There are two – not altogether consistent – ways in which people understand the word religion. There’s an everyday, non-technical sense which you would find reflected in the contents of your average school textbook of religious education. We could sum up religion in this sense as ‘any system of belief involving supernatural beings’. The ‘Contents’ page of our school textbook would typically include chapters on Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, etc..
There is also a more technical, and much broader, sense of religion that I have encountered in sociological and socio-anthropological studies. John Gray sums this up, in a recent book (7 Types of Atheism), as ‘any collective worldview’. This is a not altogether adequate definition, but one that gives a general notion of what we are talking about.
Definitions are important, because they reflect the way we ‘map out’ the real-world phenomena to which we apply them – and sometimes they carry ideological bias. Religion is an obvious case.
The former, commonplace, understanding of religion is generally the one presupposed by many who claim to examine religion – and Christianity, more particularly – from a scientific point of view. But I will argue below that it is rather the more technical usage of socio-anthropologists that reflects a properly non-ideological perspective.
This has obvious implications for the debate between Christians and their non-believer interlocutors – the central concern of this blog. If it is indeed the case that the broader understanding is non-ideological, then it is to this broader definition, that both sides should adhere. But this ‘broader understanding’ needs to be properly grasped. A definition, such as that already offered, is little use unless we have some sense of the kind of real-world phenomena to which it refers.
To this end, I propose, in what follows, not just to define the concept of religion in the broad socio-anthropological sense, but to ‘map out’ the phenomenon which would have to be included under that definition. How would we imagine the Contents Page of an alternative textbook of religious studies, based on a non-ideological concept of religion? What would be the titles of its chapters, and its chapter summaries?
What’s wrong with the old definition
First, however, a few words on why I believe the anthropological understanding of religion is indeed superior in this way.
The everyday sense of religion categorizes some worldviews as supernatural.
Now the mere positing of this characteristic as distinguishing certain worldviews from the others evokes at least the possibility of a worldview that would not be of this kind – one that would be simply natural. Such a worldview would somehow uniquely reflect the world as it exists in itself, without incorporating anything of the distinctiveness of its own, as opposed to other, perspectives.
This seems paradoxical given the evident multiplicity of worldviews. Attempting to enter into another worldview requires us to bracket out considerations arising from its conformity or non-conformity to Nature. Indeed, it is practically a tenet of social anthropology (the discipline most involved in entering other worldviews) that nobody’s reality should be considered more ‘natural’ than anyone else’s: our realities will always be refracted through a social dimension. Indeed, the claim of a worldview to be natural is itself a sure marker of its ideological/ideational status; the ‘naturalization’ of culture is precisely what every ideology/ideation does.
This is why I think the atheist John Gray, in his recent book, is probably right to see religion understood in the conventional sense as a largely ideational construct. The obvious source of such thinking would be, as he argues himself, the worldview introduced into the West by the European Enlightenment. Prior to this, a theistic worldview appears to have reigned unchallenged. The whole raison d’etre of the commonplace notion of religion introduced by the Enlightenment was, therefore, less the classification of ‘religious’ worldviews, than the opening up of an ideational space outside ‘religion’ so-described – of a worldview posited as reflecting a naïve apprehension of reality, drained of any social or cultural influence.
The use of this concept in the sphere of religious studies – let alone Christian apologetic – seems unfortunate. Go back to our typical RE textbook, with its procession through the ‘great faiths’ as so many religious options. Evidently, no open-minded Christian perspective on religion would understand the religious phenomenon like this. Pride of place would presumably have to be given to Christianity as the culmination of a process of human religious evolution. But equally, it hardly represents a comparative anthropological understanding of the phenomenon, either. Anthropologists are concerned ultimately with the various shapes and forms of what pertains to humanity as a whole; anthropology, as a science, approaches human behaviours as a potential ‘participant observer’. By contrast, ‘religion’, as a category of knowledge, presupposes a fundamental form of human behaviour that the enquirer does not share with the human subject of his/her enquiry.
A new definition
How then would I summarize the meaning of religion as that term is understood in a broader and more anthropological sense?
Actually, John Gray’s ‘collective worldview’ is not far off the mark. We are speaking of collective practices and beliefs– not just in the sense of practices and beliefs we do together, but in the sense of actions and beliefs that, through their meaning-giving function, forge that togetherness of collective identity. We could capture this by saying ‘collective symbolic practices and beliefs’.
Yet, there is another crucial aspect, harder to pinpoint, which is perhaps hinted at by the ‘world’ of John Gray’s ‘worldview’. This is the systematic aspect of religious behaviour: religion is not just ‘collective symbolic practices and beliefs, but a system of ‘collective symbolic practices and beliefs’. And this aspect of system is closely related to the potential comprehensiveness of a religious worldview – rather as geographical co-ordinates imply a system in the way they link one location to another by simultaneously bringing all locations into a single space. For its devotees, religion creates a ‘world’ – an idea not infrequently evoked by its description as totalizing. This systematic character of religion brings us close to what is meant by the term ideology. Sadly, however, ideology suffers from the connotation that something is cynically contrived in the interests of a dominant group; whereas, with religion, we are concerned with practices & beliefs expressing shared perceptions of how the world is, transmitted by the community. This has led some social anthropologists to prefer ideation, or religious ideation – a barbarously technical term, which nevertheless expresses precisely what I mean here by religion.
Mapping out the religious phenomenon
But a better way to make to make things clear is simply to describe in more concrete terms the phenomena in question. Here then is my own mapping of the religious phenomenon – if you like, chapter summaries of an alternative textbook in which religion is understood in a broader, anthropological sense.
1.Traditional religion. This is a collective piety constitutive of a world where an individual’s status and their personal life-projects are determined: 1. by obligations that bind them to their parents, ancestors and ancestral spirits; 2. by relationships that they have with their fellow-beings by dint of those obligations to the past. Here, the social and political sphere are effectively inseparable from ‘religion’. As one writer as put it, ‘society’ includes both humans and the spirits, the living and the dead. The anthropologist Natalie Biardeau observes of the ancient Indian householder: ‘His social and family bonds are so strong that his troubles and joys are to a large extent those of the group to which he belongs. He cannot think of his own prosperity without thinking of that of his whole lineage.’
Such piety may be symbolically expressed through ritual practices. Yet the spiritual pre-eminence of ancestral spirits demonstrated in those practices will not always be sharply distinguished from a more general principle of hierarchical seniority affecting their living subjects. The ‘priests’ of such a cult are in turn channels of ancestral favour to the communities they represent. And, as they channel the divine favour, so they themselves participate in the divine status. That is the basis of their seniority. One day, they will be ancestors in turn. Think of that exemplum of ancient piety, the Roman hero Aeneas with his father Anchises on his back, holding the hand of the infant son Julus trotting at his side, and with his other hand clasping the effigies of the ancestor gods he has just rescued out of his burning city. Piety of this kind, has, mutatis mutandis has been the lot of the greater part of human race throughout history.
2.Renunciatory religion. There are two major exceptions: both distinct types of a less communal religion constituting a renunciation of traditional piety. From the perspective of the traditional religion, one might almost describe them as ‘non-religious’ forms of religion. They nevertheless constitute ideational systems.
2.1.Confessional religion. The first of these types comprises forms of ethicized or salvation religion that stress the importance of ‘right intention’ in the performance of symbolic practice, and so give an enhanced role to the worshipper as an individual rather than a representative of a social group. Examples of salvation religions include those great ‘faiths’ that emerged in the axial age, and constitute the greater part of what we nowadays think of as ‘religions’, e.g. Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, etc.. The new of focus on individual intention inevitably implies a measure of withdrawal from the obligations of the inherited socio-religious order of piety, described above. To this extent, these religions may actually be at odds with ‘piety’ in the traditional sense, though such individualism is often tempered by a commitment to a social order of more universalizing cast than that of traditional inherited pieties: namely, Church (Christianity), Umma (Islam) or Sangha (Buddhism). Still, from perspective of traditional ‘religious religion’, one can understand the disapproval and alarm registered, for example, by the Chinese official writing at a time when Chinese Buddhism reached its zenith: ‘I fear that every building will turn into a monastery and the people in every family will be ordained into the priesthood, and not one foot of soil will remain to the state.’ Similar misgivings are expressed by Cicero when confronted with another kind of ‘non-religious religion’ – the ‘shameful’ phenomenon of ancient Epicureanism.
2.2.Post-revolutionary religion. The second exception consists in the range of religious options arising out of the religious revolution of 18th-19thC Europe. At first, an elite phenomenon, this revolution began with the Enlightenment project of divesting the world of transcendence, and re-conceiving human good in essentially humanist terms. It then continued with the Romantic project of re-infusing the world with a new kind of spiritual dimension that accorded the human subject the place of author – or at least co-author – of its own experience. This development resulted in a focus on individual agency still more extreme than we find in our first type of ‘non-religious’ religion. Concurrently, the social formations of early Modern Christendom with their dependence on Catholic and Protestant churches begin to transform into the modern nation state with its purely abstract concepts of sovereignty and individuality ‘based on formal reason and an absolute concentration of de facto power’ (John Milbank). Taken as a whole, this religious revolution, initiated by the social elites, has left the modern world with a broad spectrum of new religious options, all of them classifiable as renunciatory religions.
2.2.1.One option is to remain within the framework of an exclusive humanism by embracing the first phase of the religious revolution and ignoring the second.
2.2.2.Another is to stick with the transcendent god of Christianity but to integrate the second phase of the religious revolution by developing theological understandings of Christian faith within the new space accorded to spirituality by the Romantic emphasis on subjectivity and experience.
2.2.3.The third and final option rejects both exclusive humanism and transcendent theism, and carries through the Romantic revolution by seeking out non-transcendent versions of the sacred. Following the terminology of the sociologist Charles Taylor, I shall term the last option Counter-Enlightenment immanentism. Immanentism here means an understanding of the sacred that doesn’t posit a creator god standing outside and beyond (as well as within) creation. The religion of traditional piety is immanentist in this sense. But the immanentism of the counter-Enlightenment does not revert to the old pre-Christian collective pieties, nor is it theistic in the traditional sense. Rather, it seeks out a this-worldly sacredness within the spiritual space opened up by Romantic subjectivism.
What are the religious options most relevant to the Western world today, which one might expect to figure most prominently in our textbooks of religion? I would say the following: Christianity, whose various still extant forms can be situated on a spectrum running between 2.1 (traditional) and 2.2.2 (post-revolutionary); exclusive humanism (2.2.1); Counter-Enlightenment immanentism (2.2.3). These could all, in my view, be properly described as religions, as that term is here understood. The latter two (2.2.1 and 2.2.3) are both options which might be ascribed to by people who call themselves ‘atheist’. One might then, following the example of John Gray, describe both as ‘atheisms’.
Counter-Enlightenment Immanentism.
I must now say something more about Counter-Enlightenment immanentism (2.2.3). For a start, I doubt if the very summary description given above is at all sufficient to enable the reader to recognize the phenomenon I am talking about; whereas the phenomenon of exclusive humanism needs no further introduction. Second, I strongly believe that Counter-Enlightenment immanentism is a far more widespread and important religious phenomenon in the contemporary West. The relatively higher visibility of exclusive humanism is, I suspect, a relatively temporary blip occasioned by the recent notoriety of the New Atheism of Richard Dawkins et al.. Far more widespread these days, and more significant, is the religious tendency Taylor calls expressivist individualism. This is but the latest transform of a worldview largely derivative of counter-Enlightenment immanentism, and descending ultimately from Romanticism. Gray’s preference for an atheism of the latter kind is, in my view, very widely shared – especially, though by no means exclusively, by the young.
This religious worldview is elucidated by Charles Taylor in A Secular Age. We earlier described the ‘disenchantment’ brought by the Enlightenment as divesting the world of the dimension of transcendence. This does not necessarily lead to a reductive materialism of the kind that refuses to acknowledge the reality of anything not susceptible to scientific proof – though, of course, it can go in that direction. It could equally lead us to the more modest position that everything we know can be explained as arising from ‘Nature’ – including the human ‘soul’ or even religion. To affirm this is not, of course, to detract from the reality of those things. It is merely to exclude the possibility of them having an ‘other-worldly’ origin that absolutely distinguishes them from ‘natural’ realities; indeed, it is to imply that at least the potential for such spiritual realities is already immanent in the world ‘out there’, and constitutes – as much as our physical make-up – something that links us to that world. It is a position therefore that fosters – as we see, for the first time, with the Romantics – a ‘senseof our deep nature, of a current running through all things, which also resonates in us … the sense of intra-cosmic mystery, which was quite missing from Providential Deism, and from the apologetics of the age of Newton … even as it is today from the scientistic outlook and that of much Christian fundamentalism’ (Taylor).
Much of this is reflected, very precisely, in Gray’s account of the beliefs of the atheist philosopher George Santayana, to whom he gives pride of place in his account of non-humanistic atheisms:
Santayana is materialist (‘Nature is self-sufficient’) but his world doesn’t exclude the possibility of ‘spirit’ (‘Nature produces everything in the world, including the human species and all its works’ – even ‘religion’). ‘Spirit’ doesn’t involve ‘otherworldly rapture’ but arises from Nature itself ….
However, there is one absolutely indispensable aspect of the worldview of Counter-Enlightenment immanentism which, on the whole, Gray ignores – though in the case of his chapter on Santayana he makes some gesture towards it by supplementing and illustrating this description with observations on the worldview of the novelist, Marcel Proust. Fortunately, it is an aspect that receives proper attention in Charles Taylor’s magisterial A Secular Age.
This is the absolute centrality to Counter-Enlightenment immanentism, from its inception with the Romantics right up to today’s expressivist individualism, of the symbolic practice of, and belief in, artistic creativity – of what Taylor terms epiphanic art. This practice is salvational – but not in the sense of ‘otherworldly rapture’, as with the deliverance promised by axial religions. Instead, it claims to deliver us from our experience of alienation from the world through its power to reclaim and re-integrate that experience in a form that yields pleasure and aesthetic value.
Such practice is not only the outcome, but a focus of discursive interest, for countless creative works that claim to exemplify it. Proust’s famous novel happens to be a particularly well-known instance. Gray refers to the passage in Proust where the narrator towards the beginning of his seven-volume work describes the strangely overwhelming yet delightful experience of ‘involuntary’ memory evoked by a morsel of Madeleine soaked in lime tea. This turns out to be only one of a series of such quasi-mystical experiences that arise in the author’s path like so many manifestations of an enigma the narrator has yet to resolve. Finally, he discovers the key to them in the power of Art, as it were, to consciously set in motion what was earlier experienced as an involuntary movement. Thus, he acquires the means to recapture and transvalue ‘lost time’, redeeming it from meaninglessness and oblivion. As any reader will be aware, Proust’s novel is full of ‘darkness, cravings, confusion’ (Santayana). But through the trans-valuative power which the narrator finally learns to exercise over his own experiences, these are recaptured in a form that transforms the raw material of human desire into something of intrinsic aesthetic value.
It is hard to justify logically such a belief, as it is as mystical as anything you might encounter in ‘religion’ as conventionally understood. The sense of something that unites us to the world ‘out there’ to which Taylor refers in the quotation above implies a separation, or alienation, from the world which must be experienced as external and alien before it can then be recuperated as something we also recognize within our deeper selves. This outside:inside relation is precisely what is modelled in the symbolic practice of art, as exemplified by the novel of Proust. The salvation of art requires a full awareness of our state of alienation from the world – something, in Proust’s case, manifested by the unattainability of our social and erotic desires. But its form of redemption consists, not in the substitution of another world for the world of our experience, but a return to that world of experience in another, aesthetic, mode. Rather than abandoning the world, we are held in an orbit that maintains us at a certain distance, without breaking away.
It is interesting to compare this type of renunciatory ‘religion’ to the traditional forms characteristic of Christianity and other axial faiths. In particular, the comparison with Epicureanism seems apt, given its profession of a form of materialism. Evidently, neither post-revolutionary immanentism, nor Epicureanism have much time for ‘the gods’ – let alone God. Both conceive of Nature as the source of all that is. But, as Taylor comments in the passage above, there is, in the post-Romantic immanentism of Proust or Santayana, a worldly mysticism, which derives from an aesthetic appreciation of experience entirely foreign to Epicurus or, for that matter, anything the ancient world has to offer.
I happen to have just finished reading a work of novelistic fiction which both puts into practice its author’s faith in the recuperative transvaluation of the phenomenal world as ‘art’, and, at the same time, partly perhaps as a consequence of its preoccupation with religion in its various guises, illustrates with strange anachronism what I have attempted to describe above as traditional and confessional religion, their relationship to each other, and of both of them to the post-Romantic immanentism implicit in the author’s own perspective. That book is Thomas Mann’s famous novel, Buddenbrooks.
The three religions of Buddenbrooks
The novel retells the history of the rise and subsequent decline and collapse of the fortunes of a wealthy merchant family. Religion, in the broadest sense, features throughout. We begin with the very worldly though devout Lutheranism of the grandfather, Johann, symbolized by the ‘leather-bound journal’, passed down the ancestral line with the family Bible, in which the head of the household expatiates in gratitude to the divine hand that protects and guides the family fortunes. The son, Thomas, dedicates himself, body and soul, to family ‘firm’, yet, in his case, the father’s traditional piety gives way to a form of self-belief that he puts to the service of a collective, not a selfish, ambition – ‘the dream of preserving an ancient name, an old family, an old business, of carrying it on, and adding to it more and more honour and lustre … making the grain business flourish, and oneself beloved and powerful in a little corner of the earth … a Caesar even in a little commercial town on the Baltic’. Such thoughts, not committed to the ‘leather-bound journal’, evince the faith, so Thomas puts it, ‘that I am, by my mere existence, exerting pressure on the movement of life about me.’ ‘Fortune and success’, he goes on, ‘lie with ourselves. We must hold them firmly deep within us’. The tragic corollary we see playing out in the latter part of the novel is that any failure of such self-belief initiates a corresponding downward spiral. Furthermore, the Buddenbrook history evidences an increasing incapacity to make successful marital alliances – a matter of over-reaching princely ambitions scorning rival local houses in favour of cosmopolitan but ill-advised and ultimately fruitless connections abroad. This plays out, most obviously, in the farcical marital misadventures of Thomas’ sister, Toni. But it reaches a culmination in the marriage of Thomas himself to a kind of ‘trophy’ wife devoted to an art he doesn’t understand – music. Their sickly son, Hanno, is possessed of uncanny musical genius, but totally devoid of the qualities required for carrying on the family firm.
The ‘religion’ at issue in these pages is most obviously that of a very worldly form of Lutheran Christianity, which Mann satirizes mercilessly. But counterpoised to this, the reader discovers some very different ideational influences of the kind that a broader definition of the phenomenon would also allow us to call ‘religious’. These are include, first and foremost, a strongly renunciatory worldview that Thomas encounters in the shape of an unnamed philosophical text (surely by Schopenhauer). This falls into Thomas’ hands at that phase of his career when his powers are on the decline, he begins to think of death, and ‘the burden of his son’s future, the future of the house’ weighs him down. ‘He said to himself he had lived in his forebears and would live on in his descendants. And this line which he had taken coincided not only with his sense of family, his patrician self-consciousness, his ancestor-worship, as it were; it had also strengthened his ambitions … But now, before the ear and penetrating eye of death, it fell away …’.
He sat there one day, in the pavilion, and read for four hours, with growing absorption in a book … It was a large volume … the second part only of a philosophical system… And behold, it was as though the darkness were rent from before his eyes … “I shall live!” said Thomas Buddenbrook, almost aloud, and felt his breast shaken with inward sobs.
The fact no detail is given of the philosophical system in question would indicate that, for the purposes of the novel, its importance lies in exemplifying a type that the author believes to be widely familiar – and this supposition is indeed confirmed by what we subsequently learn about it:
“This is the revelation: that I shall live! For it will live – and that this it is not I is only an illusion, an error which death will make plain”…. End, dissolution! … (But) What would dissolve? Why, this his body, this heavy, faulty, hateful incumbrance, which prevented him from being something other and better.
The book may indeed have been by Schopenhauer; but, as regards what interests Thomas, that philosophy could as well be any of those many systems, ancient or modern, that have preached the death of ego, and the awakening to a sense of union with the cosmos. Indeed, such have been the goals of traditional renunciatory religion – of Siddartha Gautama, Meister Eckart or the author of the Chandogya Upanishad (‘tat tvam asi’). Indeed, there is good reason why we would be reminded of the latter in the present context: namely, the relevance to Thomas of the challenge this kind of worldview has always posed for traditional piety. It is, after all, an ideology of the family that has hitherto shaped all his aspirations.
Have I hoped to live on in my son? In a personality yet more feeble, flickering, and timorous than my own? Blind childish folly! What can my son do for me – what need have I of a son? Ah it is so brilliantly clear, so overwhelmingly simple? I shall be in all those who have ever, do ever, or ever shall say “I” – especially, however, in all those who say it most fully, potently, and gladly!
On the face of it, then, a form of Christianity so this-worldly as to resemble, very strikingly, the traditional piety of clan and tribe finds itself confronted here by the kind of renunciatory faith that in the mouths of wandering sadhus, and Buddhist and Jain monks, denounced the contemporary religious status quo of the pre-axial age. In terms of the above analysis, traditional religion (1) comes up against confessional religion (2.1).
But the ‘religion’ of Mann’s book – if we may so call it – extends well beyond that straightforwardly renunciatory aspect of the Schopenhauer’s worldview which appeals so powerfully to disappointed votaries of ‘family’ pieties, like Thomas Buddenbrook. It also encompasses the art of music (evidently representative here of all art), as understood by Schopenhauer and exemplified in the distinctive gifts of young Hanno. The experience of ‘music’ is described by Mann in the most blatantly religious terms: ‘a technique amounting to an ascetic religion, a technique elevated to a lofty sacrament, to an absolute end in itself’.
It is significant that this ‘religion’ of music is something of which Thomas is frequently described as having no personal acquaintance whatsoever, having to rely for whatever social cachet might thereby be derived, on the gifts of his ‘trophy’ wife. Music, as Mann (and I suspect Schopenhauer) understands it, embodies a kind of revelation of the human will – a consciousness of the will’s workings to itself – which is formally incompatible with the practical exercise of will in the world. Thomas and Hanno, father and son, would therefore seem to be embarked on eternally separate paths.
But it doesn’t follow from the separation that all sympathy or understanding are excluded. In the latter respect, their relationship is asymmetrical. Thomas has no understanding or sympathy for Hanno’s path; that kind of insight is quite beyond his existing capacities. But the reverse is not the case. Hanno is acutely insightful in regard to that pathology of the will that makes his father what he is – an insight that Thomas’s active engagement in the world seems to repress. Hanno’s psychological make-up owes much, I would suspect, to Schopenhauerian notions about the nature of music and its relation to the human will. Be that as it may, while Thomas is unaware of the source of the insight, he is momentarily made aware of its existence, on the occasion of a chance meeting of father and during that agonizing phase of Thomas’ life where he suspects his wife’s marital fidelity:
God knows how much he (Hanno) understood. But one thing they both felt: in the long second when their eyes met, all constraint, coldness, and misunderstanding melted away. Hanno might fail his father in all that demanded vitality, energy, and strength. But where fear and suffering were in question, there Thomas Buddenbrook could count on the devotion of his son. On that common ground they met as one.
And not only Thomas and Hanno, we might add, but the author and reader along with them.
What is beautifully exemplified by the asymmetry of this relationship is, I would argue, precisely the relationship of artist and world described earlier. It is to a large extent the experiences of Thomas and the world of Luebeck’s merchant bourgeoisie that constitute the world of Mann’s novel. But the truth of that world (which is that of the novel) requires, in order to reveal itself, that we occupy a spiritual vantage point to which its inhabitants have only very fleeting access, if any – a perspective of alienation such as that of Hanno and his literary friend Kai. Yet, this does not lead to a straightforward rejection of that world (though Mann’s novel is often satirical), but an aesthetic representation of it which fully incorporates the aspiration of its inhabitants to get beyond that world or escape to some other place. To return to our earlier characterization of Santayana – the aestheticizing worldview of counter-Enlightenment immanentism, as exemplified in Mann’s novel, recognizes its own alienation from the world, in order, not to sever, but to perpetuate its own relationship to it.
Going on now to the question of how this aestheticizing religion relates to other religious forms – it is interesting how closely the Weberian Lutheranism of the Buddenbrooks approximates, especially in the case of Thomas, to a worldliness so extreme as to put us in mind of the old family religion of pagan householder with its total supersession of the individual in the interests of clan and dynasty – to traditional ‘religious’ religion, in other words. So, in the light of this, it is hardly surprising if the religious reaction, when it comes in the shape of Schopenhauer, rather resembles in tone the traditional renunciatory call of ethicizing religions like Buddhism or Christianity to a kind of enlightenment through ego death. In both cases what is being renounced isn’t exactly individualism in the modern sense; there is indeed a sense in which such renunciation is itself ‘individualistic’. The true object of renunciation is actually the collective patrician faith of clan and dynasty, which, in Thomas’ case, has become a rigid carapace.
Yet, the ‘religion’ of the book, if we may so describe it, also differs in important respects from the traditional renunciatory faith of the sadhus and monks – even if, to some degree, it shares the reaction of those faiths to the traditional piety of family and tribe. There is indeed a side of Schopenhauerian philosophy that appears to function within the narrative, and for Thomas Buddenbrook, as a traditional confessional religion; Thomas is tempted altogether to renounce his life projects. However, there is another side, embodied in Hanno, Kai, and Hanno’s music, which, though not directly accessible to Thomas, manifests a perspective from which Thomas’ struggles and stumblings are truthfully and sympathetically appreciated, and acquire a significance all their own. This, of course, is the perspective of art – the perspective of the novel itself. Ultimately, the world of Thomas and the Luebeck merchants is not repudiated (for all its failures of self-knowledge) but nostalgically revisited. As we said earlier, in connection with Proust and Santayana, Counter-Enlightenment immanentism truthfully acknowledges an alienation from the world, not with a view to escaping it, but in order to relate to it on the level of aesthetic experience. It remains in orbit around its world, neither collapsing the distance of its alienation, nor yet breaking away entirely.
Within the novel, the philosophy of Schopenhauer does double duty, therefore. Through its renunciatory aspect, it conjures up, in Thomas, the possibility of a repudiation of the religion of family piety; while through its concept of the nature of music it allows the author to thematize, within the novel, the power of art (including his own) to redeem life from meaninglessness. How these two things relate to each other within the philosophy of Schopenhauer himself, I am not qualified to say. But within Mann’s novel they enable the representation of an almost uniquely broad spectrum of religious options, including examples of all those discussed in our analysis – with the sole and significant exception of post-Revolutionary Christianity (2.2.2)
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