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Much of everyday modern humanity takes the most basic value of religion to be its truth value, such that exposing a religion as false should be decisive. This is largely due to Christianity, and it has long been the position of most Christians and virtually every village atheist, even those of the global village.

But what if religion isn’t always about truth? Among the pre-Christian Greek philosophers, Socrates and Plato were indeed critical of Greek religion – but its truth value seems less the issue, than its moral disvalue. As for Aristotle, witness the confusion that breaks out when one seeks to discuss his views on religion. He is treated as a conventional Greek polytheist (Étienne Gilson, in The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy), a respectful adherent of a more enlightened traditional religiosity (Richard Bodéüs, in Aristotle and the Theology of the Living Immortals), a demythologizer whose hope is, through religion, to draw seekers to the true light of philosophy (Mor Segev, in Aristotle on Religion), and even (admittedly at a less scholarly level, and with evident bias) online, by secular humanist organizer Austin Cline, as a proto-atheist.

Although only in passing and with little imputation of import, Segev brings out a critical point, the significance of which extends well beyond Aristotle; he notes, as a difficulty in discussing his theme, that Ancient Greek had no word for religion. And here Aristotle is particularly instructive, for he does both discuss and clearly approve epimeleia ta hiera, “custody of the sacred,” in the sense of a department of the polis, a sort of governmental Ministry of Worship. Segev (like many others over time) wrestles with why Aristotle, who holds the cults (threskaiae) of the gods in disdain, would endorse such an institution; he does not explicitly question (nor does Gilson, who catalogues specific instances) why Aristotle, despite his contempt for the myths of Olympus, participated in them by acts of eusebeia (piety).

Perhaps the matter is simpler than it looks. What if Aristotle’s personal acts of piety, or even Greek piety per se, were not even notionally or hypocritically related to truth, but were (as epimeleia ta hiera seems to imply) acts of citizenship, a participation in the life of the polis? After all, most of us, barring a few obstinate fanatics, continue to pay our taxes even when we disapprove of state policies.

Consider that religion may have nothing, or next to nothing, to do with transcendent truth or spiritual experience, and everything to do with the forces that bind a society together. Given this, someone might find the religion of the polis regrettable, inferior to the religion of another polis or of some foreign kingdom, and yet no more abandon that religion than he would abandon the polis itself. After all, would a citizen abandon the polis on account of its bad soil, mediocre dramatists, or unstable climate?—no more would he abandon the polis over its religion, for his persistence in the latter is nested in his commitment to the former.

The works of Marcus Terentius Varro, the great Roman polymath of the Republican era, to Cicero (as recounted by Augustine) “unquestionably the acutest of all men, and, without any doubt, the most learned,” have largely been lost. We do have, through Augustine, a meaningful summary of his thought on religion, which apparently brought to the fore and made thematic the very issues we are here considering.

Varro considered three forms of religion: the mythical religion of the ignorant, lodged in the theater, superstitious and vulgar, if elevated somewhat by the verse of the poets; the natural or “physical” religion of the philosophers, intellectually interesting and generally morally uplifting but as contentious and esoteric as the philosophers themselves (all three-hundred-odd schools of them, as he notes ruefully, their doctrines replete with “things, which men’s ears can more easily hear inside the walls of a school than outside in the Forum”); and finally civic religion, a happy and judicious blend of the two, well suited to dampen the excesses of popular superstition and emotionalism and of philosophical esotericism and contentiousness… and, by the way, highly conducive to support of the state and to the maintenance of public order.

Here I should explain the identification of Varro’s “natural” religion with the philosophical and theological. This may be confusing to believers accustomed to seeing the natural opposed to the supernatural; this, clearly, was not Varro’s aim, as he would have had no idea of what such believers meant by the supernatural. Moreover, in the contemporary world, where the natural sciences and the physical sciences (if not, indeed, science qua science, science in itself) are treated as interchangeable terms, that the “natural” should connote the philosophical, much less the theological, might seem outlandish. Yet consider the alternatives Varro offers: on the one hand, the mythical, the domain of poets and of mystery plays, of the theater – of the human endeavor of marshalling art, language and imagery in pursuit of emotional resonance; on the other, the civic – the fostering of individual docility and social unity through the judicious application of power and pressure. Both of these approaches are concerned with their own action and its effects; neither is preoccupied with what is, with the nature of being. In this sense, natural religion, as Varro himself chose to call it, not intending a compliment thereby, can even be said to parallel natural science. This depends on the word “natural” in “natural science” being taken, not as “about nature,” in the sense in which it is used by, say, the Nature Conservancy, but as “concerned with the nature of” – in their case of the physical universe. If so, “natural religion” can be religion concerned with the nature of God.

Such transcendent-minded religion resembles pure science in its instantiation of what Max Weber called theoretical rationality, a category indispensable to science which originates in religion. However much or little this rationality is supplemented by supernatural revelation is immaterial, as the designation speaks to the disposition of seeking ultimate reality, rather than the data set upon which we base our seeking. Of course, most of what passes for debate today is argument about first principles, about which data set is worth following – which does not subject itself to theoretical rationality at all well. Yet this kind of transcendent “physical religion,” in common with all practices of theoretical rationality, faces a challenge.

Making religion about transcendent truth (and keeping it about transcendent truth) is hard – it requires a level of discipline, focus, and studiousness which is not to be presumed upon in the believer – even if the believer in question is oneself. And, as Varro noted, such truth is by no means likely to find welcome among the powers that be, nor much uptake in the marketplace. Besides, as Ratzinger noted in an address entitled “The Truth of Christianity,” “[N]atural theology’s concern is the ‘nature of the gods’… while the other two theologies address the divina instituta hominum; the divine institutions of men.”—rendering the first speculative, while the latter two are, as has been suggested, distinctly practical.

Ratzinger then states the decisive point: “[W]ithout the minimum hesitation, Augustine sets Christianity in the sphere of ‘physical theology’,” identifying this impulse with the testimony of Justin Martyr and the 2nd Century Apologists. Ratzinger then goes on to draw this series of remarkable conclusions:

“Christian faith is not based on poetry and politics, these two great sources of religion, but on knowledge. It venerates the Being at the foundation of everything that exists, the ‘true God’. In Christianity, rationality became religion and was no longer its adversary. For that to happen, for Christianity to see itself as the victory of myth-removal, the victory of knowledge and, with that, of truth, it had to consider itself as universal and be brought to all the peoples, not as a specific religion repressing others by virtue of a type of religious imperialism but as the truth which renders the apparent superfluous. And it is that which, despite the wide-ranging tolerance of polytheisms, must have been intolerable, but must have been seen as an enemy of religion, even as ‘atheism’. It was not founded on the relativity and on the convertibility of images. So, above all, it disturbed the political utility of religions and it thus undermined the foundations of the State in which it did not wish to be a religion among the others but the victory of intelligence over that world of religions.”

The victory of intelligence over the world of religions? Perhaps less surprising, if we consider that Augustine found subservience to the state and public order to be, for Varro, the actual point and goal of religion. While some contemporary scholars dispute this, there is no disputing that the Caesars found it so.

And looking around ourselves, we have reason to believe that the Caesars were on to something – something perhaps deeper than they knew. We are seeing in real time how much, left to itself, religion in general tends to gravitate much more toward social and cultural cohesion than toward truth. This may seem odd for, as already noted, the name of truth is cried from the mountaintops in many denominations and traditions. Yet in truth, truth is irrelevant to most such truth claims, and even where truth claims are strongest, much of the language (Elijah to the prophets of Baal, most obviously) sounds more like trash talk than theology. After all, belonging (at least among us primates) is a primal instinct, purely estimative, long preceding humanity, truth, reason and the vis cogitativa.

Moreover, an honest look at history tells that, just as there is mythical religion, natural religion, and civic religion, there is in like manner a mythical Christianity, a natural (philosophical, theological) Christianity, and a civic Christianity. Perhaps a more precise defense of Christianity as religio vera would consist in acknowledging the historical tension within Christianity and identifying the Christian commitment as a clinging for dear life to the natural, the philosophical, the theological, against all the political, cultural, and sociological exigencies that are certain to arise, that have always arisen, that always will arise.

Indeed, at some level every religion presents itself in mythical, natural and civic forms. Yet individual religions weight these aspects differently. While I cannot pretend to an expert’s knowledge of all human religious traditions, or even of the most numerous and influential among them, some things can and should be said.

For instance, Islam does not distinguish a separate, thematically “religious” realm within the geographic Dar al-Islam – nor could it very well, as the leadership of the Prophet and the Arabic of the Qur’an essentially built a nation out of the sands, and that nation, according to some strains in Sunni Islam, continues on a divinely ordained plan toward an universal earthly Caliphate. Whatever can be said of this position in Islam, it is grounded in serious theology – including the great Medieval philosopher-theologian (and strong nominalist) al-Ghazali, who held the establishment of the caliphate to be a literal religious obligation. Conversely, a contravening trend in Islamic theology largely fails due to the extinction of the rationalist Mu’tazili tradition and the discouraging of widespread study of Kalam (philosophical theology) in general. All of this tends to elevate civic religion to a premier role.

Or consider Judaism. The claims of the psalmist against the gods of the nations, or of the prophets against the Baals, would seem to demand a focus on truth. Yet Israel’s God, though indeed the God, was still the God of Israel, and Jewish commentator Zohar Atkins deftly deploys the Book of Ruth in defense of his thesis: Religion is Social – “Wherever you go I will go, wherever you lodge I will lodge. Your people shall be my people and your God, my God.” (Ruth 1, 16) Moreover, with its strong emphasis on the people and the law, Judaism has over the centuries steered natural religion away from the question of religious truth (long taking a position on the afterlife uniquely ambiguous among world religions, and at least in our time treating atheism as not per se a disqualifying belief) toward ethics and culture; the last seventy-five years have reset the question of Jewish civic religion in a way that is currently hotly disputed among Jews in Israel and throughout the Jewish diaspora.

Hinduism has long embodied a dizzying variety of mythical and natural religious approaches integrated in a structure more traditional and cultural than civic; the 20th and 21st Centuries are witnessing the development of a civic Hindutva which draws inspiration from the Islamic model of the caliphate and from European nationalism. Meanwhile, China, with its exceptional civic cohesiveness, tends to draw all religions piecemeal into a syncretistic Chinese-ness. There is doubtless finer detail here in abundance; my personal knowledge, while adequate to teach college classes in world religions, limits both the scope and the precision of what I can say here.

What of Christianity? Now I have the opposite problem; I will do my best to simplify but will still surely fall into the trap of too much detail. The non-Chalcedonian churches existed as a minority under civic Islam for almost their whole history (which has virtually come to an end in the past century or so); the Byzantine churches, Orthodox and Greek Catholic alike, are bonded to national identities, thus intrinsically entailing a civic aspect; the Roman Catholic Church has certainly had extensive political commitments over time including, though not confined to, the Pope’s retaining temporal rule over the Papal States for over a thousand years; the Protestant Reformation was accompanied (and in some cases driven) by secular political forces. Yet with fairly rare exceptions (the Peace of Augsburg, in which peasantries were forced to follow the religion of their local lords; the fraudulent “Donation of Constantine,” which alleged that the Pope was the legitimate heir of the Roman Emperors), Christianity largely followed — at least in principle — the paradigm of religio vera… so well, in fact, as to fall on the one hand under the aforementioned accusations of atheism on the part of Classical-culture pagans who understood religion as fundamentally civic, and to face claims of obsolescence and refutation posited by contemporary Global North atheists (whose minds were largely formed by Christian assumptions) on the basis of its being by their lights untrue – an objection that would have held no weight for the aforementioned pagans.

None of this means that Christianity in general — or Catholicism in particular — has lived out this commitment to truth perfectly, or even particularly well. It does, however, testify to the arguably unique potential of Christian theology to surmount the difficulties of state power and popular cult and express the truth of God — and the risks to our faith when this path is failed or betrayed in pursuit of power. This latter is a grave danger in our time, as tribalism and a fortress mentality empower a defensive and ideological Christianity that degrades faith and can actually alienate Christians from God. This is an issue that demands a great deal more thought from those who love God, in Christ.


Image: Cartwright, Mark. “Ancient Greek Priest & Priestess.” World History Encyclopedia. Last modified April 06, 2021. https://www.worldhistory.org/image/13802/ancient-greek-priest–priestess/. (CC BY-NC-SA)


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Dr. Paul Chu is currently a philosophy instructor for CTState, the Connecticut Community College, and has previously taught philosophy in college, university, and seminary settings. He also served as a staff writer and editor for various national publications. He is co-founder of Sacred Beauty, a Private Association of the Faithful in the Diocese of Bridgeport dedicated to honoring the beauty and holiness of God through artistic and intellectual creativity founded in prayer, especially Eucharistic contemplation. He contributes regularly to https://questionsdisputedandotherwise.substack.com/.

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