Discussion of the relationship between religion and society is hampered from the outset by the absence of agreed definitions for either term. The problem is due in part to a fetishistic obsession with the reality of ‘‘society’’ and ‘‘religion’’ - as if such abstractions could ever really ‘‘be.’’ Such words do not describe existing things, but reflect ways of thinking about the world. They may describe historically contingent social attitudes; they may be useful contemporary analytic categories, but in neither case do they describe the concrete or tangible. It will be convenient here to adopt definitions consistent with Durkheim’s argument. By ‘‘society’’ I mean the categories of the person (statuses) and the systematic relationships between these categories (group relations). By ‘‘religion’’ I mean beliefs, manifested in word and deed (or myth and ritual), in the transcendental, the deathless, unchanging, true or natural: what is other than the world of contingent, practical experience, and thus can serve as a model for it. The relationship as I imagine it is roughly analogous to that between the specific and the general, practice and theory.
Definitions should be qualified by a consideration of the history of the terms and their opposition. In the earliest Greek authors such as Hesiod, human experience is regarded as a unified whole. Certainly Hesiod understood the distinction between the divine and the human, the sacred and the profane. Religion, however, was not understood as an autonomous region of human life, any more than were other essential categories of modern analysis, such as ‘‘the political’’ or ‘‘social’’ or ‘‘economic’’: these the ancients regarded as integrated, or (in modern academic parlance) ‘‘embedded.’’ Similarities between this unified conception of religion and society and the modern sociological theory of coherence are only apparent. While sociologists argue that religion and society are complicit, they presume discrete regions of behavior.
The idea of religion as a distinguishable realm of human activity becomes prominent in the sixth century BC with the philosopher Xenophanes. So, for example, he observes that people have conceived the gods in human terms, as projections of themselves: ‘‘mortals think that the gods are born, and that they have clothes and speech and bodies like their own’’ (fr. 14 D-K). Xenophanes here segregates religion, treats it as a distinct object of speculation. He insists on the fundamental difference between the divine and the human, and criticizes the obtuseness of those who cannot see the distinction. In an even more famous fragment he remarks that ‘‘Homer and Hesiod have attributed to the gods everything that is a shame and reproach among men, stealing and committing adultery and deceiving each other’’ (fr. 11). From the moment that religion is isolated as an object of investigation, its connection with morality and its importance as an educative example is also recognized. The morality attributed to the gods can and should be a model for people, and representation of divine immorality has the potential to corrupt believers. The relationship of religion and morality will occupy philosophers down to the end of antiquity.
A generation or more after Xenophanes authors continue to write as though religion and the world of the human are thoroughly integrated. In Herodotus’ histories, for instance, religion plays a frequent and decisive role in human actions (for a brief example see his account of the fate of Polycrates, 3.40-3). With the Sophistic movement at the end of the fifth century BC, however, the opposition between the human and the divine is firmly established. Some are now comfortable discussing human affairs entirely without reference to the divine. The great example is the austere Athenian historian Thucydides, an extreme rationalist by the standards of any period of antiquity. When he does treat religion, it is often with irony (see the backhanded deprecation of oracles at 5.26, or the great debate about morality and religion in the ‘‘Melian dialogue,’’ notably at 5.103-5). The exemplary account of the Sophistic opposition of reason and religion is provided in Plato’s Defense of Socrates, delivered against the charge that ‘‘Socrates does wrong because he does not believe in the gods that the city believes in, but introduces other spirits; he also does wrong in corrupting the youth.’’ The relationship of the gods to justice remains central in much of Plato’s writing (see for instance the beginning of the Republic).
For Greeks the alternative to religion was not society but politics. The modern English word ‘‘politics’’ derives from the Greek, ta politika, which means, literally, ‘‘things pertaining to the polis,’’ the characteristic Greek community-formation. When Greeks speak of ‘‘politics’’ they allude to group life, as manifested in a specifically Greek organization. The Greek ‘‘political’’ takes in not only the classic modern idea of the political - i. e., the institutional forms and activities used by the state to make decisions about day-to-day life - but also those spheres of behavior that we today characterize as social and economic: they did not think of the social as something apart from the political.
The Greek idea of the political emerges in tandem with the idea of religion; the segregation of the one creates space for the other. For example, isolation of religion makes it possible to imagine an area in which people can ‘‘make their world,’’ through decisions and actions. So Aristotle rigorously excluded the religious from his account in his Politics. Plato had gone further, subordinating religion to politics. In his account of the founding of an ideal state, The Laws, he notes that since it is crucial for those in the state ‘‘to have the right thoughts about the gods’’ (888b), the state should regulate religious observance.
With Augustine’s City of God, there emerges a more categorical distinction between religion and politics: ‘‘What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?’’ The modern recognition of distinguishable, internally coherent regions of human behavior can be traced to this work. Here Augustine draws a fundamental distinction between the earthly city and the heavenly city. Although Christians are forced to live in this imperfect world, they should keep their eyes on heaven. Augustine’s philosophical argument reflects and epitomizes a real political development. With Christianity the old civic unity of religion and politics was sundered; church and state were separated. Augustine’s vision dominated the medieval world. Political philosophers, beginning with the Renaissance, adopted his insights by standing his argument on its head. Thus Machiavelli, though lamenting the dissolution of the integrated lives of the ancients, nevertheless accepts that the religious and the political have nothing to do with one another; without denying religion, he proceeds to study the political ‘‘on its own terms,’’ without God.
The modern idea of the social emerges in the Enlightenment when Machiavelli’s intellectual heirs, such as Hobbes, developed Social Contract Theory. These thinkers were interested in the nature of human communities. The problem drew them on to the question of origins, and they began to consider human group interactions as they might have existed separate from and even preceding the development of the political state. So at the outset the idea of the social might be characterized as the ‘‘human pre-political.’’
World History
