Secular or Religious? An Artificial Distinction

The following excerpt comes from William Cavanagh’s The Myth of Religious Violence. We covered this book as part of the 2018 booklist at Al-Andalus Book Club. I found myself thinking about this book recently as I go through Syed Naquib al-Attas’ Prolegomena to the Metaphysics of Islam for this year’s booklist. Cavanaugh’s remarks on the historical development of what we now unreflectively accept as the dimension of religious influence provide a good background to better appreciate al-Attas’ writing on this subject matter. An important element of al-Attas’ work is the emphasis he places on the idea that for a Muslim there can be no such thing as a sphere outside religion. Everything must fall within the purview of the five general legal categories: obligatory, recommended, permitted, discouraged, and prohibited (there are further elaboration over these but this is the basic rubric in Islamic law). Indeed, al-Attas dedicates an entire chapter at the start of his Prolegomena to the very concept of religion and explain the foundations of morality and ethics in Islam, which expands the scope of religion to include areas of life the modern mind unaccustomed to tradition would find difficult to tolerate.

_ _ _ _ _

It is not simply that religion and politics were jumbled together until the modern West got them properly sorted out. As Wilfred Cantwell Smith showed in his landmark 1962 book, The Meaning and End of Religion, religion as a discrete category of human activity separable from culture, politics, and other areas of life is an invention of the modern West. In the course of a detailed historical study of the concept of religion, Smith was compelled to conclude that outside of the modern West, there is no significant concept equivalent to what we think of as religion. Similarly, politics as a category of human endeavor independent of religion is a distinctly modern concept. As Quentin Skinner says, the idea of politics as a distinct branch of moral philosophy is impossible in a medieval context dominated by Augustine’s City of God. According to Skinner, the seeds of the modern idea of politics would not be sown until William of Moerbeke’s translation of Aristotle’s Politics appeared in the thirteenth century, and even then the idea of politics as a distinct branch of inquiry and action would have to wait the birth of the modern state in the sixteenth century…

[Any] attempt to compare religion to politics or economics or some other such institutional force in medieval Christendom and is unlikely to bear fruit. This comparison seems to be what Kimball and others mean when they say that religion has cause more violence in human history. However, religio was not a separate sphere of concern and activity, but permeated all the institutions and actives of medieval Christendom. In fact, Aquinas says, “Every deed, in so far as it is done in God’s honor, belongs to religion, not as eliciting, but as commanding. He explains the difference between eliciting and commanding in these terms:

 

Religion has two kinds of acts. Some are its proper and immediate acts, which it elicits, and by which man is directed to God alone, for instance, sacrifice, adoration and the like. But it has other acts, which it produces through the medium of the virtues which commands, directing them to the honor of God, because the virtue which is concerned with the end, commands the virtues which are concerned with the means.

For Aquinas, religio did not belong to a separate, “supernatural” realm of activity; not until Francisco de Suárez’s work at the dawn of the Seventeenth century was religio identified as supernaturalis. Religio was not separable – even in theory – from political activity in Christendom. Medieval Christendom was a theopolitical whole. This does not mean, of course, that there was no division of labor between kings and priests, nor that that division was not constantly contested. It does mean, however, that the end of religio was inseparable from the end of politics. Aquinas explains that human government is directed toward the end of virtuous living. For this reason, the king must possess virtue; justice easily degenerates into tyranny unless the king is a “very virtuous man.” More specifically, prudent and justice (the latter includes religio) are the virtues most proper to a king. The virtuous life of the assembled people – care of which pertains to the king – is not in itself the ultimate end of human life, which is the enjoyment of God. This ultimate end is in the direct care of the priests, to whom kings should be subordinate. Nevertheless, the virtuous living to which kings direct their subjects is an intermediate end which is directed toward the ultimate end: “Since society must have the same end as the individual man, it is not the ultimate end of an assembled multitude to live virtuously, but through the virtuous living to attain to the possession of God.” Acts of governing well, in other words, are directed toward the same end toward which religio is directed, and true reigio is integral to good governing. For this reason, Aquinas rejects the idea that non-Christians should have political authority over Christians.

Is religion being compared to a secular realm of activity when it is claimed that religion has caused more violence than any other institutional force through history? Certainly, the modern claim that religion causes more violence than something else depends upon the existence of a sphere of non-religion, a secular realm. As should be obvious, however, there was no such secular sphere until it was invented in modernity. The organic image of the body of Christ was fused with a hierarchical ordering of estates. There was no part of Christendom that stood outside of the holistic, sacralized order…

One may wish to argue that the invention of the religious-secular duality was, on the whole, a good thing, and that societies with such a distinction are to be preferred to societies organised like medieval Christendom. But basing such a preference on the inherent violence of religion throughout history invites anachronistic nonsense. The point is not that religion was mixed up with secular pursuits until modernity separated them. The point is that there is no transhistorical and transcultural essence of religion waiting to be separated from the secular like a precious metal from its ore. The term religio functioned in very different ways as part of a complex of power relations and subjective unique to medieval Christendom. Very different relations of power were involved in the invention of the twin categories of religion and the secular. The problem with transhistorical and transcultural definitions of religion is not just that all phenomena identified as religious are historically specific, but that the definitions themselves are historical products that are part of specific configurations of peer.