I
just began reading Karen Armstrong’s book Fields
of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (Anchor Books; New York, NY).
Her introduction provides a tremendous amount of very important historical
insights. Below is an excerpt from pages 4-5. I divided it into additional
paragraphs and underlined portions because it is packed with so much.
For about fifty years now it has been
clear in the academy that there is no universal way to define religion. In
the West we see “religion” as a coherent system of obligatory beliefs,
institutions, and rituals, centering on a supernatural God, whose practice is essentially private and
hermetically sealed off from all “secular” activities. But words in other
languages that we translate as “religion” almost invariably refer to something
larger, vaguer, and more encompassing.
The Arabic din signifies an entire way of life. The Sanskrit dharma is also “a ‘total’ concept,
untranslatable, which covers law, justice, morals and social life.” The Oxford Classical Dictionary firmly states:
“No word in either Greek or Latin
corresponds to the English ‘religion’ or ‘religious.’” The idea of religion
as an essentially personal and systematic pursuit was entirely absent from
classical Greece, Japan, Egypt, Mesopotamia, Iran, China, and India. Nor
does the Hebrew Bible have any abstract concept of religion; and the Talmudic
rabbis would have found it impossible to express what they meant by faith in a
single word or even in a formula, since the Talmud was expressly designed to
bring the whole of human life into the ambit of the sacred.’
The origins of the Latin religio are obscure. It was not “a
great objective something” but had imprecise connotations of obligation and
taboo; to say that a cultic observance, a family propriety, or keeping an oath
was religio for you meant that it was
incumbent on you to do it.
The word acquired an important new
meaning among early Christian theologians: an attitude of reverence toward God and the universe as a whole. For
Saint Augustine (c. 354-430 CE), religio
was neither a system of rituals and doctrines nor a historical
institutionalized tradition but a personal encounter with the transcendence
that we call God as well as the bond that unites us to the divine and to one
another. In medieval Europe, religio
came to refer to the monastic life and distinguished the monk from the “secular”
priest, someone who lived and worked in the world (saeculum).
The only faith tradition that does fit
the modern Western notion of religion as
something codified and private is Protestant Christianity, which, like religion in this sense of the word, is
also a product of the early modern period. At this time Europeans and
Americans had begun to separate religion and politics, because they assumed,
not altogether accurately, that the theological squabbles of the Reformation
had been entirely responsible for the Thirty Years’ War.
The conviction that religion must be
rigorously excluded from political life has been called the charter myth of the
sovereign nation-state. The philosophers and statesmen who pioneered this
dogma believed that they were returning to a more satisfactory state of affairs
that had existed before ambitious Catholic clerics had confused two utterly
distinct realms. But in fact their secular ideology was as radical an
innovation as the modern market economy that the West was concurrently
devising.
To non-Westerners, who had not been
through this particular modernizing process, both these innovations would
seem unnatural and even incomprehensible. The habit of separating
religion and politics is now so routine in the West that it is difficult for us
to appreciate how thoroughly the two co-inhered in the past. It was never
simply a question of the state “using” religion; the two were indivisible.
Dissociating them would have seemed like trying to extract the gin from a
cocktail.
Take
a few minutes to consider the points made above. It is very important to
clearly understand them.
Shalom,
Jim
Myers
Comments
Post a Comment