Drug or medicine? China's experience of Marx's opium thesis on religion

This paper tracks the changes in the influence of Marx's celebrated opium thesis in China. Marx's view that religion is “the opium of the people” was first introduced into China through propaganda associated with the Russian revolution. It became very influential among Chinese intellectuals and dominated the religious policy of the CCP for a long period. However, as the revolutionary party became the party in power after 1949, it was obvious that the opium thesis alone would be insufficient to deal with the religious situation in a socialist country. Although the “five natures” of religion thesis was proposed to explain the persistence of religion in socialist China, the opium thesis proved more powerful politically and resulted in a general attack on religion during the Cultural Revolution. Not until the era of reform and “opening up” was the opium thesis questioned. After the release of a major document entitled “The Basic Viewpoint and Policy on the Religious Question during our Country's Socialist Period” in 1982, the opium thesis was viewed as too simplistic an instrument for understanding “the problem of religion.” Scholars have argued that religion contains important cultural elements and can make a positive contribution to a socialist society in certain respects. After lengthy discussion, a consensus was reached that Marxist views on religion should keep up with the times and that the opium thesis was no longer compatible with contemporary Chinese society. Although different voices can still be heard on the issue, religion is no longer viewed as just a “drug” but rather as a kind of “medicine.” Marx's opium thesis has been replaced in China by a new theory, one that emphasizes that religion should and can adapt to the needs of a socialist society.     

TRANSCENDING DICHOTOMIES IN HISTORY AND RELIGION

At first glance, to speak of “history and religion” presents no problem. We merely identify two items to discuss in the same study. We quickly discover, however, that since at least the twentieth century the pair “history and religion” has tended to operate as a dichotomy. Within the dominant traditions of discourse originating in Europe, over many centuries, the verbal pair “history and religion” became a dichotomy encoded as the dichotomy “secular and religious,” signifying the opposition “not religious and religious.” This dichotomy does not usually appear alone, but commonly comes associated with other dichotomies whose terms align with either history or religion. The short list of associated dichotomies includes: temporal and spiritual, natural and supernatural, reason and faith, public and private, social and personal, scientific and theological, objective and subjective, rational and emotional, and modern and medieval. The opposing parts come gendered as masculine and feminine. Usage of the dichotomies creates tensions with practitioners of virtually all religions in all regions of the world. Rigorous and consistent users of the dichotomies misunderstand the character of religions as ways of life, fail to account for the persistence and revival of religion in the twenty‐first century, and overlook the intrinsic manner in which history manifests religion and religion manifests history. The defective outcomes prompt a number of constructive suggestions for transcending dichotomies in history and religion. These reflections on dichotomies refer to several varieties of Christianity, the emergence of the secular option, and the imagined triumph of Hindu dharma.     

周公摄政与周初政教关系初探

周公摄政导致了周初二王并存的局面,而二王并存的实质是国家政权和教权的分离。周公是周代初期的巫史领袖,并于武王后期开始执掌教权,由于不能和政权明确分开,引起王族的猜疑。周公为此迁居东都洛邑,并致力于制礼作乐,目的是使政教分权更加明晰化,造成了一次意义深远的社会制度和思想化的革命。     

UNIVERSAL AND PROFANE: THE HISTORIOGRAPHICAL CONSEQUENCES OF NATURAL RELIGION

Natural religion in the eighteenth century was seemingly unhistorical or even antihistorical: it “dehistoricized” morality. It posited a morality that was uniform in all ages, not dependent on any particular revelation, watermarked onto the fabric of our nature, and accessible merely by the light of reason. Even so, natural religion played an important role in the secular historiographical turn in eighteenth-century England. There was in fact an organic relationship between the two, one that historians have failed to articulate. Precisely because natural religion was thought to rest on timeless and universally valid rational foundations, it became possible to treat traditional religion (meaning above all, but not only, Christianity) as a subject of secular historical study, in the sense that it was subject to the same laws of historical knowledge and historical development as all other subjects of historical study, and left no room for miracles. A central figure in this conceptual relationship was Conyers Middleton, a once-famous, now-obscure Cambridge librarian. Middleton's account of natural religion has been swamped by the attention lavished on Matthew Tindal, and his turn to secular historiography lies in the shadows cast by Edward Gibbon. Yet Middleton played a crucial and distinctive role in laying historiographical foundations without which Gibbon could not have written as he did. His understanding of natural religion differed from that of other participants in the “deist controversy” in ultimately far-reaching ways. Those differences explain why he could treat Cicero as a kind of saint in the church of natural religion, reversing, as it were, the elevation of the Bible above Cicero that Augustine had put into effect at the beginning of medieval history. They explain above all why Middleton could approach the history of Christianity in a manner that anticipated both Voltaire and Gibbon and made their historical writings possible.     

Death,Passion and Politics: The Power of Grief and the Charisma of Loss

Caves used in antiquity had multiple functions and often long use histories. While many were employed for shelter, some became ritual sites. Revitalized interest in caves in Mesoamerica combines archaeology, ethnography, ethnohistory, epigraphy, and osteology. The current, general anthropological study of caves offers exceptional insights into early Mesoamerican customs, ceremonies, and beliefs, and indicates that caves played a significant role in religion. The evidence suggests that some caves were perceived as vital aspects of a sacred landscape and connections to the supernatural underworld. Continuity of indigenous ritual practices associated with caves remains to the present.     

Virgil's Fourth Eclogue and the Eleusinian Mysteries 1

This article argues that Virgil's Fourth Eclogue can in part be understood in light of the influence of the Eleusinian Mysteries on Roman religion. In particular, it argues that the child can be compared with Ploutos and that the return of the Virgo reflects the myth of Persephone. The myths of Demeter at Eleusis are assimilated to the Roman myth of a golden age under the rule of Saturnus. The return of Persephone from the Underworld and the birth of the child signify an end to war. The possible significance of the poem to Augustan propaganda is also discussed.     

The Proliferation of Monism to the East and the Making of the Religion of the Future in Early Twentieth‐Century Korea

This study illuminates the transnational proliferation of monism, a worldview that drew on evolutionary theory to unify both science and religion and ultimately replace traditional religions. Particular attention is paid to how monism was transmitted from Germany via Japan to Korea in the early twentieth century, and how this impacted local endeavours to imagine a religion of the future. A prominent figure in this trajectory was the religious thinker Yi Tonhwa (1884–1950) who endeavoured to use the tenets of monism to transform the Ch’?ndogyo, “Religion of the Heavenly Way,” one of the most prominent religions in Korea at the time, into a universal religion of the future. The result was among the closest to a monist religion the world had seen, although the efforts to align the Ch’?ndogyo with modern scientific thought also deprived the religion of native elements. This would have significant repercussions for the religion as the scientific optimism that had sustained the global monist movement faded away after 1945.     

The limitation of human knowledge: Faith and the empirical method in John Wesley's medical holism

In his medical and scientific works John Wesley provided an interpretation of the universe that was structured, though not pre-ordained, by God. The empirical method he adopted was measured in terms of efficacy and judged according to rationalistic standards. Its practical success, however, was used by Wesley to underpin his vocation of practical piety, which developed out of a holistic view of nature inspired by the spiritualism of Primitive Christianity. Accordingly, the providential ordering of Man and nature meant that safeguarding physical health became a spiritual act, though Wesley separated the discourse of religion and terminology of medicine. This distinction was essential because it ensured intellectual integrity whilst leaving a protective space for religious faith. He made this move on the one hand but saw no contradiction in bringing the discourses of religion and medicine together to serve his mission. For Wesley, social and personal improvement did not rely exclusively on enlightened thinking or religious faith. Rather it depended on showing how rationalism and faith could display separate strengths within an overall framework of holism.     

我国墓葬壁画的保护方法

壁画的发展与不同民族在各个历史时期的生活习俗、宗教、哲学、美学观念等紧密相连。同时,壁画的制作也与当时社会的政治、经济、文化、技术发展水平相适应,因此古代壁画极具历史、艺术、科学技术价值。墓葬壁画出现并最终形成一种丧葬文化现象是在汉代。汉代墓葬壁画自西汉前期形成以后,不断发展演变并形成了一套非常系统完整的体系,表达了深邃而复杂的信仰和丧葬观念,丰富和发展了中国古代绘画的造型技巧和艺术表现形式,因此墓葬壁画在早期绘画史和思想史上都占有非常重要的地位。本研究对发表在《考古学报》、《考古与文物》等十余种期刊自创刊至2015年的有关墓葬壁画方面的资料进行了系统整理,据此研究了我国墓葬壁画的分布区域及其特征,总结墓葬壁画的保护模式与方法,并就墓葬壁画保护的研究方向提出建议。     

"Religion" and Christian Conversionin African History: A New Model

This article reviews recent scholarship on African religion and argues that, while much has been accomplished, historians have inherited a problematic view of the processes that they have investigated. They have unknowingly adopted evangelical ideas, in the form of written words and concepts that they wrongly assume have maintained consistent meanings down through the decades. Because missionaries' translations have been taken in this way as accurate guides for understanding what gave rise to them, much of Africa's intellectual history appears religious. The article focuses on the example of tui-qua, a term used by Khoikhoi and translated as "God," and suggests a model for understanding evangelism and conversion that does not rely on the supposed ubiquity of religion. It is argued that missionaries used Christian notions to accommodate the falsity of analogous practices, which although often unrelated in their original setting, together became a single entity (religion) as a result.     

The 'civic religion' of the Resistance in post-war Italy

The problem of the legitimacy or otherwise of the Resistance tradition in post-war Italy has been addressed in recent years mainly in terms of the role of the partisan struggle and its political legacy. This article aims to assess the tradition in terms of commemorative practices, rituals, artistic representations and monuments. It seeks to evaluate whether the Resistance gave rise to a civic religion that may be compared to those which existed in the Liberal period, based on the heroic struggles and figures of the Risorgimento, and the Fascist period, which drew on the feelings of loss and injustice that followed the First World War. It is argued that, although the Resistance lacked, prior to the 1960s, a high degree of official sponsorship, it did acquire some of the features of a civic religion. Its appeal was mainly limited to the regions administered by the Left which had seen a significant degree of Resistance activity in 1943-5. Even here, however, it was difficult to sustain the tradition as a key feature of community life during and after the economic boom: the eclipse of public culture, the decline of public mourning and the development of commercial leisure and mass culture all served to deprive it of meaning. Although intellectuals, politicians and ex-partisans reacted to this situation, the visual and rhetorical languages associated with the commemoration of the Resistance became increasingly divorced from everyday life and dominant social values.     

罗马时代的信仰危机

异教时期的罗马国教具有公共性、反个人崇拜及相对宽容等特点。自从元首政治建立之后,随着东方思想的大量涌入,有关个人灵魂拯救的秘传崇拜开始打破公共崇拜对于信仰领域的垄断;皇帝崇拜日益冲击着城邦宗教中的共和与民主传统;与此同时,帝国政府对于异己思想表现得越来越不宽容。这种信仰危机随着3世纪社会总危机的爆发而日益加剧,其最直接的后果就是造成了普遍的道德危机。基督教的崛起有效地缓解了公共崇拜与私人信仰之间的张力,彻底瓦解了个人崇拜赖以存在的基础,并用一套全新的伦理原则重塑了社会的道德模式,因而最终结束了这场长达四百年之久的信仰危机。     

Dieu et les dieux chez F. Creuzer et F.G. Welcker

In the first half of the 19th century some German classical scholars tried to understand the pagan religions of antiquity as genuine religions, containing an intuition of the truth. F. Creuzer regarded popular beliefs and cults of all ancient peoples as a “religion of the imagination”;, a “pantheism of the imagination”;, but thought that, besides that popular religion, there existed a much deeper, esoteric pantheism, which was passed on from one generation to another and from one country to another by priests‐sages. In Greece, according to him, popular religion became more superficial than anywhere else; its religious content was to a large extent substituted by poetic and artistic beauty.     

The reasons of Europe: Edmund Husserl,Jan Patočka,and María Zambrano on the spiritual heritage of Europe*

ABSTRACT

This article investigates the genuinely philosophical engagement with the idea of Europe twentieth century philosophy. Here, especially phenomenology has developed a distinct tradition of conceiving Europe not as a geographical and political entity but rather as a ‘spiritual shape.’ Husserl, as the originator of this thought, traces this spiritual Europe back to Ancient Greece of the 7/6 century B.C. in which an unprecedented ‘theoretical attitude’ towards the world originated. Hence, Europe is conceived as a project of reason, of pure rationality while at the same time leaving out the constitutive dimension of religion. Furthermore, this non-historical philosophical genealogy proves itself to be an arbitrary but intentional genealogy whose intentions have to be put into critical reconsideration. In this article, I will introduce Pato?ka and Zambrano as important critiques of Husserl’s genealogy, or even potentially violent mono-genealogy, as Derrida has emphasized. Following Foucault, it is the aim of this article to put into question the myth of a single historical-political origin of Europe’s spiritual heritage and furthermore to pay attention to the transformations and conflictual relations between Europe’s different forms of reason and religion.     

God,not Caesar: Revisiting National Socialism as ‘political religion’

This article argues that use of the concept of ‘political religion’ to describe the radicalized political movements of the twentieth century has again gained currency in recent years as a result of the collapse of the Soviet Union as well as the global upsurge of religiously inspired violence and that research with respect to religion proper – what religion is, its role in public life, its evolving reception by ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’ – can advance the discussion. The article subsequently offers the author's own research as evidence of the concept's applicability to the case of National Socialism. Analysis focuses, specifically, on a movement in nineteenth century Germany to develop a secular system of ethics, a project that eventually led, ironically and tragically, to the emergence of a new faith in a absolutized ‘collective will’ as the transcendent source of all moral values. The National Socialist movement subsequently co-opted this article of faith, the article argues, by transforming Hitler into a holy medium for the salvific dictates of what became, by the early 1930s, an unimpeachable ‘Volkswille.’     

Probabilistic Darwinism: Louis Agassiz vs. Asa Gray on Science, Religion, and Certainty

Despite the professed harmony of science and religion in early to middle nineteenth-century culture, scientific practice gradually veered away from confirmation of religious assumptions. This trend culminated in the shock of Charles Darwin's theory of species development, which troubled many scientists and religious believers both for its explicit naturalism and for the unprovable probabilism at the heart of its method. Two key players — and antagonists — in the reception of Darwinism in America, Louis Agassiz and Asa Gray, actually agreed in their assessment of the probabilistic quality of Darwinism, but they split over how much uncertainty to wel-come into their science and their religion. Agassiz became intellectually marginalized because he continued to demand certainty, while Gray's acceptance of uncertainty represented a growing trend among intellectuals of science and religion.     

东瓯王子晋神仙信仰初探——兼谈白鹤大帝信仰

王乔传说最早出现在南方,在被河洛王子晋传说取代多年以后,复归于越地,天台山遂为王子晋信仰的发祥地,并与台州白鹤大帝信仰融合为鹤仙信仰,广泛流传于东瓯地区,衍化为多种信仰民俗,远及日本。     

Nation-Building and the Linguistic Situation in Upper Silesia

Language became the basis of nation-building in Central Europe at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. During the same period Czech, German and Polish nationalists had contested Upper Silesia as a multilingual region before the nation-states of Czechoslovakia, Germany and Poland took over this role. In the first half of the twentieth century, this land was divided and redivided among these nation-states. Each change entailed an alteration in language policies aimed at ennationalising Upper Silesia's inhabitants into one nation or another. Standard national language being the yardstick of nationality, the local non-standard language forms were earmarked for eradication because they could spur further emergence of Upper Silesia's ethnic groups or serve as a springboard for new nationalism(s). The Central European strain of ethnic nationalism steeped in language clashed with other loci of identity such as religion, the monarch or state. Sometimes this helped ethnic groups to survive despite ennationalising pressure exerted by the established nation-states. Officially, during the communist period, Warsaw managed to homogenise Upper Silesia into an indistinguishable part of the Polish nation-states. After 1989 it proved an illusion, as Upper Silesia seems to be the most ethnically and nationally diversified region in post-communist Poland.     

试析陈独秀的“以科学代宗教”思想

新文化运动初期,陈独秀针对在社会转型背景下出现的信仰危机,提出了"以科学代宗教"的主张.他认为以西方自然科学为基础的科学思想、精神和方法,可以在世界观、人生观、社会历史观等领域取代宗教,作为现代社会的新信仰.他后来的思想虽有曲折,但并没有放弃"以科学代宗教"的主张.在中国现代"以科学代宗教"的社会思潮的形成过程中,他起了主导性的作用,做出了主要贡献.     

Christianity and Justice in the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission: A Case Study in Religious Conflict Resolution

Abstract

Historically, international conflict resolution theorists have largely adopted the position that organized religion is an instigator of violence. As a result, these theories have tended to exclude religion as a force for peacebuilding. Recently, however, scholars have suggested that religion can contribute constructively to a theory of conflict resolution. Their general thesis is that, if religion played a significant part in people's lives, and if religion played a part in fuelling the conflict, then when resolving the conflict, religion must be at least taken into account. An example of a conflict resolution process in which religion, specifically Christianity, played a central role was South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). In dialogue with leading critics of the TRC process, particularly Richard Wilson, this article examines the ambiguous role that Christianity played in influencing concepts of justice in the TRC.