Philology imposed its own quasi-religious doxology on its practitioners, a lay science

Evidence

As Renan understood, received, and was instructed in philology, the discipline imposed a set of doxological rules upon him. To be a philologist meant to be governed in one’s activity first of all by a set of recent revaluative discoveries that effectively began the science of philology and gave it a distinctive epistemology of its own: I am speaking here of the period roughly from the 1780s to the mid-1830s, the latter part of which coincides with the period of Renan’s beginning his education. His memoirs record how the crisis of religious faith that culminated in the loss of that faith led him in 1845 into a life of scholarship: this was his initiation into philology, its world-view, crises, and style. He believed that on a personal level his life reflected the institutional life of philology. In his life, however, he determined to be as Christian as he once was, only now without Christianity and with what he called “la science laïque” (lay science). — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 357

Categorization

• XREF: The transposition of religious worldview into secular scholarship parallels the secularization thesis and anticipates how Orientalist ‘science’ inherits theological framing — connect to Said’s broader argument that Orientalism secularizes religious categories.
• DEFINE: Introduces the concept of philology as a doxology-governed discipline with its own epistemology — a core definitional term for the field’s toolkit.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 357