By Charles M. Stang

I have been a professor at Harvard Divinity School for the past 15 years, and director of its Center for the Study of World Religions for the past 5. My own teaching and research focus on religion and philosophy in the ancient Mediterranean world, especially early Christianity, but like many of my colleagues my interests and investments extend far beyond my area of focus. When I was recently asked to speak about the future of the study of religion in higher education, my first reaction was to confess to finding the present state of affairs rather sad. I may direct a university centre, but I nevertheless find myself increasingly at the periphery of the field.

To be blunt, the contemporary study of religion is trying to live in a flatland, a term from a late-19th-century novel by Edwin A. Abbott in which the characters exist as lines and polygons in an entirely two-dimensional universe. The main character is a square, who has a dream of a sphere. He tries to convince his fellow two-dimensional squares of the existence of the sphere and the three-dimensional world it occupies, which he calls “Spaceland” rather than “Flatland”. When he fails to convince any of them, all preaching about spheres and the three dimensions of space is outlawed, and he is imprisoned. The book Flatland is the square’s memoir from prison, written in hopes that future generations will come to see beyond their own two-dimensional world.

Let me widen the scope, however, and offer some more general reflections about the state of the humanities, and the study of religion within them. It’s widely acknowledged that across colleges and universities the humanities are struggling: departments and enrolments are experiencing something between rapid contraction and total collapse. The reasons for the twilight of the humanities are many, and include cultural forces outside anyone’s control, but I think the humanities have been accomplices in their own obsolescence, party to their own decline. Why do they largely fail to speak powerfully and persuasively either to students or to the literate public? My sense is that the humanities, ironically, have an impoverished understanding of the human. Just as we struggle with forms of scientific reductionism, so too we struggle with forms of humanistic reductionism.

The humanities often speak in too narrow a bandwidth, in critiques and analyses of discourse, power, identity and ideology – all of which are, of course, very real and important to excavate and interpret. At their best, these critiques create freedom and possibility within oppressive structures, both institutional and intellectual, and give space in which to breathe and to become anew. Unfortunately, though, they are rarely at their best, and today’s humanistic critiques more often feel like a hamster wheel than a bicycle wheel – they’re not going anywhere. As Rita Felski put it in The Limits of Critique, her 2015 book about the field of literary criticism, critique has its limits, and we would do well to explore a “post-critical” humanities.

The truth is that not a week goes by that I don’t invoke my own favourite critic of discourse, power, identity and ideology: Friedrich Nietzsche. Many today prefer Nietzsche’s descendants, but I favour him because his critique is unavoidably entangled with his conviction that we can and must go beyond ourselves, that we can and must become something more than mere critics, that we can and must transcend ourselves, and transform. (I’ll return to those two words, transcendence and transformation.)

The humanities are not really interpreting the human as such, but a pale shadow thereof. They appreciate neither how we humans are in embodied communion with the non-humans or more-than-humans with whom we share this world – animals, plants, fungi, but also gods and spirits – nor how this world itself has dimensions well beyond those we immediately perceive and how many are the ways we know ourselves, others, and the world. In other words, the humanities do not have a sufficiently expansive anthropology, ontology or epistemology; the human, the more-than-human, the world, and our ways of knowing them do not exist in a flatland.

I should acknowledge a fellow traveller here, really more of a guide since he is always out ahead of me. Jeffrey K. Kripal has been arguing a similar line about the study of religion and the future of the humanities for years, which has come together in his latest book, The Superhumanities: Historical Precedents, Moral Objections, New Realities. As he writes in the introduction: “I think the humanities are so important because the humanities are really the superhumanities. I think there is something cosmic or superhuman smouldering in the human, something that seems ever ready to burst into flames, and sometimes does.” He also notes that the “proper humanists will talk endlessly now about anything but the super, unless, of course, they want to critique the super and reduce it to something else, something always bad and sad”. Kripal’s call is for the study of religion to lead the way for the “superhumanities”, and after many years of ridicule and dismissal, I see signs that it is being taken seriously in corners of the academy.

The irony is that the study of religion should be leading the way, insisting on an expansive anthropology, ontology and epistemology. For me, whatever we constellate under the troubled category of “religion” has this in common: the conviction that the human and the world we inhabit are much more than we typically take them to be, and that that “more” can be named, engaged, and cultivated.

I have come to believe that the study of religion has an inferiority complex. It’s a latecomer to the humanities, and it desperately wants to be part of the club. How strange and sad that the study of religion is trying to join an already-collapsing club. It is trying to mimic the other, more established humanities, and to trade in their narrow bandwidth in hopes of fitting in. The truth is that the study of religion will never attain the privilege and respectability it seeks in the company of the other humanities. It is viewed with suspicion, as a superstitious survivor ill-suited to our secular age, at best tolerated like an eccentric cousin. As resources dwindle, it will lose if it continues to try to compete in that field. Instead, I would encourage scholars of religion to be proud of what sets us apart, to own what religion is, and its crucial importance.

What is religion, after all? Kripal cites the work of Martin Riesebrodt, a German sociologist of religion who once taught at the University of Chicago Divinity School, where Kripal and I both attended graduate school. In The Promise of Salvation, Riesebrodt argues that “religion’s promise” is “astonishingly constant” across time and place and that the focus on deconstructive critique in the humanities has “hinder[ed] serious research and has confused a whole generation of students”. Following Max Weber, Riesebrodt insists that religion is about “charisma”, about “superhuman powers” (übermenschliche Mächten) and the ascetic and ecstatic practices that humans devise to activate those powers. That’s it. That’s “the secret logic of religion” – but is it really so secret? What we observe as “religious” in the world – laws and mores, community organisation, rituals – is an ellipse formed by these two loci: powers and practices. In Kripal’s words, “It is what religion is”: “whether imagined or real (or, more likely, both) it is precisely this public claim and personal experience of transcendence, of something superhuman, that makes religion religious.”

Transcendence: I promised I would come back to that word, along with its twin, transformation. Almost two years ago I launched an initiative at the Center with those very names: “Transcendence and Transformation”. With those two words, I was trying to capture what I thought the study of religion should invest in, what I felt should be its north star. By “transcendence”, I mean those traditions and practices that aim for the transcendence of our accustomed states of being, consciousness and embodiment. By “transformation”, I mean the real and profound changes that an individual, a group, even a world can experience by means of transcending these accustomed states.

I realise that to speak of transcendence in the contemporary academy is transgressive. And to understand why, we should linger for a moment over that Latin preposition “trans” – as in transcendence, transformation, and now transgression. Trans means, at its most basic level, “across” or “beyond” and it implies movement: movement from one place to another, from one state to another, across something like a threshold, a line or a boundary – whatever differentiates here from there, this from that, one from another. Many of my colleagues are wary of transcendence because they think it implies a particular kind of movement, namely an escape, a flight from the thorny realities of our here and now to some fanciful refuge – disembodied, unencumbered by the weight of history and its horrors, or its beauties. They regard the escape as escapist, and they are certainly right that transcendence has been marshalled to justify our flight from our bodies and their demands on us, from other people and our responsibilities to them, from the earth and how we have grossly mistreated it. It appears to them as a metaphysical version of the billionaires launching themselves into space in their rockets, leaving us and this wounded world behind – changing their location but not changing themselves one atom or inch.

This is decidedly not what I invoke when I speak of “transcendence”. I am committing to the trans in “transcendence” and “transformation” – movement across and beyond, an urge to stretch ourselves and others, to explore ourselves and others, and to embark on an adventure into this world and into others. For when we worry that transcendence might be an escape from our here and now, I want to ask whether we should be confident that we know our here and now, or in the plural, our “heres” and our “nows”. Perhaps the first thing to be transcended is that very confidence, in hopes that we might discover other ways of being here and now. Rather than a flight from the body, for example, might transcendence be a flight into the body or at least other modes of embodiment we are not accustomed to perceive? I am convinced that we are, individually and collectively, much more than we typically take ourselves to be, and that the urgent task is, first, a kind of immanent transcendence, crossing the very proximate thresholds of our accustomed states of being, consciousness and embodiment.

I think something like “Transcendence and Transformation” is the direction in which the study of religion should go, and especially at a place like a divinity school. I am proud to teach at a divinity school, where the study of religion meets religion, where the rubber hits the road. And just as with rubber and road, it is only with this unique traction, tread, and – yes – friction, that we can move at all. So, let’s try to move.

I have been trying to move my field from a centre at the very periphery, from a small corner of a university that often regards the study of religion as an awkward appendage. The Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard is the fulcrum that presented itself to me. Archimedes famously said, “Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.” I don’t share his confidence entirely. I am not at all sure that we can move the study of religion or lead the humanities in a different direction, never mind move the whole world, but I am committed to this enterprise whether I think it will succeed or not. To put that another way, I want the enterprise to succeed now, in the present, not then, in some future.

I’m tired of “then” thinking, planning for a future that will never be present because we can’t enact anything in the present, because we defer it until the future. I’m tired of working to save a world for the future but unable even to see it in the present. Transcendence and transformation are to be had now, in the present, whenever that is, whenever we make it be.

Regardless of whether it succeeds or not, or even what “success” means in this case, I’m committed to this enterprise being at least three things: first, a beacon, a signal that will call others to it; second, a harbour, a shelter for this work, where the study of religion meets religion and leans into rather than shies away from an expansive anthropology, ontology and epistemology; third, it must be a record, a testimony: “we committed to this, here.” Like the square’s memoir from prison, written to future generations in hopes that they will seek out the sphere.

When I put these three concepts together – beacon, harbour, record – I’m reminded of ancient Alexandria, which was known quite literally for its beacon, its harbour, and its record – or its library. Alexandria also succeeded in a fourth capacity: it successfully spread Hellenism east and west, north and south. This vision for the study of religion and the (super) humanities, can it, will it, should it spread? I do not know, but let us first rebuild Alexandria anew: a beacon, a harbour, and a record. ◉