The New Religious Consciousness and the Secular UniversityAuthor(s): Robert N. BellahSource: Daedalus, Vol. 103, No. 4, American Higher Education: Toward an Uncertain Future,Volume I (Fall, 1974), pp. 110-115Published by: The MIT Press on behalf of American Academy of Arts & SciencesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20024251Accessed: 05/10/2010 14:30

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ROBERT N. BELLAH

The New Religious Consciousness and the Secular University

One way of getting at the ethos of the secular university today is to characterize its central value as

"cognitive rationality," the concept developed by Talcott Parsons in his recent work. Parsons is probably right in saying, that this is the central value around which the university is organized. But I am not quite so happy about that fact as Parsons tends to be. It is not, as I think will be evident, that I don't respect cognitive rationality, but that I think there are other things in the world with which the university might be concerned as well. At its best, "cognitive rationality" means

"disciplined knowing," not simply the acquisition of knowledge, the sheer intake of the finished product. Disciplined knowing is not just learning what has already been discovered, but learning to learn, the process of inquiry itself. This statement of the normative commitment, the basic value system of the secular university, obviously has a link to traditional, philosophical, and religious commitments and to traditions of education that stretch back far before the emergence of the secular university. The pursuit of truth for its own sake can become, and has become, a kind of

supreme rationality, like that which Spinoza expresses in the notion of the intellec tual love of God. In its more traditional, philosophical, and religious forms, there is a

point at which rationality transcends itself, merges with nonrational ways of know ing, and becomes one way of attaining the vision of divine truth, of ultimate reality.

Even when that particular chain of connections is not made in traditional ways of

thinking about the pursuit of knowledge, the quest of reason has been seen as in volved in a complex of human activities that includes feeling, moral evaluation, and action in the world.

For most of what the secular university does, however, cognitive rationality or

disciplined knowing does not go beyond a simple desire to understand things?how they operate, why they came to be, and what they may do next. But even in that

relatively mundane form, cognitive rationality exists precariously in the university. It exists on sufferance, so to speak, in relation to a pervasive notion in our culture

that, after all, knowing is not an end in itself. It is simply a means. Knowledge is a tool for the manipulation of the world. The pervasive emphasis on the manipulative, instrumental use of knowledge has tended to make of the university a kind of uni versal filling station where students tank up on knowledge they will "need" later. The idea of the university which Clark Kerr presented not many years ago, the so called "multiversity" catering to the numerous knowledge needs of a diverse

clientele, is perilously close to that image. In this image, all university education becomes professional education, and there is great pressure in that direction, par ticularly perhaps in state universities. The ethos behind this conception of education is very general in the culture. It is rooted in the deep American value of

pragmatism and is intense at the moment partly because of a resurgence of old ways of thinking in the society, and partly because of a curious convergence in this matter

?10

THE NEW RELIGIOUS CONSCIOUSNESS 111

between the Old Right and the New Left. Both of them tend to adopt an extremely pragmatic, manipulative idea of education.

The Old Right and the New Left agree that education is useless unless it is related to rather immediate ends in "the real world." The implication is that the uni

versity is not the "real world," that the "real world" is somehow outside the univer

sity, and that work within the university can be justified only insofar as it is a means to an end in the "real world." According to this conception, the university is com

posed of atomized, individualistic students with certain fixed impermeable goals. The university's only purpose is to help students attain their goals by com

municating to them certain discrete skills and certain discrete bodies of fact about the external world which they can then "use."

Education in the great traditional societies as well as in primitive and archaic societies is by and large as different from this picture as one could imagine. Com

munication of discrete skills and facts is not missing in more traditional modes of education?a respect for "disciplined knowing" is sometimes highly developed?but it is never seen as the sole end of education. As Plato said, "All education is ini tiation." And Whitehead, though a modern philosopher, was speaking for an an cient conception of education when he said, "All education is religious." Education

traditionally is initiation in the sense of initiation into reality with a capital "R." It involves heart, and soul, and body. Initiation is not just a process in which "secrets

of the tribe" are transmitted. Initiation is a process in which the individual is transformed and takes on a new status, a change that is frequently symbolized in various parts of the world as being born anew. It is a radical process involving the

whole.person in relation to his whole environment; it differs sharply from the idea of a closed, atomized individual manipulating an equally closed, objective world. Traditionally, education was involved in the formation of a new person ideally more

perceptive than when he began, one more aware of the whole of existence, in

cluding its tragic dimension, and more responsive as a human being. Such education involved not only cognitive skills but a discipline of body, of feeling, of imagination, as well as of mind. Its aim was to eventuate in a morally and religiously transformed

person. In the Confucian tradition in both China and Japan, for example, the

relationship with the teacher was one of the most central in a person's life, com

parable to that with parents or the ruler. It was highly ceremonious, including rigorous forms of discipline. In the traditional schools of Japan, the way one sat

when one studied, the way one behaved in the presence of one's teacher were sub

ject to strict rules. There are cases in which a Japanese teacher would simply ter minate a lesson when the student moved his body carelessly, saying, "Apparently you are not interested in learning today." Obviously such an idea of education has its own mode of corruption, its own formalism and emptiness, but the basic motive involved in such an event is profoundly serious. The student and teacher were

engulfed not simply in the transmission of knowledge or facts, but in the transmis sion of the Way, of what reality in its fullest extent is all about. The traditional no tion of

"learning" or "study" (in Chinese hsueh, in Japanese gaku) had a richness of implication that transcended a purely cognitive concern. It was frequently said in the Confucian tradition, for example, that one could have "learning" without ever

having read a book at all. The great sages of ancient China, the great mythical figures that stand at the head of the Confucian tradition, Yao and Shun, of course, had no books, yet they embodied "learning." They embodied Tao. Their whole

112 ROBERT N. BELLAH

lives were an expression of the right relationship between man and the cosmos, the focus of all "study." Books, of course, became desperately important in the Confu cian tradition. Through particular books, the Tao could with great difficulty, yet in part, be transmitted. That was what made the whole enterprise worthwhile.

One feature of the Confucian tradition characteristic of all traditional religious forms of education was a special attitude toward texts. Some degree of philological sophistication in textual criticism long existed in China and Japan, but the basic in terest was the inner message that the texts imparted, not philological knowledge about the texts. The fundamental problem for the student was how to internalize, how to embody, the message of the text. Many of these texts were poetic or highly symbolic. In many instances, ways of learning texts involved more than silent

reading. They involved chanting, or sometimes special ritual motions that were vir

tually a dance form, so that one related to the tradition as a complete physical being and not simply as a disembodied intellect. In the first two books of the Laws, Plato bases the ideal state on a mode of education which also has this encompassing, totally human characteristic common in traditional forms of education.

Traditionally education was not a relationship between a closed subject and an alien object, but the development of a transformed person in relation to an organic

whole which included his society, the natural world, the whole cosmos. If that

description has any validity, it will be apparent how sharp the contrast is with the kind of education typical of the contemporary, secular university. Even though there is perhaps no word used more often today than "experience," the experiential

dimension is extraordinarily weak in the kind of education that we purvey. The wholeness of culture that stood behind traditional modes of education began

to crack in the West at least by the seventeenth century. Thus, one might imagine that the kind of education we know today dates back several centuries to the begin ning of secular scientific culture in the West. That is not the case. A much more traditional pattern of educational experience survived far into the period of so-called

modern, secular culture. Even the state university not so long ago found words like

religion and morality at the heart of its enterprise. The denominational college through the nineteenth century was the main mode of higher education in the

United States and offered an educational situation concerned with the whole human

being, with building character. However phony those words may sound to us, there was a totality of moral concern that links those forms of education to much more an cient ones.

The victory of cognitive rationality as the central value in higher education had its roots in the rise of the graduate school in the late nineteenth century, was ad vanced by the emergence of mass-educational institutions in the twentieth century, and was not complete until after World War II. Only recently have the remnants of a fuller conception of education been finally washed out of the American university. At the same time that higher education was becoming secularized and narrow in

focus, far larger percentages of the population sought entrance. The combination of

"alienating education" and a mass audience not surprisingly produced grave strains in the decade of the sixties, strains that are by no means gone from the Ameri can university.

Thus far, I have painted the traditional form of consciousness in its brightest hue. The other side is a narrow dogmatism, a repressive authoritarianism, and an absolute lack of openness. During the seventeenth century the growing empirical consciousness challenged all established powers. In the name of rationality, it under

THE NEW RELIGIOUS CONSCIOUSNESS 113

mined every status quo, every doctrinaire assertion of social and religious in stitutions. It helped in the immense release of those human energies that David

Landes has called "the unbound Prometheus" of the modern age. The secular con sciousness had a genuine transcendent element especially where it challenged es tablished tyrannies. In the religious field, it led to the undermining of established authorities, both clerical and textual, and the rise of higher criticism. It unmasked all assertions about religious man, ending in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with Marx, and Nietzsche, and Freud, the three great unmaskers of the

pretensions of Homo religiosus. And that, too, was a liberation, a liberation that

plays into the possibilities of our present situation in a way that would have been surprising to those masters of suspicion themselves.

Modern secularism, while releasing human beings from one kind of tyranny, often imposed a new, more terrible tyranny, however?the tyranny of the pragmatic world of every day, of the givenness of immediate reality with all its constraints. It has resulted in the rise of the bureaucratic, technological, and manipulative man, who rejects all transcendence, who has what Blake called "single vision." There is something deeply demonic in the single vision of modern secular consciousness with the vast range of human experience that it tends to shut out.

From its beginning, the modern secular culture has faced critical opposition and, eventually, movements from inside that cautioned: "Beware! What kind of human being will this liberating revolution finally produce?" I do not refer here to the sur vival of more traditional forms of criticism, an important feature of all modernizing societies and one that takes the form of peasant rebellions, religious movements, and revivals of various sorts. I think of those questionings that came not from those un der attack from the new culture, the remnants of an old world receiving its mortal blows, but from the children of the new enlightened culture itself, from men like Pascal, Rousseau, Fourier, and Marx as well as Schleiermacher and Kierkegaard.

The rise of modern culture from the seventeenth century can be characterized at a simple level by the word "criticism," a criticism of everything taken for granted in the traditional world view, a total undermining of what Paul Ricoeur has called "primary na?vet?." Ricoeur also suggests a possibility only indistinctly perceived at present?that of a second na?vet?, not through the rejection of criticism, but through the full exposure to its fires. It is the possibility that once again the symbols

may speak, and we may be able to live in their grasp. This possibility, this second na?vet?, I want to refer to by the notion of "new

religious consciousness." It should be quite c^ear that this notion does not include

everything novel on the religious scene today. Much of what looks new on the sur face?the Jesus Movement, the Neo-Pentecostals?is probably a more or less genuine expression of primary na?vet? or an effort to recapture a primary na?vet? that has been lost. In the Hare Krishna movement, for example, the absolute prohibition on any serious criticism of the system from those who have accepted it appears to be an effort to regain that lost world of perfect wholeness characterized as

primary na?vet?. Even a religion like Zen Buddhism, which seems extraordinarily sophisticated, which does not commit itself to any particular symbols, and which in theory is radically open to human experience, can become completely encap sulating, closing adherents off from exposure to anything outside a relatively narrow range of experience.

Second na?vet? is hard to define, hard to get a handle on. Clearly it does not rest on hostility to primary na?vet?. Indeed it often includes a great nostalgia for primary

114 ROBERT N. BELLAH

na?vet?, but also recognizes that it is no longer possible. The person who ex

periences new religious consciousness has passed through criticism, not avoided it.

He has gone to school with the masters of suspicion, he has subjected every one of his childhood beliefs to the most radical undermining. He knows the vulnerability of every text in every sacred tradition. Above all, and here is the crux of the difference with primary na?vet?, he knows that every interpretation of reality is finally only an

interpretation, and not reality itself. And he cannot confuse his own words or the words of some creed or doctrine with ultimate reality. Second na?vet? could be characterized in fairly traditional words as the final fulfillment of Biblical ieonoclasm, which accepts nothing as a substitute for the Divine itself. It is aware that

every religion is as much a defense against divine reality as it is a channel of transmis sion of divine reality. And a great many religions a great deal of the time are more

defenses than they are transmissions.

Consequently, the person in this situation denies the ultimacy of any interpreta tion. But he differs from the skeptic and the critical intellectual because he believes that purely religious symbols themselves have inexhaustible meaning, that no inter

pretation will ever fathom their depths. By opening oneself up to every possible mode of interpretation, however, it is possible to be grasped by the symbols?as Ricoeur says, "to hear again." Through ieonoclasm of the most radical sort, there may come not nihilism but a new way of grasping religious meaning. Such de-mystification

may lead to a new possibility of living in a mythical world, in the profound, not the

pejorative, meaning of that term. The person who has this new religious con sciousness can give himself to the symbols, or symbols can grasp him, because he does not place his interpretation above the symbols. Here is the crux of the issue of

changing interpretations. Only if one makes the interpretations more finally real than the text itself is that problem posed. The person with new religious con sciousness takes the religious symbols as revelatory of Being, but always as in part hidden. He is not disturbed by changes in interpretation and wants to remain open to every possible new interpretation. Finally, he can see that Buddhist or Hindu or

Navajo or Hopi symbols can be as revelatory as Christian or Jewish symbols. This does not mean that he cannot take a stand and commit himself to certain symbols as

being the most profound of his experience, knowing all the while that one can never

fully understand even those symbols which come out of "one's own tradition." But there is a profound openness to the radical experiential dimension of the entire

religious heritage of mankind. Of importance in this context is a normal aspect of growing up which can be

referred to as "youth fundamentalism." The transition from childhood to adulthood is a very upsetting one, and intense commitment of a religious or ideological sort to a relatively closed system provides an important way of moving from childhood to adulthood. Thus, rather than idolizing youth, I would say that chronological age is not a key to what is new culturally and what is the long-run direction of cultural

change. Everything that young people do is not, in the way I use the terms,

necessarily new religious consciousness.

I do not intend to identify the new religious consciousness with the so-called counter-culture. Second na?vet? begins much earlier than the counter-culture and is not co-terminous with it, though to some extent its popular dissemination has not been wholly unrelated to the counter-culture. Above all, it is a new way of being religious within modern culture and is not simple rejection of that culture. As a form of consciousness, it is not clearly institutionalized, although there is more in the

THE NEW RELIGIOUS CONSCIOUSNESS 115

churches than perhaps is realized. But just because it is the child of the critical in tellect and the product of modern culture at its best, its terrain, if it has any, is the

contemporary university, and even more specifically, in some places at least, the

Department of Religion. Here there is an institutional support for precisely that combination of seriousness and openness with respect to the whole of the human

religious heritage that characterizes this mode of religious consciousness. In one sense, this development is encouraging and in another rather upsetting.

After all, many people thought we finally had this whole question settled: the secular university was one thing, religion and all that nonsense was something else.

What on earth is happening if within the heart of the secular university a new un

derstanding of human beings is emerging, an understanding that takes seriously the

preconceptual, nonrational aspect? What do we do when such a perception emerges in the midst of our rational enlightenment enterprise? Some may be tempted to reach for their guns, so to speak, and to start talking about the separation of church and state. I frankly am not concerned. For one thing, these possibilities are at the

moment only incipient. We have a long way to go before their full implications will be clear. But here at least is one small point where the profound schism in our

culture, the schism between the disembodied intellect and our whole humanity, might possibly begin to be overcome, where the initiatory element of education

might begin to be regained. I certainly do not have any highly Utopian or es

chatological hopes as to what the Department of Religion per se can do about it. The

problems of the contemporary university go very deep, to the whole structure and

ideology of the university. In the long run, these problems will have to be solved at a much more radical level. Yet, in the present cultural situation, a Department of

Religion may be a small beachhead in that process of change which could lead again in a new way to a whole human being.

Article Contentsp. 110p. 111p. 112p. 113p. 114p. 115

Issue Table of ContentsDaedalus, Vol. 103, No. 4, American Higher Education: Toward an Uncertain Future, Volume I (Fall, 1974), pp. i-x, 1-356Volume InformationFront MatterPreface to the Issue "American Higher Education: Toward an Uncertain Future". Volume I [pp. v-x]Thoughts on Higher Educational Purposes and Goals: A Memorandum [pp. 1-11]Reflections on "Higher Education" [pp. 12-17]Instruction and Inquiry [pp. 18-24]Reflections on a Worn-out Model [pp. 25-32]The Erosion of Academic Privileges and Immunities [pp. 33-37]Paradoxes of Plenty [pp. 38-40]Credibility, Will, and Response [pp. 41-43]The Legacies of Evil [pp. 44-49]The University: Old Ghosts and New [pp. 50-53]Looking Back [pp. 54-57]The Failure of the University [pp. 58-66]The "Events": A Retrospective View [pp. 67-71]Blacks and Change in Higher Education [pp. 72-79]Where Do We Go from Here? [pp. 80-84]An Epitaph for Two Revolutions That Failed [pp. 85-103]Knowledge Elites and Counter-Elites [pp. 104-109]The New Religious Consciousness and the Secular University [pp. 110-115]Clio Vanishes from New York City [pp. 116-127]Elitism in the Humanities [pp. 128-137]Some Ill-Tempered Reflections on the Present State of Higher Education in the United States [pp. 138-142]Green Stamp or Structured Undergraduate Education? [pp. 143-147]Higher Education or Higher Skilling? [pp. 148-158]On the Purposes of Undergraduate Education [pp. 159-172]Civilizing Education: Uniting Liberal and Professional Learning [pp. 173-179]What Should Undergraduate Education Do? [pp. 180-185]Some Reflections on the Crisis of the University Curriculum [pp. 186-187]The Evaluation of Educational Experience [pp. 188-195]Designing Higher Education [pp. 196-202]The One and the Many [pp. 203-211]Reflections on Student Unrest, Institutional Response, and Curricular Change [pp. 212-216]The Artist and the University [pp. 217-220]Evolution and Education [pp. 221-228]Agonistic Structures in Academia: Past to Present [pp. 229-238]Coeducation and Women's Studies: Two Approaches to the Question of Woman's Place in the Contemporary University [pp. 239-249]The Self-Analysis of Educational Belief Systems [pp. 250-257]Thinking about Faculty [pp. 258-264]On the "Oversupply" of Graduate Students [pp. 265-268]Stability and Change in the American University [pp. 269-277]On the Uses of the University [pp. 278-281]Liberal Education in Contemporary American Society [pp. 282-287]One Wide River to Cross [pp. 288-296]Social Values in College and University [pp. 297-301]A Dialogue [pp. 302-310]But How Is Someone to Live a Life? [pp. 311-315]On the Sense of Vocation [pp. 316-325]The First Child at College [pp. 326-331]On Myopia: A Complaint from down Below [pp. 332-340]The American Credo... Of Higher Education [pp. 341-345]Back Matter