3930 HERMENEUTICS
substantial reply to Bauer. For works on the early church re-
flecting the influence of Bauer, see Robert Wilken, The Myth
of Christian Beginnings (Garden City, N.Y., 1971, reprint
1980); and Gerd Lüdemann, Heretics: The Other Side of
Early Christianity, translated by John Bowden (Louisville,
Ky., 1996). James M. Robinson and Helmut Koester extend-
ed Bauer’s theories by tracing trajectories from the first cen-
tury into later centuries in Trajectories through Early Chris-
tianity (Philadelphia, 1971). For the application of
sociological theories of deviance to the problem of heresy, see
John Barclay, “Deviance and Apostasy: Some Applications
of Deviance Theory to First-Century Judaism and Christian-
ity” in Modelling Early Christianity: Social-Scientific Studies
of the New Testament in its Context, edited by Philip F. Esler
(London and New York, 1995), pp. 114–127; and Sheila
McGinn, “Internal Renewal and Dissent in the Early Chris-
tian World” in The Early Christian World, edited by Philip
F. Esler (London and New York, 2000), vol. 2,
pp. 893–906.
THOMAS A. ROBINSON (2005)
HERMENEUTICS. The term hermeneutics is derived
from the Greek verb hermēneuein (“to interpret”) and refers
to the intellectual discipline concerned with the nature and
presuppositions of the interpretation of human expressions.
INTRODUCTION. The Greek term has etymological associa-
tions with the name of the Greek god Hermes, the messenger
of the gods and the deity of boundaries. Some have seen this
association as reflecting the inherently triadic structure of the
act of interpretation: (1) a sign, message, or text from some
source requires (2) a mediator or interpreter (Hermes) to (3)
convey it to some audience. So considered, this deceptively
simple triadic structure implicitly contains the major concep-
tual issues with which hermeneutics deals: (1) the nature of
a text; (2) what it means to understand a text; and (3) how
understanding and interpretation are determined by the pre-
suppositions and beliefs (the horizon) of the audience to
which the text is being interpreted. Serious reflection on any
of these three issues reveals why interpretation is itself a
philosophical issue and a subject of interpretation.
Since interpretation is fundamental to all the intellectu-
al disciplines—to the natural sciences as well as the humani-
ties—one might have expected hermeneutics to have arisen
earlier in Western culture than it did. Although there were
many controversies within Judaism and Christianity con-
cerning the interpretation of the Bible—just as pre-
Reformation humanists were concerned with the exegesis of
the texts of antiquity—it was not until the middle of the last
century that modern hermeneutics was born. Friedrich
Schleiermacher (1768–1834) is generally acknowledged to
be the founder of modern hermeneutics, but it was Wilhelm
Dilthey (1833–1911) who first dreamed of developing a
foundational discipline for the cultural sciences
(Geisteswissenschaften) that would render their conclusions as
objective and as valid as those of the natural sciences.
Dilthey’s dream was overtaken by the rapid emergence
and proliferation of the many specialized disciplines that are
now recognized and preserved by the organizational struc-
ture of the modern university—art history, anthropology,
economics, history, the various literatures, political science,
psychology, philosophy, and so on. Each of these disciplines
rapidly developed its own intellectual interests and norma-
tive procedures for the presentation and adjudication of ar-
guments within them. Methodologies rather than hermeneu-
tics dominated intellectual life.
In recent years, however, powerful intellectual currents
have brought hermeneutics once again to the fore, so that in-
terest in it has burgeoned among literary critics, sociologists,
historians, anthropologists, theologians, philosophers, and
students of religion. These currents include (1) new theories
of human behavior in the psychological and social sciences
in which human cultural expressions are regarded as manifes-
tations of unconscious and instinctual drives or as reflections
of class interests; (2) developments in epistemology and the
philosophy of language that have led to claims that what
counts as reality for a given culture is a function of the lin-
guistic structures superimposed on experience; and (3) the
arguments advanced by philosophers such as Ludwig Witt-
genstein and Martin Heidegger that all human experience is
basically interpretative, and that all judgments take place
within a context of interpretation mediated by culture and
language behind which it is impossible to go. Underlying all
these currents is the assumption that human consciousness
is situated in history and cannot transcend it—an assump-
tion that raises important questions concerning the role of
cultural conditioning in any understanding.
It would be an error, however, to conclude from this
new interest in hermeneutics that Dilthey’s dream of a uni-
versal foundational discipline for the cultural sciences is
about to be realized. Even a superficial glance at the contem-
porary intellectual scene reveals little agreement concerning
how hermeneutics is conceived or how the discipline should
proceed. The intellectual disciplines constituting the modern
university have themselves been fractured into parties, each
of which has its own method and mode of interpretation. In
psychology, for example, there are behaviorists, cognitive
psychologists, Freudians, Jungians, and Gestaltists, just as in
the social sciences there are functionalists, structuralists, eth-
nomethodologists, and Marxists.
Paradoxically, it is just this proliferation of parties that
partially accounts for the resurgence of interest in hermeneu-
tics in the early twenty-first century. Diversity and conflict
of interpretations historically have provided the stimulus and
the urgency for acquiring understanding and agreement. Dil-
they pointed out, for example, how the rise of modern her-
meneutics was itself closely connected with the post-
Reformation debates among Protestants and Catholics over
the interpretation of Scripture, just as Schleiermacher’s own
attempt to establish a universal hermeneutics was admittedly
prompted by the attempt to overcome misunderstanding.
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RELIGION, SECOND EDITION

The incommensurate perspectives that disciplines may adopt
concerning the same object (such as a text, language, or
human nature) raise profound questions about the nature of
human conceptualization, objectivity, understanding, expla-
nation, and translation. Hence it is not surprising that, for
many intellectuals, hermeneutics is increasingly coming to
occupy the role that epistemology did a few decades ago.
The problems of hermeneutics are more unavoidable in
the scholarly study of religion than in many other academic
disciplines, for reasons both conceptual and historical. Con-
ceptually, religions themselves may be regarded as communi-
ties of interpretation, so that the scholarly study of them
takes the form of an interpretation of an interpretation. Since
the scholarly interpretation of religion most often rests on
different assumptions than the religious interpretation itself,
the religious participant frequently regards the scholar’s in-
terpretation as reductionistic and alien. Hence there is a pe-
rennial debate among scholars of religion regarding the de-
gree to which the scholarly interpretation of religion must
do justice to the believer’s own point of view.
Historically, the scholarly study of religion—as well as
the rise of modern hermeneutics—is closely associated with
the religious tradition of liberal Protestantism. Indeed, liber-
al Protestantism might be said to have emerged through a
series of bitter hermeneutical debates concerning the applica-
tion of historical-critical methods to the Christian Bible.
These debates illustrate the phenomena discussed at the be-
ginning of this paragraph, since orthodox Christians regard-
ed the application of these methods to the Bible as an alien
mode of interpretation. Liberal Protestantism resolved the
issue by defining the essence of religious faith as experience
rather than doctrine or historical belief.
Schleiermacher, the founder of hermeneutics as well as
of liberal Protestantism, was particularly influential in articu-
lating the outlines of this compromise. He regarded the vari-
ous religions as culturally conditioned forms of an underly-
ing and universal religious sensibility. Thus he not only
moved the locus of faith from belief to experience, but also
laid the foundations for a descriptive science of religion to
which Rudolf Otto (1869–1937), Joachim Wach (1898–
1955), and others were to contribute. This close connection
between liberal Protestantism and the scholarly study of reli-
gion partially accounts for the fact that liberal theologians
have been particularly sensitive to theories of interpretation.
Many scholars would insist that, to answer the many
questions arising from the activity of interpretation, it is im-
portant to have a hermeneutical theory. Others, however,
would insist that the great mistake distorting all modern he-
meneutics is precisely the lust for some such theory. Rather
than prejudice the issue from the outside by describing alter-
native hermeneutical theories, this article shall roughly delin-
eate four ways in which modern hermeneutics may be con-
ceived, each of which is dominated by a distinctive question:
1. What is it to understand a text and what are the condi-
tions of its possibility?
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RELIGION, SECOND EDITION
HERMENEUTICS 3931
2. How are the cultural sciences distinct in method and
form from the natural sciences?
3. What are the conditions that make any sort of human
understanding possible?
4. How can one resolve certain conceptual puzzles associ-
ated with concepts like understanding and meaning, and
how might such a resolution help one to understand the
task of interpretation?
Each of these questions, and the conception of hermeneutics
it yields, often overlaps with the others, and a theorist of one
type may also deal with issues characteristic of another. Nev-
ertheless, these four ways are sufficiently distinctive to be a
useful heuristic device for organizing what follows.
HERMENEUTICS AS INQUIRY INTO THE INTERPRETATION OF
TEXTS. Modern hermeneutics had its origins in attempts to
solve problems and conflicts concerning the interpretation
of texts; Schleiermacher is usually regarded as the originating
figure. Although there were debates before his time concern-
ing the difference between sacred and profane interpretation,
it was Schleiermacher whom Dilthey properly called the
“Kant of hermeneutics,” because Schleiermacher argued that
Scripture required no special type of interpretative proce-
dure, and grasped that the fundamental issue was to develop
the basic grammatical and psychological conditions neces-
sary for the understanding of any text whatsoever. It was
Schleiermacher again who saw that the nature of language
was the crucial theoretical issue confronting hermeneutical
theory, because one could gain access to another person’s
meaning only through the medium of language.
Authorial Intention. Schleiermacher’s hermeneutical
theory is organized around two foci: (1) the grammatical un-
derstanding of any characteristic modes of expression and the
linguistic forms of the culture in which a given author lived
and which conditioned that author’s thinking and (2) the
technical or psychological understanding of the unique sub-
jectivity or creative genius of that author. Both these foci re-
flect Schleiermacher’s own indebtedness to Romantic think-
ers who had argued that any individual’s mode of expression,
however unique, necessarily reflects a wider cultural sensibili-
ty or spirit (Geist). A correct interpretation requires not only
an understanding of the cultural and historical context of an
author, but a grasp of the latter’s unique subjectivity. This
can be accomplished only by an “act of divination”—an in-
tuitive leap by which the interpreter “relives” the conscious-
ness of the author. By seeing this consciousness in the larger
cultural context, the interpreter comes to understand the au-
thor better than the author understands himself or herself.
Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics have not had a great in-
fluence on secular literary criticism in either England or the
United States, although most literary criticism until the
1920s generally assumed that the aim of interpretation was
to discover the intention of the author. In the last several dec-
ades, however, most literary criticism has been built on the
assumption—classically enunciated by T. S. Eliot in his essay
3932 HERMENEUTICS
“Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919) but argued on
other grounds by Freudians, Marxists, New Critics, structur-
alists, and deconstructionists—that a literary text has its own
afterlife independent of the author, and that to understand
it has little or no relationship to understanding the author’s
intentions when writing it. In recent years, however, some
critics have rediscovered Schleiermacher and reaffirmed his
view that some form of authorial intent must be the founda-
tion of a theory of objective meaning. E. D. Hirsch, Jr., for
example, has argued in Validity in Interpretation (1967) that,
if interpretation is to avoid pure subjectivity and arbitrari-
ness, there must be some criteria for determining the correct
meaning of a text. This in turn, says Hirsch, requires some
theory of determinate meaning. Anyone concerned with ob-
jectivity will be driven logically to some discriminating
norm, and “the only compelling normative principle that has
ever been brought forward is the old-fashioned ideal of right-
ly understanding what the author meant” (p. 26). This has
led Hirsch and others to deal with the many problems this
position raises. However, while this view represents the com-
mon sense of most laypersons, it is not now widely shared
by most literary critics, who have developed hermeneutical
theories rejecting authorial intent as the norm of meaning.
Schleiermacher and the Interpretation of Religion.
So far as the interpretation of religion is concerned, Schleier-
macher’s influence is to be found less in his hermeneutical
theory, which is dominated by the problem of recovering the
author’s meaning, than in his views that (1) religiosity is an
essential and a priori aspect of human nature and (2) lan-
guage is the medium of all understanding. The first assump-
tion has elicited many attempts to develop what Paul Ricoeur
has called a “regional hermeneutics”: rules governing the in-
terpretation of religious expressions as a unique and autono-
mous type. One of the earliest and most influential of these
attempts was Rudolf Otto’s analysis of the “numinous” in
his famous book Das Heilige (1917; Eng. trans., The Idea of
the Holy).
Less explicitly indebted to Schleiermacher, but based on
the same assumption of the universality of human religiosity,
was the very influential work of Mircea Eliade. He argued
that the basic structure of religiosity can be seen most clearly
in archaic religions in which human life is regarded as part
of a living cosmos. Profound connections are said to exist be-
tween the rhythms of human and cosmic life. Myths and reli-
gious symbols are systems of micro-macrocosmic correspon-
dences and analogies. Human fecundity, for example, is seen
as recapitulating the pattern of divine fecundity. All human
activities are thus sanctified and made meaningful. This as-
sumption led Eliade to explore the many variants of certain
recurring symbols in the world’s religions, as for instance the
sacred tree, stones, snakes, fish, and water.
HERMENEUTICS AS FOUNDATION FOR THE CULTURAL SCI-
ENCES. A second way of thinking about hermeneutics is to
regard it as providing a foundational discipline for the cultur-
al in contrast to the natural sciences. This discipline would
presumably establish the boundary lines separating the vari-
ous generic types of interpretation—literary, artistic, philo-
sophical, legal, religious, and so forth—and would establish
the methods and normative canons of objectivity and validity
for each type. It would, in short, be a universal hermeneutics.
Wilhelm Dilthey is generally regarded as the most important
exponent of this view of hermeneutics, and the Italian histo-
rian of law Emilio Betti is perhaps its best-known contempo-
rary advocate. Although profoundly influenced by Schleier-
macher—at an early age he wrote a prize essay on
Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics, and later a monumental bi-
ography of him—Dilthey rejected Schleiermacher’s assump-
tion that every work of an author is an outgrowth of an im-
plicit principle contained in the author’s mind. Dilthey
considered this assumption to be profoundly antihistorical,
because it does not sufficiently take account of the external
influences at work or the author’s development. Moreover,
Dilthey thought that a universal hermeneutics required the
elaboration of epistemological principles that would serve the
cultural sciences in the way that Kant’s principles accounted
for Newtonian physics. If Kant developed a “critique of pure
reason,” then Dilthey devoted his life to a “critique of histori-
cal reason.”
Cultural versus Natural Sciences. Dilthey’s herme-
neutics quite obviously rests on a sharp distinction between
the methods of the cultural and those of the natural sciences.
The distinctive method of the cultural sciences is under-
standing (Verstehen), whereas that of the natural sciences is
explanation (Erklärung). The natural scientist explains events
by employing universal laws, whereas the historian neither
discovers nor employs such laws but, rather, seeks to under-
stand the actions of agents by discovering their intentions,
purposes, wishes, and character traits. Such action is intelligi-
ble because human actions, in contrast to natural events,
have an “inside” that others can understand because they too
are persons. Understanding, then, is the discovery of the “I”
in the “Thou,” and it is possible because of a shared universal
human nature.
Insofar as Dilthey’s hermeneutics rests on understand-
ing as a distinctive act that requires an imaginative identifica-
tion with past persons, one can discern the influence of
Schleiermacher. But Dilthey developed an elaborate and
complex theory of experience (Erlebnis) and its relationship
to various forms of expression that constitutes nothing less
than the philosophical anthropology and epistemology he
thought necessary to establish hermeneutics as a foundation-
al discipline of the cultural sciences. Dilthey was never able
to complete this enterprise in a way satisfactory to himself
or others, and its complexities defy any brief exposition here.
Suffice it to say that it contained a sophisticated analysis of
the temporality of experience and the way in which human
experience is bound together by units of meaning that are
subconscious and prereflective. These meanings become ob-
jectified in human expressions. He held that one’s knowledge
of one’s own experience as well as of the experience of others
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RELIGION, SECOND EDITION

is available only through these objectified expressions. Con-
sequently, one comes to know human nature through histor-
ical knowledge, that is, through understanding the varieties
of objectified forms in which humanity has expressed its own
experience of life. Ultimately, history is the variety of ways
in which human life has expressed itself over time. Indeed,
one can grasp one’s own possibilities only through historical
reconstruction and understanding. Through understanding
(Verstehen) of the life-expressions (Lebensäusserungen and Er-
lebnisausdrücke) of past persons, one comes to understand
the humanity of which one is a part.
Weber and Wach. Like Dilthey, the German sociolo-
gist Max Weber (1864–1920) was preoccupied with estab-
lishing the objectivity of the results of the cultural sciences,
but he was even more interested in the status of generaliza-
tions in political economy and sociology. His work therefore
stands at the juncture between the humanities and the social
sciences. He was interested in the logical relationships be-
tween understanding and explanation. Though sympathetic
to Dilthey’s attempts to establish the autonomy of under-
standing, he was also interested in generalizations about
human collective actions—generalizations he hoped could be
made as objective and scientific as those in the natural sci-
ences. His analysis and classification of types of social ac-
tions, and his delineation of ideal types, are attempts to solve
these conceptual problems. Unlike Dilthey, he was especially
interested in the interpretation of religion. His Sociology of
Religion (1904–1905) is one of the great works in the com-
parative study of religion, and his Protestant Ethic and the
Spirit of Capitalism (1922), although now dated in important
respects, is one of the influential books in modern sociology.
The significance of Dilthey and Weber for hermeneu-
tics lies primarily in (1) their minimalization of the concern
for recovering the author of the text, and their extension of
hermeneutics to cover all forms of cultural expression and ac-
tions; (2) their efforts to work out the logic of understanding
as an activity unique to the cultural sciences; and (3) their
attempts to ground the possibility of understanding in some
theory of the structure of human nature and its expressions
(Dilthey) or of types of social action (Weber).
The hermeneutical theories of Schleiermacher, Dilthey,
and Weber deeply influenced the work of Joachim Wach, a
German sociologist of religion who immigrated to the Unit-
ed States in 1935. Wach wanted to establish the interpreta-
tion of religion as an objective descriptive discipline free of
the normative claims of Christian theology. For him as for
Dilthey, the proper starting point for such a discipline was
the establishment of the necessary conditions for under-
standing (Verstehen). Wach, like Schleiermacher, believed
that Verstehen generally requires a type of empathy, but that
in religion it specifically presupposes a basic “sense for reli-
gion” that Wach then explicated in terms of Schleiermacher’s
notion of an inherent religious propensity in human nature.
Wach argued that religions are the expressions of this sense
for religion. The challenge of religious studies, then, is to de-
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RELIGION, SECOND EDITION
HERMENEUTICS 3933
velop a logic of the forms of religious expression, a theory
of religious symbolism and language. Wach himself concen-
trated on arranging and classifying the forms of religious ex-
pressions—for example, the theoretical, practical, and socio-
logical, which he then further subdivided and explored.
The attempt to construct a universal hermeneutics for
the cultural sciences inevitably leads the theorist to propound
some theory of human nature and its expressions. Having
uncovered the radically different forms of consciousness and
belief exemplified in history, for example, Dilthey then
thought it important to develop a psychology that would ac-
count for this diversity of worldviews while affirming the
“unity of human nature” that made it possible for an inter-
preter in one culture to understand a person in a strange and
different culture. But, it may be asked, how can the appeal
to some abstract principle such as the “unity of human na-
ture” aid an interpreter who is actually confronted with cul-
tural expressions so different and strange that a sympathetic
act of understanding seems impossible? Dilthey never solved
this problem.
Psychological Theories. The degree to which one’s
hermeneutics is a function of one’s view of human nature is
most dramatically illustrated by modern psychological theo-
ries such as those of Freud and Jung. Here human expression
and behavior are explained and understood in terms of un-
conscious psychical forces. As Paul Ricoeur has shown,
Freud’s theory of the unconscious led him not only to broad-
en the theory of human expressions so as to include dreams
and slips of the tongue as “texts” but also to propose a herme-
neutics in which art and religion were also seen as containing
unconscious meaning. According to Freud, for example, reli-
gion is best understood as the expression of unconscious
wishes rooted in infantile helplessness and molded by the
“family romance” in which Oedipal sexual wishes play an
important role. Consequently, religion is regarded as a col-
lective neurosis and evaluated negatively. Thus not only does
Freud’s hermeneutics reject “authorial intent” as a superficial
category, but it proposes a different meaning for the classical
hermeneutical dictum that the interpreter can better under-
stand an author than the author understands himself. For
Schleiermacher and Dilthey, this dictum meant that the in-
terpreter better understands the cultural and linguistic con-
text that conditions the author, and of which the author is
unaware. For Freud, this dictum means that the interpreter
has the theoretical key to unlock the unconscious meanings
of which no past author could possibly be aware. The inter-
preter understands more scientifically the unconscious
drives, instincts, and mechanisms of repression that deter-
mine a given form of expression. Texts are semiotic codes for
which the scientific interpreter alone holds the key.
HERMENEUTICS AS REFLECTION ON THE CONDITIONS OF
ALL UNDERSTANDING. Given the way in which reflection on
understanding necessarily drives one to consider basic episte-
mological and anthropological issues, it should not be sur-
prising that the philosophy of Martin Heidegger (1889–
3934 HERMENEUTICS
1976) has been so influential at the turn of the twenty-first
century. In Being and Time, Heidegger, although profoundly
influenced by Dilthey, argues that Dilthey was finally unable
to overcome the subjectivistic tendencies of Western thought
since Descartes—tendencies that have led to a peculiar di-
lemma in epistemology, and to a seductive preoccupation
with the cognitive ideals of the natural sciences and technolo-
gy. Crucial to Heidegger’s analysis is the argument that
human beings already find themselves in a world made intel-
ligible to them by virtue of what he called “the forestructure”
of understanding, that is, the assumptions, expectations, and
categories that one prereflectively projects on experience and
that constitute the “horizon” of any particular act of under-
standing. An analysis of “everydayness” reveals that what is
regarded as problematic as well as intelligible becomes so
only against the backdrop of the tacit, prereflective under-
standing one already possesses. In all explanation one discov-
ers, as it were, an understanding that one cannot understand;
which is to say, every interpretation is already shaped by a
set of assumptions and presuppositions about the whole of
experience. Heidegger calls this the hermeneutical situation.
He means that human existence itself has a hermeneutical
structure that underlies all one’s regional interpretations,
even those in the natural sciences. One’s prereflective under-
standings are modified and corrected as they become more
self-conscious in the encounter with texts, objects, and other
interpretations.
Heidegger’s thought has been influential in several di-
rections, two of which are important for religious studies: the
interpretation of religion and the conception of hermeneu-
tics generally. Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976), a German
New Testament scholar and theologian, saw in Heidegger’s
analysis of human existence the conceptual basis for an exe-
gesis of the New Testament whereby its basic religious in-
sights could be extracted from the mythical thought-forms
of the first century, in which it was originally expressed. To
the complaint that this exegesis employed modern presuppo-
sitions, Bultmann replied that all exegesis is determined by
certain philosophical presuppositions; the only question is
whether these are correct. He believed Heidegger to be cor-
rect because Heidegger had discovered the inherent historici-
ty of human existence; that is, how it is essentially constitut-
ed by acts of decision rooted in a self-understanding oriented
toward the future. Moreover, Heidegger had shown that
genuine historical understanding requires the encounter with
past expressions of human self-understanding that can modi-
fy one’s own. In this sense, the act of historical understand-
ing has an element that resembles the act of appropriation
of a religious message. Although Bultmann was primarily in-
terested in the implication of Heidegger’s work for the inter-
pretation of the New Testament understanding of faith, the
same hermeneutical procedure could be employed on other
religious phenomena, as Hans Jonas has done in his well-
known work The Gnostic Religion (1958).
It is Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002), however, who
in a major work, Truth and Method (1960), has done more
than any other thinker to reconceive hermeneutics along
Heideggerian lines. His theory also involves a criticism of
previous conceptions of hermeneutics such as those of
Schleiermacher and Dilthey. The difficulty with Schleierma-
cher’s hermeneutics, apart from its limitation to the interpre-
tation of texts, is that Schleiermacher (and Dilthey too) as-
sumed that the historical and cultural distance of the
interpreter from the phenomena being interpreted necessari-
ly occasions misunderstanding. Gadamer argues, following
Heidegger, that interpretation also assumes a context of in-
telligibility, and that the presuppositions and assumptions—
one might say prejudices—of the interpreter are precisely
what enable understanding as well as misunderstanding.
Consequently, one’s own assumptions and beliefs are not
necessarily barriers to understanding but preconditions of it.
The quest for a presuppositionless understanding is futile.
Every text or object is interpreted from some standpoint in
a tradition that constitutes the horizon within which any-
thing becomes intelligible. This horizon is continually modi-
fied as it encounters objects, but there is no final and objec-
tive interpretation.
Gadamer has been criticized by Emilio Betti for destroy-
ing any possibility of distinguishing between a subjective and
a universally valid interpretation. Betti argues that texts and
cultural expressions have meanings independent of the inter-
preter’s opinions, and that the interpreter can provide no
canon for distinguishing right from wrong interpretations.
Gadamer replies that the task is not to provide norms and
rules for interpretation but to analyze the inherent structure
of understanding itself—an analysis that reveals interpreta-
tion to be as Gadamer describes it.
HERMENEUTICS AS AN ANALYTIC AND MEDIATING PRAC-
TICE. There is a fourth way of thinking about hermeneutics
that is less easily characterized than the others, because it in-
volves no theory of hermeneutics. Those who think in this
fashion are not interested in establishing rules for the inter-
pretation of texts nor in providing foundations for the cul-
tural sciences. Their aims appear to be more piecemeal: to
analyze, to clarify, and if possible to resolve conceptual issues
surrounding explanation and interpretation in the various
contexts in which they are employed; to establish the logical
connections between meaning, truth, and validity; to discover
the various normative uses of language; to ascertain what is
meant by rationality and irrationality, especially as it bears on
the possibility of translation and the problem of relativism.
No one of the various thinkers who think and work in this
way may necessarily discuss all these problems systematically,
yet the various proposed solutions often bear directly on
those problems normally associated with classical hermeneu-
tical theory. For example, some thinkers concerned with the
philosophy of science, such as Mary Hesse, have argued that
no sharp distinction can legitimately be drawn between ex-
planation and interpretation, since explanations in the natu-
ral sciences are as interpretative as those in the cultural sci-
ences. Or again, some philosophers have argued that, since
there is no realm of the given to which theories can corre-
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RELIGION, SECOND EDITION

spond, the attempt by philosophers since Kant to formulate
epistemological theories is a mistake. There is no one right
or wrong way to interpret anything, including texts, hence
the quest for agreement is not a desideratum.
Generally, this type of thinking about hermeneutics
owes much to the writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–
1951), whose later works deal extensively with issues such as
“What does it mean to understand?” and “How does one
know that another person is in pain?” It was characteristic
of Wittgenstein’s approach that no simple summary of his
views can be given, since he argued that the function of a phi-
losopher is to analyze carefully the concrete uses in specific
contexts of words like understanding. He believed that it was
a mistake to attempt to provide a general theory of under-
standing. The mind easily becomes bewitched by such gener-
al theories, and this bewitchment is itself the source of most
philosophical difficulties and illusions. Instead, one should
look at how such words are actually employed and embedded
in concrete practices. A few students of religion have argued
that this approach has important implications for the inter-
pretation of religion. For example, it has been asserted that
the hermeneutical theory of Joachim Wach has excessively
constricted interpretation by superimposing a single model
upon it.
Although Wittgenstein’s philosophy is often said to be
alien to Heidegger’s, there are affinities at surprising points,
not the least of which is the notion that explanation and in-
terpretation make sense only within a horizon of presupposi-
tions, practices, and assumptions that individuals’ culture
mediates to them—their tradition, so to speak. Wittgenstein,
like Heidegger, also saw the human situation itself to be her-
meneutical. But unlike Heidegger, he did not think this fact
justified the construction of an ontology. Rather, he felt it
should be the occasion for the painstaking exploration of the
concrete forms of discourse—“language games”—in which
human beings engage. There can be only regional explora-
tions of the grammar governing specific forms of expression.
Presumably, then, the interpretation of religion ought to de-
vote itself to carefully mapping and exploring those charac-
teristics of the distinctively human form of life one calls reli-
gious: its structure, presuppositions, and forms of expression.
SEE ALSO Anthropology, Ethnology, and Religion; Biblical
Exegesis; Buddhist Books and Texts, article on Exegesis and
Hermeneutics; Literature, article on Literature and Religion;
Phenomenology of Religion; Structuralism; Study of Reli-
gion; Tafsir; Women’s Studies in Religion.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bauman, Zygmunt. Hermeneutics and Social Science. New York,
1978. A discussion of the significance of hermeneutics
when conceived as inquiry into the nature and objectives of
historical knowledge and of the social sciences. There are
chapters on Marx, Weber, Mannheim, Husserl, Schutz, and
Heidegger.
Bernstein, Richard J. Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science,
Hermeneutics, and Praxis. Philadelphia, 1983. A very useful
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RELIGION, SECOND EDITION
HERMENEUTICS 3935
critical discussion and overview of the debates concerning
relativism in recent philosophy, with special attention to the
philosophy of science and the hermeneutical tradition repre-
sented by Gadamer.
Betti, Emilio. Teoria generale della interpretazione. 2 vols. Milan,
1955. Translated into German by its author as Allgemeine
Auslegungslehre als Methodik der Geisteswissenschaften (Tü-
bingen, 1967). A criticism of the hermeneutics of Gadamer
and the Heideggerian tradition, and a defense of the classical
position on objectivity in interpretation. A shorter manifesto
is to be found in his Zur Grundlegung einer allgemeinen Aus-
legungslehre (Tübingen, 1954).
Bultmann, Rudolf. “Is Exegesis without Presuppositions Possi-
ble?” and “The Problem of Hermeneutics.” In New Testa-
ment and Mythology and Other Basic Writings, selected, ed-
ited, and translated by Schubert M. Ogden. Philadelphia,
1984. Characteristically lucid attempts by a famous New
Testament critic to deal with the problem of objectivity from
an existentialist perspective influenced but not determined
by Heidegger.
Dilthey, Wilhelm. Gesammelte Schriften. 18 vols. in 20. Stuttgart,
1957–1977. Volumes 5–7 are especially important for un-
derstanding Dilthey’s view of historical understanding.
Eliade, Mircea. “Methodological Remarks on the Study of Reli-
gious Symbolism.” In The History of Religions: Essays on
Methodology, edited by Mircea Eliade and Joseph M. Kita-
gawa with a preface by Jerald C. Brauer, pp. 66–107. Chica-
go and London, 1959. A statement of the hermeneutical
principles governing research on religious symbols by an in-
fluential historian of religion.
Eliade, Mircea. The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion.
New York, 1959. A more general work on the nature of
religion.
Eliot, T. S. Selected Essays. New York, 1950. This volume brings
together a number of Eliot’s influential writings, including
the essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919),
which debunks the “fallacy” of authorial intention.
Ermarth, Michael. Wilhelm Dilthey: The Critique of Historical Rea-
son. Chicago, 1978. A fine scholarly discussion of Dilthey’s
attempt to provide theoretical foundations for the human
sciences in the light of the exigencies of his own life and the
intellectual crisis of the time.
Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method. New York, 1975. Per-
haps the most influential book in hermeneutical theory of
the late twentieth century. Beginning with a critique of aes-
thetic theory, Gadamer engages in a far-reaching critique of
Schleiermacher and Dilthey before exploring the implica-
tions of Heidegger’s thought for hermeneutics.
Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. New York, 1962. Regarded
by many as one of the most influential philosophical works
of the last century, especially as regards hermeneutics.
Hirsch, E. D., Jr. Validity in Interpretation. New Haven, Conn.,
1967. A modern statement of the classical view that the aim
of literary interpretation is truth and agreement.
Norris, Christopher. Deconstruction: Theory and Practice. New
York, 1982. A useful introduction to the literary theories of
deconstructionist critics, especially Jacques Derrida, that re-
ject the assumptions of classical hermeneutical thought.
Palmer, Richard E. Hermeneutics: Interpretation Theory in Schleier-
macher, Dilthey, Heidegger, and Gadamer. Evanston, Ill.,
3936 HERMES
1969. After a useful classification of six modern definitions
of hermeneutics and a discussion of the debate between Betti
and Gadamer, the author discusses the four major theorists
of the title. Contains a very helpful bibliography.
Ricoeur, Paul. Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, Cambridge,
1982. With roots in the French phenomenological tradition,
Ricoeur has exerted a significant influence on Protestant the-
ology and hermeneutical theory through his analysis of reli-
gious symbolism and his examination of the hermeneutical
significance of Freud’s view of human nature.
Robinson, James M., and John B. Cobb, Jr. The New Hermeneu-
tic. New York, 1964. A collection of essays by German and
American theologians dealing with the hermeneutical devel-
opments in the Bultmannian school as represented by Ger-
hard Ebeling and Ernst Fuchs.
Schleiermacher, Friedrich. Hermeneutics: The Handwritten Manu-
scripts. Edited by Heinz Kimmerle, translated by James Duke
and Jack Forstman. Missoula, Mont., 1977. An English
translation of the various handwritten manuscripts found
after Schleiermacher’s death, including aphorisms dated as
early as 1805 and formal addresses as late as 1829. There is
an extremely helpful introduction by Heinz Kimmerle trac-
ing the development of Schleiermacher’s thought on inter-
pretation.
Toulmin, Stephen. Human Understanding, vol. 1, The Collective
Use and Evolution of Concepts. Princeton, N.J., 1972. Intend-
ed to be the first of three volumes. The author interprets con-
ceptual change in the sciences as rooted in “changing popula-
tions of concepts and procedures” that function within
intellectual communities. Especially useful for its discussion
of the way in which, since Kant, two paradigms of knowing
have dominated the Western mind: relativism and formal-
ism.
Wach, Joachim. Das Verstehen: Grundzüge einer Geschichte der her-
meneutischen Theorie im 19. Jahrhundert. 3 vols. Tübingen,
1926–1933. A massive three-volume history of the problem
of hermeneutics that, unfortunately, has yet to be translated.
Primarily descriptive and historical, it nevertheless reflects
the influence of Schleiermacher and Dilthey.
Weber, Max. The Methodology of the Social Sciences. Glencoe, Ill.,
1949. Contains some of Weber’s methodological essays deal-
ing with the problems of objectivity and value-freeness in the
social sciences and the logic of the cultural sciences.
Weber, Max. Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretative So-
ciology. 2 vols. Berkeley, Calif., 1978. This unfinished mas-
terwork of Weber contains his Katagorienlehre, his basic the-
ory of types and categories of social and economic action, as
well as his sociology of religion. There is an extremely useful
introduction by Guenther Roth.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. 2d ed. Oxford,
1958. Although not directly concerned with hermeneutics as
traditionally understood, the revolutionary view of language
proposed here has had a profound effect on modern philoso-
phy generally. The analysis of meaning and understanding
cannot be ignored by anyone dealing seriously with these
issues.
Wood, Charles Monroe. Theory and Religious Understanding: A
Critique of the Hermeneutics of Joachim Wach. Missoula,
Mont., 1975. A published doctoral dissertation; an eminent-
ly readable critique of Wach and, by implication, of the clas-
sical hermeneutical tradition from a Wittgensteinian point
of view.
VAN A. HARVEY (1987 AND 2005)
HERMES was recognized in Mycenaean tablets, and his
nature was described in early Greek poems as that of a clever
mediator among the gods or between gods and men, or as
an archetypal messenger. Hermes gave the kings of Mycenae
the scepter of Zeus (Homer, Iliad 100–108) and the lamb
with the golden fleece, a fatal pledge of royalty for the Pelo-
pides (Euripides, Orestes 995–1000). The ancient authors
show the Peloponnesus as the most ancient and important
environment where Hermes’ cult had developed, but inscrip-
tions and monuments show him worshiped everywhere in
the Greek world. The Homeric Hymn to Hermes describes
him as the son of Zeus and the nymph Maia, locates his
abode in a cave of Cyllene, and ascribes to him the invention
of the lyre, made from a tortoise shell.
Hermes is also reported to have stolen fifty sacred cows
from Apollo’s herd—he hid the theft by forcing the cows to
walk backwards in order to produce reversed tracks. Hermes
then discovered a means to light a fire, ritually sacrificed two
of the cows, then returned to his cave. Apollo discovered the
thief in spite of all Hermes’ tricks, but his wrath was assuaged
when he saw the lyre and accepted it in exchange for the two
cows Hermes had sacrificed. This trade was considered to be
the beginning of commerce.
Apollo granted Hermes the power of prophecy known
to three sacred women at Delphi, and Zeus made him the
lord of every herd and the only messenger to Hades (Homer-
ic Hymn to Hermes 550–572). The same myth also appears
in the Ichneutai of Sophocles (fr. 314 Radt) and a Persian
version of a Hellenistic novel, the Vamiq and Adhra (see
Hägg, 1989). Hermes’ symbol is the herald’s staff and his
speed is symbolized by little wings on his boots and cap. The
ancestry of the Attic priests Kerykes (literally, “heralds”) de-
scended from Hermes (e.g., Pausanias 1.38.3).
Hermes was also worshiped by shepherds (Semonides,
fr.18 Diehl; Homer, Odyssey 14.435–436); Pan, the god of
sheep farming, was his son. Statues of Hermes often depict
him with a ram. In addition, Hermes granted fertility to cat-
tle and was thus often represented as a phallus (Paus. 6.26.5)
or as a phallic stele called a herma. Like Hercules, Hermes
stole cattle from the world of gods in order to take them to
the world of humans.
Hermes was worshiped by travelers, whom he protected
and guided, and he was the focus of a cult in which heaps
of stones where piled near roads (Hesychius, s.v. hermaioi
lophoi). The mythic origin of these heaps was the trial of Her-
mes, who was judged by the gods after he had killed Argos,
the Argive cowherd, causing Io, a priestess of Hera who had
been transformed into a cow, to run away from the herd.
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RELIGION, SECOND EDITION