Pagans and Christians in the City

by Steven D. Smith

  To this criticism, either an audacious or a more conciliatory response might be given. The audacious response would contend that whether they know it or not, all people are religious. A religious impulse or inclination is lurking in everybody, perhaps in the person’s subconscious, or in the inherited customs and habits that help to constitute the person. Viktor Frankl sometimes advanced the first version of this claim; Mircea Eliade sometimes proposed the second version.

  Thus, just as his Freudian counterparts attributed much in human psychology to the repressed sexual urges, Frankl argued on the basis of his own clinical experience that many people repress their religious inclinations. But such inclinations surface in the course of sustained therapy; there is, Frankl asserted, an “unconscious religiousness” and a “latent relation to transcendence” discernible even in people who believe themselves to be wholly secular.103 Frankl thus proclaimed the “omnipresence of religion”: “a religious sense is existent and present in each and every person, albeit buried, not to say repressed, in the unconscious.”104

  Eliade perceived a continuing and widespread religiosity in people’s customs and habits. While acknowledging the fact of secularization in the modern world, Eliade added that “nonreligious man in the pure state is a comparatively rare phenomenon, even in the most desacralized of societies. The majority of the ‘irreligious’ still behave religiously, even though they are not aware of the fact. . . . Modern man who feels and claims that he is nonreligious still retains a large stock of camouflaged myths and degenerated rituals.”105

  A version of the audacious response can be grounded in theological assumptions. Augustine famously began his spiritual autobiography, written in the form of a confession to God, by declaring that “thou hast made us for thyself, and restless is our heart until it comes to rest in thee.”106 Not everyone feels this restlessness with the same sharpness, perhaps—here Pascal’s gloomy reflections on men’s tendency to use diversions like gambling, sports, work, and warfare to avoid noticing their existential condition, or their “wretchedness,” might be pertinent107—and of course, not everyone who does feel such restlessness will connect it to the absence of the sacred. Augustine was perfectly aware of these facts; indeed, his Confessions is basically a record of how he himself made the connection only gradually and after repeated false starts, mistaken interpretations, and misguided choices. But, in this view, whether we know it or not, the connection to the sacred—to God—is necessary and real for all of us.

  These assertions will seem uncompelling, of course, and possibly offensive, to unbelievers. More generally, the audacious claim that all persons have a religious dimension or inclination whether they know it or not will likely seem implausible and insulting to people (such as a friend and colleague with whom I was just yesterday discussing the question) who feel quite sure that they know their own minds, and that there is no religious belief, inclination, need, or gap anywhere there to be found. The theologian E. L. Mascall observed that “nothing . . . should prevent us, as believers, from holding that God is at work, so to speak anonymously, even in the minds and lives of those who disbelieve in him; but we must not exasperate them by refusing to take them seriously in their unbelief.”108

  For our purposes, fortunately, we need not try to decide whether the audacious claim is defensible (an issue on which agreement seems unlikely). It is enough, rather, to offer a weaker and more conciliatory claim—namely, that religiosity of the kind discussed here is a sufficiently important and widespread feature of many human beings that we will understand human history and behavior better by taking that feature into account than by ignoring it, or by trying to dissolve it without remainder into something else—like “interests” as usually conceived.

  So let us stipulate, at least for the sake of argument, that the “religious” conception of human personhood does not apply to all individuals. In that respect, it is no different than other useful conceptions of personhood. Thus, the traditional assertion that “man is a rational animal” is not negated by the observable fact that many people often act irrationally, and that a few seem largely lacking in rational capacity. Similarly, claims that humans are “moral” beings,109 or “economic” beings,110 are not discredited by the existence of a few psychopaths or by the occasional ascetic hermit. In the same way, the conception of humans as “religious” beings who seek meaning and respond to perceptions of sublimity or the sacred is fully compatible with an uneven reality in which some humans are self-consciously and profoundly pious, others are tepidly and intermittently religious, and still others, as Thomas Nagel says of himself, “lack the sensus divinitatus that enables—indeed compels—so many others to see in the world the expression of divine purpose.”111

  Nor are the various conceptions of personhood in any way incompatible or mutually exclusive. Homo religiosus coexists with homo economicus . . . and with homo ludens, and homo sociologicus, and so forth—all of which descriptions fit some individuals better than others. Borrowing and adapting a formula, we might say that a human being is composed of two (or more) natures in one person. Moreover, the strength of these various natures surely varies from person to person. “Ought it to be assumed that in all men the mixture of religion with other elements should be identical?” William James asked, and then he replied to his own question: “I answer ‘No’ emphatically.”112

  Nonetheless, James concluded a celebrated lecture series by predicting that “religion, occupying herself with personal destinies and keeping thus in contact with the only absolute realities which we know, must necessarily play an eternal part in human history.”113 In a similar vein, the sociologist Émile Durkheim asserted that “the religious nature of man” is “an essential and permanent aspect of humanity.”114 If James and Durkheim were right, then an effort to understand our history and even our current situation—our so-called culture wars—that does not take full account of our religious dimension seems foreordained to fail, and to distort.

  In sum, acknowledging the religious conception does nothing to negate the interest-seeking conception. That conception remains available, useful, powerful—but not exclusive. Recognition of the religious conception implies that some aspects of human behavior will be understood better in religious than in interest-seeking terms. Conversely, an insistence on explaining all aspects of behavior in interest-seeking terms is likely to lead to a distorted and impoverished understanding of human and social and political phenomena.

  The Communal Dimension

  In this chapter, we have mostly followed William James in focusing on what religion is and does for individual human beings. It would be wrong to end the chapter, though, without acknowledging that religion often has a communal dimension—a communal dimension that, though perhaps neither necessary nor sufficient to constitute “religion,” seems more than merely incidental or aggregative.

  Community is not strictly necessary for religion, it seems, because a person might encounter the sacred and find meaning just on his or her own. Indeed, religion sometimes can produce a sort of antisocial impulse; the imperative of purity can drive the believer away from the corruptions of human society. Saint Antony leaves society and retreats into the desert.115 Jesus had done the same thing—for a period.116 Saint Simeon Stylites sits apart atop his Syrian pillar for thirty-seven years (though he depends on followers and admirers to bring him sustenance). Roger Williams, the great champion of freedom of conscience, though evidently gregarious by nature, is moved in his quest for purity to separate himself, first from the Church of England, then from his Massachusetts Bay brethren, then from his more religiously stringent Plymouth congregation, eventually from his wife.117 Williams’s progressive flight from community is reflected in the chapter headings of Edwin Gaustad’s sympathetic biography: “Exile from England,” “Exile from Massachusetts,” “Exile in London,” “Exile from the Church,” “Exile from the World.”118

  More commonly, though, religion pulls the faithful together. They found a church, a
monastery, a synagogue, a temple. They feel that they cannot fully realize their religious aspirations except in union. The reclusive monks of the desert, like Antony, are succeeded by orders of Benedictines, later of Dominicans and Franciscans and Jesuits, living and worshiping together.

  Moreover, the religious union is more than merely a mutual assistance society, or an enterprise in which collective efforts can better achieve each person’s individual goals. If you need to move a boulder, you will be prudent to enlist the aid of other people—especially other strong people—but the value of the group effort is merely aggregative. One really strong man is just as good as two weak ones. The communal dimension of religion, it seems, is not like that. It is a union that is itself a sort of natural end or culmination of the believers’ spiritual imperatives.

  “Where two or three of you are gathered together,” Jesus tells his followers, “there will I be in the midst of you.”119 And the church founded by and around Jesus is not just a voluntary association devoted to remembering him and attempting to live by his teachings. It in a sense is Christ; it is “the body of Christ.” Or so the faithful believe.120

  This communal dimension of religion can be viewed as a means of expressing or fulfilling one central aspect of human personhood—namely, sociality. Humans are naturally social animals, Aristotle observed, and the individual who feels no need of society is not quite a man but is “either a beast or a god.”121 Just in itself, though, this social dimension can be satisfied by all manner of groups—families, teams, business partnerships, political parties, bowling leagues, book clubs, bird-watching societies. A religious community is both like and unlike these other associations. It is a form of human society, yes. But it is a society in which the propensity to fellowship converges with the need for meaning and the sense of the holy.

  Community, we might say, tends to perfect or complete religion, and, conversely, religion can serve to perfect or complete community. To consecrate community. A community bound together around a shared sense of meaning and a shared commitment to the sacred has a more profound connection than one committed, say, to some important but mundane goal, like making a profit or securing passage of a piece of legislation. Persons in a religious community are bound together, we might say, at a more fundamental level of their being.

  This emphasis on the communal dimension may go against the grain of modern individualist thinking that sees religion as something for or by “the individual in his solitude,” as William James put it. But the communal dimension would have seemed utterly obvious to peoples of the ancient world. For them, it was the isolated believer who would have seemed anomalous. Religion—or what we would call “religion” in their world, because they likely would not have used or perhaps even understood the term—was inherently connected to temples, rituals, processions, theatrical spectacles, mass gatherings and entertainments, and cultic initiations.

  In short, religion tended and tends to culminate in community. In, we might say, a city. This natural culmination is perhaps obscured for us today by familiar notions of “separation of church and state.” But two thousand years ago, humans suffered from no such obstruction. Religion and the city went hand in hand; both practically and conceptually, the city and its religion were essentially inseparable. In the next chapter, we will consider what was surely the most glorious example of this union.

  1. See, e.g., William T. Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 57–122. Cavanaugh notes that the eminent scholar Wilfred Cantwell Smith “was compelled to conclude that, outside of the modern West, there is no significant concept equivalent to what we think of as religion” (61). Cf. Jonathan Z. Smith, Relating Religion: Essays in the Study of Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 179 (describing “the major expansion of the use and understanding of the term ‘religion’ that began in the sixteenth century”); Nicholas Lash, The Beginning and End of “Religion” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 13–17 (describing “the invention of ‘religion’ ”).

  2. See generally John H. Evans, What Is a Human? What the Answer Means for Human Rights (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).

  3. Richard A. Posner, Economic Analysis of Law, 5th ed. (New York: Wolters Kluwer Law and Business, 1998), 3–4.

  4. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971).

  5. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 19 (emphasis added).

  6. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 144.

  7. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 143 (emphasis added).

  8. “People who use the terms preference, wants, needs, and interests,” Charles Lindblom observes, “often assume that they refer to some objective attributes of human beings, such as a person’s metabolic rate. . . . These are bedrock facts about ‘real’ preferences or interests.” Charles E. Lindblom, Inquiry and Change: The Troubled Attempt to Understand and Shape Society (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 19.

  9. See, e.g., Ronald Dworkin, Life’s Dominion: An Argument about Abortion, Euthanasia, and Individual Freedom (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), 201–2.

  10. See Jonathan Haidt, “Forget the Money, Follow the Sacredness,” Campaign Stops (blog), New York Times, March 17, 2012, http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/17/forget-the-money-follow-the-sacredness/?_r=0.

  11. Considerable data regarding religious practice in America is collected in Robert D. Putnam and David E. Campbell, American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010).

  12. See, e.g., Paul Horwitz, “Freedom of the Church without Romance,” Journal of Contemporary Legal Issues 21 (2013): 89–125; Michael W. McConnell and Richard A. Posner, “An Economic Approach to Issues of Religious Freedom,” University of Chicago Law Review 56 (1989): 1.

  13. Matt. 4:4.

  14. As noted, the term “interest” is potentially broad and elastic; consequently, a proponent of the interest-seeking conception might try to annex or absorb the criticism by simply acknowledging a possible “interest” in living a meaningful life, or in searching for a “purpose” in life. But the annexation can run either way: if one side can say we have an “interest” in meaning or purpose, the other side can say that the “purpose” of life includes the satisfaction of interests. This sort of debate seems quite pointless. The important question is whether an exclusive focus on subjective “interests” functions to distort or shortchange the importance of “meaning.”

  15. Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (New York: Washington Square Press, 1963), 179.

  16. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, 154.

  17. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, 121, 127, 164.

  18. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, 179. The “mass neurosis” of the twentieth century, Frankl thought, was an “existential vacuum,” or lack of meaning (204, 167).

  19. Susan Wolf, Meaning in Life and Why It Matters (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 2 (emphasis added).

  20. Wolf, Meaning in Life, 56.

  21. Leo Tolstoy, “A Confession,” in A Confession and Other Religious Writings, trans. Jane Kentish (London: Penguin, 1987), 34–35.

  22. Tolstoy, “A Confession,” 19. “This spiritual condition presented itself to me in the following manner: my life is some kind of stupid and evil joke that someone is playing on me. Despite the fact that I did not acknowledge any such ‘someone,’ who might have created me, this concept of there being someone playing a stupid and evil joke on me by bringing me into the world came to me as the most natural way of expressing my condition” (31).

  23. Tolstoy, “A Confession,” 63, 63–78.

  24. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, 121–22.

  25. Consistent with this subjective conception, Frankl emphasized that meaning is a personal matter that varies with the individual, not a monolithic universal imperative. See, e.g., Man’s Search for Meaning, 122 (“These tasks, and therefore the meaning of life, differ from man to
man, and from moment to moment. Thus it is impossible to define the meaning of life in a general way”).

  26. Wolf, Meaning in Life, 4.

  27. Wolf, Meaning in Life, 16. See also 47 (“People do the darnedest things. They race lawn mowers, compete in speed-eating contests, sit on flagpoles, watch reality TV”).

  28. For Wolf’s defense of the requirement of objective value against objections, see “Response,” in Meaning in Life, 102, 119–27.

  29. Wolf, Meaning in Life, 20. On this bipartite view, for a life to be meaningful, both an objective and a subjective condition must be met; a meaningful life is a life that the subject finds fulfilling, and one that contributes to or connects positively with something that has value outside the subject.

  30. Wolf, Meaning in Life, 62.

  31. Wolf, Meaning in Life, 45–47.

  32. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, 156–57. “We have to beware of the tendency to deal with values in terms of the mere self-expression of man himself. For logos, or ‘meaning,’ is not only an emergence from existence itself but rather something confronting existence. If the meaning that is waiting to be fulfilled by man were really nothing but a mere expression of self, or no more than a projection of his wishful thinking, it would immediately lose its demanding and challenging character; it could no longer call man forth or summon him” (156).

  33. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, 183.

  34. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, 187.

  35. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, 132.

  36. In later work, Frankl linked “ultimate meaning” to religion—but to religion “in its widest sense,” as he put it, and indeed in a sense “encompassing even agnosticism and atheism.” Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Ultimate Meaning (Cambridge, MA: Perseus Publishing, 2000), 153.