions, the author urges not New-Age 
eclecticism, but rather a shared under-
standing rooted within commitment to 
particular faith traditions, and to that 
end quotes the legal and moral philos-
opher Herbert Fingarette: “One may 
be a sensitive and seasoned traveler, at 
ease in many places, but one must have 
a home.” 
Religion in Human Evolution closes 
with a vision of how we might construct 
a truly global civil society—our best 
hope for the future, Bellah believes. His 
summons, though steeped in theory and 
scholarly research, links clearly to our 
contemporary challenges, and deepens 
this book’s impression of a great intel-
lect helping us situate ourselves in histo-
ry, global ecology, and the cosmos. For 
over half a century, Robert N. Bellah 
has set his extraordinary mind out on 
the frontiers of human knowledge and 
has written back to make that knowl-
edge accessible to the educated read-
er. This remarkable book f inds him 
nearing the close of a long and fruit-
ful life, and generously giving it back 
to us in love. n
Richard L. Wood is associate profes-
sor of sociology and founding director 
of the Southwest Institute on Religion, 
Culture, and Society at the University of 
New Mexico. He is the author of Faith in 
Action: Religion, Race, and Democratic 
Organizing in America (University of 
Chicago Press).
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From the Beginning

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