Philology inherited religion’s historical worldview while losing its coherence

Evidence

The best example of what a lay science could and could not do was provided years later by Renan in a lecture given at the Sorbonne in 1878, “On the Services Rendered by Philology to the Historical Sciences.” What is revealing about this text is the way Renan clearly had religion in mind when he spoke about philology—for example, what philology, like religion, teaches us about the origins of humanity, civilization, and language—only to make it evident to his hearers that philology could deliver a far less coherent, less knitted together and positive message than religion. Since Renan was irremediably historical and, as he once put it, morphological in his outlook, it stood to reason that the only way in which, as a very young man, he could move out of religion into philological scholarship was to retain in the new lay science the historical world-view he had gained from religion. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 358

Categorization

• XREF: The genealogy of secular disciplines inheriting religious frameworks connects to later Islamophobia readings on how ‘objective’ Western scholarship on Islam retains theological assumptions below the surface. — connects to: Modern Philhellenism fused barbarism and culture in German scholarship; The Western idea that history moves toward an endpoint descends from Christian eschatology — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 159
• QUESTION: Worth tracking how Said’s ‘lay science’ mechanism reappears in critiques of modern Islamophobia research — does the analytical vocabulary transfer?
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 358