Defining Religion

Essays in Philosophy of Religion

Robert Cummings Neville

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781438469591
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Philosophy of Religion

In this collection of essays, written over the past decade, Robert Cummings Neville addresses contemporary debates about the concept of religion and the importance of the comparative method in theology, while advancing and defending his own original definition of religion. Neville's hypothesis is that religion is a cognitive, existential, and practical engagement of ultimate realities—five ultimate conditions of existence that need to be engaged by human beings. The essays, which range from formal articles to invited lectures, develop this hypothesis and explore its ramifications in religious experience, philosophical theology, religious studies, and the works of important thinkers in philosophy of religion. Defining Religion is an excellent introduction to Neville's work, especially to the systematic philosophical theology presented in his magisterial three-volume set Philosophical Theology.

Part I

HEURISTICS

PRELIMINARY REMARKS

What is religion? Does this question call for a definition of religion that allows us to identify it and provide ways for distinguishing religion from what is not religion? Many people would say no. Given that there are so many kinds of religion, perspectives on religion, disciplines studying religion, public voices reporting on religion, and feelings of religious people, would it not be better simply to not raise the question? We can say that there are family resemblances among many things that are called religious and leave it at that. There is no reason to define religion, as if it had an essence distinct from and related to other things, so long as we can keep moving and talking about religious matters as the conversations unfold. This is a heuristic argument, claiming that inquiry would be better served by not raising the question of how to define religion.

The claim in these essays, however, is that the heuristic case is just the opposite: inquiry proceeds more fruitfully by defining religion a certain way. The nature of definition, however, is a complicated problem in itself. Everyone knows what religion is, and yet there are huge disagreements. Furthermore, religion is not like an Aristotelian substance that can be defined in a genus/species classification system. Rather it is a harmony of many different aspects of reality. The definition to be put forward is that religion is the human engagement of ultimacy, which requires harmonizing semiotic cultural systems, aesthetic achievements, social institutions with their own dynamics, and psychological structures, along with intentional relations with what is ultimate. All these things can be present, but not harmonized so that something ultimate is engaged. Chapter 1 explores some of the problems of definition.

How can a definition of religion be understood? This requires an explication of basic notions, for instance, ultimacy, ontological creativity, universal traits of existence, their human bearings, and so forth. Chapter 2 provides a formulaic definition of religion and begins the explication of its basic notions.

How can we understand what is involved in religion, defined in accordance with the hypothesis proposed here? That requires a theory of religion, expanding on the definition. The initial presentation of such a theory is the topic of chapter 3. Chapter 4 continues that presentation, deepening the introductory discussions.

All the arguments in the chapters of this part are intended to be hypotheses about religion that are presented as heuristically good ways forward. The hypotheses are not deductive, but are speculative nets that need to prove their worth by how neatly they allow religious phenomena to be identified and connected, and how they allow religion to be distinguished from things that are not religious.

Part of religion as the engagement of ultimacy is religious experience. But religious experience is only a part, not the whole of religion. Religious experience is the main topic of part 2 of this volume.

Chapter 1

PROBLEMS OF DEFINITION

CONFUSIONS OF DEFINITION

For some people, religion means a spiritual path. For some people, religion means a community of practice and belief within which members live out a spiritual path. For some people, religion means a set of beliefs about ultimate things, whatever ultimacy is construed to be. For some people, religion means belief in supernatural beings, whether or not they are ultimate. For some people, religion means a tradition of beliefs and practices with a special vocabulary and a history of development and definition over against other traditions. For some people, religion means a rich evolving culture whose images and institutions prompt great literature, music, dance, architecture, and art.

For some people, religions mean ingroups, often ethnically based, with markers of behavior, institutions, beliefs, and gut feelings of propriety and impropriety, distinguishing themselves from outgroups. For some people, religions mean cultural and institutional systems within a larger society that identify themselves in religious terms. For some people, religions mean political forces representing the beliefs, attitudes, and moral programs of such religiously identified social systems. For some people, religion means moral leadership for change in a larger society. For some people, religion means leadership in opposing change that would weaken a prized cultural and institutional system. For some people, especially in the media, religions mean denominationally named social groups that have political agendas and organized activities.

For some people, religion means an interior, individual, search for meaning and fulfillment. Religion means an affair of the heart, whether this involves approaching God, realizing identity with Brahman, entering into harmony with the Dao, or some other orientation to what is of ultimate concern. For some people, religion means extraordinary experience, transformative, wild, or mind-blowing experience, something sharply contrasting with quotidian experience. For some people, religious experience merges with the erotic and excessive. From these perspectives, membership in religious groups, participation in religious movements, and cultural conditions and contributions are of secondary importance. Sometimes the ecstatic experiences are communal, however.

For some people, religion is one of the great engines of civilization. The Axial Age religions in their various ways developed conceptions of the cosmos as a whole, of the fundamental sources of things being one or few and hence of the interrelatedness of the world, of the greater importance in certain circumstances of one’s humanity than of one’s tribal or kinship membership, of the recognition of all people as among one’s extended kin, of the need to be just and compassionate to all, not only those within one’s ingroup, and of the greater virtue of achieving peace than victory. The world’s civilizations are still trying to live in to these high religious ideals that have been laid down on fractious ingroups of ethnic, tribal, and cultural factions.

For some people, religion is one of the most mischievous forces in a world struggling to survive with peace and prosperity because religion means loyalty to one’s ingroup. Religion fuels denominational wars among factions in Islam today as it did among Christian denominations in centuries past. The struggles about the effects of European colonialism are fashioned in religious terms pitting Muslims, Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, and African tribal religions against one another. Religious groups that feel threatened become fundamentalistic, exaggerating ingroup-outgroup boundary conflicts. Religions sometimes reject reason, scientific inquiry, and good counsel in favor of some inappropriate authority. Despite the veneer of universal compassion, many self-proclaimed religious people are bigoted, nasty, and profoundly disrespectful of people outside of their ingroup, and this is what religion means to some people.

For some people, religion is to be identified with popular folk expressions in festivals and local celebrations, in popular scientific views about supernatural beings, magical causal principles, and superstitious interpretations of the circumstances of life. For some people, all those popular folk practices really are manifestations of much deeper and more sophisticated religious engagements. For some people, religion is to be identified with the most sophisticated teachings of the great founders such as Confucius, the Buddha, Mohammed, Moses, and St. Paul, as interpreted in the great commentarial and theological traditions; for many of these people, the folk expressions of religion are the compromises made when the great religious traditions are embodied in local folk cultures.

“Some people” in the preceding examples of what religion means usually refers to particular perspectives on some aspect or role of religion, and a given individual can occupy many or perhaps all of the perspectives at some time or other. Religion means many more things than are mentioned, of course, but all of these mentioned are recognizable meanings in common public and scholarly discourse. Even if we personally reject some of those meanings as illegitimate, mistaken, or reductive, we know what people are talking about when they use the word “religion” in any of these ways. But it is confusing when religion has so many meanings, often contradictory to one another.

It might be tempting to follow the lead of some postmodernists and reject the whole idea of “religion” as a colonialist imposition of a Western conception on a global array of cultures whose social organization might be very different from the West’s. “Religion,” for these postmodernists, has validity only when referring to Western religious denominations, especially Protestant ones, and its wider application distorts other cultures.

Our first response to the postmodern criticism of the idea of “religion,” of course, should be to amend our understanding of religion so that it does not distort other cultures. Most of us know, for instance, that it is a mistake to define religion exclusively as worship of a supreme personal deity, however common that assumption has been in the recent past in America. When monotheistic European colonialists encountered cultures with swarms of gods, sometimes with none of them regarded as supreme, the first reaction was often to regard these cultures as deficient because not monotheistic. The second response was to hunt for some deep analogue to a supreme deity, as Matteo Ricci did in China with his focus on Shangdi, even when the analogue was not particularly important. The third response has been to reconsider the whole nature of the object of worship as involving different metaphorical systems. The West Asian religions (including Europe as West Asian) developed personifying metaphors, elaborating the notion of the person as ultimate. The South Asian religions, including the many kinds of Buddhism and Hinduism, developed the root metaphor of consciousness for the various conceptions of ultimacy and regarded personified deities as subject to karma. The East Asian religions developed the metaphors of spontaneous emergence and harmony for the ultimate realities. As we come to have more comprehensive and less biased views of these theological constructions, we can observe their interactions over the millennia but also their important differences with only local priorities of one over the others. Paul Tillich taught us to speak of “ultimate reality” instead of God and to have an extremely capacious view of what might count as ultimate; he himself, though a Christian theologian, was dead set against thinking of God or ultimate reality as “a being” of any sort, much less a personal being.

Tillich also recognized that “worship” should not be confined to liturgical practices. Like the ancient “prophets” who thundered against hollow, hypocritical, inauthentic participation in religious rituals, he regarded institutional religious life as suspect and looked to other areas of life for what he called the “depth dimension.” Instead of worship, he suggested we think of “ultimate concern,” however that is worked out existentially. At the same time, we have come to regard at least some instances of religious rituals as much more than vehicles of worship or the expression of ultimate concern. Rather, as in Purva Mimamsa and Levitical Judaism, they are ontological practices that are taken to constitute the world in some sense and bring it to right order. Regarding rituals mainly as vehicles for worship or expressing ultimate concern is a locally Protestant perspective.

In these and many other ways, our understanding of religion has been correcting its biases for the last three centuries and continues to do so. The basic languages for religious expressions have been studied for their underlying commitments. Translations have been made of an increasing array of religious texts and historical representations of religion. A comparative base for religion and theology is now often presupposed even by postmodern scholars who disapprove of such large theories. And the scholarly world now includes representatives of all the world’s cultures, not just the European and American. Although the scholarly study of religion and the broader intellectual understanding of it may never be free from bias, self-consciousness about bias and the concern for self-correction of bias have made our reflections on religion generally vulnerable to correction. This is our proper first response to the postmodern suggestion that we abandon the category of religion.

The second is to look at the history of the category itself. “Religion” derives from the Latin religio. Cicero thought the word came from re-lego, where lego meant considering and relego meant considering over again. Lactantius, a third-century Christian writer, followed by Augustine, thought it came from re-ligo, where ligo meant binding together. Its main meaning in the ancient Roman world was the scrupulous, conscientious, strict observance of the services owed to the gods or to God. It meant taking the cults and their observance seriously, or as we might say “religiously.” Thus, the study of religion as the Romans might have practiced it would be the study of the nature of cults worshipping or serving the gods, and how people are or should be deeply invested in that.

For Thomas Aquinas, religio was the duty owed to God. All people, he thought, originally had a natural knowledge of God and an impulse to worship and love God. But this natural inclination to religio was distorted by original sin and, hence, needs to be supplemented by revealed faith, which only Christians have, according to him. Whereas religion is natural and generally universal, for Thomas, revealed religion is reparative. Thus, he could debate the natural aspects of religion with Jews, Muslims, and, in his case, the Cathars. One of the most intriguing ways to understand the history of the concept of religion is to see it working with regard to a deep problem, the problem of religious violence. Roger A. Johnson’s outstanding study, Peacemaking and Religious Violence: From Thomas Aquinas to Thomas Jefferson, gives a careful account of the definition and redefinition of religion in the works of Aquinas, Ramon Lull, Nicholas of Cusa, Herbert of Cherbury, and Thomas Jefferson. The point to notice is that “religion” as a term comes from the classical Latin period and has been historically reworked in the West ever since. The nineteenth century did see it redefined to apply beyond the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim discussions to the texts being translated into European languages from South and East Asia. Of course, the translators, led by Max Muller and James Legge, used European words such as the cognates of “religion” to make translations. Of course, there are European biases that might distort the non-European religious cultures. Of course, this applies to translating any foreign culture into the languages of Europe. Of course, these biases all need to be corrected one by one. European and American scholars have spent over a century and a half working explicitly on the biases of European conceptions with a history. Of course, this book of essays is another attempt to define religion in ways that do not distort other cultures and that do pick up on some common threads that are important for noting differences and similarities.

DEFINING RELIGION AS A HARMONY

The customary concept of definition assumed in Western thought reflects Aristotle’s theory of formal causes in which he describes a hierarchy of genus-species relations, with differentia distinguishing the various species within a genus. In defining things, we usually want first to say what they are, their essence or genus, and then to say how they differ from other things under the same genus. Definitions are more or less rich depending on the depth of layers of genus-species relations. In most contemporary thinking, especially in the sciences, a given level in a genus-species hierarchy can be explicated by an entire theory. Many variations exist on this conception of definition by classification and then distinction from other things in the same class. But they all suppose something like the Aristotelian view that things are substances that bear properties and that the properties can be explicated by classification systems. On this approach to definition, everything that can be defined at all can be treated as a substance bearing its properties. The properties exhibited in a definition inhere in the substance, just as predicates are predicated of a subject.

Let us suppose, however, that things are not unitary substances but rather are harmonies. Some form or pattern unifies the various components of a harmony. Some of the components are essential for unifying the harmony, but others are conditions arising from other things and thus have a reality in part that is external to the harmony in question. Without the latter, which I call “conditional components,” the thing would not be determinate with respect to other things because it would contain no components that connect with the other things. Without the former, which I call “essential components,” the thing would have no being of its own aside from the potential influences of other things that would condition it, but those other things would have nothing to condition and therefore could in fact have no real potential to condition. This analysis of harmony is developed in a number of the chapters to follow.

The characterization of things as harmonies is so abstract as...