Feeling Religious: Cosmopolitanism, Translation, and the Mobility of Belief

This essay explores how comparative religious scholars and translators of the fin de siècle exercised a contingent, instrumental view of religious identity that permitted them to establish problematic claims of similitude between cultures. If cosmopolitanism necessitates a sense of detachment, I argue that the self-conscious work of figures like F. Max Müller shows how detachment functionally permitted thinkers to temporarily attach to other religious traditions. With attention to G. U. Pope, Gu Hongming, and others, I ultimately suggest that translators' faith in affect represents a contradiction at the heart of fin-de-siècle cosmopolitanism.