"We must, however, note that what are usually called the high religions made their appearance within about twenty-five hundred years - most of them within fifteen hundred years"
About this Quote
The line lands with a historian’s favorite weapon: a calmly stated timeline that quietly rearranges our sense of permanence. Latourette is pointing out that the so-called “high religions” (the traditions that come with scriptures, institutions, moral systems, and claims to universality) are not timeless fixtures emerging from the mist of prehistory. They appear, in his framing, in a surprisingly tight historical window. Twenty-five hundred years is long on a human calendar, short on a civilizational one. The compression is the provocation.
The intent is comparative and demystifying. By stressing how clustered these appearances are, Latourette nudges religion away from pure revelation and toward recognizable historical forces: urbanization, empire, trade routes, literacy, and the rise of bureaucratic states that could support priesthoods and canon-making. “Usually called” is doing quiet ideological work, too. It signals that “high religion” is a category, not a neutral fact; it carries an old comparative-religion hierarchy that elevates text-based, institution-heavy traditions over local, oral, or “folk” practice. Latourette both uses the term and distances himself from it, as if acknowledging its baggage while still relying on its convenience.
Context matters: writing in a 20th-century Western academy, Latourette is mapping religion like intellectual infrastructure, with Christianity implicitly among the “high” forms. The subtext is that faiths have origin points, growth phases, and historical conditions - which makes them legible to scholarship, and less available to the claim that they simply arrived fully formed, outside of time.
The intent is comparative and demystifying. By stressing how clustered these appearances are, Latourette nudges religion away from pure revelation and toward recognizable historical forces: urbanization, empire, trade routes, literacy, and the rise of bureaucratic states that could support priesthoods and canon-making. “Usually called” is doing quiet ideological work, too. It signals that “high religion” is a category, not a neutral fact; it carries an old comparative-religion hierarchy that elevates text-based, institution-heavy traditions over local, oral, or “folk” practice. Latourette both uses the term and distances himself from it, as if acknowledging its baggage while still relying on its convenience.
Context matters: writing in a 20th-century Western academy, Latourette is mapping religion like intellectual infrastructure, with Christianity implicitly among the “high” forms. The subtext is that faiths have origin points, growth phases, and historical conditions - which makes them legible to scholarship, and less available to the claim that they simply arrived fully formed, outside of time.
Quote Details
| Topic | Faith |
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