Religion

Augustine places faith before philosophy in the order of religious knowledge. The mind may reach toward God by reason, but it does not arrive without grace. The Confessions recounts a passage through Manichaeism, skepticism, and Neoplatonism, none of which, on Augustine's account, could carry him to the living God. What moved him at last was not an argument but a voice in a garden bidding him take up and read. Faith, as he conceives it, is the will's assent to what God reveals, and even that assent is possible only because God has first moved the will. Men do not climb to God by a ladder of reason; God descends to them through Scripture, sacrament, and the interior witness of grace. Whether the will can be both moved by grace and free in assenting is a question treated more fully under the ideas of Will and God.

This understanding of faith governs Augustine's account of religion as a communal thing. The City of God turns on a distinction between two cities: the one animated by love of God, the other by love of self. The two are intermingled in historical time, and no visible institution embodies either one purely. The Church contains hypocrites and sinners; the Roman Empire on occasion produced men of virtue. The distinction is nonetheless held to be real and permanent. The city of God is the community of the faithful, bound together not by territory or political allegiance but by a common love of the eternal. Its members are pilgrims in the earthly city, using its goods without placing their hope in them. How far such a division bears on the obedience owed to civil rulers is considered under the ideas of State and Citizen.

Scripture, for Augustine, is the authoritative testimony through which God speaks to the faithful. Philosophy may clarify and defend what is believed, but it does not generate belief. The pagan philosophers glimpsed something of the divine nature, yet lacked the humility to receive what they could not discover for themselves. Augustine grants that Scripture is difficult and admits of many interpretations, and he does not take this to be a defect. Where several readings may each be true, he thinks it rash to assert that Moses intended one rather than another, since by him one God may have tempered the sacred text to the minds of many who should see truths in it, and not all the same truths. What he objects to is not the diversity of interpretations but the pride of those who love an opinion because it is their own. Religion, on this view, is neither a human invention nor a philosophical conclusion, but the response of creatures called by their Creator.

Much of the vocabulary in which the West afterwards discusses religion comes from Augustine. Because the two cities remain intermingled until the end of time, the terms on which believers are to live within political orders they cannot wholly endorse are left unsettled. Aquinas addresses the difficulty by assigning temporal authority a legitimate sphere of its own, subordinate to the spiritual; Hobbes removes it by absorbing the Church into the sovereign. Neither, it may be said, is content as Augustine was to leave the matter open.

Aquinas distinguishes what reason can prove from what faith alone can hold. The existence of God, the unity of God, and certain attributes of the divine nature are preambles of faith, accessible in principle to unaided reason through the Five Ways and other demonstrations. The Trinity, the Incarnation, and the Resurrection exceed the capacity of any created intellect. These are known because God has revealed them, and they are accepted through the theological virtue of faith. Faith is accordingly an intellectual virtue, a habit of mind by which assent is given to truths proposed on divine authority, yet it is directed by the will, since the evidence does not compel assent as a geometrical demonstration compels it. Aquinas further distinguishes the material from the formal object of faith. What is believed may be many things; that by which it is believed is nothing else than the First Truth, for faith assents to nothing except as revealed by God.

Sacred doctrine, the body of teaching drawn from revelation, is on this account a science in the Aristotelian sense. It takes its first principles not from self-evident axioms but from the articles of faith, which are guaranteed by the divine knowledge. As optics takes its principles from geometry, so sacred doctrine takes its principles from the science of God and the blessed, communicated through Scripture and the teaching of the Church. Theology is therefore systematic and rational, though its starting points lie above reason. Since Scripture admits of a multiplicity of senses, Aquinas adds two rules of interpretation which he draws from Augustine: the truth of Scripture is to be held without wavering, and any particular explanation is to be adhered to only in such measure that one remains ready to abandon it if it be proved false, lest Scripture be exposed to the ridicule of unbelievers.

Religion, treated in the Summa as a moral virtue annexed to justice, is the virtue by which men render to God the worship due to Him. It falls under justice because God is Creator, and honor, praise, and service are owed Him. Aquinas distinguishes religion from the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity: religion has to do with the external acts of worship, prayer, sacrifice, tithes, and vows, by which interior devotion is expressed. It is the highest of the moral virtues, its object being God, and it remains inferior to the theological virtues, which unite the soul to God directly. A like ordering appears in his account of government. Since men attain their last end by divine rather than human power, the direction of men to that end is entrusted to priests rather than to earthly kings, and those whose care is of intermediate ends are subject to those whose care is of the ultimate end.

The synthesis of faith and reason which Aquinas constructs becomes the standing position of the Catholic intellectual tradition, and the point at which later writers press it is how much weight its rational structure will bear. Hobbes argues that the whole apparatus changes character once the sovereign, and not the Church, determines which doctrines may be taught. Pascal argues that the synthesis concedes more to reason than reason can deliver, and that grace rather than argument brings a man to God. The relation of sacred doctrine to the other sciences is treated more fully under the idea of Theology.

Dante's Divine Comedy is religious poetry rather than writing about religion. The poem follows the soul from the dark wood of sin through the purgation of vice to the vision of God in the Paradiso, and its structure is doctrinal throughout. Each circle of Hell, each terrace of Purgatory, and each sphere of Heaven answers to a theological and moral distinction drawn from Augustine, Aquinas, and the tradition they transmit. What scholastic theology sets out in argument, Dante sets in motion. The pilgrim does not merely learn about God; he is drawn toward God by love, corrected by justice, purified by suffering, and at the end exceeded by a light he cannot comprehend. Religion, so presented, is not a set of propositions to be affirmed but the ordering of a whole life toward its proper end. In this the poem belongs with the Oresteian trilogy and Paradise Lost, and stands apart from the poem of Lucretius, which is written about religion and against it.

In the Paradiso faith reaches its term in the beatific vision. The pilgrim passes through the celestial spheres, meeting saints and theologians who expound different aspects of divine truth, and Beatrice, who conducts him, is commonly read as theology under the light of grace. At the close the pilgrim gazes into the eternal light and sees, bound together by love, the scattered leaves of the universe. He glimpses the mystery of the Trinity and the Incarnation, but reports that language fails him. The highest religious experience, on Dante's account, is neither a concept nor a doctrine but an encounter with a reality so full that the mind can do no more than gesture toward it. Faith gives way to sight, and sight to love. Whether such a vision can be described at all, or only pointed at, is a question raised more generally under the ideas of God and Immortality.

In De Monarchia, Dante takes up the political side of religion. Man, he holds, exists for a double purpose, and has two beatitudes: an earthly perfection consisting in the exercise of his intellectual powers, and a heavenly perfection consisting in the vision of God. These two ends are reached by different ways, the first by philosophical teachings, the second by spiritual teachings which transcend human reason. From this follows his doctrine of the autonomy of Empire and Church, both ordained by God, neither entitled to the other's jurisdiction. Church and state may be compared to sun and moon, in that the state receives some illumination from the church, but temporal power, Dante maintains, receives from spiritual power neither its being nor its authority, having its own source of light in reason. He wrote during the conflict of Boniface VIII with the Empire, and argues that the papacy had overreached in claiming temporal sovereignty, to the injury of both orders.

Dante gives the medieval Christian conception of religion its fullest imaginative form. That conception rests on a confidence in the Church as the custodian of the order the poem depicts, a confidence which Pascal, writing three centuries later and after the Reformation, does not share. What the poem holds fast is the conviction that a true religion must order the whole of life; what it leaves in dispute is where the authority to determine that order resides. The controversy over Church and state to which Dante contributes is treated more fully under the ideas of State and Law.

Pascal writes as a Christian apologist against the philosophers who suppose that reason by itself can reach God. Having read Descartes, he found the God of the philosophers abstract and of no use for salvation, and set against it the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob. The memorial sewn into his coat records a night of fire rather than a night of argument. The Pensees, fragments of an unfinished apology, develop this conviction. Reason has its office, but it operates within limits, and it cannot demonstrate the things which matter most: the existence of God, the immortality of the soul, the meaning of suffering. For these, Pascal says, the heart must speak. He does not mean sentiment in place of thought. He means that there are ways of knowing, among them intuition, moral perception, and the experience of grace, which lie outside the reach of discursive proof. The scope and limits of demonstration are considered under the idea of Reasoning.

The wager approaches the matter from another side. Suppose that reason cannot determine whether God exists. A man must still wager, since he cannot avoid living as though one answer or the other were true. If God is and he believes, he gains everything; if God is and he does not believe, he loses everything; if God is not, the loss either way is small. The reasonable bet, on this reckoning, is belief. It has been objected that the wager is mercenary, and that it reduces faith to a calculation of advantage. Pascal's answer would be that the wager is not intended to produce faith but to remove the obstacles which stand in its way, so that grace may do its work. It is addressed to the man who wishes to believe and cannot see past the objections, not to the man who has never asked the question.

What recommends Christianity above the rest, Pascal argues, is its account of the human condition. No other religion or philosophy, on his view, explains why man is at once great and miserable, capable of nobility and sunk in pettiness. The corruption of nature and the redemption by Christ are the two facts which the Christian faith goes chiefly to establish, and together they account for what neither an optimistic nor a pessimistic doctrine can explain by itself. Pascal applies similar tests to the other religions. A religion is false, he holds, which does not worship one God as the origin of everything and does not command the love of God as the end of everything; and since no religion had adduced remedies for human lust and weakness, the presence of such remedies marks his own. He treats Judaism as the historic foundation and prophetic forerunner of Christianity, and takes miracles to furnish the test in matters of doubt.

The Pensees, unfinished as they are, become a point of reference for later defenses of faith which decline both a purely rational theology and a faith wholly without reasons. Pascal's position, that religion addresses the whole man and not the intellect alone, is taken up in different ways by Rousseau, who locates religion in conscience, and by Kant, who locates it in the moral law. Hume, arguing that the evidence for miracles never meets the standard which testimony must meet, denies Pascal the test he thought decisive.

Writing as an observer of religious belief, Hobbes assigns religion a natural origin. Men, anxious about the future and ignorant of causes, feign invisible powers to account for what they cannot explain. Fear of things invisible is, he says, the natural seed of what every man calls religion in himself and superstition in those who worship otherwise than he does, the difference between the two lying in whether the tales are publicly allowed. Religion so understood is one superstition among others, distinguished by the sovereign's permission. Hobbes does not deny God's existence, and professes Christianity throughout the Leviathan, but the account he gives of religion's natural seeds bears against any theology which takes the fact of belief as evidence of revelation. He observes further that these seeds have received culture from two sorts of men: those who ordered them by their own invention, the founders of commonwealths and lawgivers of the Gentiles, and those who did so by God's commandment.

In Part III of the Leviathan, treating of the Christian commonwealth, Hobbes argues that no spiritual authority can stand independent of the civil. A church, on his definition, is a company of men professing Christian religion and united in the person of one sovereign, and it is therefore the same thing as a civil commonwealth consisting of Christian men. From this it follows that there is on earth no universal church which all Christians are bound to obey, since there is no power on earth to which all commonwealths are subject. The sovereign interprets Scripture, governs the church within his dominion, and judges which doctrines may be publicly taught. Priests hold no jurisdiction of their own, and no private revelation overrides the sovereign's command. A subject commanded to profess what he believes false may keep his belief inwardly, but outward conformity is required of him. Faith itself, Hobbes holds, comes by education and discipline rather than by supernatural infusion.

The argument leaves religion without institutional independence. Where Augustine distinguishes the city of God from the earthly city, and Dante assigns distinct jurisdictions to Empire and Church, Hobbes denies that the temporal and the spiritual name two governments at all. Church and state must be one, since a divided sovereignty tends to war, and Hobbes had seen the commonwealth torn by factions each claiming divine warrant for its politics. The consequence is a religion under civil direction: doctrine is what the sovereign declares, worship takes the form he prescribes, and dissent is sedition. Hobbes writes at times as a Christian rather than as an observer, comparing the state religion of the Romans, which was part of their policy, with the divine religion of the Jews, and holding that where God planted religion by supernatural revelation He made to Himself a kingdom in which the distinction of temporal and spiritual has no place.

After Hobbes the question of power can hardly be kept out of the discussion of religion. If religion cannot be separated from politics, liberty of worship has no secure ground, and it is on this point that Locke takes up the argument, distinguishing the business of civil government from that of religion. Rousseau accepts much of Hobbes's judgment about the political danger of a church with a jurisdiction of its own, yet declines to hand religion over to the sovereign entire. The general problem of church and state is treated more fully under the ideas of State and Government.

Locke answers Hobbes by denying the state any authority over religious belief. The Letter Concerning Toleration argues that the civil magistrate's power extends only to the protection of life, liberty, health, and property, and that the care of souls is committed to him neither by God nor by the compact from which his office derives. No man can transfer to the government a power he does not himself possess, and no man possesses the power to compel another's belief. Belief requires inward persuasion, and fines, imprisonment, and the threat of violence do not produce it. A religion imposed by force is, on this view, not religion but hypocrisy. Locke treats toleration as required by the Gospel as well as by prudence, and it is here that he thinks the business of civil government must be exactly distinguished from the business of religion, and the bounds between the two settled.

The two societies are distinguished by their ends. The commonwealth is a society of men constituted only for procuring, preserving, and advancing their civil interests; a church is a voluntary society of men joining themselves together of their own accord for the public worship of God in such manner as they judge acceptable to Him and effectual to the salvation of their souls. Since membership is voluntary, a church's power over its members reaches no further than persuasion and, at the extreme, exclusion from its own body, and it cannot deprive a man of civil rights. The magistrate for his part must protect the civil rights of all alike, whatever their religion. Locke does not deny the importance of religion; he denies that the magistrate is competent to judge which religion is true, and holds that a magistrate who enforces his errors injures both religion and the civil peace.

The toleration Locke defends has limits, and the limits show something of its ground. He excludes atheists, on the reasoning that oaths and promises, which are the bonds of human society, have no hold on those who deny God, and he excludes Catholics as owing allegiance to a foreign prince. Toleration so qualified rests less on a principle of conscience taken universally than on a judgment about which bodies of men endanger civil order. Locke also thinks the question of what has been revealed distinct from the question of how revelation is to be understood. Nothing carries higher assurance than the testimony of God, who can neither deceive nor be deceived; but the reader of a revealed text, he grants, cannot choose but be fallible in understanding it, from which he concludes that men should be less imperious in imposing their own interpretations upon others.

The doctrine of the Letter becomes the ordinary position of the Enlightenment, and the ground on which later disputes about religious freedom are conducted. It is reflected in the American constitutional provision that Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, and Mill extends the same principle against Sabbatarian legislation. Rousseau and Hegel take issue with it from opposite directions, the one prescribing a civil profession of faith, the other holding that the state may require its citizens to belong to some church while leaving the content of belief alone. The general question of what the magistrate may command is treated under the ideas of Liberty and Law.

Hume examines natural religion in the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, published after his death, where three speakers take different positions on the question of God's existence. Cleanthes defends the argument from design: the order of the universe resembles that of a machine, machines have intelligent authors, and the universe must therefore have an intelligent cause. Philo, whom readers have generally taken for Hume, presses a series of objections. The analogy between the universe and a machine is weak, since the universe resembles an animal or a vegetable quite as much; even were the analogy allowed, it would establish at most a finite and imperfect designer rather than the infinite and perfect God of Christian theology; and the suffering in the world tells against the designer's benevolence. Hume does not undertake to show that God does not exist. He argues that the design argument does not show that God does.

Section X of the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding takes up the credibility of miracles. A miracle is a violation of a law of nature, and the laws of nature are established by uniform experience. Testimony to a miracle must accordingly be weighed against the whole of our experience of natural regularity, and it is to be credited only if its falsehood would be more miraculous than the event it reports. This condition, Hume argues, is never satisfied. Witnesses are prone to credulity and to the love of wonder, reports of the miraculous abound chiefly among ignorant and barbarous nations, and the miracles alleged by rival religions tell against one another. The argument bears directly on revealed religion, which rests on the claim that God has intervened in the order of nature. Hume grants, with what may be irony, that the Christian religion cannot be believed by any reasonable person without a miracle, the miracle in question being faith itself, which subverts the principles of the believer's understanding.

In The Natural History of Religion Hume traces religious belief not to reflection on the order of nature but to the passions, and chiefly to fear. Men uncertain of the causes of their fortune and misfortune personify the unknown powers that govern their lives. Polytheism comes first in time; monotheism arises later, not from philosophical insight but from the disposition to exalt one deity by flattery above the rest. Religion so explained is a product of human nature rather than a response to any divine self-disclosure, and it informs us about the mind of the believer and not about God. Hume distinguishes this natural religion from the supernatural. Natural religion, being a species of philosophy, can never carry us beyond the usual course of experience or give us measures of conduct different from those furnished by reflection on common life.

Hume's examination of natural theology sets much of the ground on which later defenders of religion have to argue. Kant grants that the theoretical proofs fail and looks for another footing in practical reason; Hegel treats religion as a form of consciousness which philosophy comprehends rather than refutes. Those who, like Marx and Freud, explain religion as imposture or as the response to a need, reject natural religion along with revealed, where Hume had allowed natural religion the standing of a species of philosophy. The question of how far testimony may establish what lies outside common experience is treated under the ideas of Opinion and Prophecy.

Rousseau declines both the rationalist theology of the philosophers and the doctrinal authority of the churches. In the Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar, set within Emile, he sets out a natural religion resting on sentiment and conscience. The Vicar believes in God, in the immortality of the soul, and in a moral order of the universe, but he arrives at these beliefs neither by syllogism nor by scriptural authority. Conscience, on this account, is a divine instinct which precedes all reasoning and all doctrine, and the unlettered man who attends to it stands nearer to God than the theologian entangled in dogma. What remains of religion when so reduced is wonder before the created world, gratitude toward its Author, and obedience to the law written in the heart. The elaborate systems of Christian doctrine Rousseau regards as later growths which obscure rather than clarify what conscience already declares.

The Social Contract takes up the political office of religion, and here the question which religion arises for Rousseau as it does not for Plato, who could treat the nature of the gods and the nature of the state as alike within the province of the political philosopher. Rousseau distinguishes three sorts: the religion of man, inward and without temples or rites; the religion of the citizen, in which the gods of a particular state command the loyalty of its people; and the religion of the priest, which gives men two legislations and two countries and so leaves them, he says, neither men nor citizens. Christianity in its Gospel form he judges to be the religion of man rather than of the citizen, since so far from binding the hearts of citizens to the state it draws them away from all earthly things. A society of true Christians, on his argument, would not be a society of men.

What the state requires, Rousseau concludes, is a purely civil profession of faith, whose articles the sovereign fixes not as religious dogmas but as sentiments of sociability without which a man cannot be a good citizen or a faithful subject. The dogmas of this civil religion ought to be few, simple, and exactly worded: the existence of a mighty, intelligent, and beneficent Divinity possessed of foresight and providence, the life to come, the happiness of the just and the punishment of the wicked, and the sanctity of the social contract and the laws. No one is compelled to believe them inwardly, but whoever rejects them publicly may be banished, and whoever professes them and then acts against them may suffer death. The combination of tolerance in private belief with severity in public profession follows from Rousseau's estimate of the political danger of religion, which he shares with Hobbes without following Hobbes in surrendering religion to the sovereign entire.

Rousseau's civil religion states in an extreme form a difficulty which recurs wherever a republic must decide what its citizens are to hold in common. Kant retains the conviction that true religion is written in the conscience while rejecting the civil enforcement, on the ground that a profession commanded by the state is not faith. Hegel objects to both that religion requires a concrete community and an inherited content, and cannot subsist as inward conviction or as a civic formula. The question of what a state may demand of belief in the name of unity is treated further under the ideas of Citizen and Liberty.

Kant sets aside the theoretical proofs of God's existence and looks for the ground of religion in morality. The Critique of Pure Reason argues that the ontological, cosmological, and design arguments alike fail, since each attempts to extend knowledge beyond the bounds of possible experience, and God is not an object which theoretical reason can know. The Critique of Practical Reason proposes another route. The moral law commands unconditionally, and it obliges us to seek the highest good, in which virtue and happiness are proportioned to one another. Nature by itself affords no ground for expecting such a proportion, which would require a moral author of the world. God's existence is therefore a postulate of practical reason, neither demonstrated nor rendered probable, but presupposed by the moral life. Faith, on this account, is rational faith, and rests on what duty requires rather than on what speculation can establish.

Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone works out what follows. Religion, properly understood, is the recognition of all our duties as divine commands, and whatever does not serve the moral life has no religious standing. Prayer, ritual, sacrament, ecclesiastical authority, and claims of special revelation are at best vehicles of moral instruction and at worst instruments of superstition. Kant distinguishes pure rational faith from ecclesiastical faith. The latter, resting on Scripture and tradition, he takes to be historically necessary, since men require concrete forms in which to grasp moral ideas, but it is subordinate to the former and should give way to it as men come of age. A church is legitimate so far as it advances morality; when it exacts obedience to rites or doctrines for their own sake, it passes into what Kant calls the counterfeit service of God.

Kant nevertheless retains much of the matter of Christian doctrine in a moral translation. What he calls radical evil, the disposition to subordinate duty to self-love, corresponds to the doctrine of original sin: men are not merely weak but corrupted in the maxims by which they choose. To overcome it requires a revolution of the will, a resolution to make the moral law supreme, which Kant describes in the language of a new birth while holding the change to be moral rather than miraculous. Grace, if there is grace, must not be conceived so as to relieve a man of responsibility for his own regeneration. Religion assists that regeneration by supplying images, histories, and a community which support the moral life, and it exceeds its office when it comes between the individual and the law he gives himself. The relation of moral obligation to divine command is treated further under the idea of Duty.

By making morality the measure of religion, Kant leaves open the question which Hegel takes up: whether a religion of pure duty can sustain itself once the historical content of faith has been set aside as a temporary vehicle. Those who, with Pascal, hold that religion answers to more in man than his sense of obligation find in Kant's account an omission rather than a purification. The dispute turns in part on what is meant by faith, a question also considered under the ideas of Knowledge and Theology.

Hegel treats religion as a necessary moment in the self-development of absolute Spirit. In the Phenomenology of Spirit religion is the stage at which Spirit becomes conscious of itself in the form of representation, that is, in images, narratives, symbols, and rites. Art gives the divine in sensuous form, religion in representational form, philosophy in pure concepts. The three are not rival activities but ascending expressions of one content. Religion stands above art in that it passes beyond the sensuous image to the thought of God as a being who creates, redeems, and reconciles; it stands below philosophy in that it holds its truths in pictures and stories rather than in the categories which exhibit their necessity. The Trinity, on this view, is grasped by the believer as a history, the Father sending the Son and the Spirit proceeding from both, and by the philosopher as the self-differentiation of the Absolute.

Christianity occupies a particular place in this scheme. Hegel calls it the absolute or revealed religion because in it the central truth of philosophy is made manifest, namely that the infinite is not set over against the finite but realizes itself through the finite. The Incarnation is for him more than a historical event; it expresses the requirement that Spirit externalize itself, enter into otherness, and return to itself enriched. The death of Christ is the negation of the finite, the moment at which God Himself passes through death, and the Resurrection and the coming of the Holy Spirit are the return, the reconciliation of infinite and finite in the life of the community. Christian doctrine is thus read as the pictorial presentation of dialectical logic, and Hegel intends the reading as an honor to Christianity rather than a reduction of it.

The honor is nonetheless qualified. If philosophy comprehends in concepts what religion represents in images, philosophy has the superior form of a content the two share. Religious consciousness holds to a personal God conceived as elsewhere, a heaven above, a history with beginning and end; philosophical consciousness takes God to be not a being apart from the world but the thought which thinks itself throughout reality. Hegel does not on this account abolish religion, which he holds to remain necessary for those who have not reached the standpoint of philosophy. He subordinates it. Religion is true, but does not yet know why it is true, and only philosophy supplies that self-transparency. In political matters he holds that the state should require all citizens to belong to a church, adding that a church is all that can be required, since the content of a man's faith depends on his private ideas and lies beyond the state's reach.

Hegel's claim that religion and philosophy have a single subject matter differs from Hume's explanation of religion by the passions and from Kant's reduction of it to morality, in that it neither refutes religion nor confines it to duty. What remains in dispute is whether philosophy can take up what faith claims to offer, or whether something is lost in the passage from image to concept. Later writers who follow Hegel's method while rejecting his conclusion, among them Marx, treat religion as a form of consciousness to be explained by conditions outside it. The larger question of what the mind can know of God is treated under the ideas of God and Theology.