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BEFORE RELIGION This page intentionally left blank BRENT NONGBRI Before Religion A History of a Modern Concept NEW HAVEN AND LONDON Copyright © 2013 by Yale University. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for educational, business, or promotional use. For information, please e-mail [email protected] (U.S. offi ce) or [email protected] (U.K. offi ce). Set in Janson Oldstyle and Futura Bold types by Westchester Book Group. Printed in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Nongbri, Brent, 1977– Before religion : a history of a modern concept / Brent Nongbri. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 978-0-300-15416-0 (alk. paper) 1. Religion—History. I. Title. BL430.N57 2012 200.9—dc23 2012020811 A cata logue record for this book is available from the British Library. This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48– 1992 (Permanence of Paper). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 For Janet and Govanon Nongbri This page intentionally left blank CONTENTS Ac know ledg ments ix Introduction 1 one What Do We Mean by “Religion”? 15 two Lost in Translation: Inserting “Religion” into Ancient Texts 25 three Some (Premature) Births of Religion in Antiquity 46 four Christians and “Others” in the Premodern Era 65 fi ve Re nais sance, Reformation, and Religion in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries 85 six New Worlds, New Religions, World Religions 106 seven The Modern Origins of Ancient Religions 132 Conclusion: After Religion? 154 Notes 161 Bibliography 231 Index 263 This page intentionally left blank INTRODUCTION My father grew up in the Khasi Hills of northeastern India. The Khasi language is today spoken by roughly one million people, mostly in the state of Meghalaya. When I was in college and just becoming aware of the complexity of studying religion, it occurred to me one day that I had no idea what the Khasi word for “religion” was. I owned a small Khasi- English dictionary, but it did not provide English- to- Khasi defi nitions. Faced with the usual number of dead- lines for various projects, I didn’t immediately try to track down an answer to the question and soon forgot about it. But a few years later, the topic came up in a conversation with my father, and I asked him about the Khasi term for “religion.” He replied that it was ka niam. By this time I was a graduate student in religious studies, and I was curious to learn more about this word. I dug out my little dic- tionary and looked it up. I found it could also simply mean “cus- toms,” that is to say, not necessarily anything particularly or espe- cially religious. More intriguing, though, was the asterisk beside the word that directed me to a short note at the bottom of the page. It turned out that niam was in fact not an indigenous Khasi term at all but a loan- word from the Bengali niy˙ama, meaning “rules” or “du- ties.” My father’s language, it seems, had no native word for “reli- gion.”1 For much of the past two centuries, both pop u lar and academic thought has assumed that religion is a universal human phenomenon, a part of the “natural” human experience that is essentially the same across cultures and throughout history. Individual religions may vary through time and geo graph i cally, so the story goes, but there is an element that we call religion to be found in all cultures in all time periods. Introductory textbooks supply us with competing defi nitions 1 INTRODUCTION of religion ranging from simple, confessional defi nitions (belief in God or belief in the supernatural) to more universal-sounding defi - nitions (belief in an Ultimate Concern), but regardless of how they defi ne religion, these books assure us that the institution of religion is ubiquitous. This ubiquity prompts different explanations. Some religious adherents claim that there are many false religions but that a “true” form of religion was revealed at some moment in history. It has become more common recently to hear that all religions (or at least the “better elements” in all religions) point to the same transcen- dent reality to which all humans have access. Or, as a number of au- thors from the scientifi c community have argued, it is possible that religion is simply, for better or worse, an evolutionary adaptation of the brains of Homo sapiens.2 For all their differences, these groups agree on a basic premise: religion appears as a universal given, present in some form or another in all cultures, from as far back as the time when humans fi rst became . well, human. During the past thirty years, this picture has been increasingly criticized by experts in various academic fi elds. They have observed that no ancient language has a term that really corresponds to what modern people mean when they say “religion.” They have noted that terms and concepts corresponding to religion do not appear in the literature of non- Western cultures until after those cultures fi rst encountered Euro pe an Christians. They have pointed out that the names of supposedly venerable old religions can often be traced back only to the relatively recent past (“Hinduism,” for example, to 1787 and “Buddhism” to 1801). And when the names do derive from ancient words, we fi nd that the early occurrences of those words are best understood as verbal activities rather than conceptual entities; thus the ancient Greek term ioudaismos was not “the religion of Judaism” but the activity of Judaizing, that is, following the practices associated with the Judean ethnicity; the Arabic isljm was not “the religion of Islam” but “submitting to authority.” More generally, it has become clear that the isolation of something called “religion” as a sphere of life ideally separated from politics, economics, and science is not a universal feature of human history. In fact, in the broad view 2 INTRODUCTION of human cultures, it is a strikingly odd way of conceiving the world. In the ancient world, the gods were involved in all aspects of life. That is not to say, however, that all ancient people were somehow uni- formly “religious”; rather, the act of distinguishing between “reli- gious” and “secular” is a recent development. Ancient people simply did not carve up the world in that way. In the academic fi eld of religious studies, the claim that religion is a modern invention is not really news. The major (and still highly infl uential) study in En glish is Wilfred Cantwell Smith’s The Mean- ing and End of Religion: A New Approach to the Religious Traditions of Mankind, which fi rst appeared in 1963 and continues to be reprinted, most recently in 1991.3 Smith famously argued that we should stop using the term “religion” because it has come to refer to systems rather than genuine religious feelings. He preferred to use the desig- nation “faith” to describe what he believed were the universal, au- thentic religious feelings of all humans. As part of his case, he narrated a history of religion as a story of what he called “reifi cation,” that is, “mentally making religion into a thing, gradually coming to con- ceive it as an objective systematic entity.” 4 For Smith, a committed Christian with a sincere interest in religious pluralism, this process of reifi cation was not a neutral development: This much at least is clear and is crucial: that men throughout his- tory and throughout the world have been able to be religious without the assistance of a special term, without the intellectual analysis that the term implies. In fact, I have come to feel that, in some ways, it is probably easier to be religious without the concept; that the notion of religion can become an enemy to piety. In any case, it is not entirely foolish to suggest that the rise of the concept “religion” is in some ways correlated with a decline in the practice of religion itself.5 Thus, while Smith was ready to dispense with the concept of reli- gion, he had no doubt that all humans throughout history have been able to “be religious.” What was troubling for him was that this reli- giousness had been systematized over the course of the centuries into religion. Many in the academic fi eld of religious studies have fol- lowed Smith’s lead on this point. 3 INTRODUCTION My initial curiosity about the history of the concept of religion is in large part due to my fi rst reading of The Meaning and End of Reli- gion more than a de cade ago. Yet, I have come to think that his focus on reifi cation, a focus shared by many in the fi eld of religious studies, tends to confuse more than it clarifi es. After all, ancient people sys- tematized. Ancient people had “concepts.” The real problem is that the par ticu lar concept of religion is absent in the ancient world. The very idea of “being religious” requires a companion notion of what it would mean to be “not religious,” and this dichotomy was not part of the ancient world. To be sure, ancient people had words to describe proper reverence of the gods, but these terms were not what modern people would describe as strictly “religious.” They formed part of a vocabulary of social relations more generally.