서구 종교학의 역사에 대한 지성사적 재조명: 키펜베르크의 논의를 중심으로

According to Hans Kippenberg, the foundation of an academic study of religions coincided with the beginnings of modernization. Since the second half of the nineteenth century most European countries were involved in a process of rapid social change. The repercussions that this had for daily life were momentous. Instead of working for their traditional needs, people now had to produce goods for a market. Old customs ceded to private contracts and political laws. The superior knowledge of science replaced the inherited worldview. This deep changed severed societies from their ties to the past. Many educated people in Europe believed in an imminent end of all religions. Had not the scientific progress superseded the religious worldview? Historians had to come to terms with that expectation when they directed their attention to historical religions.

Friedrich Max Müller introduced a new science, so-called Religionswissenschaft through the study of the ancient Vedic sources. He thought that genuine religion was a taste for, and sense of, the infinite. From his point of view, the Indian sources confirm that nature is more than mechanical laws. Thus his interpretation sought to contradict the materialist ideology of his day. Edward Burnett Tylor described religions as a kind of natural philosophy. His notion of ‘soul’ functioned to explain natural events. This legacy of the past cannot be missed even in modern society. Only the concept of the soul may preserve human dignity in an age of materialism. Gerardus van der Leeuw, also tried to perform the same function of the cultural critique for the renewal of the religious imagination in modern, rationalized Europe imprisoned in the iron-cage.

In this respect, we could think that the interpretations of the history of the History of Religions in the light of the intellectual history are very suggestive for the korean student of religion. It helps them to describe the early history of the study of religion in Korea. For example, Yi Neung Wha(李能和) is regarded as a father of korean religious studies, but no one could present a proper answer for the question of why and through which connection of his intellectual milieu he was interested in the religious history and the study of religion. We would discover its signification in his confrontation of the prevailing social thought, such as social evolutionism.