Religioso

 

Religioso is a marking in music: it seems to call on the player to perform the piece in a hushed, meditative manner that evokes religious awe or deep contemplation. I suppose this is pars pro toto. We like to think that religion is at its best in things like deep contemplative awe even though much religious behavior is simply pro forma and other religious behavior is simply nasty. For the same reason we tend to associate religion with things like theism as religion, at its best, should put us in touch with the best and highest causes. It should make us conscious of the absolute because that is the best kind of consciousness. This is the case in spite of the fact that much religion puts us in contact which beings on much lower levels like saints and ancestors. We idealize certain moments of religion, abstract them from the embodied totality, and identify them as the essence or core. There is nothing wrong with this as it is absolutely one way to define things. A true dog is a dog at his very best. However, it will not quite do for public discussions of religion for here we have to speak not normatively but descriptively to the extent that description can ever be separated from judgment (it cannot but that is another matter). The first thing that you notice when you make this shift is that the term ‘religion’ covers such a range of different even contrary things that one wonders if the term has any intension at all or just a vast nebulous extension with fuzzy boundaries (rather like the concept ‘English’). Religion, for instance, overlaps with the arts and with philosophy. It also overlaps with politics and nationalism. It encompasses behaviors that are routine and ordinary and others that are exalted or weird. It encompasses the most antithetical of positive and negative emotions and reactions. We might say that the word religion is about as precise as the word culture and religion may just be, at bottom, another word for culture: a symbol system which orders our experience mythically and ritually, conceptually and socially and does this in different proportions and relations at different times. Sometimes as with Buddhism, this seems to begin with a conceptual discovery which embodies itself in social, political and aesthetic forms. Sometimes, as with Christianity it goes the other way: an ‘event’ gives rise to a speculative tradition.  

With apologies to Telltale and his friends, though, I think the first thing to do is expunge ‘supernaturalism’ from any conception of what a religion is. ‘Supernatural’ is a term in Catholic theology and that is the only context in which it has any use and meaning. It refers to certain effects of grace that transcend natural agency. There are no ‘supernatural’ entities. Once one drops this burdensome notion the relationship between things like Marxism, Buddhism and Stoicism becomes clear. These systems have no ‘transcendent’ deities as such but certainly have world immanent principles like the Dharma, the Dialectic or the Logos. It becomes possible to understand things like polytheism where the deities are, far from being supernatural, as natural as can be. Indeed, it is a pretty weird definition of ‘religion’ that leaves out Pantheism. Pantheists do not recognize a ‘supernatural’ God because they hold God to be nature. However, there is a certain use in this error as there is in many errors. In the west we have come to consider ‘absolutes’ as transcendent thanks to the Hebraism at the base of our culture. This, word, transcendent, is the correct term to use of the Hebraic god rather than the inept ‘supernatural’. For this reason we think that all other cultures conceptualize their absolutes as prior to or above nature although it is easy to discover that they don’t. The Egyptian God Ra is nothing a more and nothing less than the sun though the Egyptian saw so much more in the sun than we can, including the perfection and beauty of his discoid form. But, what our western misunderstanding reveals is that when religion moves beyond the immediate social world it produces something, we in the west, happen to value: enlightenment. By this I mean it becomes speculative and betrays the unified process behind external and internal events. It gives us knowledge of the causes not in an immediate sense but in the unconditional sense. It raises our minds to the condition of conditions, the first given.

Thus we have God, the Good, the One, Brahman, Nirvana, the Dharma, the Dao, Moira, Maat, the Logos and so on. Sometimes these principles are objects of longing and the drive to erotic fusion: we then have the phenomenon of mysticism. Sometimes they are objects of external fear and respect. Sometimes their function is largely conceptual (though they may still be objects of secret worship!) and here we may put concepts like the dialectic, natural selection, the invisible hand of the market and other supposedly ‘secular’ concepts (secular is another term that may be useless but that is for another day) which function analogously to the ancient concepts referred to above. Since comparative religion (as far as I can tell at least) is really about describing these functional analogies I suppose I have no problem describing Capitalist or Socialist ideologies as religions in the broad sense I am laying out here. I say this especially as they fuse the conceptual and material with personal, moral, affective and even sacramental concerns (fossil fuels anoint Kings nowadays and also anoint the purified nation!) exactly as religions are supposed to do.  Finally these principles are variously figured as towering above the world in majesty or as acting cunningly within it as the world-immanent reason of things. It is, I suppose, in the latter mode that they can be conceived in ‘secular’ terms for all this word really means is ‘temporal’. However, sophisticated thinkers in the Judeo-Christian, Pagan, Islamic and Hindu traditions realize that the absolute, whatever it is, should encompass both modes in its ineffable manner as it is beyond dualistic thinking and structured, finite opposition.   

This, of course, raises the problem that everything may be religion and if so then religion is surely a useless concept as it marks out nothing in particular from the realm of culture and simply swallows the whole of it. We might think of religion as involving ‘the sacred’ but all the sacred is, is the unconditionally good, potent and true, that which elicits ultimate loyalty, respect, fear and concern. I think most every culture has some such notion and indeed things as mundane as a football team can step in this role. It may then be that I have no answer at all to the question of whether Pastafarianism is a religion or Atheists religious. It may really be that I have to leave this question to politicians and lawyers who have to grant a certain tax status to some groups and a different one to others.