Toward a Definition of Religion
____________________________

There are two different kinds of definitions in general:

1) Normative: the essence of a thing by which all specific instances of the thing are identified.

For example, justice is giving to each person what he or she is due. Any claim that a given action is just must be verified by demonstrating that all parties affected by the action have been treated fairly, in accordance with what they deserve in the circumstances. Notice that justice does not necessarily require equal treatment, as is implied in popular usage, nor is what is just determined by what people usually do, but by what they should do.

The limitation of such a definition is that its validity depends upon the authority by which it is stated, whether that authority is a cultural institu­tion (such as a church or government), a tradition, or reason.

2) Descriptive: the general characteristics of a thing as commonly observed and acknowledged.

For example, Ogden Nash’s poetic definition of a certain mammal:

          A cow is of the bovine ilk.

          One end’s moo, the other’s milk.

Or the definition of man proposed by the philosophers in Plato’s Academy: “a featherless biped.” When a member of a rival school threw over the wall a plucked chicken, the Academicians added to their definition the phrase, “with broad, flat nails.”

Obviously the problem with such definitions is that they are limited by our experience. Since our experience is relative to our situation in time and space, we can never be sure that our description of a thing in fact encompasses all possible instances of the thing. For example, we could never state that all swans are white with the same degree of certainty we can affirm that all bachelors are unmarried, or that 2 plus 2 equals 4 in a base-10 number system.

A normative definition of religion is not possible, since the very ques­tion of who or what has the authority to establish the nature of religion is at issue. Similarly, a simple appeal to reason begs the question of whether human reason can be a trustworthy guide to ultimate truth. Further, most attempts to define religion “within the limits of reason alone” result in reducing religion to a derivative form of some other domain of cultural experience, such as morality (see the definition by Kant on the page, "some Definitions of Religion") or economic patterns (Marx) or psychological development (Freud). In these cases religion is not so much defined as eliminated.

Therefore, we will begin with a descriptive definition, drawn from common experience. 

WHAT DO YOU ASSOCIATE WITH THE TERM RELIGION?

Moral direction (commands or ideals)
Communication with God or the “divine within” (prayer or meditation)
Center of community (worship, ritual)

Religion is a means of focusing attention on what is supremely valuable or of “transcendent importance” (Whitehead), so that one may find direction in confusion and stability in chaos. For what is of transcendent importance is fully real and enduring: the religious vision discovers what is constant and reliable, what merits unconditional loyalty. This vision provides guidance and direction for life amidst the ambiguities and anxieties of history. The religious vision provides a point of orientation, an absolute standard of reference against which every particular feature of one’s actual experience can be measured (Eliade).

For example, for Muslims the holy book of the Qur’an contains a vision of life at perfect peace in submission to God’s will. Yet every day one falls short, fails to keep some provision in the divine law; and each shortcoming is made clear in the light of the absolute standard. Yet the vision of human perfection also contains faith in divine mercy. Thus Allah, the beneficent, the compassionate, forgives the repentant; and one can proceed with confidence in pursuit of the vision of a righteous society.

Another example: When the Israelites traveled in the wilderness, after escaping from slavery in Egypt, always they arranged their tents in circles around a portable tabernacle, in the center of which was the ark, a wooden box with a seat on the lid, where the shekinah (“glory”) of God resided and could be approached once a year by the high priest. Further, the ark contained the tablets of the Ten Commandments, which sealed Israel’s covenant with God to be “his people.” The ark was the point of orientation for both moral conduct and ritual action in the religious life of the ancient Hebrews.

Religion is one way people seek to discover and maintain a sense of direction in their lives. That guidance usually comes from a divine being, but not always. What is practically universal, however, is that religious vision is expressed in stories or myths (Greek: mythoi). Although the etymology of the word religion is not entirely clear, both the Latin verbs which may provide its root meaning point to the activity of story telling. As Jarl Dyrud notes:

Religion is a word of some ambiguity. Its Latin roots mean both to read over and over (relegere) and also to bind again (religere). Religious rituals inevitably combine rereading and retelling sacred stories with some efforts to rebind the worshippers by communal action to one another and to the object of their devotion. [1]

At the simplest level, religion is expressed in shared stories about gods or heroes and in traditional patterns of conduct (rituals) which reenact those myths. A well-known example is the Christian communion service in which the story of Jesus’ last supper with his disciples and his death is acted out in set routines of words and gestures. This communal act is an intentional exercise of memory, in response to Jesus’ words: “do this in remembrance of me.”

As the stories are told and the rituals performed, the people enter into the divine/sacred reality which renews and strengthens them to face ordinary/profane life with “ultimate courage” (Tillich) and a sense of purpose. Eliade goes so far as to say that “life is not possible without an opening toward the transcendent; in other words, human beings cannot live in chaos,” without a point of reference. Whether Eliade’s claim is true of all humans, it is an accurate description of those with religious disposition.

For example, the Hebrew prophet Isaiah saw a vision of God in the temple in Jerusalem. He saw the Lord “sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up,” surrounded by fabulous angelic beings with six wings, who cried, “Holy, holy, holy is the LORD of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory. And the foundations of the thresholds shook at the voice of him who called, and the house was filled with smoke. And I said: ‘Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts!’” (6:1-5). Isaiah is in a sacred place, and he acknowl­edges his own corruption and consequent threatenedness. Then one of the seraphim cleanses his lips with a hot coal, and Isaiah is prepared to speak holy words himself as a prophet of God. The scene closes with his accepting the mission to carry the message of divine judgment to his own people. The experience of the transcendent transformed his ordinary existence and provided him with a direction for his life and the “ulti­mate courage" to follow it.

The same pattern is evident in the stories of Moses, Job, the Buddha, Jesus, and Muhammad. Ramakrishnan’s encounter with the goddess Kali filled him with such bliss that he surrendered his entire life to her service.

These general statements and specific examples help us in formulating a description of religious experience and action. Accurate description is indispensable for our understanding. One cannot overstate the evil that has been the result of ignorance of the religions of others, specifically, the misunderstanding of symbols and rituals—and the sense of being threatened by the mysteries of others.

For example, the early Christians were accused by the Romans of atheism (because they prayed to no visible god), sexual orgy (because they referred to their communion meal as a “love feast” and greeted each other with a “holy kiss”), cannibalism (because they claimed to partake of the body and blood of a human being), and infanticide (because the sacrifice of Jesus, the son of God, was a central part of their ritual). [2]

As in all other areas of study, so in religion also, we must get straight on the facts first of all. But mere description cannot communicate the power of religion to transform human life, by means of cultural change and private conversion. To appreciate that power we must become to some extent what anthropologists call “participant observers.” In the image of Native Americans, we must try to walk a mile in someone else’s moccasins. Ideally, we would all travel to the cultures in which various religions are practiced and immerse ourselves in the sights and sounds and smells which mediate reli­gious experience. We would also need to travel across time:

·       crawling into the hidden areas of the caves where Cro-magnon artists drew pictures of totem animals,

·       kneeling in a medieval European monastery,

·       sitting in mediation in the forests of India or in the snows of Tibet,

·       walking among the monoliths of Stonehenge in a Druid procession,

·       mounting the temple steps where the Aztecs sacrificed humans,

·       standing all day in the burning sun on the Mount of Mercy in the plain of Arafat in Arabia with Muslim pilgrims,

·       huddling around a village fire in the Arctic circle while an Eskimo shaman recited the story of her journey among the spirits of the dead.

But we are finite, bounded by time and space, creatures of history—except for our imagination, which is the one prerequisite for this course. For imagination is the capacity by which religion is begun and sustained. Therefore, it is the capacity by which we can enter into an appreciation of religion. When I say, imagination, I do not mean mere fancy. Religious symbols are not born of private delusion or arbitrary invention, but from our ability to transcend the given, the ordinary, the routine, and to form an image of what could be or should be—an image of paradise or the kingdom of God or the Pure Land or enlightenment or the good life—and to communicate that image so vividly, so compellingly, that others are drawn into its power (Geertz).

Religious symbols communicate in two senses: 

1) They create a common bond among those who acknowledge them.

Examples: in the Christian celebration of the Eucharist, or the Lord’s Supper and in the American “civil religion.”

2) They mediate the reality of the transcendent possibility they symbolize. In Tillich’s words, “the religious symbol, the symbol which points to the divine, can be a true symbol only if it participates in the power of the divine to which it points” (Sysematic. Theology, I:239).

For example: The mantra often used as an aid to meditation by Hindu yogis is AUM, composed of three letters, representing the three modes of the Absolute Self. The goal of meditation is to unite one’s individual consciousness with the universal and undifferentiated Reality of the Absolute Self. The term AUM represents Brahma/Creator, Vishnu/Preserver, and Siva/Destroyer.  The three letters can also represent three modes of consciousness: waking, dreaming, and dreamless sleep.

To chant AUM is to enter into the reality of the Absolute Self, the state of dreamless sleep. Drawing out the final m-m-m sound in pronunciation is both the symbol of, and an exercise in, transcendental consciousness. [3] The relation between symbol and reality in the Hindu experience is made explicit in the Chandogya Upanishad, following a description of the priests’ recitation of AUM before each stage in a ritual of sacrifice: “All this is done for the glory of the Imperishable by the greatness of that sylla­ble and by its essence.” The essence of the syllable is revealed in its use as a mantra in religious practice. To those who do not share the Hindu view of reality it is only a curious sound. To appreciate religious symbols we must imagine the world they both construct and reflect: the world of transcendent possibility which is related to this actual world through religious experience. 

What can we conclude thus far about the nature of religion? It is the activity by which people interpret and order their lives, both individually and collectively, according to a pattern of transcendent reality. Religion directs, shapes, judges, liberates, enlightens, inspires, terrifies, creates and destroys—all in order to bring human life to ultimate fulfillment. The definitions of religion offered by Geertz, Berger, and Eliade emphasize this power of religion to order life.  For Berger religion has “played a strategic part in the human enterprise of world-building.”

The critical response to these descriptions of religion is that the world-order envisioned by religious imagination is, indeed, imaginary. Religion thus inhibits and confuses a mature and realistic attitude toward life in the actual world. For Freud, religion is an expression of infantile dependence unworthy of adults. For Marx religion is an illusory escape from the opperession of economic injustice; and religion will disappear when those inequities are corrected.

It cannot be denied that religious imagination is as subject to distor­tion and vanity as are other human dispositions: religious people can be greedy and cruel, as well as neurotic, just as non-religious people can be. Indeed, humans have imagined “perfect” worlds in which other people are made to suffer, or in which the gods require pain and sacrifice in order to make possible ultimate human fulfillment. As Whitehead insists, it is a mistake to think of religion as necessarily good. 

On the other hand, Freud’s negative judgments are based on an examination of patients whose illnesses were expressed in religious images, but were derived from other sources of psychic dysfunction. In fact, Erik Erikson’s work demonstrates that religious faith can be a sound ground for the development of “basic trust” in oneself and the world, without which our psychosocial development may be seriously thwarted. Marx’s critique is also limited because it applies to forms of religion which serve the ideological purpose of maintaining the economic power of the industrial elite. As did Freud, so Marx examined an unhealthy form of religion, one distorted by the childish selfishness of a privileged class. In recent decades, in Latin America particularly, Roman Catholic Christians have adopted Marx’s criticism of exploitative capitalism as the first stage of their “liberation theology.” There the religious vision of the kingdom of God has inspired political revolution of the sort Marx himself envisioned. 

At its most mature, religion generates nurture and care for others in acts of benevolence (St. James), but in less mature forms religion can lead to persecution and war. Then the essence of religion is revealed, not in the moral action it inspires, but in the intensity of feeling it arouses. Religion in the broadest sense in concerned with “transcendent importance.” That fact explains the intensity of religious commitment, the willingness of some religious people to die rather than to abandon their faith: all religions of serious intent have their martyrs. 

Thus, there is a certain intuitive persuasiveness in Tillich’s simple definition: religion is “the state of being grasped by an ultimate concern,” that is, concern with what is truly ultimate, what is taken with unconditional seriousness. In response to a student’s request to clarify his definition, Tillich once replied,

If people tell you, “I have no ultimate concern,” which all of you have probably heard, then ask them, “Is there really nothing at all that you take with unconditional seriousness?  What, for instance, would you be ready to suffer or even die for?” Then you will discover that even the cynic takes his cynicism with ultimate seriousness, not to speak of the others, who may be naturalists, materialists, Communists, or whatever. They certainly take something with ultimate seriousness. [4]

Lest this definition be construed so broadly as to encompass every human obsession, Tillich insists that genuine religion clearly distinguishes what is ultimate from what is merely secondary, including its own teachings, practices, and institutions. Thus “true religion” guards against self-idolatry by being always self-critical, retaining a sense of modesty and humility about its own claims, and remembering that the actual state of religion is not the same as the transcendent possibility to which religion points. 

When religion itself becomes the object of unconditional loyalty, fanaticism develops. Believers are no longer concerned with the ultimate beyond all religious symbols, but rather with the symbols themselves. Such religions become demonic, constricting and destroying human life, rather than enlarging it. In such moments religion betrays itself: heretics are burned, crusades are launched, inquiring spirits are quenched. Those consequences are what Tillich calls the shame of religion. They are the moments when religion “forgets its emergency character” as provisional vision that spans the distance between human life as it is and as it could and should be. When that vision is realized, the means to its fulfillment, religion as such, will no longer be needed.

For example, in the New Testament vision of the perfect city, the New Jerusalem, there is no temple for there is no gap between God and his people that needs to be bridged, no further chaos to be ordered by creative power. There will then be no more troubled waters, for in the vision of the new earth, “the sea was no more” (Revelation 21:1).

For Tillich the specific object of “ultimate concern” is the ultimate power of being itself to sustain what is against the threat of non-being. Here the modern theologian is one with the ancient myth-makers who told of the original chaos which continually threatens the order of the world, symbolized usually by the endlessly shifting seas on the fringes of the formed creation.

Another person who shared this view of religion as concern with the divine power to save human life from the threat of destruction was the leading preacher of the Great Awakening in eighteenth-century America, Jonathan Edwards. In a famous sermon, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, Edwards described human life as a precarious existence. He compared it to being sus­pended over an abyss of flames, as a spider on a thread, or to walking over a pit on rotting boards, not realizing that “there are innumberable places in this covering so weak that they will not bear their weight, and these places are not seen.”

Setting aside the images of literal hellfire, and the uncanny appeal to the primal fear of falling, consider Edwards’s rhetoric as a description of what Tillich calls the constant threat of non-being, or what is imagined in many myths of creation, such as the Babylonian Enuma elish, as a sea monster. To an agitated congregation in Enfield, Connecticut, in 1741, Edwards set forth the threat of non-being in these terms:

You probably are not sensible of this; you find you are kept out of hell, but don’t see the hand of God in it, but look at other things, as the good state of your bodily constitution, your care of your own life, and the means you use for your own preservation. But indeed these things are nothing; if God should withdraw his hand, they would avail no more to keep you from falling, than the thin air to hold up a person that is suspended in it.

Your wickedness makes you as it were heavy as lead, and to tend downwards with great weight and pressure towards hell; and if God should let you go, you would immediately sink and swiftly descend and plunge into the bottomless gulf, and your healthy constitu­tion, and your own care and prudence, and best contrivance, and all your righteousness, would have no more influence to uphold you and keep you out of hell, than a spider's web would have to stop a falling rock. [5]

Religion is rooted in a strong sense of the vulnerability of human life, a vulnerability which can be experienced as moral condemnation, as well as anxiety about the fragility of life itself. Yet even in Edwards’s version, the religious vision also directs people to affirm the meaningfulness of life, of being itself, in the face of suffering and death. Genuine religion is, then, the source of ultimate courage, what Tillich called “the courage to be.” 

It is also the courage to sustain and nurture other beings as well. It is appropriate that Edwards wrote a work on ethics near the end of his life in which he interpreted “the nature of true virtue as the “consent of being to being,” expressed in universal benevolence. But perhaps the clearest expression of this religious disposition is found in the traditional profession of a Buddhist monk: “I vow to save all sentient beings.” Such a vow expresses concern for what is ultimate, even though the totality of sentient beings is not supernatural, according to Buddhism, nor the result of any creator’s design.

So far, we have identified two basic features of religion:

These two ingredients can be distinguished, but they are not entirely separable.

• Week 1 we will emphasize the first in our study of the basic elements of religious experience.
  
  
• Week 2 we will be concerned with the second in our consideration of existential problems addressed by religion.
  
  
• Week 3 we will study the synthesis of the two in our survey of Islam as a world tradition.