Approaches to the project of new phenomenology of religion in the works of Ninian Smart

The author considers a sketch the phenomenological study model of religion proposed by N. Smart. According to N. Smart, the phenomenology of religion should differ from the history of religion in the statement focusing on the structural description of religion not in its dynamics, but in statics, and should proceed from the fact that at different stages of the development of religion there are different normative pictures. N. Smart reduces all the variety of methods used by phenomenologists to two basic ones: an epoch and a neutral but evocative bracketing. Under the “epoch” of N. Smart understands psychological abstinence from value judgments, and defining “bracketing” he means putting the question of the reality of religious phenomena and their supernatural nature out of brackets. At the same time, the phenomenologist must simultaneously take into account both the fact that there is something real in religion and the fact that there is nothing except human actions, i.e. take into account both the reductive and non-reductive description of the phenomenon. Separately, the author considers the question of the influence of classical phenomenologists on N. Smart, since he was convinced that on the basis of individual developments of G. van der Leeuw, R. Otto and M. Eliade can create a discipline that would complement the general religious complex. The researcher shows that G. van der Leeuw influenced N. Smart most of all: with the help of the category of Force developed by him, N. Smart describes the process of the phenomenon interpolation into people’s lives. The category of the numinous developed by R. Otto plays a significant role in N. Smart’s model. N. Smart even creates the neologism “numinous forces” and speaks of “numinous charge”. From M. Eliade N. Smart borrows the concepts of “illudtempus” and the dialectic of order and chaos.