Religion

C

Ritual

Ritual plays a major part in primitive cultures, although it is not recognizable to them as in any way different from so-called practical activity. It is rather an attempt to influence or harmonize oneself with the course of nature by dramatized or symbolic enactment of such fundamental events as the daily rising and setting of the sun, the alternation of the seasons, the changing phases of the moon, and the annual planting and harvesting of crops. Moreover, ritual is the acting out of the great mythical themes that, in these cultures, take the place of religious doctrines. Ritual, as found in primitive religions, might therefore be described as an art form expressing and celebrating humanity's meaningful participation in the affairs of the universe and the gods.

In cultures wherein this type of feeling about the world prevails, no department of life is specifically recognizable as religion. Everything is permeated by religion; indeed, religion is so involved with everyday life that it is impossible to distinguish the sacred from the secular. Only greater and lesser degrees of the sacred exist. Religion as a specific activity does not exist, and members of such cultures would have the greatest difficulty in talking about their religion. They would have no way of distinguishing the rituals for successful hunting from what Western culture would call the pure technique of hunting. Symbolic forms on spears, boats, and household utensils are not for them supernumary decorations but functional parts of the object, evoking mana for their effective use.

D

Myth

Similarly, such cultures have no religious doctrine or abstract concepts about the nature of the numinous and its difference from everything else. Spirit is a feeling rather than an idea; the language most appropriate to it consists not of concepts but of images. Thus, instead of religious doctrine there is myth, or an unsystematic complex of stories handed down from generation to generation because such tales are felt in some undefined way to represent the meaning of the world. According to the earliest anthropological interpretations of myth, such as that of the Scottish anthropologist Sir James Frazer, the mythical gods and heroes personify the heavenly bodies, the elements, and the so-called spirits of the crops and herds, and myths are naive explanations of the ways of nature. A later interpretation is that of the Swiss psychologist and psychiatrist Carl G. Jung, who suggested that myths are based on dreams and fantasies giving concrete expression to unconscious psychological processes. According to Jung, the psychological unconscious, like the human body, has more or less the same structure among all peoples; this uniformity accounts for the astonishing resemblances between mythological themes in unconnected cultures throughout the world. He felt further that these unconscious processes shape people's mental and spiritual growth and that for this reason mythological imagery and its enactment in ritual is a kind of wisdom for the direction of life. Thus, when a tribal dance is believed to assist the rising of the sun, the enactment of the rite gives the members of the tribe a sense of meaning, that is, of playing a significant part in the life of the entire universe.

A somewhat similar explanation of myth was offered in his studies of Indian and Indonesian culture by the Sri Lankan scholar Ananda Coomaraswamy, who felt that the great mythical themes are parables of a timeless philosophy, an intuitive knowledge of human nature and destiny that has always been available to those who truly wish to plumb the depths of the human mind. The American philosopher Susanne K. Langer holds that myth affords the earliest example of general ideas and therefore of metaphysical thinking. According to Langer, language is better fitted to express new ideas by metaphorical than by literal means. The assumption that solar and fertility myths are rudimentary attempts to explain natural forces, as science explains them, must probably be abandoned. Just as the myth-making cultures do not distinguish between spirit and nature, or religion and life, neither do they discriminate symbolic truth or fantasy from literal truth or fact. It is not a matter of confusing myth with fact, for the idea of the literal fact has not yet arisen.

III

The Religions

Religions, as defined in this article, arise in cultures in which people have acquired a strong sense of differentiation of the human mind from the natural environment, subjective consciousness from objective fact, and thus spirit from matter. This sense of differentiation accompanies the development of settled agricultural civilizations in which the division of labour requires that individuals play different roles in the community. In hunting cultures, each individual male is master of all the skills required for survival, but in farming cultures a much higher degree of cooperation is required between individuals with differing skills and functions. Such cooperation necessitates in turn more precise forms of communication between people and thus of convention, or common agreement, as to the symbols of communication, especially language and role.

A

Language, Convention, and Roles

A language becomes more effective as its vocabulary increases. Large numbers of words also indicate a high degree of awareness of distinctions among various things and events. Every word is a label for a class of experiences, and the essence of classification is that it divides things from one another. The necessity for playing different roles in the community also divides individuals from one another, and, to avoid confusion, requires individuals to identify themselves with their roles. Many names, such as Smith, Baker, Priest, Taylor, Carpenter, and Fuller, originally denoted roles performed in society. The word person (Latin persona) comes from the word for masks worn by actors in Graeco-Roman drama, the different masks identifying the roles to be played by the actors. People develop an awareness of their uniqueness and separateness from others based, in part, on their acceptance of particular roles in society.

The division of individuals by role and the increased perception of divisions in the world by language come about through convention, which is both divisive and cohesive. Conventions, however, are complex and learned with some difficulty. Because of this, the differences agreed on by society have to be enforced, just as children must be disciplined to learn a language and to master the rules of games or of etiquette and morals. The very life of the community depends upon observing the conventions of communication. The function of a religion is precisely to guarantee the whole system of convention, or the rules of thought and language, conduct, and role. For Judaism and Christianity, the idea of salvation is inseparable from the idea of belonging to a community of so-called chosen people, that is, the Church, considered as a body of members, or an assembly (Latin ecclesia), whether it be Israel or the communion of saints.

The connection between a system of social convention and a system of beliefs about the universe requires further explanation. Social convention includes such means as grammars, vocabularies, numbers, and signs, without which a person can feel but cannot think about the world. The American linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf suggested that the structure of language, that is, of a person's thinking instrument, determines that person's view of the structure of nature. Thus, it is understandable that both the Semitic and the Indo-Aryan religious traditions conceive of the universe as having been created by the word of God. If the world is explained, managed, and described by thinking, it is therefore natural to suppose that it is created by thinking and that the laws of nature that thought discovers are the word or law of God underlying the world as its primordial pattern.

As a culture develops a coherent and orderly picture of the world, it is natural for its members to believe that the numinous power behind the world is itself coherent and orderly, and that it has unity. Their gradual realization that the natural order of the world has an intelligent pattern is accompanied by a feeling that they did not invent, but discovered this pattern, which someone must know entirely. They therefore attribute it to an intelligence other than their own. The more people appreciate the complexity of the pattern, the more they marvel at the intelligence behind it and so begin to formulate a mature conception of the Deity as a being who excels in wisdom and power and is immeasurably greater than a mere mortal. Thus, contemplating the wonder of his own bodily structure, the psalmist in the Bible wrote, “Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high, I cannot attain it” (Psalms 139:6).

B

Theism

Religion, in this sense, is invariably theistic. It involves belief in a personal, living, and spiritual God, distinct from the world that he has created as the human mind is felt to be distinct from what it knows. Various forms of theism exist, however. The Old Testament shows a progress from henotheism (belief that the community must be loyal to one god only) to monotheism (belief that this god is the one and only God). Other forms of theism are polytheism, belief in many gods, which includes usually at least a vague apprehension that the many are aspects of one; pantheism, the belief that God is simply all things in the universe (although this type of belief is historically a philosophical idea rather than a religious belief); and panentheism, the belief that every creature is an appearance or manifestation of God, who is conceived of as the divine actor playing at once the innumerable parts of humans, animals, plants, stars, and natural forces.

Religion is therefore communal faith in and conformity to the pattern that thought discovers, or has revealed to it, as the will or commandment of the intelligence behind the world. The community binds itself to this pattern as its rule of life consisting of three elements—the creed, the code, and the cult. Creed is faith in the revealed pattern and in the divine intelligence that gave it. Code is the divinely sanctioned and authorized system of human laws and morals comprising the rules of active participation in society. Cult is the ritual of worship, or symbolic acts, whereby the community brings its mind into accord with the mind of God, either by ceremonial dances or dramatic re-enactments of the deeds of God, or by sacrificial meals held in common between God and his people. It is from this last-mentioned type of cult that, for example, the Christian Mass or communion service is derived.