The problem with this formulation is that it also excludes a lot of beliefs that ordinary people and professional scholars routinely describe as “religions.” As Durkheim argues in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, most human beings for most of human history had no basis for distinguishing between the “natural” and the “supernatural”; no way of questioning the legitimacy of their ancestors’ ways; and no objection to sharing the same world with a variety of gods, spirits, and more or less dead forebears, not all of them human. Such beliefs may seem absurd in a world with a different sense of the “ordinary,” but they are not about the supernatural as opposed to something else. In Christian and post-Christian societies, they have been seen to comprise “pagan religions,” “primitive religions,” “traditional religions,” “primary religions,” or simply a lot of foolishness. According to the definitions centered on the supernatural, such beliefs are either uniformly religious or not religious at all.2
One solution is to follow Auguste Comte and Karl Marx in associating religion with beliefs and practices that are absurd from the point of view of modern science. What matters is not what “they” believe, but what we believe they believe. If they believe in things we (as rational observers) know to be absurd, then they believe in the supernatural, whether they know it or not. The problem with this solution is that it offends against civility and possibly against the law without answering the question of whether communism belongs in the same category. If “animism” is a religion whether it realizes it or not, then Marx’s claim that the coming of communism is a matter of scientific prediction (and not a supernatural prophecy) is irrelevant to whether rational observers judge it to be so. The problem with rational observers is that they seem unable to make up their minds and, according to their many detractors, may not be fully rational (or they would not be using non sequiturs such as “secular religion” and would not keep forgetting that “religion” as they define it is the bastard child of Christian Reformation and European Enlightenment). Some newly discovered “world religions” are named after their prophetic founders (Buddhism, Mohammedanism, Christianity); others, after the people whose beliefs they described (Hinduism, the Chukchi religion); and yet others, by using vernacular terms such as Islam (“submission”), Sikh (“disciple”), Jain (“conqueror”), or Tao (“path”). Most of the rest are usually grouped by region. Some regions (including China for much of its history and large sections of Europe in the “secular age”) may or may not have religion, depending on what the compilers mean by the “supernatural.”3
An attempt to stretch the definition (and accommodate Theravada Buddhism, for example) by replacing “supernatural” with “transcendental,” “supra-empirical,” or “other-worldly” provokes the same questions and makes the inclusion of Marxism—something the advocates of substantive definitions would like to avoid—more likely. Just how empirical or non-transcendental are humanism, Hindutva, manifest destiny, and the kingdom of freedom?
Durkheim suggests another approach. “Religion,” according to his definition, is “a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things.” Sacred things are things that “the profane must not and cannot touch with impunity.” The function of the sacred is to unite humans into moral communities. Religion is a mirror in which human societies admire themselves. Subsequent elaborations of functionalism describe religion as a process by which humans create a sense of the self and an “‘objective’ and moral universe of meaning”; a “set of symbolic forms and acts that relate man to the ultimate conditions of his existence”; and, in Clifford Geertz’s much cited version, “a system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic.” Whatever one’s understanding of the “sacred,” “ultimate,” or “general” (Mircea Eliade describes the sacred as a “fixed center” or “absolute reality” amidst “the never-ceasing relativity of purely subjective experiences”), it seems impossible to avoid the conclusion that every society is by definition religious, that any comprehensive ideology (including secularism) creates and reflects a moral community, and that Osinsky’s luminous faith provides a fixed center in the swamp of subjective experiences and relates humans to the ultimate conditions of their existence.4
In sum, most people who talk about religion do not know what it is, while those who do are divided into those who include Marxism because they feel they have no choice and those who exclude it according to criteria they have trouble defining. Compromise terms such as “quasi-religion” make no sense within the functionalist paradigm (a moral community is a moral community whether its sacred center is the Quran or the US Constitution) and raise awkward questions (Taoism, but not Maoism?) for the champions of the “supernatural.” By extension, states that are “separate from the church” have no idea what they are separate from. The First Amendment to the US Constitution fails to define its subject and violates itself by creating a special constitutional status for “religion” while prohibiting any such legislation. In 1984, a University of California–Berkeley law professor, Phillip E. Johnson, surveyed the field and concluded that “no definition of religion for constitutional purposes exists, and no satisfactory definition is likely to be conceived.” Three years later, he read Richard Dawkins’s The Blind Watchmaker, had an epiphany, and founded the “intelligent design” movement.5
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One reason for the trouble with definitions is the desire to apply the same name to two very different belief systems: one that did not know it was a belief system and one that did—and felt very strongly about it. In the first millennium BCE, much of urban Eurasia was afflicted with an epidemic of reflexivity and self-doubt. The arrival of Zoroaster in Iran; the Buddha, Jain dharma, and the Upanishads in India; Confucius, the Tao, and the “hundred schools” in China; classical tragedy and philosophy in Greece; and the prophetic era in ancient Israel had inaugurated what Karl Jaspers has called the “Axial Age”—an age “of standing back and looking beyond.” They were not all about the “supernatural” in the strict sense, but they all posited an “absolute reality” radically distinct from a world inhabited by humans and their gods and ancestors. They shipped off as much of the sacred as they could to another plane or another time, allowing themselves occasional glimpses; posited an abyss separating humans from their true nature (as expressed in concepts or commandments); and made “alienation” the universal law of existence (leading a lot of people to believe that it had always been so). They proclaimed or implied, in other words, that humans were living incorrectly; that human life was, in some fundamental sense, a mistake, and possibly a crime.6
Ever since, these “Axial civilizations” and their numerous descendants—including Christianity (an offshoot of prophetic Judaism) and Islam (their close relative)—have been preoccupied, above all else, with the tasks of restoration, reformation, and “redemption” (as an escape from a human existence newly revealed to be misguided or meaningless). This has led to the emergence of “reason” independent of social ascription; the perception of the contingency—and, therefore, reformability—of the political order; the appearance of moral communities bound neither ethnically nor politically; the unification and codification of the sacred through written compilations of original solutions; the rise of elites specializing in interpreting the scripture and monopolizing access to salvation; and the possibility of the rise of counter-elites proposing alternative interpretations or entirely new solutions. Different traditions have different conceptual repertoires and escape routes, but all have offered more or less consistent and self-sufficient ways of “standing back and looking beyond.”7
The fact of having lost one’s way suggests the possibility of being able to find it again. All societies and the worlds they inhabit have had their beginnings, but it is only when human life turned out to
be a problem that endings became solutions, and thus matters of serious concern. In ancient Greece, they tended to be political, metaphysical, provisional, and unintegrated. In southern Asia, the focus on individual reincarnation and escape allowed the collective resolution to remain remote (or perhaps it was the remoteness of the collective resolution that helped focus individual minds). In eastern and southeastern Asia, Confucian world-improvement and Buddhist and Taoist world-rejection came together to produce a tradition of expecting both at once (occasionally in the shape of an immediate world improvement by means of a violent world rejection). But even as they imagined an eventual return to wholeness and wondered about the effect of human choices on the unfolding of the cosmic drama, most heirs to the Axial predicament continued to expect a perennial cycle of corruption and rebirth. All final solutions were temporary. For the sun to rise, spring to return, hunted prey to submit, and the earth to give up its fruits, the hero had to keep killing the serpent and humans had to keep making mistakes and sacrifices. Holding chaos and its many agents at bay was a daily effort and the closest life could get to having a meaning. Everything was forever.8
Until it was no more. Sometime around the turn of the first millennium BCE, Zoroaster made history—literally, as well as figuratively—by prophesying the absolute end of the world. There was going to be one final battle between the forces of light and darkness and one last judgment of all human beings who had ever lived—and then there would be nothing but an all-encompassing, everlasting perfection: no hunger, no thirst, no disagreement, no childbirth, and no death. The hero would defeat the serpent one last time; chaos would be vanquished for good; only the good would remain—forever. This meant, among many other things, that time had become linear and irreversible (and thus, in a sense, properly historical). It also meant that the cost of individual moral choices had become almost impossibly high: not everyone was going to make it into timelessness, and no one was going to get a second chance.9
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Perhaps influenced by Zoroaster, the ancient Israelites also came to think of time as a straight plot line. In some sense, Exodus is a conventional migration narrative explaining the legitimacy of a group’s territorial claim. Such stories (themselves versions of a questing hero’s return from the netherworld) tend to describe a hazardous march from a wrong temporary home to the right permanent one, indicated by the gods and discovered by the anointed leader-founder. But Exodus does much more than that. The story it tells is one of a final liberation from politics and a permanent solution to the “standing back and looking beyond” problem. Having escaped the Pharaoh, the Israelites did not establish a new state: they created a virtual one. Instead of a this-worldly king, they got themselves an other-worldly one, as powerful as their imagination would allow. The Israelites bridged the “Axial” chasm between the real and the ideal by submitting to a single ruler of unlimited power. They did not simply inherit him from their ancestors: they handed themselves over to him as part of a voluntary contract. They did not worship him through a polity that embodied his will: they worshipped him directly, as individuals (the Ten Commandments are in the second person singular) and as a community of the elect. After Moses, political and spiritual representation—indeed, any mediation between the Hebrews and their true ruler—became problematic or dispensable. They became “a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.” Observance of the law became a matter of personal devotion and inner discipline. The Heavenly Father was to be loved, not simply served, and he was always watching and always listening: “Now what I am commanding you today is not too difficult for you or beyond your reach. It is not up in heaven, so that you have to ask, ‘Who will ascend into heaven to get it and proclaim it to us so we may obey it?’ Nor is it beyond the sea, so that you have to ask, ‘Who will cross the sea to get it and proclaim it to us so we may obey it?’ No, the word is very near you; it is in your mouth and in your heart so you may obey it.”10
The key to the one-on-one relationship with the absolute was that it be the only one (that is, truly absolute). “Do not worship any other god, for the LORD, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God.” The Israelites escaped a rule that was transitory, contingent, and mostly tolerant of golden calves and local cults by subjecting themselves to a rule that was eternal, self-sufficient, and utterly inescapable. They fled a tyranny that was gratuitously arbitrary for a tyranny that was arbitrary out of principle—and thus, one hoped, just. When Job insisted on his innocence, he was questioning God’s goodness. When Job’s three friends defended God’s goodness, they were questioning Job’s innocence (because punishment, they reasoned, must be proof of sinfulness). But they were all wrong, as God himself explained. The Almighty was simply too mighty, too powerful, and too busy with matters of life and death to justify himself to anyone. He did as he pleased for reasons only he understood. Job had to “repent in dust and ashes” and do as he was told. He had no moral agency at all. The price of political freedom was absolute moral slavery.11
Absolute moral slavery to the source of all morality may equal freedom (although Job’s possession of an independent moral sense seems to suggest otherwise), but even if it does not, the Hebrew god was remote and inconsistent enough to allow for some uncertainty. Unlike earthly kings and specialized gods, an all-powerful transcendental despot cannot be cheated (“there is no dark place, no deep shadow, where evildoers can hide”), but he just might be in a forgiving mood or otherwise engaged (he has so much more to do, after all). And of course the God of Israel gave Job and his friends plenty of reason to believe that the Covenant was well within human understanding and that all that was required of them was that they follow a few simple rules. “For I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing love to a thousand generations of those who love me and keep my commandments.”12
Whatever the predicament of the individual subject, the fate of the chosen people as a whole was clear. The logic of the Book of Job did not apply to the Israelites as a group—or rather, the logic of the Book of Job seemed to suggest that individual moral slavery was a fair price for the guarantee of collective redemption. Some members of the tribe would be put to the sword, devoured by wild animals, or die of a plague (for breaking the law or for no reason at all), but the tribe as such would triumph no matter what. Its “great rebellions” and “many backslidings” might postpone the final deliverance, but they could do nothing to prevent it. The original election and final outcome were beyond morality or understanding: “The LORD your God has chosen you out of all the peoples on the face of the earth to be his people,” and that was the end of it. Or rather, that was the beginning. The end was the restoration of the chosen people to the promised land, where “they will neither hunger nor thirst, nor will the desert heat or the sun beat upon them.” Everything in between was history.13
The most obviously remarkable thing about the Hebrew God is that he was the first transcendental ruler to successfully eliminate all customary allegiances and proclaim himself an absolute monarch. But he did not stop there. After banning all rival cults and exterminating their adherents within the house of Israel, he denied the existence of all foreign gods, too. From being the only god of the Israelites, he became the only God, period. A few vestiges of traditional tribal relativism persisted for a while (you take “what your god Chemosh gives you,” and we’ll take “whatever the LORD our God has given us”), but the tendency was clear enough. “I am the LORD, and there is no other; apart from me there is no God. I will strengthen you, though you have not acknowledged me, so that from the rising of the sun to the place of its setting men may know there is none besides me. I am the LORD, and there is no other.”14
Some tribal gods are universal creators; the Hebrew God was the first universal autocrat. A small tribe repeatedly conquered by its much larger neighbors retaliated by conquering the world conceptually. Rather than recognizing the demonstrable superiority
of their masters’ spiritual sponsors, switching loyalties, and dissolving in the multitudes of fellow opportunists, the Israelites extended ad infinitum the powers and jurisdiction of their own patron. Everything that ever happened anywhere was part of a universal design centered on the drama of their wanderings and eventual deliverance. All human beings, including the rulers of the great empires, were pawns in the hands of Israel’s heavenly pharaoh. History as the meaningful unfolding of time was the result of the Israelites’ collective moral choices. Human life past and present was one continuous reason for the postponement of the Day of the Lord.15
There was not much mystery or inscrutability on this score. The End was predetermined; the Israelites kept making wrong choices; and the Lord kept blaming them for his continued unwillingness or inability to fulfill his promise. The world’s first heavenly autocrat was also, by virtue of his chronic theodicy problem, the world’s first Underground Man (or Adolescent). Constantly snubbed by his spiritual inferiors, he bragged about his great accomplishments, promised even greater accomplishments, nursed his many grudges, feigned humility, relished his ability to cause pain and thwart expectations, and fantasized obsessively about a spectacular public humiliation of the strong, the arrogant, and the well-connected. According to Isaiah, among others, he was not going to simply take his people to the assigned place and help them defeat the Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites who lived there. “The LORD is angry with all nations; his wrath is upon all their armies. He will totally destroy them, he will give them over to slaughter. Their slain will be thrown out, their dead bodies will send up a stench; the mountains will be soaked with their blood.”16
The House of Government Page 11