Prof. Dr. Adrian Hermann

Building on the hypothesis that the emergence of ‘religion’ as a global category is characterized by the establishment of a number of “distinctions of religion” (Hermann 2015; Hermann 2016), I argue that one key distinction of religion is the distinction between ‘religion’ and ‘science.’ My project will contribute to an investigation of the history of Southeast Asian traditions of secularity by tracing the history of this distinction through two case studies. The first case study pertains to encounters between Buddhist elites and Christian missionaries in nineteenth-century Thailand. The second looks at the early history of the ‘Iglesia Filipina Independiente’ (IFI), an independent Catholic movement in the Philippines around 1900.
In Thailand, a core element of the development of Buddhist modernism in the nineteenth century was the contentious relationship between Buddhist descriptions of the cosmos and the Western scientific knowledge spread by Christian missionaries and other actors.
Debates on this subject can be found in a number of publications including the periodical Bangkok Recorder, and, in particular, the 1867 book Nangsue Sadaeng Kitchanukit [A book explaining various things] by Chaophraya Thiphakorawong (1813–1870). I will also consider the role that “media of scientific space” played in transformations of the cosmo-geographical imagination in nineteenth-century Thai Buddhist modernism. Christian missionaries used instruments and devices – maps, globes, compasses, and astronomical models – in their debates with Buddhists in Thailand and beyond and deemed them essential to their challenging traditional notions of space.
In the Philippines, the establishment of the IFI in 1902 by the Ilustrado intellectual Isabelo de los Reyes y Florentino (1864–1938) and the former Roman Catholic priest Gregorio Aglipay (1860–1940) was accompanied by the publication of two short-lived periodicals and a number of books mainly written by de los Reyes. In his writings, de los Reyes explores the relationship between ‘religion’ and ‘science’ and locates his new church and the history of religion in the Philippines in a global framework. I will explore this in detail by analyzing his main works, in particular “Mitologia Ilocana” (in La España Oriental, 1888), La Religion del Katipunan (1900), Catecismo de la Iglesia Filipina Independiente (1905), and Biblia Filipina (1908). In these texts, de los Reyes repeatedly reworks his theology in order to integrate results from the natural sciences and, in doing so, develops a concept of a ‘modern’ and ‘scientific’ Christianity. De los Reyes also develops the nascent comparative perspective that can be found in IFI periodicals from 1903/04 into a global perspective on the religious history of mankind.
By working through these case studies, I will attempt to address key questions in the current debate about equivalents of ‘religion’ in non-Western languages and cultures. To meaningfully speak of ‘religion’ as a global category, thereby indicating that there is something that connects discourses on ‘religion’ (including variants in European languages, such as ‘religione’ and ‘religião’) and discourses on, for example, ‘zongjiao,’ ‘shūkyō,’ ‘bada,’ and ‘āgama,’ a fundamental change of approach is needed. We must move away from current approaches that focus on proving the existence (or lack thereof) of non-Western or premodern ‘equivalents of religion.’ Drawing on Lydia H. Liu’s notion of “translingual practice,” I suggest that we reconceptualize the search for ‘non-Western equivalents’ as an investigation of the historical processes through which hypothetical equivalences are established.