Book Review: Peter Harrison, The Territories of Science and Religion (Part Three)

It is not that there is absolutely nothing of our modern concepts of religion present—although they are only there by way of anticipation.  In and of themselves they could mean many things, and have been taken in many directions.  For example Harrison notes that Christianity extricated itself from time and nationality, and thus at the very least provided materials for the later invention of the generic “religion.”  Nonetheless Harrison’s point is important: the basic understanding of religion in the modern period as an essential feature of mankind that can be discerned by enumerating a list of beliefs, creedal statements, or theologies is a modern exigency as not part and parcel of the self-understanding of those historical actors we would today identify as “religious.”  It thus begins to create historiographical problems on the historical relations between something called “science” and something called “religion”—this time from the side of the “religious” itself.  For while textual, creedal, and theological issues were obviously important, the mode and overall situating of these resources is precisely what is at issue. While in our own time it is still common to elevate doctrine qua doctrine as itself the litmus test for discerning a religion and its beliefs, early on doctrine was related to Christianity in much the same way that Hadot had judged philosophy: as conducive to a way of life—“For the Church Fathers, catechesis and doctrinal understanding were similarly pursued in order to serve the ends of religious life.”

[Early] associations of heterodoxy belief with improper worship, immorality, disloyalty, and sedition, give a strong indication of the fact that religious belief was not a discrete variable of some notion ‘religion.’  Beliefs as we understand them were embedded in, and hence inextricable from, social and political realities.  Returning to the homiletic practice of the Fathers, we can conclude that the preaching was less concerned with the communication of doctrine to the faithful than with the attempt to use a form of words to direct their spiritual growth and shape the boundaries of the moral community.

Indeed, even the very content indexed by many of the relevant terms—“creed” and “belief” for example—have themselves changed, and with them any straightforward identification of early “religions” by how we believe these terms function today.  The Latin credo and the Greek pisteuo (“I believe”) originally meant something akin to “confidence” or “trust” between persons, along with connotations of obedience, hope, and faithfulness.  Latin uses both fides and credere to capture the Greek pistis.  Harrison summarizes: “Until well into the Middle Ages … the declaration ‘I believe’ was [primarily] neither an assertion of the existence of some being nor the lending of assent to propositional truths, but was primarily an expression of trust between persons.” Of course, this involved propositions, yet they were subordinate to the superordinate goal of spiritual discipline, catechesis, and community. Rather “the contraction of the scope of ‘I believe’ and the assumption of its more familiar modern meaning—‘to believe in the actual existence of some person or thing’” or as a list of beliefs attempting to approximate a total worldview, only begins in the seventeenth century.  Thus Harrison concludes:

For the moment my suggestion is that ‘belief’ is not a historically stable concept in the West, and thus it provides a poor foundation for a notion like ‘religion’ for which is claimed both transhistorical and cross-cultural applicability.  … Similar considerations apply in the case of ‘doctrine,’ which is often identified as the propositional substance of belief: doctrine is what is believed.  If the analysis of belief set out above is largely correct, then this understanding of doctrine cannot be right.  But if doctrine is not the primary object of belief, what is it?  Again, attending to the history of the term is illuminating.  In antiquity, doctrina meant ‘teaching’—literally the activity of a doctor—and the ‘habit produced by instruction’ in addition to referring to the knowledge imparted by teaching.  Doctrina is thus an activity or process of training and habituation.  Both of these understandings are consistent with the general point that Christianity was understood more as a way of life than a body of doctrines.  Moreover, [this] also correlates with theology as an intellectual habit [as Harrison outlined in chapter one].

Thus as Harrison ends this chapter, he concludes that as we understand them today, neither the category ‘science’ nor ‘religion’ work very well in this period of early Christian history.  Even if we somehow forced the phenomena to fit into these categories, we would not get a conflict narrative, but in general would see that “natural philosophy was always pursued with moral and religious ends in mind.  We know this because the relevant historical actors state it unambiguously.”  In fact, far from Christianity in this period somehow hindering the emergence of modern science as we now understand it, in a way it set the precedent: Christianity had the tendency to take over the moral and religious goals intrinsic to natural philosophy, which is as such a “step in the direction of that demoralized and detheologized version of natural philosophy we designate ‘science,’” though, of course, the analogy is still only a distant one.