The Myth of Religious Violence Chapter Two (Part Two): Early Concepts of Religion

Cavanaugh begins the next section (which is an investigation of the historical evolution of the concept of religio) by citing two quotes, one from Charles Kimball and the other from Leroy Rouner.  Kimball writes "It is somewhat trite but nevertheless sadly true, to say that more wars have been waged, more people killed, and these days more evil perpetrated in the name of religion than any other institutional force in human history."  And Rouner echoes nearly every part of this sentiment: "Religion has probably been the single most significant cause of warfare in human history and, at the same time, the single most significant force for peace."  Cavanaugh notes that quite tellingly, "neither author makes any attempt to support these claims with empirical evidence." (60).

Could it be done?  That is to say, what conditions and evidences would be necessary to prove that religion  causes and has caused more violence than any other institutional force?  Of course given the inculcation of many of us into the habits of modern ways of thinking, it seems prima facie obvious that these claims ring true, and so that a follow-up inquiry empirically investigating our best intuitions should be fairly ready-to-hand.  Take a few instances--say the Jews slaughtering Canaanites, Mayan human sacrifice, maybe a few examples from the early church, a few from medieval times, a few contemporary examples like 9/11, tie them into a narrative and there you go.  But (of course) things are not so simple.

First "you would need a concept of religion that would be at least theoretically separable from other institutional forces over the course of history."  Yet, "the problem is that there was no category of religion separable from such political institutions until the modern era, and then it was primarily in the West.  What meaning could we give to either the claim that Roman religion is to blame for the imperialist violence of ancient Rome, or the claim that it is Roman politics--and not Roman religion--that is to blame?" (60)  Either claim is nonsensical because no such neat division existed--Roman religio was inextricable from duty to the emperor and to the gods of Roman civic life.  "Similar comments aptly apply to ancient Israel, Confucian China, Charlemage's empire, Aztec civilization, and any other premodern culture." (61)  Thus any attempt to prove Kimball's self-proclaimed "trite" claim about the destructive influence of religion gets bogged down in hopeless anachronism.

Nor, it should be said (and Cavanaugh does) does this mean that in pre-modern times religion and politics were simply "mixed together" to be later properly sorted out by moderns.  Following again the work of those like Wilfred Cantwell Smith and Quentin Skinner, Cavanaugh notes "religion as a discrete category of human activity separable from culture, politics, and other areas of life is an invention of the modern West."  Thus to use John Milbank's phrase from his Theology and Social Theory these "ontological objects" or domains "politics" and "religion" simply did not exist.  They were not merely mixed together in a way radically more united than now, for "mixture" as an analogy presupposes to varying extents the diachronic viability of the modern categories.  Thus: "it is a mistake to treat religion as a constant in human culture across time and space."  And that, while none of the thinkers covered in chapter one would deny the "kaleidoscopic variety" of forms religion has taken across the centuries, nonetheless each one of them discourses on "religion as such."  Which is to say that there is a distinction between essence and form: religion is religion in any era, but it make take on different appearances.

In fact ancient languages had no word or concept that approximated what we as modern English speakers mean by "religion."

The word religio itself of course is from Latin and derives from re-ligare or to bind-again.  It referred inititially to the "powerful requirement to preform some action." (62)  That is to say something which carried serious obligation.  "This included not only cultic observances--which were themselves sometimes referred to as religiones, such that there was a different religio or set of observances at each shrine--but also civic oaths and family rituals, things that modern Westerners normally consider to be secular.

In early Christianity the term religio was quite minor "because it did not correspond to any single concept that the biblical writers considered significant."  In the Latin Vulgate Jerome used religio to translate a variety of Greek terms and appears only six times.  In the King James religion only appears five times, to translate three different words, "and not always the same ones that Jerome rendered as religio."  

In fact the only treatise written entirely on religio was Augustine's De Vera Religone (late fourth century). In it Augustine distinguishes between true and false religio, a distinction introduced prior in the third century by the Latin Christian Lactantius (63).  Yet Augustine's subject is not Christianity as opposed to other false "religio" understood as systems of propositions and rites.  Rather here religio takes the meaning "to worship."  In fact so far from any religious/secular distinction, Augustine's discussion turns on the concept that any human pursuit can have its own false type of religio as a rendering of praise to God.  Later in The City of God book X Augustine still uses religio to refer to the worship of the one, true God, yet finds it ambiguous because religio normally refers to devotion in human relationships, especially among family and friends.  The upshot is that religio for Augustine is found in all social relationships. (64)

The word received even less attention in the Medieval period.  Cavanaugh notes the irony by citing a great quote by Wilfred Cantwell Smith: "It is nowadays customary to think of this period as the most 'religious' in the history of Christendom.  Despite this or because of it, throughout the whole Middle Ages no one, so far as I have been able to ascertain, ever wrote a book specifically devoted to 'religion.'" (65).  In fact the term nearly disappeared, and only occasionally was used to refer to describe different sorts of Monastic rule.  This held as the word entered into English in the early 13th century, as "a state of life bound to monastic vows."  And in time "religion" was actually a term specifying those who had take monastic vows (the "religious life") as opposed to "secular" clergy who, while members of the church, were not part of a specific monastic order.  Thus the religion/secular divide actually emerged in terminology describing the inner distinctions of Christianity.

Thomas Aquinas, as a final and quite major example, treats religio in his Summa Theologia under the virtue of justice.  Religio is one of the nine virtues annexed to the principle virtue of Justice.  "It is a potential part of justice because it renders to God what is God's due, which is reverence or worship."  However religio is not equated with Justice, because finite human beings can never give to God his proper due and always fall short of an equal return (65).  According to Aquinas then, religio is a moral, not a theological virtue because "God is related to religio not as matter or object, but as an end and completion."  God is the direct object of the theological virtue, faith. 

Here in summary Cavanaugh notes it is helpful to list four things that religio is not for Aquinas (and by extension the fairly vast historical terrain just covered):

1.)  Religio is not a universal genus of which Christianity is a particular species (65).  Religio is found wherever worship is offered (good or bad).  The distinction here, like Augustine, is not between religion and secular, but true and false forms of worship.

2.) Religio was not a system of propositions or beliefs (66): "Doctrine is not unimportant for cultivating true religio, but Christian religio is not a system of propositions about reality.  It is a virtue, a disposition of the person, which elevates the person's action into participation in the life of the Trinity.  As a virtue, Christian religio is a type of habitus, a disposition of the person toward moral excellence produced by highly specific disciplines of the body and soul."

3.) Religio was not a purely interior impulse secreted away in the human soul.  Rather Christian religio "is a set of skills that become 'second nature' through habituated disciplines of the body and soul..." and "for Aquinas, religio is a virtue, and a virtue is a type of habit, and habits are caused by the repetition of acts." (67)  These habits and disciplines thus involved the entire person (and she was conceived as a whole, not a duality of accidentally related parts of soul and flesh, as the common caricature goes), and thus religio as a concept invokes a series of disciplines and habits of attention and action which cross and include the entire spectrum of embodied existence.

4.) Religio is not an institutional force separable from other nonreligious or secular forces. (67)

"Religio was not separable--even in theory--from political activity in Christendom.  Medieval Christendom was a theopolitical whole.  This does not mean, of course, that here was no division of labor between kings and priests, nor that the divisions was not constantly contested.  It does mean, however, that the end of religio was inseparable from the end of politics.  Aquinas explains that human government is directed toward the end of virtuous living.  For this reason the King must possess virtue; justice easily degenerates into tyranny unless the king is a very virtuous man." (68)

Thus Cavanaugh concludes this brief section:

"Is religion being compared to a secular realm of activity when it is claimed that religion has caused more violence than any other institutional force throughout history?  Certainly, the modern claim that religion causes more violence than something else depends upon the existence of a sphere or non-religion, a secular realm.  As should be obvious, however, there was no such secular sphere until it was invented in modernity....Nothing in the above analysis of the history of the term religion either disproves or proves the thesis that medieval Christendom was more violent than modern society.  One may wish to argue that the invention of the religious-secular duality was, on the whole, a good thing, and that societies with such a distinction are to be preferred to societies organized like medieval Christendom.  But basing such preferences on the inherent violence of religion throughout history invites anachronistic nonsense.  The point is not that religion was mixed up with secular pursuits until modernity separated them.  The point is that there is no transhistorical and transcultural essence of religion waiting to be seperated from the secular like a precious metal from its ore.  The term religio functioned in very different ways as part of a complex of power relations and subjectivities unique to medieval Christendom.  Very different relations of power were involved in the invention of the twin categories of religion and the secular.  The problem with transhistorical and transcultural definitions of religion is not just that all phenomena identified as religious are historically specific, but that the definitions themselves are historical products that are part of specific configurations of power." (69).