Abstract
The article raises some questions about issues in the recently published volume Mourning religion, edited by Parsons et al. (2008).
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Notes
The Latin word for the person who is going to be promoted to doctor; of course, only male persons in the old days! The Latin word for a female candidate is promovenda.
And I am well aware that each of them may reveal my ignorance or inadequate understanding and my being all too Dutch. Let me add another more personal remark, relevant in a context of mourning, probably. The Dutch have a reputation of being terribly straightforward, blunt, whatever (White and Boucke 1989). That reputation may be justified or not, but those among the authors in this volume or among the readers of this comment who are acquainted with me or my work will know that everything I say needs to be understood with a good deal of humor. I hope not to be the last who endorses Nietzsche’s concept of fröhliche Wissenschaft (gay science)!
I put these words between quotation marks as I am quite uncomfortable with each of them: “the West,” “Christianity,” “Islam” to me are just as much constructions as the word “religion”; the empirical “reality” hinted at by such words is so complex and contradictory that one better introduce more precise terminology.
Of course, a comment like this, talking about the book as a whole, is somewhat sweeping too and thereby too generalizing. In order to avoid being misunderstood as an empiricist of some kind, I should at least note that to my appreciation the chapter by the clinician Wallwork is empirical in nature and that also Parsons draws on empirical material. Wallwork’s chapter, by the way, is a relief to the reader: after half a book full of general assertions about what would be the case on an individual and a societal level when it comes to religion, loss and mourning, he at last gets very concrete, noting, however: I don’t hear much of all this from patients in psychotherapy....
The discipline “history of religions,” I prefer the plural “s,” was not founded by Eliade. While it is always problematic to name the first who practiced a discipline, with history of religions as an academic enterprise, people like Müller, Tiele and others from the nineteenth century need to be mentioned. Fortunately already Celia Brinkman’s chapter, directly following, provides better information than Homans on the past of the history of religions as an academic discipline.
Although also the term “profession of religious studies” is employed, mostly it is spoken of as the “discipline of religious studies.” To my understanding the term “profession” (or just: department) is far more correct, however: “religious studies” is not a single discipline, it is—on the contrary and fortunately!—a conglomerate of several different scholarly disciplines that can all be employed to do research, empirical and otherwise, on “religion.” (I do admit that the situation is certainly not just “fortunate,” however, but it would lead me too far astray to go into that issue.)
There is hardly anything specific about this “approach”: this is how all psychology should be pursued! Admittedly, it takes an enormous work and therefore a long time to come up with results, but if one if willing to indeed do the drudgery, one may well achieve formidable results—as Homans has shown best!
To go short, let me quote from Aristotle (1991): “Why is it that all men who have become outstanding in philosophy, statesmanship, poetry or the arts are melancholic, and some to such an extent that they are infected by the diseases arising from black bile [...]?” (Problemata Physica, 953a, 10–13). Note that he, too, distinguishes melancholia from disease.
References
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Berger, P., Davie, G., & Fokas, E. (2008). Religious America, secular Europe? A theme and variations. Hampshire: Ashgate.
Homans, P. (1970). Theology after Freud: An interpretative inquiry. New York: Bobbs-Merrill.
Homans, P. (1979). Jung in context: Modernity and the making of a psychology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Homans, P. (1989). The ability to mourn: Disillusionment and the social origins of psychoanalysis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Parsons, W. B., Jonte-Pace, D., & Henking, S. E. (eds). (2008). Mourning religion. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.
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White, C. & Boucke, L. (1989). The undutchables: An observation of the Netherlands, its culture and its inhabitants. Montrose: White & Boucke.
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Belzen, J.A. Mourning Religion? Celebrating Transformation! From Loss to Gain, from Depression to Melancholia. Pastoral Psychol 59, 347–353 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-009-0266-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-009-0266-y