Part 1: Religion, a Genealogical Inquiry

This is a condensed English version of the Dutch essay Deel 1: Religie, een genealogisch onderzoek.

God is back from (never) having been away. And through his followers he is reclaiming his place in the ‘public domain’. Only sociologists of religion were taken by surprise. In the last decades of the twentieth century they were busy describing God’s steady disappearance from society. Secularisation was the code word: religion was losing its relevance, slowly but surely. Every follow-up survey – God in Nederland, België en zijn goden, to name two well-known Dutch-language titles; the patterns hold for Western Europe as a whole – showed that the impact of faith and faith organisations on society had declined further. The explanation was the advance of science and technology, which made religious beliefs implausible or superfluous. If you can choose between praying against a plague of locusts and spraying DDT, the choice is quickly made. The scientific world view was displacing the mythical one, irreversibly. It all sounded very plausible, and the facts did not lie: churches emptied, vocations collapsed, Christian morality lost its grip, and one organisation after another in the Christian ‘pillar’ fell into an identity crisis, broadened its statutes and changed its name. Max Weber, godfather of sociology, had seen it and said it well: rationalisation had led to the ‘disenchantment of the world’. Or, in the image of the best-known sociologist of religion of the later twentieth century, Peter Berger: the ‘sacred canopy’ that had sheltered us for centuries was torn; from now on we would have to survive under the open sky, whether we liked it or not. In 1968 he predicted that by the year 2000 religion would survive only in small sectarian groups huddling together against a secular culture (New York Times, 25 February 1968, ‘A Bleak Outlook is Seen for Religion’). A human being, even a scientist, can be wrong. Berger admitted it handsomely, long before 2000: in the 1990s he argued that modernity leads not necessarily to secularisation but to plurality – one can no longer be religious in the same, self-evident way as before, which may lead to relativisation or to fundamentalism. Secularisation is then an option (Europe), not a necessity.

Are we secular or not?

This analysis was common ground not only among outside observers (sociologists) but within the church too. There ‘secularisation’ was likewise the main theme – judged less positively, of course, but nobody denied the fact that people were living their lives in an increasingly secular way. Theologians tried to translate the old faith in a manner acceptable and relevant to ‘modern secular man’. Some, mainly Protestant, theologians of the 1960s even welcomed secularisation as the completion of a critique of religion and a demythologisation already present in the Bible itself. Books like Honest to God (the Anglican bishop John A.T. Robinson) and The Secular City (Harvey Cox, Baptist minister and Harvard professor) topped the bestseller lists. Secularisation was an opportunity to free the Christian message at last from its primitive mythical ballast – God in heaven with his angels (to say nothing of hell with its devils), miracles and the like. Once the mythological shell was peeled away, a purely human message would remain, strikingly often of a left-wing social and political colour. Conservative Christians, who naturally did not join in such superficial talk, did not deny the underlying assumption either; they simply deplored it and saw the great Enemy at work. Real atheists gloated, quietly or openly, though they were a little disappointed that so few apostates joined their ranks. For most people found it all fine as it was. The level of doctrinal engagement among ordinary believers has never been as high as church leaders would like. Many in Western Europe, inside and outside the church, were glad secularisation was carrying on. It had its shadow sides, but on the whole it was liberating.

Even the naturally conservative Roman Catholic Church decided on an update in the early 1960s. Since the beginning of the modern era it had resisted the Enlightenment tooth and nail as a rebellion of man against divine law; anyone holding an office in a Catholic organisation, Catholic universities included, had to swear the anti-modernist oath (abolished only in 1967). Now it changed tack. At the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965) all hands were on deck to turn the unwieldy ship so it would not end up in dead water. An aggiornamento took place: Protestantism was no longer seen merely as heresy, the right to religious freedom was recognised (under heavy pressure, mainly from America), the vernacular was introduced, and the Church no longer wanted to be a sacral institution of salvation but ‘God’s people on the way’. None of this came without a struggle, and it led to a small schism of those who saw in it a ruse of the devil (Archbishop Lefebvre and the Priestly Fraternity of St Pius X). Looking back half a century later, one wonders whether, from the secular point of view, it was not already too little too late – and whether, from the religious point of view, the Council fathers did not change things they had better have left alone (some liturgical matters) while leaving untouched what needed changing (the entanglement of priesthood, gender and sex). Hindsight is easy, I admit, and a Protestant criticising the Roman institution is an easy target. That does not make it untrue.

Religiosity is human, religion a construct

That religiosity itself – the impulse, the urge, the need from which religious institutions draw their emotive force – did not disappear but sought other channels escaped many sociologists of religion, who were perhaps a little too pleased with their own results. Church leaders and theologians often did see it, but dismissed the alternative forms of religiosity that appeared as ‘superstition’, bound to vanish as quickly as they had come; the condescending tone in which official church circles spoke of ‘New Age’ in the 1980s speaks volumes. That large groups of Christians carried on in a fairly traditional way, and that the United States even saw an evangelical revival: those had to be rearguard actions, last convulsions. However many copies Hal Lindsey’s apocalyptic The Late Great Planet Earth sold, it remained a fait divers. When American evangelicals, backed by preachers with their own TV channels, conjured up an almost complete subculture, universities and film studios included, one read that this was ‘typically American’ – as if that explained anything. The French sociologist Gilles Kepel was one of the few to take it seriously. In 1991 he published La revanche de Dieu, showing that secularisation was no autonomous process unfolding automatically in one direction.¹ He detected a counter-movement, a reconquista by religious movements regaining lost ground, and successfully so – since the 1970s at least. The Iranian revolution was iconic: the shah (we order life secularly) driven out by the ayatollah (we order life religiously). He saw parallels in the US (the evangelicals) and among the Jewish Lubavitchers. Secularising Western Europe might well be the global exception that confirms the rule that religion is self-evidently a socio-political factor – and for how long? Even for Kepel, though, ‘God’ is still strongly Western-coloured. The singular in his title speaks volumes: this is the God of the Book.

Secularisation as emancipation

Meanwhile all kinds of groups that had come off badly under the dominant religion and its culture took the floor in the space secularisation had opened up: women and gays came out, Black people claimed their rights. As public space grew, so did freedom of expression. Hippies went to California, and in May 1968 students and workers marched hand in hand through Paris, claiming a new world. The Times They Are a-Changin’, sang Bob Dylan. Whatever place religion would have in that world, it would be radically different: the Doors sang of reinventing the gods, others built their own stairway to heaven to roaring guitar chords, and the Beatles went to India. What would religion turn into? Some expected a vague spirituality with an undefined transcendence (‘somethingism’), others a privately assembled religion, others again its evaporation, or its dispersal into art, sport and the group experience of festivals and mega-events. Despite all differences there was agreement that the future of religion would be non-institutional. The time of the church was over. Any institutions that remained would behave themselves, translating their arguments into generally acceptable terms and accepting that the majority would sometimes decide otherwise. Reimbursement of the contraceptive pill, euthanasia and abortion laws tested this tacit agreement. King Baudouin’s refusal in 1990 to sign the Belgian abortion law had only symbolic meaning: it demonstrated the political powerlessness of Christian morality. Then the Wall fell and the Cold War ended. The typically Western opposition between capitalism and communism no longer dominated ideological debate, which soon shifted to the Middle East – and suddenly God was back. Only now he was no longer called ‘God’, but Allah.

God returns as Allah

In the first year of the new millennium, on 9/11, a violent political statement was made in the name of that god – rightly or wrongly, that does not matter here; what matters is the link itself. Western society was branded ‘godless’, and another society ‘pleasing to God’ was set against it. War rhetoric with a religious tinge was back. In the West we first tried to pretend that God’s return was happening only outside our society, but the loud and quiet support that Islamic criticism of the West turned out to have within it confronted us inescapably with the question: how do we give God and religion a place in our society without its falling apart – with Islam rather than Christianity as the test case? Can a secular society bear a cohabitation religieuse? Many sociologists quickly changed course: God is back, and we had better reckon with it. Books and articles vied to declare that secularisation had passed its peak and that we had entered a ‘post-secular’ age. After some hesitation Christian authors and church leaders jumped on the bandwagon too, just after they had got used to the modest tone they had adopted in order to be allowed to take part in public debate at all. Religious leaders of various stripes now claimed respect for their respective gods together, yet side by side – a novum whose significance has not been sufficiently weighed – and were much less inclined than before to translate their discourse hermeneutically. And despite its title, Charles Taylor’s masterpiece A Secular Age is an intelligent apology for Christian faith, based on the assumption that secular thought has reached its limits.² In all this eagerness many forgot that it was not the familiar God (singular and Christian) who had returned, but a plurality of gods now active on the same stage – a stage that now covered more or less the whole globe – and that the one drawing most attention was a different god from the one we had come to know in the debate on secularisation. Lumping Allah together with the Christian God (and why not the Jewish God too – ‘religions of the Book’, after all!) is very short-sighted, given the fierce animosity and rivalry between their adherents until recently, and still today, as anyone can see who looks beyond the surface. Hardly a detail where human society is concerned.

Blind spots where religion is concerned

Are we asking the question about the place of religion in society in the right way at all? Do our (Western Christian) conceptual frameworks fit the realities we want to understand and whose risky effects we want to control? Have we understood why the secularisation thesis produced at least partly wrong predictions, and why it still works on, even though partly falsified? Western thought is, if anything, more mesmerised by it than before: we cannot talk about religion without the opposition ‘secular–religious’ coming up. That surely has to do with our belief that our democratic constitutional state is secular and therefore threatened when ‘religion’ spreads itself. In the background the centuries-old tug-of-war between Enlightenment and religion still rages; in Flanders especially, the old ‘pillarisation’ seems to have lodged itself in the mental frame through which the subject is perceived. Yet whoever tries to fight today’s war – excusez le mot – with the weapons of the last has already lost. History never repeats itself; periods do not even neatly follow each other, and people certainly do not live according to sociological classifications. God was never gone from Europe either. Researchers suffered from some stubborn blind spots and tunnel vision. When they surveyed religion, they examined only Christianity, preferably through easily classified items: beliefs, frequency of church attendance, number of baptisms, church weddings, funeral rites and so on.

Many sociologists of religion were really just sociologists of the church.

So only one facet of one variant of what is on offer in the field of religion(s) was mapped: institutionalised Christianity. For that, the secularisation thesis is indeed correct, still in 2017: engagement with the official form of faith as the church offers it has declined spectacularly in Western Europe, and has not rebounded since God’s return. The churches are still ageing; only by import can staffing be kept up. But do these figures say anything about the phenomenon of religion in our society? I fear not. Even the Christianity supposedly measured is so much more than was measured, and beyond Western Europe its palette is far more colourful still – and through migration those colourful variants are now amply present here too. Africa is in the classroom, and immigrant churches spring up like mushrooms. Widen the view to other religions and every definition of religion shatters on the diversity of realities. The concept ‘god’ is hardly adequate once you cross the Indus; in Africa ‘spirit’ or ‘force’ has a better claim to be the common denominator of the religious than the sharply defined, personal ‘god’. And the importance – or unimportance – of a set of beliefs also turns out to be very relative once you leave the world of the religions of the Book; even within that world the fixation on book and doctrine is far less essential for many ordinary ‘believers’ than theologians and church leaders would like. If I want to know what religion means to people and what place it may, can or should have in society, we must put our Western concept of God (and of religion) up for discussion. It is not wrong, but it is limited. If we do not widen it, or set other concepts beside it, we will not even get to see a large part of the reality we want to talk about.

We should also realise how much our Western view of religion is shaped by the debate on religion and secularisation. We approach the matter almost automatically from that opposition, even when we no longer subscribe to the thesis. That is not bad in itself – the thesis is interesting and relevant, if only because it shows our Western preoccupation with religion, and its one-sidedness, so clearly. But framing the question determines the answer. We must call things by their name, parler vrai. It is about the reality of people living together in a concrete world, not about correct theory-building. Where theories, however venerable, block our perception of reality, reality must take precedence. I am aware that this involves a sizeable subjective factor: the proof of the pudding is in the eating. If everyone says the headscarf is no problem (not theologically, not culturally, not from a feminist point of view), the question has not been solved but only posed. For the headscarf is a problem; the only question is: why exactly? We can also be so impressed by venerable concepts – ‘the Enlightenment’, ‘the liberal constitutional state’, ‘separation of church and state’ – that we lose sight of the lived reality beneath and behind them. Constantly falling back on a correct theory of secular society and its freedoms is not enough. For humanity’s sake we must dare to descend deeper into reality, and listen longer before we speak. Maurice Merleau-Ponty put this concern like no other when, in 1946–47, he tried to get beyond the standard treatments of the problematic relation between communism and violence. In exemplary fashion he did not succeed. His essay Humanisme et terreur is a plea not to give in to the fatigue that can overcome you when analysing difficult, fiercely contested social questions. Many a thinker has succumbed to it and, unable to find a way out, settled for solemnly formulating, as ‘venerable truths’, ‘the platitudes that suit their fatigue’.³ Merleau-Ponty calls that desertion. If we want to save something of ‘humanity’ in times of crisis, we must get as close as possible to human experience in all its complexity, however unpleasant the findings, and test our thinking to the limit. ‘To know and judge a society, one must reach its deep substance, the human bond of which it is made, which depends on legal relations, no doubt, but also on the forms of labour, on the way of loving, living and dying.’⁴ He was speaking of political phenomena; I could not have put it better for religious ones.

‘Religion’ is a secular concept

‘Religion’ as a category denoting a well-defined part of human reality comes into use precisely when the world begins to secularise in the original sense of the word: when the church has to allow domains it had controlled to withdraw from its authority. That is no coincidence. ‘Religion’ is a modern concept – an invention of the Enlightenment or, less bluntly, a term for phenomena that can only be described as a more or less autonomous and coherent whole once Reason begins its analytical work. I write Reason with a capital this once, because I do not just mean ‘the intellect’. People have always used their intellect, but in pre-modern times it was above all a means of proving, explaining, defending and understanding something already established outside or above it. Anselm of Canterbury put it most beautifully: fides quaerens intellectum, faith seeking understanding. Even at the beginning of what we call the modern age, most scholars still re-examined the old sources on the assumption that reason serves faith: philosophy and philology as ancillae theologiae, handmaids of theology. But the enthusiasm with which fifteenth- and sixteenth-century readers threw themselves on the flood of new information – new editions and translations of old texts – slowly tipped the scales. Command of classical and new languages grew; old texts were reread and findings eagerly shared in learned circles. The particularity of those texts was better understood, and their inherent message got more chance to speak. Renaissance and Reformation belong together. For a long time people believed the world view could stay as it was: new knowledge enriches, even when it criticises. The awareness that traditional insights might not just need emending but abandoning penetrated only slowly – and its seeping down to the level of lived life had yet to begin.

Reading sacred texts anew

What marks the period from about 1600 is that people begin to look critically at every part of reality, systematically – and not just a few individuals: it becomes mainstream in the world of the learned. Scholars such as Isaac Casaubon and Joseph Scaliger, with their philological and historical-critical work on classical texts, opened the way to reading other ancient texts, Christian sources included, in the same open way – less to prove something than out of curiosity about what the texts actually say if you do not interrupt them too soon with what you think they say, or what they have always been said to mean. Letting texts speak within their own context, textual and historical, was felt to do them more justice than keeping them at all costs within a system of meaning. For classical authors that could be published freely; for the Bible it was not yet self-evident. The name of Spinoza comes to mind at once, but think also of Richard Simon, priest and outstanding Hebraist, whose Histoire critique du Vieux Testament took huge steps towards a sober historical reading of the Bible, reaping the harvest of sixteenth-century philology. Typically, he stops at philology and leaves theology intact – which as a Roman Catholic he could do, since for him the Bible is only an illustration of the eternal true doctrine, not its source and touchstone, as it is for Protestants. But he was genuinely interested in Judaism as such, not only as he found it in the Bible but also as it had developed in rabbinic Judaism down to his own time: he translated into French the Historia de’ riti hebraici of the Venetian rabbi Leone Modena, introducing the world to Judaism as a living religion. Alongside this philology, others tried to order and analyse the information about religious customs streaming in from every corner of the earth. Here too the novelty after about 1600 is that description sheds the classical thought patterns and prescribed schemes within which those phenomena were supposed to be interpreted.

Foreign religions?

An example of such ordering, still entirely within the classical frameworks, is Johann Böhm’s (Boemus) Mores, leges, et ritus omnium gentium (customs, laws and rites of all peoples) of 1520.⁵ It was reprinted 47 times in the sixteenth century and translated into Italian, English, French, German and Spanish: a bestseller, a kind of ethnographic compendium of the whole known world, drawn from classical sources, medieval accounts and contemporary travel reports, neatly arranged by the three continents Africa, Asia and Europe. Its tone differs markedly from the fifteenth-century Livres des merveilles, where truth and lies stand side by side as long as they are spectacular. Böhm is sober: sources must be reliable. He leaves out many medieval legends and does not yet venture into stories from the New World, still too controversial in 1520. When he mentions non-Christian religious practices he does so descriptively, with genuine curiosity and sometimes admiration – he explicitly praises how ‘Saracens and Muslims’ administer justice carefully and apply the law (sharia) scrupulously. But he also stresses that Muhammad is of course a false prophet and his followers the arch-enemies of the Christian faith. Description grows more objective; the valuation of others’ beliefs does not change. Theologically Böhm still looks entirely to the past, but he is surprisingly objective and realistic, which is why his book remained the ethnographic compendium for years.

Two centuries later the picture is incomparably different, when we open the seven volumes of Cérémonies et coutumes religieuses de tous les peuples du monde (Amsterdam, J.F. Bernard, 1723–1737), illustrated with Bernard Picart’s still very popular engravings – rightly called the first encyclopedia of religion.⁶ As an end point of the new approach one could name Charles Dupuis’s four-volume L’origine de tous les cultes, ou Religion universelle (Paris, 1794). That it appeared just after the French Revolution had ended the ancien régime is symbolic: the Christian God had fallen from his pedestal, and the short-lived cult of the Supreme Being, the supposed ‘universal religion’ of the title, was already over. The relation between religion and society would never be the same again, though it was far from clear. For today’s concept of religion, the fairly descriptive, rational and analytical approach of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries matters most. It is also the background of the term ‘religion’ in the first legal texts that tried to guarantee freedom of religion (Madison, Jefferson). Descartes, Locke, Leibniz and the French philosophes such as Diderot and Voltaire all drew their material from studies of this kind. Religion appears there as a combination of ethnographic curiosity about plurality (exoticism) and philosophical interest in the ‘universal natural religion’ supposed to underlie that colourful world of ‘cults’ – the double approach captured in Dupuis’s title.⁷ We easily recognise in it the still very common idea that ‘all religions basically come down to the same thing, so the differences do not really matter’. In my view that is one of the misunderstandings behind the impasse in the debate on the place of religions in society: a typically Western framing, born of the Christian spectacles worn at the time. It removes the many colours of experience from religion and blocks any deep probing of the phenomena we conveniently subsume under ‘religion’. Do a passionate pilgrim to the Virgin of Guadalupe and a Calvinist singing psalms in whole notes ‘ultimately’ do the same thing? If you think so, at least don’t tell them. And I have not even left Christianity. Who says chanting is really a form of praying? Only a Westerner who does not know how an Eastern religion ‘feels’ could say something so superficial. And whether salat should be translated as ‘prayer’ is very much the question.

Christianity: the end of plurality

We are not the first to look for the right words for complicated and seemingly new states of affairs in religion, nor is this the first time religion has caused tension in a society. A crucial moment was the transition from what we call the ‘Middle Ages’ to the ‘modern age’. Nobody knows when the Middle Ages began or ended, and no medieval person ever experienced himself as such; everyone feels he lives in a new age. Nineteenth-century historians invented the term for the period between two supposed high points: classical antiquity and its supposed rebirth in the fifteenth-century Italian Renaissance, spreading over Europe in the next century. The period in between automatically got the epithet ‘dark’. There is much to object to in that construction, but what matters here is this: in antiquity, among Greeks and Romans, speaking of religions in the plural was no problem at all, unlike in the Middle Ages, when there was one religion (and everything else was wrong).

Gods and religions in the plural

In ancient Greece there were gods galore. They quarrelled among themselves, but as gods of different peoples they did not bite each other. The Romans preferred to bring them together in a pantheon, and through comparative study tried to reduce their number by defining ‘types’ – gods of love, fertility, war, protection, household – so that Aphrodite = Venus = Freya… Gods who fitted into the pantheon could be served freely by their worshippers: they were regional, had a specific field of action, and were therefore harmless to the state. When Romans spoke of ‘religion’ they saw a host of locally anchored gods whose worship bound particular peoples together. Religion was an ethnic phenomenon in which plurality posed no problem, because the claims were limited. A religion that claimed universality was more awkward, and if its god would not even be accommodated in the place of the supreme god (Zeus, Jupiter) because he ‘tolerated no other gods beside him’, Rome had a problem. With the Jews, then – but they did not claim universal worship for their God, so that was manageable. The most successful variant of Judaism, Christianity, did universalise that claim and was promoted to state religion under Constantine (who gained most by that, the emperor or Christianity, I leave open). The Christian God is just as ‘jealous’ as the Jewish one, and the consequences for the other religions and their gods are easy to guess. They were no longer interesting local variants of something similar, but paganism and idolatry to be eradicated: submission and conversion were all that remained, starting with Roman citizens and, if possible, the whole inhabited world, urbi et orbi.

So, in theory, the missionaries set out from Rome to the ends of the earth. In fact they went only west and north-west, and not even from Rome; that came later. After France, which likes to call itself ‘the eldest daughter of the Church’, winning parts of England was already quite a task. After the collapse of the Roman state, the future of Christianity hung by a thread. Had Pope Gregory – former prefect of Rome and imperial envoy in Constantinople – not vigorously taken political as well as spiritual leadership upon himself, the story of Western Europe might have gone very differently. He is not called ‘the Great’ for nothing. Then the tide turns, and missionaries from the north-western fringes (Ireland, England) return to the continent to finish the half-done work of Christianity’s first 500 years: the Frisians and Germans go into the font. ‘754: Boniface murdered at Dokkum’, Dutch schoolchildren used to learn. It is the story of heroic missionaries, steadfast saints and martyrs, where good and evil, God and idol (or devil) clearly face each other. However noble a ‘heathen culture’ might be, if it did not bow the knee to Christ, its cult had to go. Yet Gregory had devised a clever strategy to gild the bitter pill. To win hearts, missionaries were to be generous with holy water: they could purify pagan cult sites and turn the buildings into churches, and even ‘Christianise’ local rites and gods – give them a Christian sauce. ‘The temples of the idols should by no means be destroyed, only the idols in them… so that the people, seeing their temples not destroyed, may put away error from their hearts and gather, as of old, at the familiar places… for whoever wishes to climb to the highest summit rises by steps, not by leaps.’⁸ Purification from within would follow, slowly but surely. Not badly seen; he had a feeling for the power of narrative constructions. It explains why the Christian religion is still such a wondrous amalgam of biblical teaching, theological sublimities and all manner of strange customs, including pagan gods living on in Christian saints, many on their own sacred ground (caves, mountains, springs) or by a healing tree. Think of the oak between Zichem and Diest whose leaves had long been held to cure fever: in the fifteenth century a statue of the Virgin appeared in it, the clergy explained that the healer was Mary, not the tree, and when Scherpenheuvel (Montaigu) came to lie on the front line between Protestant and Catholic troops in the seventeenth century, the pilgrimage became an act of militant Catholic faith, crowned by the Archdukes’ basilica. That is why we hunt for eggs at Easter, why Christmas coincides with the solstice, why we go on pilgrimage to Santiago, and why there is something as wondrous as carnival. Jesus could never have made it up!

Christianity as a cultural phenomenon

While in the south (Spain) and the east (Byzantium) Christianity was already losing ground to Islam, towards the end of the first millennium the ‘evangelisation’ of Western Europe took such root in people’s heads and hearts that we can speak of a Christian Europe – ‘Christian’ being far more syncretistic (a religious hotchpotch) than Christians themselves think. And I am still telling the story in a stereotypically Western way: all of Russia only went over to Jesus around 1000, Scandinavia and the Baltic much later, and meanwhile the bishops of Rome and Constantinople had excommunicated each other (1054). Lithuania was officially Christianised only in 1387, after union with Poland, and the faith only really took root there when the struggle between Reformation and Catholicism sharpened things and political interests became involved. This turbulent, far from linear history means that in France a church stands on every colline inspirée, that many an old church was built on the grave or around the relic of a holy man or woman, and that behind many a statue and shrine of the Virgin one may, digging a little deeper, find traces of a pre-Christian mother goddess. The great achievements of Christianity – medieval churches, pilgrimage routes and shrines – have deeper roots in the popular devotion of medieval Europeans (at heart not exactly Christian) than in the holy Gospel itself. This becomes more pressing when we realise that what we can know of the Middle Ages comes by definition from the upper layer of society, which often coincided with church authority. What a ploughing peasant thought at the word ‘God’, and what he experienced at Mass, we can largely only guess – certainly not what the (higher) clergy wished; ordinary village priests often just had a stab at it too. And we should not imagine that upper layer as colourful carbon copies of today’s bishops and abbots: the church was strongly oriented to this world; it preached heaven and hell, but its focus was on earthly life, and it recruited accordingly.

Even the high points of medieval art – the soaring cathedrals with their play of light and colour, the altarpieces and statues we so admire – are unthinkable without the mystical philosophy of being of a certain Dionysius the Areopagite, who wrote thick books on how being is ordered in steps, how through mystical contemplation one can ascend from earthly turmoil to the eternal God, and how God makes the uncreated light visible in the natural play of light and colours, each with its own meaning and place in the eternal divine order. His authority was immense; after all, he was a disciple of Paul, named in the Bible as the man who turned to Paul after his speech on the Areopagus (Acts 17), and according to Eusebius the first bishop of Athens. Orthodoxy guaranteed! In reality the author was a Syrian Christian of the early sixth century, steeped in Neoplatonism; his real name is unknown. Lorenzo Valla, who also unmasked the Donation of Constantine as a pious fraud, had his doubts, but only in 1666 did the Protestant theologian Jean Daillé prove definitively that the work was pseudepigraphal. After Augustine he was the highest authority in the Western church; Thomas Aquinas cites him constantly, and mystics such as Meister Eckhart are unthinkable without him. Philosophically, this means that Plato’s philosophy of being, in a mystical variant, was married to the message of Christ on quasi-apostolic authority – even more so in the Eastern church, whose whole liturgy is steeped in Greek ontology. Without the Plotinian mysticism of being, Christianised by the man we now correctly call ‘pseudo-Dionysius’, no iconostasis, no play of light and dark in churches – and no Adoration of the Mystic Lamb in St Bavo’s, for without his ordering of all that is into one perfect hierarchy, the Van Eyck brothers could never have captured John the Seer’s heterogeneous apocalyptic images in so harmonious a composition.

And what, finally, of the moving bond of all Christendom, East and West, with Mary, the mother of Jesus? That too does not come from the Bible (pity for those who think otherwise), yet it pervades the whole of Christian history; cut Mary out and a bloodless body remains. None of this is new, but that it ought to have consequences for Christianity’s self-definition is often not seen, or not wanted to be seen. And before you say, ‘there’s the Protestant again, sniping at rich Catholic piety’: Protestants too adopted the whole early church dogma (Nicaea 325, Constantinople 381, Chalcedon 451), in which the Jewish rabbi Yeshua of Nazareth was definitively deified, complete with a highly speculative doctrine of God heavily angehaucht by Greek ontology: two natures, truly God and truly man, unmixed, undivided, inseparable; God one in essence and three persons. Jesus would not have understood much of it, let alone realised it was about him. And though Protestants loudly proclaim that they follow only the Bible, when Miguel Servet voiced such thoughts in the sixteenth century, the papal inquisitor and the Reformer Calvin in a joint venture saw to it that he was silenced: condemned as a heretic, with the only punishment that fitted, death. Among Protestants, too, all sorts of ‘non-theological’ factors lead to fierce church quarrels: which hymns are sung and at what tempo (read Maarten ’t Hart on the psalm riot at Maassluis), the exact mode of baptism, or whether the congregation will be raptured before or after Christ’s return. Their lived religion, too, draws on many more sources than they are aware of. Religion: an elusive thing, and always has been.

The struggle for the true religion

At the end of the Middle Ages, after almost a thousand years of Christian hegemony in the Latin West, it was clear to everyone that there was only one God, the Christian one. Pre-Christian gods had become memories, like the Greek and Roman ones; the societas christiana was a fact – not designed, but grown. From this world, thoroughly steeped in (unconsciously syncretistic) Christianity, people looked at religions they heard were practised beyond Christian lands. The verdict was fixed in advance: this was no service of the one true God but an attempt by God’s arch-enemy, the devil, to keep people from the true Gospel by offering a substitute. Two of these perfidious religions were known by name and in person: Judaism and Islam (then usually called ‘Mohammedanism’).

The Jews would not see that Jesus was the promised Messiah (Christos), although – so Christians thought – their own scriptures proclaimed it loud and clear. Strange that the people who had written those scriptures and read them daily in the original language saw it differently and could not be convinced. The devil had to be behind it, blinding their eyes; hence the synagogue appears in Christian art as a blindfolded woman. They were barely tolerated in the Christian world, if at all; their continued existence was a standing criticism of the Church’s truth claim. Islam was something else: a dangerous competitor, an enemy. Muslims lived not in but at the edge of the Christian world, and sometimes advanced alarmingly far into it: in 1492 they had just been driven out of Spain after centuries; Constantinople had fallen in 1453; twice, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, they would stand before the gates of Vienna. Theologically the matter was soon settled: Muhammad was an impostor posing as a prophet and twisting the scriptures – the devil’s work, the ‘father of lies’. Today people sometimes wax lyrical about periods of peaceful coexistence of the three scriptural religions, especially in al-Andalus, forgetting that these were exceptions possible only under autocratic rule, which collapsed again and again under pressure from zealots, now Muslim, now Christian. Strategically permitting other religions from a position of power, because you can use their people and skills, is not quite ‘tolerance’ in the modern sense. Francis of Assisi’s legendary visit to the sultan in 1219, too, must be read in context: the friars went ‘as sheep among wolves’ to preach Christ to the infidels, and Bonaventure’s biography explicitly presents the visit as Francis’s attempt to obtain martyrdom.⁹

At the edge of the world – the Far East – lived, as classical sources and, since Marco Polo, first-hand reports told, peoples with strange customs and rites but a high civilisation. The legends in circulation show how little real knowledge there was: an exotic, curious picture with traits of an ethnographic freak show (read Umberto Eco’s Baudolino, or look at the tympanum of Vézelay). They populated world maps far into the modern era; Pierre Desceliers’s famous mappemonde of 1550 is cartographically top-notch, yet its legends are as fabulous as those on medieval fantasy maps. These peoples were marginal phenomena, as strange as the biblical peoples with their Baals and Astartes against whom the Old Testament prophets had railed. One thing was certain: one day all peoples would acknowledge Christ as Lord, by conversio or by subversio.

Christianity was not ‘the true religion’ (as if there were others); it was simply the religion; everything else was deceit, devilry, idolatry. Vera religio was an internal Christian qualifier: God must be served truly, sincerely, from within. ‘Religio’ meant the service owed to God – prayers, rites, but also the ordering of life. The king ruled ‘by the grace of God’, the laws were the Lord’s, not man’s, and nature too was God’s creation; early on, Christian thinkers and canon lawyers incorporated the Roman notion of natural law, which of course could be none other than divine law. The sometimes fierce disputes about whether the church served God rightly were not debates between religions or denominations but a struggle for orthodoxy and orthopraxy within the one religion. Losers were disqualified as heretics and usually suppressed quite efficiently with the help of the secular arm. Behind heresy stood the devil, who constantly hijacks the human faculty for serving God. The devil is never original; he can only imitate. He is God’s ape: he falsifies doctrines, parodies rites, perverts conduct and so disrupts the whole order of the Church. The Cathars even offered a complete counter-church and had to be exterminated. Doctrinal heresies were easiest to neutralise: burning the writings and the chief heretics sufficed. Before printing, heresy was therefore often a local phenomenon. The line between heresy and legitimate protest was sometimes wafer-thin: Valdes, wandering in pairs with the Poor of Lyon, preaching the Gospel in poverty, was condemned as a heretic, while his spiritual twin Francis of Assisi, doing much the same, was canonised – having narrowly escaped condemnation himself. Likewise Thomas Aquinas, who gave the pagan Aristotle such generous room in his thought, had to be defended against charges of heresy by his teacher Albertus Magnus; a few centuries later Thomism was all but canonised when Rome wanted to create clarity against Protestant chaos (Council of Trent). From heretic to doctor ecclesiae.

Four kinds of religion

The religious world was not without strife, and Christendom was no monolithic block, but at the core it was clear. There were two possibilities: you served God correctly, and were a Christian; or you served him wrongly, and were a Jew, a Muslim or an idolater – with the devil behind the last three. Irreligion was no option, not because it was forbidden but because it was unthinkable. One could not not serve God; that was an ontological impossibility. An atheist was not a theoretical denier of God but a practical one: he lived as if God did not exist, while He of course did. The Psalms already sketch his portrait and call him a ‘fool’. Far into the modern era the medieval division of all religious phenomena into four groups dominated: Christians, Jews, Muslims and idolatrous heathens. The last was the residual category, known essentially from hearsay: from the Bible, especially the Old Testament, where people served ‘idols’ (male and female, Baal and Astarte), made images, worshipped them and sacrificed to them – confirmed by classical texts describing similar practices around Greek and Roman gods. There was one God, the Christian one. So there were no other religions to live alongside nicely; there was idolatry, to be rooted out. Examples abounded – the prophet Elijah challenging, defeating and personally killing the priests of Baal – and in Christian tradition the greatest saints were those who had cleansed Europe of idol worship: in the Low Countries Amandus, Willibrord, Boniface. Stories of felling idols and destroying cult objects were standard material; legion were the martyrs, especially female martyrs, whose story was built on the heroic refusal to worship some pagan god. The more exotic the better!

Religion across the ocean (Columbus)

Then Cristoforo Colombo crossed the ocean and discovered, among many other things, a world of religious forms that would put the standard frameworks under heavy pressure. It is 1492; he sets foot on an island he takes to be the ‘West Indies’ and claims it at once for the only Lord who matters in his world, Jesus Christ, the Saviour: San Salvador. Something peculiar is going on with the inhabitants, as he describes at length in his journal and letters. They go about naked, or nearly, without any shame. They are peaceable, seem to know no weapons, are trusting and extremely helpful. And – very striking – they have ‘no religion, nor idols’ (the original says secta and idólatras; journal, 12 October 1492). So they should be easy to win for Christianity. He repeats the observation several times, adding that as far as he can tell – difficult, since he does not speak their language and must go by behaviour – they also have ‘no sense of evil’. He sees this confirmed in the six ‘Indians’ he takes on board for Europe: of their own accord they never say a prayer, yet they neatly join in the Ave Maria and Salve Regina they have been taught during the ship’s liturgy, hands raised to heaven as they should be, and afterwards even cross themselves. Since they ‘understand quickly’, kind priests who learned their language could bring them ‘into the Church’ without difficulty.

These telling formulations are easily misunderstood. By ‘having no religion’ Columbus does not mean they are atheists or pure humanists – anachronisms – but that they cannot be categorised religiously. Columbus is a medieval man. He knows the four options: Christian, Jew, Muslim or idolater. Judging by their behaviour these people fit none of the four boxes. In matters of religion they are hors catégorie – and without saying so, his choice of words suggests that they might be hors catégorie as human beings too.

When it became clear that Columbus had struck an unknown and very large continent, speculation broke loose. From whom were these people descended? Surely from one of Noah’s sons, Shem, Ham or Japheth. How had they got there? At first people assumed, like Columbus, that Asia and North America more or less touched, as world maps show far into the sixteenth century (Gastaldi, 1546, the basis of many later maps); on the Mercator–Ortelius maps of 1569/1570 that connection has gone. Without a land bridge, might they descend from the inhabitants of sunken Atlantis? Or from the ten lost tribes of Israel? Had Saint Brendan sailed that way? Were they descendants of the Carthaginians who, according to Aristotle, had once sailed out through the western straits? Or – more spectacular still – direct descendants of Adam and Eve who had lived there before the Flood and so had not perished? Besides such fairly innocent fantasies about their origin there were less innocent speculations about their nature. Aristotle had written (Politics) that some people are ‘by nature’ predisposed to serve others – a theory that suited colonists in need of labourers and slaves perfectly. It caused a furore and led in the mid-sixteenth century to the famous debates in which Spanish theologians confronted Bartolomé de las Casas, who pleaded the cause of the ‘Indians’ and held that they were ordinary and therefore free human beings. (Crown and Vatican had in fact long settled the matter when they accepted the new territories as part of the Spanish kingdom and classed the inhabitants as subjects of the Spanish Crown. For Columbus too, his journals make clear, they were ordinary people – somewhat childlike and with a very basic culture, but certainly not backward.) What interests us is how the religion (or non-religion) of the New World’s inhabitants came to be catalogued, and especially how their concrete customs and rites were named. Nomina omina sunt.

Worshipping [idol] gods is human

Because the behaviour of the people of Guanahani (now usually called the Taíno) fitted none of the four known categories, they were particularly interesting. The devil evidently had no grip on them yet; they were an almost blank page. The natural religiosity implanted by God – and it had to be there, of that everyone was convinced – had not yet gone off the rails, had not yet been hijacked by Satan. They lived, Columbus’s language suggests, almost as God had intended. Theologians would say they lived by ‘natural law’: peaceful, friendly and vegetarian. For mission that posed no problem, for Christian doctrine – so all fifteenth-century theologians held – fitted seamlessly onto human nature, as supernature onto nature: foundation and superstructure. The break caused by Adam’s fall had been undone by Christ. It was simply a matter of explaining how things stood, and they would be led into the Church: piece of cake. Whether Columbus (or his editor) described the mores of the Guanahani in these terms to please his patrons is another matter; European Christians found these stories fascinating and the sketch of an almost unspoiled natural religion highly credible. The stories spread quickly, especially once an unauthorised Latin version of Columbus’s letter to the king was printed. A positive start, then.

Homo naturaliter religiosus

The most interesting theory was the one implicit in Columbus’s observation: religiously these people were a case apart, people on whom ‘original sin’ had no hold. The remarks that they were naked, felt no shame and ‘had no knowledge of evil’ suggest a paradisal condition (the terms come from the second creation story, Genesis 2). Since theology does not allow any human being to have escaped the Fall, the speculation could not be pursued literally. But the idea that people could in principle live quite naturally without making gross errors in religion (literally: the service of God) was widespread. There had to be something like a natural religiosity, planted by God in every human being. The Church Fathers spoke of a semen religionis, a seed of religion; today they would speak of a religion gene. The thought is not so strange. Cognitive scientists and evolutionary biologists increasingly agree that humans are more predisposed – hard-wired – to an imaginative, animated world view than to a cool, rational, mechanical one. Pascal Boyer and Justin Barrett have even labelled it: human perception is coloured by HADD, a hyperactive agency detection device, which makes us inclined to attribute what happens around us to an ‘agent’ rather than simply take note of it. ‘What’s rustling in the bushes? Surely not a predator…’ Better a hundred false alarms than to be ignored once and eaten. Add the psychological need to give events a place (why? what for? what does it mean?) and our instinctive preference for causal explanations that sound credible – not because we understand the arguments but because of the soothing, satisfying power of the word ‘because’ – and religion is not far away. We are far less rational than we think and see ‘actors’ at work everywhere; and since great events require great explanations, something superhuman as actor is an obvious candidate. Seen this way, the different religions – or better, the colourful world of religiosity – are variations in operating systems (software) running on the same hardware (our brain).

Medieval people did not know it in these terms, but in another sense they did. They had eyes in their heads and a surprising dose of common sense. When the world grew larger (the first ‘globalisation’ took place between 1500 and 1600) they soon noticed that virtually all peoples had something to do with God, or spirits, or superhuman forces – and that the more developed a culture, the more elaborate its cult (China, the exception, comes below). All ‘developed peoples’ made a great spectacle of honouring the gods, with rituals, feasts, images, temples, sacrifices. Since Christ was missing, the verdict was quickly given: sectas, category 4, idolaters. Subjugate and convert, then; only the order was disputed – fiercely. One thing was clear: the more elaborate the religion, the harder the nut to crack, for a fully developed idolatry meant the devil had gained a solid foothold.

And indeed, when Columbus and those who followed penetrated the mainland and came upon highly developed cultures (Inca, Maya, Aztec), the simple, pure inhabitants of Guanahani were soon forgotten and the question changed. It was no longer about a ‘minimal natural religion’ Christianity could easily build on, but about manifest idolatry. Yet interpretation proved more complicated than expected. The rituals were so unfamiliar, and there were no written sources to explain them. Were certain libations at mass gatherings signs of idolatry or simply social rituals? Were buildings without obvious images of gods pagan temples or public halls? And what of the absence of monogamous marriage, free or strange sexual behaviour, gender roles, clothing, different social classes, the absence of private property – things thought to belong to ‘natural law’? How do you distinguish cult from culture? What does and does not belong to idol worship? That strange ball game played on walled courts, sometimes with rituals and sometimes without – what was it?¹⁰ The debates ran high, especially once the first missionaries turned into budding ethnologists and published detailed descriptions. They learned the languages, studied the narratives behind the rituals and tried to reconstruct the Amerindian world view – in order to convert these ‘heathens’ more effectively, of course, but real interest grew along the way. Some came to sympathise with the people and tried all the harder to understand them; a few reached surprisingly nuanced judgements. For that, criteria were needed – above all a definition of religion in the literal sense: a delimitation. Where does religion begin and end? Where does cult stop and culture begin? No simple question, then or now or ever, for the two are one.

Comparing religions

Still, people wanted to distinguish. With no handbooks or ready-made church decrees, they worked by analogy, drawing on the descriptions of foreign religious behaviour, category ‘idolatry’, they already had. So the religions of the ‘Old World’ were studied anew with more than ordinary interest: there at least was comparative material the Church had already thought about and judged. Aztec rituals were compared with what the Bible and classical authors (Herodotus, say) reported of Canaanite, Egyptian, Babylonian or Persian religion, or with Greek and Roman rites and myths; sacrificial practices recalled the religion of the Old Testament, of Israel and of its neighbours. Though aimed at better mission, this is the birth of comparative religion and ethnography (Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology, 1982). That the devil was ‘God’s ape’ came in handy: parallels with Christian customs could be drawn without defaming the latter – they were simply the devil’s cunning manipulations of humanity’s religious impulse. Purification rites, for instance, seemed closest to Christian baptism. On this view, the fact that people worshipped idols had two sides. It was wrong and had to be ‘corrected’ – one may not give the devil a foothold. But it also deserved appreciation. People who had had to live without Christian revelation could hardly do anything but err. Their reverence for the divine was not wrong in itself, only misdirected. That they threw themselves so zealously into rituals was in se a good thing. They were God-fearing, but – alas – misled, and could not be blamed for it: they did not know better because they could not know better, as innocent as all the other peoples before Christ appeared and the twelve apostles went out into the world. However wrong, even horrific, some of their acts (child sacrifice), they were victims rather than perpetrators; the devil held them in his power, and they had to be freed and enlightened by the preaching of the Gospel. The famous advocate of the Amerindians, Bartolomé de las Casas, never tired of hammering on this anvil – so much so that he stands at the origin of the image of the ‘noble savage’, especially where he contrasts it with the barbaric methods of the colonisers. Idola colere humanum est is the bottom line: not only to err is human, but to worship idols too.

José de Acosta: Historia natural y moral

The great synthesis published at the end of the sixteenth century by the Jesuit José de Acosta (1540–1600) is written entirely within this framing, applied without hesitation to everything discovered in the New World. He had lived and worked for years in Peru and Mexico and returned to Spain to advise Philip II on his policy there. His life’s work, the Historia natural y moral de las Indias, first appeared in Seville in 1590 and was very quickly translated into all European languages: a treasure trove for anyone wanting to know what was really true of all the Indian stories going around. This is not a theological book – he had written that earlier, as a missionary – but a proto-scientific one, describing, framing and interpreting just about everything discovered across the Atlantic: Time-Life or National Geographic, anno 1600. The subtitle of the early Dutch translation (Enkhuizen, 1598) leaves nothing to be desired: it treats ‘the most notable things of the heavens, elements, metals, plants and animals, as also the manners, ceremonies, laws, governments and wars of the Indians’. Religion comes only in book five. Before that he discusses the rich vegetation, animal species unknown in Eurasia, differences of climate (including the habitability of the tropics, against Aristotle) and altitude sickness (he had crossed the Andes himself). He looks for explanations everywhere, within the framework of his time, but consistently and patiently, based on observation and, where possible, his own or others’ reliable experience. He suggests, for instance, that after the Flood large animal species dispersed by a combination of ‘natural instinct’ and ‘divine providence’ to parts of the earth where they could flourish, and died out elsewhere because they could not adapt (book IV) – about as close to ‘survival of the fittest’ as you could get in the sixteenth century. On the origin of the first inhabitants he resolutely dismisses Atlantis, Carthage and the lost tribes as fables, and suggests there must be a connection via the polar regions ‘still unknown, because the north pole has not yet been found’, with migration taking place spontaneously over several thousand years. That view of ‘Paleo-Indians’ migrating from Eurasia to North America is still the prevailing one.

In book V Acosta describes the ‘superstitions, rites, idolatries and sacrifices of the Indians’. The heading of the first chapter shows his classical approach: Que la causa de la idolatría ha sido la soberbia y envidia del demonio – the cause of idolatry is the pride and envy of the devil. Idolatry is not the people’s fault; it goes on the devil’s account. The paradoxical conclusion follows at once: the Indians are much occupied with idolatry, superstition and ritual; ergo, the Indians are a deeply religious people – pity they shape and apply that religious energy wrongly. And even if some of the rites seem cruel and barbaric, that may not be held against them: they are no worse than what we know of the Greeks and Romans. Long passages of ‘comparative religion’ follow, with Greco-Roman and Egyptian gods (Isis, Osiris, Amun) and regularly Christian rites and institutions too. He finds forms of circumcision (Inca princes), baptism-like rites, monastery-like foundations for men and women (which he compares at once with the Buddhist monasteries his colleagues in the Far East had described), an imitation of communion and even of the feast of Corpus Christi – all perversions by the devil, the ‘father of lies’, stealing God’s honour, but also proof that the source of religiosity is always the same. He invariably concludes: ‘What they could not yet see in their darkness is visible in full glory in the rites of Holy Church.’

The underlying view is the classical medieval one, but here applied systematically to the whole phenomenon of ‘religion’: there is a general human nature with a religious component, created by God, perverted by sin (the devil), restored by Christ, so that through brokenness man can shine more than ever before; nature is completed in glory. Acosta and many colleagues combine this with the way Christians had valued both biblical Judaism and classical philosophy as preparations for Christianity. The Old Testament was read (and by some still is) as one long announcement of Jesus Christ, the Jewish rites, especially sacrifice, as foreshadowings of his sacrifice; the Gospel ‘fulfils’ the Jewish law, which in many people’s experience thereby became obsolete, even though Jesus explicitly says the opposite. Once Christianity settles in, Judaism is demoted to an antiquarian religion, thanked for services rendered: der Mohr hat seine Schuldigkeit getan, der Mohr kann gehen.¹¹ Eusebius of Caesarea, Constantine’s court theologian, did something similar with Greco-Roman culture: for all its faults, a praeparatio evangelica. Greek and Roman myths could serve as catechetical material, the beloved Stoics as building blocks for Christian morality. You did not have to throw everything overboard when you became a Christian; much of the culture and elements of the cult were incorporated into the Christian story, provided they were ‘purified’. No wonder Christian writings set David beside Orpheus when speaking of music, and Ovid’s Metamorphoses turn up regularly in moralising sermons.

Natural religion?

Well then, says Acosta – voicing many sixteenth-century missionaries – if this held for those ancient cultures, why not for these new ones? He introduces as many nuances as possible. He notes a great readiness among the Incas to acknowledge a ‘highest God’, even if convincing them that there is only one, and detaching him from the sun, remains difficult; but that will come right if mission continues diligently and kindly. Not extermination and destruction of culture and cult, but education, instruction and purification: show that the devil is responsible for the perversion, peel the pure content out of the form, and the ‘Indians’ will come along into the worldwide Catholic Church and experience it as fulfilment. About most of their cultural and social institutions he is positively favourable: in book VI he shows that many social customs and forms of political organisation are neither primitive nor inhuman, but clever forms of government, and he advises Philip II, now ‘their sovereign’ too, to govern the new peoples as much as possible through their existing institutions and by their own rules, insofar as these do not clash with church law.

Acosta does not go as far as Garcilaso de la Vega, who argued in 1609 that the Inca religion was in fact a form of natural religion, unsullied by diabolical manipulation, pure and human, and did not need to be abolished at all: the ‘idols’ many missionaries spoke of were not idols in the Christian sense but ‘manifestations of the divine’ for which European languages have no proper word. Garcilaso, you will not be surprised, was a mestizo, son of a Spanish father and an Inca mother. Las Casas too had suggested that the Incas had no concept of God truly corresponding to the Christian one. Here we hear the intuition that has become so important in modern comparative religion: religions must be judged on their own merits, and one must be very careful applying the stories, experiences and terms of one religion to another. A good comparativist knows that, when it comes to it, his comparison probably won’t hold. For the extinct Mesoamerican religions, scholars now point out that what missionaries usually translated as idols more likely represented spirits of dead ancestors, carried in processions like dolls – more like ‘our’ statues of saints than images of gods. But that too is just a comparison, and so it limps.

To be clear: by no means all missionaries agreed with Acosta. A memorandum to Philip II printed in Bolivia and rediscovered in 1991, by one Bartolomé Álvarez, De las costumbres y conversión de los indios del Perú, urged the king to outsource the conversion of the Indians to the Inquisition; its tone is militantly anti-Indian. Philip did not listen to Álvarez, but even without the Inquisition Spanish mission was so bent on eradicating ‘idolatry’ – the devilry supposed to underlie the whole superstructure – that with the cult it destroyed the culture. Harsh exploitation and imported germs did the rest. The highly esteemed ‘natural religiosity’ turned out de facto to be an empty shell; what remains of the culture is a couleur locale of an imposed culture, preserved often in spite of rather than thanks to the church. Yet some Spanish missionaries did come to love the people and their culture even while they were wiping it out. That is how it goes when representatives of one culture meet people of a truly different one. They do not understand each other, yet want to; and all a well-meaning person can do is start from what seems familiar, look for similarities and points of contact, and then ‘think he understands’. Imagine the Taíno of then sailing to today’s Europe and attending a football match. How could they make head or tail of it except through their own sacred ball game? They would see a world of rituals, community hymn-singing, enormous emotions, and think they were witnessing a religious rite. Getting acquainted can only begin by seeing where we resemble each other; otherwise we remain strangers. Sustained attention may then reveal that it is ‘just a bit different’ from what we thought. But where the gap is large and power is unequal, the danger is real that the other has meanwhile been brought into line – which, where the other is essentially different, amounts to destruction.

What remains admirable is that some of these theologian-missionaries tried, in their own way, to ‘understand the other’. Comparing religious phenomena, however imperfectly, offered an opening. It was a long road full of pitfalls, but it was passable, and the postulate of a ‘universal natural religiosity’ seemed strong enough to bear the effort. An unexpected effect was that, by extending the comparison beyond ‘idolatries’ to the other categories, including one’s own religious customs, people began to see their own religion through an outsider’s eyes: a first step towards Christianity understanding itself as one religion among others. The end result – that with the eradication of the ‘pagan elements’ in the cult the culture perished too, though people tried to spare it – has still not been sufficiently thought through. It also applies to religions rooted in other cultures that try to take root here. Culture shock is never neutral; it always calls lived religion into question. And it applies to the receiving side: the cultural peculiarities of Western European countries are not neutral or interchangeable but religiously charged, even for people who adhere to no official religion. That is precisely what makes integration so difficult.

Culture or religion? (China)

Another important step in mapping hard-to-place phenomena was taken by the Jesuits in the Far East, confronted with an ‘alterity’ they had not thought possible. In China they found a society dominated by a ‘sect’ not explicitly occupied with religious activity at all. Unlike the Taíno, living ‘close to nature’ with little cultural and cultic superstructure, this was a highly developed, hypercomplex and strongly ritualised culture. Matteo Ricci and his five companions first presented themselves as ‘Western monks’, thinking Chinese culture akin to Buddhism. They soon discovered that the Confucianism of the elite was something quite different. As good Jesuits they adapted: they learned Chinese, lived as Chinese among the Chinese, and behaved at court as a kind of Western mandarins – with success; they had the emperor’s ear. While they ‘accommodated’, their respect for Chinese culture, politics and morality grew. But one thing puzzled them: what was the religion of these Chinese? Buddhism and Taoism they could place in category 3, by analogy with Islam: not idolatry, but wrong; the Buddha and Laozi were venerable teachers or prophets, not divine – like Muhammad. That in popular religion the line between veneration and worship blurred did not escape them, but it did not interest them much: simply the passage from category 3 to 4. What fascinated them was that the political elite kept aloof from all that. They seemed to have no religion at all. They belonged to the ‘sect’ of Confucianism, in which Confucius was greatly honoured but which could hardly be called a cult, and in which God played no great role – certainly no personal God, rather ‘the divine’ as a general term for what transcends us. Confucius looked more like a scholar, a philosopher, a sage, than a cleric. The first translation of his Analects appeared, tellingly, as Confucius Sinarum Philosophus, sive Scientia Sinensis – Confucius the philosopher of China.¹² In his sayings the divine is presupposed in a general sense but is not the object of thought and hardly influences it; Confucius speaks of human action – political, social, with a strong moral undertone.

This meant, according to Ricci and his colleagues, that the Chinese elite could not be regarded as idolaters. Whatever rites they performed or offerings they made to the ‘spirits of heaven’ should be seen as civil activity. Theologically the Jesuits appealed to the Roman notion of religio civilis (Varro’s three types of religion): it makes no pronouncement about the deity but recommends a moral code for the people, grounded in very general religious principles, worked out by purely human means for a social purpose. If Seneca the Stoic could be revered in the Christian West, why not Confucius? But they had reckoned without their hosts. Their fellow missionaries of the Dominican order judged Chinese culture and Confucianism far more negatively. They granted that Confucianism was very much this-worldly (diesseitig), but that could not hide that it rested on a wrong conception of God and was therefore fundamentally wrong. Christ was missing, and that was no detail. Simply assuming that Christian doctrine could be built as a superstructure on Confucian foundations went too far: one may ‘accommodate’ to people, but not flirt with idolatry. The polemic, known as the Chinese Rites controversy, peaked in 1700 when the theological faculty of the Sorbonne condemned the Jesuits’ efforts, followed by Rome. But losing a battle does not mean losing the war. Thanks to their command of the language, the Jesuits had such a lead – a near monopoly – that they remained the conduit of Chinese culture for interested Westerners far into the nineteenth century. Their sinophilia proved contagious; more importantly, their attempt to understand Chinese culture (with its wealth of ritual and ceremony) as a valid ‘human creation’, valid precisely because it does not refer to a deity unacceptable to Christians, would prove pioneering. With it, secularity crept into the discussion of religion – this time not in the original sense of ‘the church loses its say over a domain that properly belongs to it’, but in the sense that man is credited with the capacity to manage a large part of his life by himself, and is allowed to. The Jesuits tried to make this acceptable to Mother Church by calling it ‘civil religion’, but they did not get away with it.

In search of words

From the beginning of the first globalisation, thinking about ‘religion’ has been governed by the tension between a positive valuation of a supposed natural, universally human religiosity and the real manifestations of religiosity. The positive valuation soon hit its limit when the barely filled-in ‘natural religiosity’ of the Taíno had to be placed within the four forms of religion that the one true religion could perceive. It did not fit. The medieval fourfold division broke open and a general concept of religion, underlying all forms of religiosity, imposed itself. As a result people began to see their own religion, at least in its outward forms, as ‘a religion’ among others: Christianity became ‘a religion’ too – the true one, but no longer hors catégorie. This relativisation, insofar as anyone was aware of it, was not thought through intellectually, let alone digested theologically; the church was still too self-evident and too convinced it was the only true one. To this day theologians rarely think through what this juxtaposition of all religions means for each religion’s truth claims. The truth claims of the two largest religions in Western Europe, Christianity and Islam, both contain unmistakable rejections of the other’s. Ask a Muslim what he thinks of the second article of the creed (‘I believe in Jesus Christ, God’s only Son’), and ask a Christian whether Muhammad is the greatest of the prophets, and you will see what I mean. The awkward contacts between the world religions, the love-hate relationship, the striking and anointing at the same time, are a clear symptom.

On the other side of the world another shortcoming of the Western concept of religion came to light, when missionaries had to characterise a highly developed society full of rituals, customs, ceremonies and laws, in which ‘God’ hardly played a role. Some Jesuits did not hesitate to speak of atheism – and meant it positively, believing that this ‘atheism’, like ‘natural religiosity’, could be an excellent preparation for Christianity, which could be placed as a superstructure on Chinese civil religion, its cult a crowning of an already rich culture. The Jesuits had to back down, but the line of thought did not disappear; it only gained strength. For our question, both the conflict over the almost god-less civil religion of the Chinese and Acosta’s twofold analysis of the Amerindian religious impulse are of great importance, for they bring to light two essential traits that still mark the Western concept of religion today, with their attendant tensions.

Natural religion: an ambiguous concept

First, Western religious sensibility often assumes something like a ‘natural universal religion’ or a ‘general human disposition to seek God’ – assumed by all the missionaries and, in a sense, confirmed by recent evolutionary biology and cognitive science. If so, how does it relate to the true service of God (asks whoever thinks he belongs to the true religion)? Until about fifty years ago the double feeling Acosta voiced so well was still very recognisable: positive about the religious impulse, negative about its concrete elaboration. This discourse dominated in all the churches and in a sense outside them too, though agnostics and atheists thought the question of a ‘true religion’ meaningless. Western churches accepted a ‘natural religion’ (as a preliminary stage, primitive, unfinished), but as soon as things got concrete, understanding ended and ‘conversion’ was called for. Jean Calvin put it quite adequately in his Institutes of the Christian Religion: there is a semen religionis in every human being, which he values positively as a remnant of the ‘image of God’ ingrained in human nature even after the Fall; but de facto man always turns out to be a fabricator idolorum, a factory of idols, as soon as he gets to work with that gift.¹³ (By ‘idol-makers’ Calvin was thinking less of distant heathens than of nearby Roman Catholics, but that aside.) This doubleness is typical of those who approach real religious phenomena from the recognition of a ‘natural religion’: one strikes and anoints at the same time, embraces the religious other in one sentence and rejects him in the next. Once again, the institution and the professional theologians are much ‘narrower’ and more anxious here than the average believer. Most people do not make much of a problem of it and go by gut feeling. They are more ecumenical than the pope and more multi-religious than the rabbi. A little yoga can’t hurt, says a Catholic mother; and a Korean Protestant often has his child blessed, just to be sure and without the minister knowing, by a local Cheondoist shaman, whose ‘religion’ is itself a nineteenth-century indigenous mix of Confucianism, Buddhism, Taoism and Catholicism. Official religion is often based on a theological construct from the pens of religious professionals. Real religious experience does not necessarily coincide with it, and often lives in tension with it.

Cult and culture: a symbiosis with pros and cons

Second, we keep trying to separate cult and culture, but they are so closely bound up that we do not succeed. Acosta still thought that by ‘purifying’ the cult of its diabolical elements one could save the culture (and even parts of the cult), but when the religion had been eradicated, the culture had gone too. In the Rites controversy Jesuits and Dominicans put their finger on the wound: what is the value of that rich human activity we call ‘culture’, apart from the presence or absence of a ‘cult’? By culture I mean everything that humans, in a cumulative tradition, ‘add’ to the natural impulses arising from their physical existence as Homo sapiens: the ordering of life and social bonds (household, family, clan, tribe, people, state), the regulation of sexuality, the way one deals with the nature in which and from which one lives, how one gives death and the dead a place, how one looks to the future. Everyone agreed it had to be judged from God’s point of view, but not on the verdict when God hardly features in that foreign culture. Can such a culture simply continue? The Jesuits in China tried, as I understand it, to start from the other end – not from theology, as Acosta did, but from the culture itself, presented as one organic whole in which the religious component became almost invisible and God was present only as guarantor of the moral and political order. Christianity could then be introduced as a new element, a crowning. It was a bridge too far for the church. Its message, the church finally decided, was a total package, take it or leave it: cult including culture. Although in practice many more compromises were made with local cultures than church authorities found desirable, that was the philosophy of Catholic and Protestant mission far into the twentieth century.

Coming from the other side than Acosta, then, the outcome is the same. The interweaving of cult and culture (religion as part of culture) makes every religion a cultural phenomenon as well. How Christianity handled this in its globalisation still shapes perceptions of it: elsewhere in the world it is still seen as a Western religion, even though long inculturation in Africa, Asia and Latin America has produced other variants. The same happens on a regional scale: as a Protestant in Flanders I am perceived as Dutch (Protestantism being a ‘Dutch religion’), and vice versa.

Looking ahead

The religious ‘disposition’ as a human faculty has generated a rich variety of ideas, acts and beliefs. They did not arise apart from other human endeavours but form part of them; such a cumulative tradition we call a culture. What form the religious impulse takes is not easy to determine. The neurological wiring can be activated in very diverse ways and the energy generated can shoot off in any direction, as anyone who looks around the world of religiosity a little longer will see at once. How it mixes with other cultural phenomena also varies enormously, from all-pervading to marginal. Religion is thus far more diverse than people thought around 1800, when freedom of religion was anchored in constitutions on the assumption that several ‘religions’ could coexist within one culture. That was a fairly safe bet then, because it concerned variations of one religion (Christianity) that all shared the same culture in one way or another. Because cult and culture cannot simply be pulled apart, transplanting a religion into another culture is not self-evident, quite apart from the possibility that it clashes there with another religion. That is what Acosta had to experience in South America. The idea of culture as base and religion as superstructure is far too simplistic, and the notion that any religion could in theory be grafted onto any culture is an idée fixe – shared by many people, policymakers included. If religion and culture are bound together by a thousand and one fibres, they form an indivisible whole. Touch one and you touch the other; try to detach one and you endanger both; try to connect cult A to culture B and sparks fly. It does not simply fit – not automatically, at any rate.

The many cultures that vanished in the age of colonisation and mission testify to the harmful consequences of such experiments. We witness it in our own time too – strangely enough on a voluntary basis. In Western Europe the Christian religion is detaching itself from Western culture, saying that culture is only incidental. But oddly, something changes as it detaches itself: it becomes more abstract, more theological, harder too; and simply joining Christians from other cultures turns out to be difficult as well, though in theory it ought to happen. At the same time Islam presents itself where Christianity and culture were bound together for so many centuries that they stamped the culture of non-believers as well – and Islam too, of course, comes with its own culture; how could it be otherwise? Religion without culture is an abstraction. Endless debates about whether the two are ‘reconcilable’ are held at every level of society, put bluntly as ‘Islam must go through the Enlightenment or it does not belong here’, or ‘It is time for a European Islam’. Very often the discussion then turns to the beliefs (dogma, ethos) of the religions in question, leading to theological debates in the public domain: at best experts politely talking past each other, at worst a spiteful cacophony.

In my view this discussion is hampered not only by failing to recognise the interweaving of cult and culture, but also by a fixation on ‘doctrine’ in Western European discourse on religion. Almost everyone in the debate – advocates, opponents, mediators – seems to think religion is about ‘what you believe’ or do not believe, and whether that is ‘reconcilable’ with certain behaviour. Precisely because in religious matters words are ‘creative’ – repeat something often enough and it becomes true – it matters to see where this focus on ‘belief’ and the preoccupation with a set of beliefs actually comes from. It was not always there, at least not in this sense. I would go further: if you look closely, you soon see that religion is mostly not about beliefs, even when believers emphatically say it is. The most striking example: several faith communities founded on a very specific belief – that Jesus would return at time x, or the great final battle begin in year y – did not cease to exist when their claim was falsified. On the contrary, often only then did they really start to grow: the Adventists (Jesus returns on 22 October 1844), the Jehovah’s Witnesses (Armageddon begins in 1874, 1878, 1881, 1914, 1925, 1975). Hal Lindsey has been predicting the end times since the early 1970s, shifting the crucial dates by about ten years each decade, and his books remain just as popular. Truth claims are at least of a different nature than many bystanders think; they have more to do with the psychological mechanism of faith itself than with its objective content. To understand this we must go back in time once more – precisely five hundred years, to 1517. There a monk asked what the Christian religion actually is in such a way that we are still caught in his framing of the question. Within it, personal faith came to play a central role, and to define that faith he relied wholly on the reading and interpretation of a collection of 66 to 72 ancient books in Hebrew and Greek: the Bible. That we so often speak today of ‘the faith of individuals’ and of ‘what the holy Book does or does not say’ is to a large extent due to Martin Luther – for he, of course, is the monk I mean. Continue with Part 2.

© Dick Wursten – fair use policy: all use permitted, provided the source is acknowledged.