Durkheim on Religion

Emile Durkheim (1858-1917) is important because he offered an alternative to the Protestant idea of religion as being essentially about God and the holy books He revealed to special people. Here I examine Durkheim's treatment of the sacred in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), devoting one page to what he has to say and another to my comments. In a third page, I look in particular at the final chapter of this book: it turns out that the understanding of religion of this pioneer of sociology is a matter of metaphysics rather than of science.