Religion as Human Institutions

Abstract

Rather than begin with any of the scores of definitions of religion offered over the years from different standpoints — sociological, anthropological, psychological, philosophical, theological — it will be more useful to begin with two important distinctions. One is historical, between pre- and post-axial religion, and the other, within the latter, between on the one hand the human religious institutions and, on the other, their living heart, for which we have no satisfactory name but which I shall call both spirituality and mysticism. Each term is appropriate when understood in a certain way, and each can also be misleading. I will clarify in the next chapter the way I want to use them.