The Myth of Religious Violence Chapter Two (Part Three): The Invention of Religion in the West
By way of a summary and review Cavanaugh opens this next section by stating:
"In the medieval application of the term, religio was primarily used to differentiate clergy who were members of orders from the diocesan clergy. Secondarily religio named one relatively minor virtue in a complex of other practices that assumed the particular context of the Christian church and the Christian social order. With the dawn of modernity, however, a new concept with a much wider and different significance came to operate under the term religion. Religion in modernity indicates a universal genus of which the various religions are species: each religion comes to be demarcated by a system of propositions; religion is identified with an essential interior, private impulse; and religion comes to be seen as essentially distinct from secular pursuits such as politics, economics, and the like. The rise of the concept of religion thus establishes Christianity's proper sphere as the interior life, without direct access to the political. As [Wilfred Cantwell-] Smith remarks, 'the rise of the concept of 'religion' in some ways correlated with the decline in the practice of religion itself.' What he means is that the invention of the modern concept of religion accompanies the decline of the church as the public, communal practice of the virtue of religio. The rise of religion is accompanied by the rise of its twin, the secular realm, a pairing which will gradually remove the practice of Christian religion from a central place in the social order of the West." (69-70)
Thus in this section Cavanaugh traces how this conceptual transition of religio to religion occurred. He begins with two major renaissance contributors. The first is Nicholas of Cusa, who defines religio as the variety of ways differing ways in which God is worshipped. There are Christian, Jewish, Arabic and other religions, i.e. Christian, Jewish, and Arabic ways of worshipping God. "What is novel about Cusa's use of religio," remarks Cavanaugh, "is that ritual practices are not essential to it; religio is a universal, interior impulse that stands behind the multiplicity of rites." (70) Shaken by the violent fall of Constantinople by the Turks in 1453, Cusa attempted to arrive at some principle of concord between Christians, Jews, and Muslims (and in principle others) by noting that all peoples are burdened by the cares of the body, and hence cannot come to pure knowledge of God. God therefore provided a multiplicity of bodily prophets, each of whom "had the same wisdom," but in differing customs and languages. It is only by an act of habit that these are forgotten as temporary, temporal constructs. "There is," says Cusa, "in spite of the many varieties of rites, but one religion."
Religion is here clearly not identified with any publicly visible rites or bodily disciplines or communal relations, but with an essentially interior impulse that underlay all rites. Thus "in Cusa we see the beginnings of religion as an interior impulse that is universal to human beings and therefore stands behind the multiplicity of exterior rites that express it. Cusa however still wants to identify that universal impulse with Christianity...nevertheless, Cusa's position is a precursor to the hitherto unknown idea that there is a single genus of human activity called religion, of which Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Sikhism, etc., are the various species." (71)
The second manor Renaissance thinker Cavanaugh cites is Marsilio Ficino (71). Here again Ficino is innovative over the medieval concept of religio insofar as Ficino's use of it essentially, like Cusa, universalized and interiorized a natural, innate impulse of the human heart to make religion a fundamental constant across time and space. Unlike Cusa however (and this is important) Ficino did not believe that Christ is the true underlying content of the universal religion. Rather all religions are put here by God to beautify the world. Thus there is only one religio implanted in the human heart, but diverse approximations. The highest form of this is still Christ--i.e. worshipping as Christ did--but in Ficino's eyes any faith can be a "Christian religion" even without any connection to the historical Christian revelation or the church.
The moves by these two thinkers would be supplemented, says Cavanaugh, over the next two centuries by an increasing movement towards emphasizing belief over practice (72). Guillaume Postel for example explores the idea that certain propositions are central to all of the world's religions (in 1544 he lists sixty-seven such propositions) which would, to his mind, create concord if these are accepted and the "superfluous externalities" of rites, practice, and tradition were cast off. Postel still identifies Christianity as the "true religion" (i.e. the purest or least-traditioned form of the sixty-seven propositions) but still comes close to identify religion itself as a genus of which Christianity is still merely one example. While he also does not dismiss the work of the visible, exterior church to unite the peoples of the world, he also emphasizes a dichotomy between this visible church which is now merely instrumental to the pursuit of agreement on the common propositions which ultimately mystically unite humanity.
Cavanaugh writes: "the internal-external belief-practice binaries were crucial to the continued formation of the religious-secular binary in the sixteenth-century." According to Peter Harrison, the transition to religion as a state of mind can be mapped especially clearly amongst the Calvinists (73). For Calvin himself religio retained its medieval meaning as a worshipful disposition in the person. But for many running amongst Calvinist circles there emerged an emphasis on religion as saving knowledge. "Saving knowledge was not a grasp of doctrinal facts that guaranteed salvation, but was rather a knowledge of God's will, the assurance that one had been chosen by God to be among the saved. In time however saving knowledge came to indicate a body of objective truths to which the believer could assent or withhold assent." (73). This would receive additional impetus from the Arminian controversy at the end of the sixteenth century. For Arminius, sensitive what he saw as problems in Calvin's concept of double-predestination, he proposed a conditional predestination which sought to allow human agents to play a role in their salvation without earning it. "For Arminius, human freedom came in the act of intellectual assent - a mere 'I Believe' -- to certain central Christian doctrines. No moral acts or works were required of the human agent, thus avoiding the charge of Pelagianism that Calvin had so wanted to avoid. As a result, however, the tendency to reduce religion to assent to doctrine was magnified."
Thus the Reformation brought in its wake numerous attempts to encapsulate Christian faith by series of propositions and beliefs to be confessed (e.g. the Thirty-Nine Articles, the Lambeth Articles, the Westminster Confession...) (74). Indeed there was a virtual explosion of books and pamphlets attempting to outline "Christian religion" or "Catholic religion" or "Protestant religion" inspired by the polemical context of differing confessional schemes and the need to encapsulate the differences succinctly and precisely. There developed, thereby, the concept of "religions" in the plural, and these as distinguished not by the medieval sense of opposing styles of worship, but abstract sets of doctrinal convictions and confessions. Eventually, though religion was still primarily used to refer to the "Christian religion," by the seventeenth century in writers like Thomas Browne it was possible to begin to see religion as a genus in which Christianity was a species alongside many others, and again these are collated together yet distinguished by lists of doctrinal desideratum. "Christianity" was moving conceptually from being a body of people to an, "ism" or a body of beliefs.
Echoing the idea of Guillaume Postel, Lord Herbert of Cherbury (whom, I have to editorially insert, has the most hilarious name ever) attempted to distill five propositions which all world religions agreed upon (75). He called these "common notions," and like Postel before him argued that all religions are anchored by these universal propositions, and not the array of rites and cultural encrustation they were ensconced within. Indeed for Herbert the only true and universal church were the "common notions" themselves; salvation as such was immediately accessible to all, without need for rites or scriptures or bodily disciplines or fellowship in communal guidance, because these common notions are innate and derive from a universal "natural instinct." (75). Indeed this type of introspective impulse are actually actively weighed down by traditions and dogmas which can only at best be a sort of decorative beneficial example of these universal truths. As he seemed to have viewed the incarnation and resurrection in such a light, Herbert earned the label the Father of English Deism. (76).
The main problem with Herbert's schema, Cavanaugh notes following Peter Harrison, "is that it is unfalsifiable. Whenever evidence is adduced that certain people at certain times or in certain places do not in fact hold to the five notions common to all human beings, such peoples are merely declared abnormal. In constructing an a priori religion in the minds of all people, Herbert has made his theory impervious to empirical evidence." (77). Thus "Herbert is not discovering the timeless essence of religion, but is helping to create a new reality, nonmaterial, and essentially distinct from the political."
But this is not only true of Herbert. "Attempts to construct religion as a universal, timeless, interior, and apolitical human impulse in the early modern period are willy-nilly part of the creation of new configurations of power, especially the subordination of ecclesiastical power to that of the emergent state. Herbert's schema is part of a larger shift toward absorption of ecclesiastical power by the rising state in the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries (78). "The creation of religion reduced to five inoffensive propositions thus comes with the concomitant power of the state to police the boundaries of religion and punish anyone whose more substantive version of Christianity would challenge the authority of the state and the state church."
With John Locke we find a more recognizable form of this same impulse. Human religion is primarily a state of mind (78). He draws a distinction between the "outward force" used by the civil magistrate and the "inward persuasion" of religion. This inward/outward distinction would have been unrecognizable in Medieval Christendom, where the state of the interior soul was inseparable from the bodily disciplines, associations, and rituals which both form and express the disposition of the soul. (79). Yet Locke is also to be distinguished from the Calvinists, for whom saving knowledge was still public in the sense that it represented objective truths of the faith. For Locke however, the speculative truths of religion cannot be settled by public authority, neither that of the church nor that of the magistrate. True religion then is essentially a private matter of uncovering saving knowledge for oneself. Locke writes: "Those things that every man ought sincerely to inquire into himself, and by meditation, study, search, and his own endeavors attain this knowledge of, cannot be looked upon as the peculiar possession of any sort of men."
Locke's scheme does not result in the strict privatization of worship; what he does however is create a strict division of labor between the state whose interests are public in origin, and the church, whose interests are private, thereby clearing a space for purely secular concern. "Locke defines the commonwealth in terms of the promotion of civil interests, and civil interests he defines as 'life, liberty, health, and indolence of body; and the possession of outward things, such as money, lands, houses furniture and the like.' Violence can be used for the securing of civil interests, but has no place in the advancement of true religion." (79). Thus in Locke we "find a modern version of the spatial division of the world into religious and secular pursuits." (80).
"In the medieval period, the saeculum had both a temporal and spatial dimension; it referred to this world and age, and saecula saeculorum was translated into English as 'world without end.' The saeculum was all of creation, written into the providential plan of God. It did not refer to some spatial area of interest autonomous from the church's concern. In the suggestive words of Bailey, 'It was in the secular that religion revealed its reality, as religion rather than hobby (or fantasy).' When the opposition of religious clergy to secular clergy was transferred to the new conception of religion in the early modern era, however, the secular retained its oppositional character and became that which is not religious in the modern sense. The new religious-secular dichotomy fit into the modern state's individualist anthropology." (80)
At this point Cavanaugh transitions into summary (81). He says that this certainly does not pretend to give a complete history of development (which has been more fully provided by people like Cantwell-Smith, Talal Asad, Tomoko Masuzawa, and others). Rather the basic point that is attempting to be established by this brief historical tour is that: the concept of religion has a history and is not transhistorical. In the next section (hence in our next post) Cavanaugh will argue also that it is not transcultural. For now he wants his readers to focus on the historical portion of the concept. "To say, as Kimball and Rouner do, that religion has done this or that throughout history is in fact to ignore history. There was a time when religion, as modern people use the term, was not, and then it was invented." (81). In the premodern West there simply was no concept that Christianity was a species of the genus religion, which was universal, interior, private, reducible to propositions of belief, and essentially distinct from secular pursuits.
Cavanaugh at this point repeats an essential concept from earlier: "The point is not simply that religion has changed over time, that is used to be a particular virtue tied up with bodily disciplines in the medieval period and became a universal, interior impulse in the modern era, nor that we used not to seperate religion and politics, and now we do. To say this would be to persist in maintaining that there is something lurking underneath the changes that identifies all of the various manifestations as religion. To say this, in other words, would be to say that, despite the differences between medieval religio and modern religion, it is still essentially the same thing that has undergone accidental change. But we have seen that religio and religion are not the same thing... There are, of course, commonalities between medieval religio and modern religion, but religio as a virtue also has commonalities with modern concepts such as public allegience, civic obligation, justice, public virtue, and a host of other concepts and practices that modernity categorizes as political." (81)
Cavanaugh demurs that he is not merely making the nominalist point that no two things are the same, or that there are no continuities. Of course there are commonalities and continuities. Rather what he is attempting to argue is that the relevant continuities necessary to make Kimball and Rouner's case (that religion has caused more violence in history than any other institutional force) has to assume the seperability of religion from politics, economics, culture, and other institutional forces in ancient and medieval times, which is simply absent from the historical record. (82). "How could one make the case empirically? How would one go about showing, from empirical evidence, that religion has caused more violence than any other institutional force in history, when the distinction is absent from premodern cultures?...Like Lord Herbert's thesis, such essentialist accounts of religion may be impervious to empirical disproof, but they are also impossible to prove without a prior commitment to finding religion in the complex historical traces left behind by people who arranged their world in a very different way than we do."
And Cavanaugh notes a second important part to his demonstration in this section: "The problem here is not just one of misdescription or anachronism. The problem is that essentialist accounts of religion occlude the way that power is involved in the shifting uses of concepts such as religion. One of the significant disadvantages of essentialist readings of religion, in other words, is that they ignore or distort changes in how the world is arranged...this is the second conclusion I have set out to show...The deeper problem is that transhistorical accounts of religion are themselves implicated in shifts in the way authority and power are distributed, while claiming to be purely descriptive." (82). For example like Herbert, John Locke thought he was uncovering the timeless essence of religion. What is obscured in their accounts is that they are both witnessing and contributing to a previously unheard of constellation of power. "The very claim that the boundaries between religion and nonreligion are natural, eternal, fixed, and immutable is itself part of the new configuration of power that comes about with the rise of the modern state." (83). "The new state's claim to a monopoly on violence, lawmaking, and public allegiance within a given territory depends upon either the absorption of the church into the state or the relegation of the church to an essentially private realm. Key to this move is the contention that the church's business is religion. Religion must appear, therefore, not as what the church is left with once it has been stripped of earthly relevance, but as the timeless and essential human endeavor to which the church's pursuits should have always been confined."
True religion cannot have designs on civil power because it is essentially and always distinct from the political on this reading. Thus the new conception of religion helped shift the state to dominance over the church by distinguishing inward religion from the bodily disciplines of the state (84). Citing William Arnal, Cavanaugh writes: "The very concept of religion as such--as an entity with any distinction whatsoever from other human phenomena--is a function of these same processes and historical moments that generate an individualistic concept of it...this very definition of the modern democratic state in fact creates religion as its alter-ego: religion, as such, is the space in which and by which any substantive collective goals (salvation, righteousness, etc...) are individualized and made into a question of personal commitment or morality. Religion, as Arnal says elsewhere, is a special political category that marginalizes and domesticates whatever forms of collective social action happen to retain a positive or utopian orientation."
It is thus crucial to underscore that the category of religion does not simply describe a new reality but helps to bring it into being and enforce it.
Cavanaugh ends this section with a very quotable paragraph:
"The idea that there exists a transhistorical impulse called religion with a singular tendency to promote fanaticism and violence when combined with public power is not an empirically demonstrable fact,but is itself an ideological accompaniment to the shifts in power and authority that mark the transition from the medieval to the modern in the West. There may be good reasons to prefer modern to medieval, or Western to Islamic, arrangements...but normative commitments should not be passed off as descriptions of fact. The idea that 'religion has probably been the single most significant cause of warfare in human history' has a history of its own." (85)
"In the medieval application of the term, religio was primarily used to differentiate clergy who were members of orders from the diocesan clergy. Secondarily religio named one relatively minor virtue in a complex of other practices that assumed the particular context of the Christian church and the Christian social order. With the dawn of modernity, however, a new concept with a much wider and different significance came to operate under the term religion. Religion in modernity indicates a universal genus of which the various religions are species: each religion comes to be demarcated by a system of propositions; religion is identified with an essential interior, private impulse; and religion comes to be seen as essentially distinct from secular pursuits such as politics, economics, and the like. The rise of the concept of religion thus establishes Christianity's proper sphere as the interior life, without direct access to the political. As [Wilfred Cantwell-] Smith remarks, 'the rise of the concept of 'religion' in some ways correlated with the decline in the practice of religion itself.' What he means is that the invention of the modern concept of religion accompanies the decline of the church as the public, communal practice of the virtue of religio. The rise of religion is accompanied by the rise of its twin, the secular realm, a pairing which will gradually remove the practice of Christian religion from a central place in the social order of the West." (69-70)
Thus in this section Cavanaugh traces how this conceptual transition of religio to religion occurred. He begins with two major renaissance contributors. The first is Nicholas of Cusa, who defines religio as the variety of ways differing ways in which God is worshipped. There are Christian, Jewish, Arabic and other religions, i.e. Christian, Jewish, and Arabic ways of worshipping God. "What is novel about Cusa's use of religio," remarks Cavanaugh, "is that ritual practices are not essential to it; religio is a universal, interior impulse that stands behind the multiplicity of rites." (70) Shaken by the violent fall of Constantinople by the Turks in 1453, Cusa attempted to arrive at some principle of concord between Christians, Jews, and Muslims (and in principle others) by noting that all peoples are burdened by the cares of the body, and hence cannot come to pure knowledge of God. God therefore provided a multiplicity of bodily prophets, each of whom "had the same wisdom," but in differing customs and languages. It is only by an act of habit that these are forgotten as temporary, temporal constructs. "There is," says Cusa, "in spite of the many varieties of rites, but one religion."
Religion is here clearly not identified with any publicly visible rites or bodily disciplines or communal relations, but with an essentially interior impulse that underlay all rites. Thus "in Cusa we see the beginnings of religion as an interior impulse that is universal to human beings and therefore stands behind the multiplicity of exterior rites that express it. Cusa however still wants to identify that universal impulse with Christianity...nevertheless, Cusa's position is a precursor to the hitherto unknown idea that there is a single genus of human activity called religion, of which Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Sikhism, etc., are the various species." (71)
The second manor Renaissance thinker Cavanaugh cites is Marsilio Ficino (71). Here again Ficino is innovative over the medieval concept of religio insofar as Ficino's use of it essentially, like Cusa, universalized and interiorized a natural, innate impulse of the human heart to make religion a fundamental constant across time and space. Unlike Cusa however (and this is important) Ficino did not believe that Christ is the true underlying content of the universal religion. Rather all religions are put here by God to beautify the world. Thus there is only one religio implanted in the human heart, but diverse approximations. The highest form of this is still Christ--i.e. worshipping as Christ did--but in Ficino's eyes any faith can be a "Christian religion" even without any connection to the historical Christian revelation or the church.
The moves by these two thinkers would be supplemented, says Cavanaugh, over the next two centuries by an increasing movement towards emphasizing belief over practice (72). Guillaume Postel for example explores the idea that certain propositions are central to all of the world's religions (in 1544 he lists sixty-seven such propositions) which would, to his mind, create concord if these are accepted and the "superfluous externalities" of rites, practice, and tradition were cast off. Postel still identifies Christianity as the "true religion" (i.e. the purest or least-traditioned form of the sixty-seven propositions) but still comes close to identify religion itself as a genus of which Christianity is still merely one example. While he also does not dismiss the work of the visible, exterior church to unite the peoples of the world, he also emphasizes a dichotomy between this visible church which is now merely instrumental to the pursuit of agreement on the common propositions which ultimately mystically unite humanity.
Cavanaugh writes: "the internal-external belief-practice binaries were crucial to the continued formation of the religious-secular binary in the sixteenth-century." According to Peter Harrison, the transition to religion as a state of mind can be mapped especially clearly amongst the Calvinists (73). For Calvin himself religio retained its medieval meaning as a worshipful disposition in the person. But for many running amongst Calvinist circles there emerged an emphasis on religion as saving knowledge. "Saving knowledge was not a grasp of doctrinal facts that guaranteed salvation, but was rather a knowledge of God's will, the assurance that one had been chosen by God to be among the saved. In time however saving knowledge came to indicate a body of objective truths to which the believer could assent or withhold assent." (73). This would receive additional impetus from the Arminian controversy at the end of the sixteenth century. For Arminius, sensitive what he saw as problems in Calvin's concept of double-predestination, he proposed a conditional predestination which sought to allow human agents to play a role in their salvation without earning it. "For Arminius, human freedom came in the act of intellectual assent - a mere 'I Believe' -- to certain central Christian doctrines. No moral acts or works were required of the human agent, thus avoiding the charge of Pelagianism that Calvin had so wanted to avoid. As a result, however, the tendency to reduce religion to assent to doctrine was magnified."
Thus the Reformation brought in its wake numerous attempts to encapsulate Christian faith by series of propositions and beliefs to be confessed (e.g. the Thirty-Nine Articles, the Lambeth Articles, the Westminster Confession...) (74). Indeed there was a virtual explosion of books and pamphlets attempting to outline "Christian religion" or "Catholic religion" or "Protestant religion" inspired by the polemical context of differing confessional schemes and the need to encapsulate the differences succinctly and precisely. There developed, thereby, the concept of "religions" in the plural, and these as distinguished not by the medieval sense of opposing styles of worship, but abstract sets of doctrinal convictions and confessions. Eventually, though religion was still primarily used to refer to the "Christian religion," by the seventeenth century in writers like Thomas Browne it was possible to begin to see religion as a genus in which Christianity was a species alongside many others, and again these are collated together yet distinguished by lists of doctrinal desideratum. "Christianity" was moving conceptually from being a body of people to an, "ism" or a body of beliefs.
Echoing the idea of Guillaume Postel, Lord Herbert of Cherbury (whom, I have to editorially insert, has the most hilarious name ever) attempted to distill five propositions which all world religions agreed upon (75). He called these "common notions," and like Postel before him argued that all religions are anchored by these universal propositions, and not the array of rites and cultural encrustation they were ensconced within. Indeed for Herbert the only true and universal church were the "common notions" themselves; salvation as such was immediately accessible to all, without need for rites or scriptures or bodily disciplines or fellowship in communal guidance, because these common notions are innate and derive from a universal "natural instinct." (75). Indeed this type of introspective impulse are actually actively weighed down by traditions and dogmas which can only at best be a sort of decorative beneficial example of these universal truths. As he seemed to have viewed the incarnation and resurrection in such a light, Herbert earned the label the Father of English Deism. (76).
The main problem with Herbert's schema, Cavanaugh notes following Peter Harrison, "is that it is unfalsifiable. Whenever evidence is adduced that certain people at certain times or in certain places do not in fact hold to the five notions common to all human beings, such peoples are merely declared abnormal. In constructing an a priori religion in the minds of all people, Herbert has made his theory impervious to empirical evidence." (77). Thus "Herbert is not discovering the timeless essence of religion, but is helping to create a new reality, nonmaterial, and essentially distinct from the political."
But this is not only true of Herbert. "Attempts to construct religion as a universal, timeless, interior, and apolitical human impulse in the early modern period are willy-nilly part of the creation of new configurations of power, especially the subordination of ecclesiastical power to that of the emergent state. Herbert's schema is part of a larger shift toward absorption of ecclesiastical power by the rising state in the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries (78). "The creation of religion reduced to five inoffensive propositions thus comes with the concomitant power of the state to police the boundaries of religion and punish anyone whose more substantive version of Christianity would challenge the authority of the state and the state church."
With John Locke we find a more recognizable form of this same impulse. Human religion is primarily a state of mind (78). He draws a distinction between the "outward force" used by the civil magistrate and the "inward persuasion" of religion. This inward/outward distinction would have been unrecognizable in Medieval Christendom, where the state of the interior soul was inseparable from the bodily disciplines, associations, and rituals which both form and express the disposition of the soul. (79). Yet Locke is also to be distinguished from the Calvinists, for whom saving knowledge was still public in the sense that it represented objective truths of the faith. For Locke however, the speculative truths of religion cannot be settled by public authority, neither that of the church nor that of the magistrate. True religion then is essentially a private matter of uncovering saving knowledge for oneself. Locke writes: "Those things that every man ought sincerely to inquire into himself, and by meditation, study, search, and his own endeavors attain this knowledge of, cannot be looked upon as the peculiar possession of any sort of men."
Locke's scheme does not result in the strict privatization of worship; what he does however is create a strict division of labor between the state whose interests are public in origin, and the church, whose interests are private, thereby clearing a space for purely secular concern. "Locke defines the commonwealth in terms of the promotion of civil interests, and civil interests he defines as 'life, liberty, health, and indolence of body; and the possession of outward things, such as money, lands, houses furniture and the like.' Violence can be used for the securing of civil interests, but has no place in the advancement of true religion." (79). Thus in Locke we "find a modern version of the spatial division of the world into religious and secular pursuits." (80).
"In the medieval period, the saeculum had both a temporal and spatial dimension; it referred to this world and age, and saecula saeculorum was translated into English as 'world without end.' The saeculum was all of creation, written into the providential plan of God. It did not refer to some spatial area of interest autonomous from the church's concern. In the suggestive words of Bailey, 'It was in the secular that religion revealed its reality, as religion rather than hobby (or fantasy).' When the opposition of religious clergy to secular clergy was transferred to the new conception of religion in the early modern era, however, the secular retained its oppositional character and became that which is not religious in the modern sense. The new religious-secular dichotomy fit into the modern state's individualist anthropology." (80)
At this point Cavanaugh transitions into summary (81). He says that this certainly does not pretend to give a complete history of development (which has been more fully provided by people like Cantwell-Smith, Talal Asad, Tomoko Masuzawa, and others). Rather the basic point that is attempting to be established by this brief historical tour is that: the concept of religion has a history and is not transhistorical. In the next section (hence in our next post) Cavanaugh will argue also that it is not transcultural. For now he wants his readers to focus on the historical portion of the concept. "To say, as Kimball and Rouner do, that religion has done this or that throughout history is in fact to ignore history. There was a time when religion, as modern people use the term, was not, and then it was invented." (81). In the premodern West there simply was no concept that Christianity was a species of the genus religion, which was universal, interior, private, reducible to propositions of belief, and essentially distinct from secular pursuits.
Cavanaugh at this point repeats an essential concept from earlier: "The point is not simply that religion has changed over time, that is used to be a particular virtue tied up with bodily disciplines in the medieval period and became a universal, interior impulse in the modern era, nor that we used not to seperate religion and politics, and now we do. To say this would be to persist in maintaining that there is something lurking underneath the changes that identifies all of the various manifestations as religion. To say this, in other words, would be to say that, despite the differences between medieval religio and modern religion, it is still essentially the same thing that has undergone accidental change. But we have seen that religio and religion are not the same thing... There are, of course, commonalities between medieval religio and modern religion, but religio as a virtue also has commonalities with modern concepts such as public allegience, civic obligation, justice, public virtue, and a host of other concepts and practices that modernity categorizes as political." (81)
Cavanaugh demurs that he is not merely making the nominalist point that no two things are the same, or that there are no continuities. Of course there are commonalities and continuities. Rather what he is attempting to argue is that the relevant continuities necessary to make Kimball and Rouner's case (that religion has caused more violence in history than any other institutional force) has to assume the seperability of religion from politics, economics, culture, and other institutional forces in ancient and medieval times, which is simply absent from the historical record. (82). "How could one make the case empirically? How would one go about showing, from empirical evidence, that religion has caused more violence than any other institutional force in history, when the distinction is absent from premodern cultures?...Like Lord Herbert's thesis, such essentialist accounts of religion may be impervious to empirical disproof, but they are also impossible to prove without a prior commitment to finding religion in the complex historical traces left behind by people who arranged their world in a very different way than we do."
And Cavanaugh notes a second important part to his demonstration in this section: "The problem here is not just one of misdescription or anachronism. The problem is that essentialist accounts of religion occlude the way that power is involved in the shifting uses of concepts such as religion. One of the significant disadvantages of essentialist readings of religion, in other words, is that they ignore or distort changes in how the world is arranged...this is the second conclusion I have set out to show...The deeper problem is that transhistorical accounts of religion are themselves implicated in shifts in the way authority and power are distributed, while claiming to be purely descriptive." (82). For example like Herbert, John Locke thought he was uncovering the timeless essence of religion. What is obscured in their accounts is that they are both witnessing and contributing to a previously unheard of constellation of power. "The very claim that the boundaries between religion and nonreligion are natural, eternal, fixed, and immutable is itself part of the new configuration of power that comes about with the rise of the modern state." (83). "The new state's claim to a monopoly on violence, lawmaking, and public allegiance within a given territory depends upon either the absorption of the church into the state or the relegation of the church to an essentially private realm. Key to this move is the contention that the church's business is religion. Religion must appear, therefore, not as what the church is left with once it has been stripped of earthly relevance, but as the timeless and essential human endeavor to which the church's pursuits should have always been confined."
True religion cannot have designs on civil power because it is essentially and always distinct from the political on this reading. Thus the new conception of religion helped shift the state to dominance over the church by distinguishing inward religion from the bodily disciplines of the state (84). Citing William Arnal, Cavanaugh writes: "The very concept of religion as such--as an entity with any distinction whatsoever from other human phenomena--is a function of these same processes and historical moments that generate an individualistic concept of it...this very definition of the modern democratic state in fact creates religion as its alter-ego: religion, as such, is the space in which and by which any substantive collective goals (salvation, righteousness, etc...) are individualized and made into a question of personal commitment or morality. Religion, as Arnal says elsewhere, is a special political category that marginalizes and domesticates whatever forms of collective social action happen to retain a positive or utopian orientation."
It is thus crucial to underscore that the category of religion does not simply describe a new reality but helps to bring it into being and enforce it.
Cavanaugh ends this section with a very quotable paragraph:
"The idea that there exists a transhistorical impulse called religion with a singular tendency to promote fanaticism and violence when combined with public power is not an empirically demonstrable fact,but is itself an ideological accompaniment to the shifts in power and authority that mark the transition from the medieval to the modern in the West. There may be good reasons to prefer modern to medieval, or Western to Islamic, arrangements...but normative commitments should not be passed off as descriptions of fact. The idea that 'religion has probably been the single most significant cause of warfare in human history' has a history of its own." (85)
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