In  much nineteenth-century evolutionary thought, religion was considered to be an early human
   condition from which modern law, science, and politics emerged and became detached. In  this
   century most anthropologists have abandoned Victorian evolutionary ideas, and many have
   challenged the rationalist notion that religion is simply a primitive and therefore outmoded
   form of the institutions we now encounter in truer form (law, politics, science) in modern
   life. For these twentieth-century anthropologists, religion is not an archaic mode of
   scientific thinking, nor of any other secular endeavor we value today; it is, on the contrary,
   a distinctive space of human practice and belief which cannot be reduced to any other. From
   this it seems to follow that the essence of religion is not to be confused with, say, the
   essence of politics, although in many societies the two may overlap and be intertwined.

   In  a characteristically subtle passage, Louis Dumont has told us

   that medieval Christendom was one such composite society:

   I shall take it for granted that a change in relations entails a change in whatever is
   related. If throughout our history religion has developed (to a large extent, with some other
   influences at play) a revolution in social values and has given birth by scissiparity, as it
   were, to an autonomous world of political institutions and speculations, then surely religion
   itself will have changed in the process. Of some important and visible changes we arc all
   aware, but, I submit, we. are not aware of the change in the very nature of religion as lived
   by any given individual, say a Catholic. Everyone knows that religion was formerly a matter of
   the group and has become a matter of the individual (in principle, and in practice at least in
   many environments and situations). But if we go on to assert that this change is correlated
   with the birth of the modern State, the proposition is not such a commonplace as the previous
   one. Let us go a little further: medieval religion was a great cloak-I am thinking of the
   Mantle of Our Lady of Mercy. Once it became an individual affair, it lost its all-embracing
   capacity and became one among other apparently equal considerations, of which the political
   was the first born. Each individual may, of course, and perhaps even will, recognise religion
   (or philosophy), as the same all-embracing consideration as it used to be socially. Yet on the
   level of social consensus or ideology, the same person will switch to a different
   configuration of values in which autonomous values (religious,. political, etc.) are seemingly
   juxtaposed, much as individuals are juxtaposed in society. (1971,32; emphasis in original)

   According to this view, medieval religion, pervading or encompassing other categories, is
   nevertheless analytically identifiable. It is this fact that makes it possible to say that
   religion has the same essence today as

   ';it had in the Middle Ages, although its social extension and function were different in the
   two epochs. Yet the insistence that religion has an autonomous essence-not to be confused with
   the essence of science, or of politics, or of common sense-invites us to define religion (like
   any essence) as a\transhistorical and transcultural phenomenon. It may be a happy accident
   that this effort of defining religion converges with the liberal demand in our time that it be
   kept quite separate from politics, law, and science-spaces in which varieties of power and
   reason articulate our distinctively modern life. This definition is at once part of a strategy
   (for secular liberals) of the confinement, and (for liberal Christians) of the defense of
   religion.

   (Yet this separation of religion from power is a modern Western norm, the product of a unique
   post-Reformation history. The attempt to understand Muslim traditions by insisting that in
   them religion and politics (two essences modern society tries to keep conceptually and
   practically apart) are coupled must, in my view, lead to failure. At its most dubious, such
   attempts encourage us to take up an a priori position in which religious discourse in the
   political arena is seen as a disguise for political power.

   In what follows I want to examine the ways in which the theoretical search for an essence of
   religion invites us to separate it conceptually from the domain of power. I shall do this by
   exploring a universalist definition of religion offered by an eminent anthropologist: Clifford
   Geertz's "Religion as a Cultural System."2 I stress that this is not primarily a critical
   review of Geertz's ideas on religion-if that had been my aim I would have addressed myself to
   the entire corpus of his writings on religion in Indonesia and Morocco. My intention in this
   chapter is to try to identify some of the historical shifts that have produced our concept of
   religion as the concept of a transhistorical essence-and Geertz's article is merely my
   starting point.

   It is part of my basic argument that socially identifiable forms, preconditions, and effects
   of what was regarded as religion in the medieval Christian epoch were quite different from
   those so considered in modern society. I want to get at this well-known fact while trying to
   avoid a simple nominalism. What we call religious power was differently distributed and had a
   different thrust. There were different ways in which it created and worked through legal
   institutions, different selves that it shaped and responded to, and different categories of
   knowledge which it authorized and made available. Nevertheless, what the anthropologist is
   confronted with, as a consequence, is not merely an arbitrary collection of elements and
   processes that we happen to call "religion." For the entire phenomenon is to be seen in large
   measure in the context of Christian attempts to achieve a coherence in doctrines and
   practices, rules and regulations, even if that was a state never fully attained. My argument
   is that there cannot be a universal definition of religion, not only because its constituent
   elements and relationships are historically specific, but because that definition is itself
   the historical product of discursive processes.

   A universal (i.e., anthropological) definition is, however, precisely what Geertz aims at: A
   religion  he proposes, is " a system of symbols which act to  establish powerful, pervasive,
   and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by  formulating conceptions of a general order
   of existence and ) clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods
   and motivations seem uniquely realistic" (90). In what follows I shall examine this
   definition, not only in order to test its interlinked assertions, but also to flesh out the
   counterclaim that a transhistorical definition of religion is not viable.

   The Concept of Symbol as a Clue to the Essence of Religion

   Geertz sees his first task as the definition of symbol: "any object, act, event, quality, or
   relation which serves as a vehicle for a conception-the conception is the symbol's 'meaning'"
   (91). But this simple, clear statement-in which symbol (any object, ete.) is differentiated
   from but linked to conception (its meaning)-is later supplemented by others not entirely
   consistent with it, for it turns out that the symbol is not an object that serves as a vehicle
   for a conception, it is itself the conception. Thus, in the statement "The number 6, written,
   imagined, laid out as a row of stones, or even punched into the program tapes of a computer,
   is a symbol" (91), what constitutes all these diverse representations as versions of the same
   symbol ("the number 6") is of course a conception. Furthermore, Geertz sometimes seems to
   suggest that even as a conception a symbol has an intrinsic connection with empirical events
   from which it is merely "theoretically" separable: "the symbolic dimension of social events
   is, like the psychological, itself theoretically abstractable from these events as empirical
   totalities" (91). At other times, however, he stresses the importance of keeping symbols and
   empirical objects quite separate: "there is something to be said for not confusing our traffic
   with symbols with our traffic with objects or human beings, for these latter are not in
   themselves symbols, however often they may function as such" (92). Thus, "symbol" is sometimes
   an aspect of reality, sometimes of its representation.

   These divergencies are symptoms of the fact that cognitive quest appropriate production of
   other representations/discourses; the two are intrinsically and not just temporally connected.

   Systems of symbols, says Geertz, are also culture patterns) and they constitute "extrinsic
   sources of information" (92). Extrinsic, because "they lie outside the boundaries of the
   individual organism as such in that inter-subjective world of common understandings into which
   all human individuals are born" (92). And sources of information in the sense that "they
   provide a blueprint or template in terms of which processes external to themselves can be
   given a definite form" . Thus, culture patterns, we are told, may be though t of as "models
   f01' reality" as well as "models of reality."

   This part of the discussion does open up possibilities by speaking of modeling: that is, it
   allows for the possibility of conceptualizing discourses in the process of elaboration,
   modification, testing, and so forth. Unfortunately, Geertz quickly regresses to his earlier
   position: "culture patterns have an intrinsic double aspect," he writes; "they give meaning,
   that is objective conceptual form, to social and psychological reality both by shaping
   themselves to it and by shaping it to themselves" (1973, 93). This alleged dialectical
   tendency toward isomorphism, incidentally, makes it difficult to understand how social change
   can ever occur. The basic problem, however, is not with the idea of mirror images as such but
   with the assumption that there are two separate levels-the cultural, on the one side
   (consisting of symbols) and the social and psychological, on the other-which interact. This
   resort to Parsonian theory creates a logical space for defining the essence of religion. By
   adopting it, Geertz moves away from a notion of symbols that are intrinsic to signifying and
   organizing practices, and back to a notion of symbols as meaning-carrying objects external to
   social conditions and states of the self (" social and psychological reality").

   This is not to say that Geertz doesn't think of symbols as "doing" something. In a way that
   recalls older anthropological approaches to ritual, he states that religious symbols act "by
   inducing in the worshipper a certain distinctive set of dispositions (tendencies, capacities,
   propensities, skills, habits, liabilities, proneness) which lend a chronic character to the
   flow of his activity and the quality of his experience" (95). And here again, symbols are set
   apart from mental states. But how plausible are these propositions? Can we, for example,
   predict the "distinctive" set of dispositions for a Christian worshiper in modern, industrial
   society? Alternatively, can we say of someone with a "distinctive" set of dispositions that he
   is or is not a Christian? The answer to both questions must surely be no. The reason, of
   course, is that it is not simply worship but social, political, and economic institutions in
   general, within which individual biographies are lived out, that lend a stable character to
   the flow of a Christian's activity and to the quality of her experience ..

   Religious symbols, Geertz elaborates, produce two kinds of dispositions, moods and
   motivations: "motivations are 'made meaningful' with reference to the ends towards which they
   are conceived to conduce, whereas moods are 'made meaningful' with reference to the conditions
   from which they are conceived to spring" (97). Now, a Christian might say that this is not
   their essence, because religious symbols, even when failing to produce moods and motivations,
   are still religious (i.e., true) symbols-that religious symbols possess a truth independent of
   their effectiveness. Yet surely even a committed Christian cannot be unconcerned at the
   existence of truthful symbols that appear to be largely powerless in modern society. He will
   rightly want to ask: What are the conditions in which religious symbols can actually produce
   religious dispositions? Or, as a non-believer would put it: How does (religious) power create
   (religious) truth?

           The relation between power and truth is an ancient theme, and no one has dealt with it
   more impressively in Christian thought than St. Augustine. Augustine developed his views on
   the creative religious function of power after his experience with the Donatist heresy,
   insisting that coercion was a condition for the realization of truth, and discipline essential
   to its maintenance.

   For a Donatist, Augustine's attitude to coercion was a blatant denial of Christian teaching:
   God had made men free to choose good or evil; a policy which forced this choice was plainly
   irreligious. The Donatist writers quoted the same passages from the Bible in favour of free
   will, as Pelagius would later quote. In his reply, Augustine already gave them the same answer
   as he would give to the Pelagians: the final, individual act of choice must be spontaneous;
   but this act of choice could be prepared by a long process, which men did not necessarily
   choose for themselves, but which was often imposed on them, against their will, by God. This
   was a corrective process of "teaching," eruditio, and ,vaming, admonitio, which might even
   include fear, constraint, and external inconveniences: "Let constraint be found outside; it is
   inside that the will is born."

   Augustine had become convinced that men needed such firm handling. He summed up his attitude
   in one word: disciplina. He thought of this disciplina, not as many of his more traditional
   Roman contemporaries did, as the static preservation of a "Roman way of life." For him it was
   an essentially active process of corrective punishment, "a softening-up process," a "teaching
   by inconveniences" -a per molestias eruditio. In the Old Testament, God had taught his wayward
   Chosen People through just such a process of disciplina, checking and punishing their evil
   tendencies by a whole series of divinely-ordained disasters. The persecution of the Donatists
   was another "controlled catastrophe" imposed by God, mediated, on this occasion, by the laws
   of the Christian Emperors ....

   Augustine's view of the Fall of mankind determined his attitude to society. Fallen men had
   come to need restraint. Even man's greatest achievements had been made possible only by a
   "straight-jacket" of unremitting harshness. Augustine was a great intellect, with a healthy
   respect for the achievements of human reason. Yet he was obsessed by the difficulties of
   thought, and by the long, coercive processes, reaching back into the horrors of his own
   schooldays, that had made this

   

   intellectual activity possible; so "ready to lie down" was the fallen human mind. He said he
   would rather die than become a child again. Nonetheless, the terrors of that time had been
   strictly necessary; for they were part of the awesome discipline of God, "from the
   schoolmasters' canes to the agonies of the martyrs," by which human beings were recalled, by
   suffering, from their own disastrous inclinations. (Brown 1967, 236-38)

   Isn't Geertz's formula too simple to accommodate the force of this religious symbolism? Note
   that here it is not mere symbols that implant true Christian dispositions, but power-ranging
   all the way from laws (imperial and ecclesiastical) and other sanctions (hellfire, death,
   salvation, good repute, peace) to the disciplinary activities of social institutions (family,
   school, city, church) and of human bodies (fasting, prayer, obedience, penance). Augustine was
   quite clear that power, the effect of an entire network of motivated practices, assumes a
   religious form because of the end to which it is directed, for human events are the
   instruments of God. It was not the mind that moved spontaneously to religious truth, but power
   that created the conditions for experiencing that truth. Particular discourses and practices
   were to be systematically excluded, forbidden, denounced-made as much as possible unthinkable;
   others were to be included, allowed, praised, and drawn into the narrative of sacred truth.
   The configurations of power in this sense have, of course, varied profoundly in Christendom
   from one epoch to another-from Augustine's time, through the Middle Ages, to the industrial
   capitalist West of today. The patterns of religious moods and motivations, the possibilities
   for religious knowledge and truth, have all varied with them and been conditioned by them.
   Even Augustine held that although religious truth was eternal, the means for securing human
   access to it were not.

   From Reading Symbols to Analyzing Practices

   One consequence of assuming a symbolic system separate from practices is that important
   distinctions are sometimes obscured, or even explicitly denied. "That the symbols or symbol
   systems which induce and define dispositions we set off as religious and those which place
   these dispositions in a cosmic framework are the same symbols ought to occasion no surprise"
   (Geertz, 98). But it does surprise! Let us grant that religious dispositions are crucially
   dependent on certain religious symbols, that such symbols operate in a way integral to
   religious motivation and religious mood. Even so, the symbolic process by which the concepts
   of religious motivation and mood are placed within "a cosmic framework" is surely quite a
   different operation, and therefore the signs involved are quite different. Put another way,
   theological discourse is not identical with either moral attitudes or liturgical discourses-of
   which, among other things, theology speaks. Thoughtful Christians will concede that, although
   theology has an essential function, theological discourse does not necessarily induce
   religious dispositions, and that, conversely, having religious dispositions does not
   necessarily depend on a clear-cut conception of the cosmic framework on the part of a
   religious actor. Discourse involved in practice is not the same as that involved in speaking
   about practice. It is a modern idea that a practitioner cannot know how to live religiously
   without being able to articulate that knowledge.

   Geertz's reason for merging the two kinds of discursive process seems to spring from a wish to
   distinguish in general between religious and secular dispositions. The statement quoted above
   is elaborated as follows: "For what else do we mean by saying that a particular mood of awe is
   religious and not secular, except that it springs from entertaining a conception of
   all-pervading vitality like mana and not from a visit to the Grand Canyon? Or that a
   particular case of asceticism is an example of a religious motivation except that it is
   directed toward the achievement of an unconditioned end like nirvana and not a conditioned one
   like weight-reduction? If sacred symbols did not at one and the same time induce dispositions
   in human beings and formulate ... general ideas of order, then the empirical differentia of
   religious activity or religious experience would not exist" (98). The argument that a
   particular disposition is religious partly because it occupies a conceptual place within a
   cosmic framework appears plausible, but only because it presupposes a question that must be
   made explicit: how do authorizing processes represent practices, utterances, or dispositions
   so that they can be discursively related to general (cosmic) ideas of order? In short, the
   question pertains to the authorizing process by which "religion" is created.

   The ways in which authorizing discourses, presupposing and expounding a cosmology,
   systematically redefined religious spaces have been of profound importance in the history of
   Western society. In the Middle Ages, such discourses ranged over an enormous domain, defining
   and creating religion: rejecting "pagan" practices or accepting them; authenticating
   particular miracles and relics (the two confirmed each other); authorizing shrines; 16
   compiling saints' lives, both as a model of and as a model for the Truth; requiring the
   regular telling of sinful thoughts, words, and deeds to a priestly confessor and giving
   absolution to a penitent; regularizing popular social movements into Rule-following Orders
   (for example, the Franciscans), or denouncing them for heresy or for verging on the heretical
   (for example, the Beguines). The medieval Church did not attempt to establish absolute
   uniformity of practice; on the contrary, its authoritative discourse was always concerned to
   specify differences, gradations, exceptions. What it sought was the subjection of all practice
   to a unified authority, to a single authentic source that could tell truth from falsehood. It
   was the early Christian Fathers who established the principle that only a single Church could
   become the source of authenticating discourse. They knew that the "symbols" embodied in the
   practice of self-confessed Christians are not always identical with the theory of the "one
   true Church," that religion requires authorized practice and authorizing doctrine, and that
   there is always a tension between them-sometimes breaking into heresy, the subversion of
   Truth-which underlines the creative role of institutional power.

   The medieval Church was always clear about why there was a continuous need to distinguish
   knowledge from falsehood (religion from what sought to subvert it), as well as the sacred from
   the profane (religion from what was outside it), distinctions for which the authoritative
   discourses, the teachings and practices of the Church, not the convictions of the
   practitioner, were the final test. Several times before the Reformation, the boundary between
   the religious and the secular was redrawn, but always the formal authority of the Church
   remained preeminent. In later centuries, with the triumphant rise of modern science, modern
   production, and the modern state, the churches would also be clear about the need to
   distinguish the religious from the secular, shifting, as they did so, the weight of religion
   more and more on to the moods and motivations of the individual believer. Discipline
   (intellectual an<;i social) would, in this period, gradually abandon religious space, letting
   "belief," "conscience," and "sensibility" take its place. But theory would still be needed to
   define religion.

           It was in the seventeenth century, following the fragmentation of the unity and
   authority of the Roman church and the consequent wars of religion, which tore European
   principalities apart, that the earliest systematic attempts at producing a universal
   definition of religion were made. Herbert's De ve1˙itate was a significant step in this
   definitional history. "Lord Herbert," writes Willey,

   differs from such men as Baxter, Cromwell, or Jeremy Taylor mainly in that, not content with
   reducing the creed to the minimum number possible of fundamentals, he goes behind Christianity
   itself, and tries to formulate a belief which shall command the universal assent of all men as
   men. It must be remembered that the old simple situation, in which Christendom pictured itself
   as the world, with only the foul paynim outside and the semi-tolerated Jews within the gates,
   had passed away for ever. Exploration and commerce had widened the horizon, and in many
   writers of the century one can see that the religions of the East, however imperfectly known,
   were beginning to press upon the European consciousness. It was a pioneer-interest in these
   religions, together with the customary preoccupation of Renaissance scholars with the
   mythologies of classical antiquity, which led Lord Herbert to seek a common denominator for
   all religions, and thus to provide, as he hoped, the much-needed eirenicon for
   seventeenth-century disputes. (1934, 114)

   Thus, Herbert produced a substantive definition of what later came to be formulated as Natural
   Religion-in terms of beliefs (about a supreme power), practices (its ordered worship), and
   ethics (a code of conduct based on rewards and punishments after this life)-said to exist in
   all societies. This emphasis on belief meant that henceforth religion could be conceived as a
   set of propositions to which believers gave assent, and which could therefore be judged and
   compared as between different religions and as against natural science (Harrison 1990 ).

   The idea of scripture (a divinely produced/interpreted text) was not essential to this "common
   denominator" of religions partly because Christians had become more familiar, through trade
   and colonization, with societies that lacked writing. But a more important reason lies in the
   shift in attention that occurred in the seventeenth century from God's words to God's works.
   "Nature" became the real space of divine writing, and eventually the indisputable authority
   for the truth of all sacred texts written in merely human language (the Old Testament and the
   New). Thus:

   Locke's The Reasollableness of Christianity popularized a new version of Christianity by
   reducing its doctrine to the lowest common denominator of belief in Jesus as the Messiah,
   whose advent had been foretold in the prophecies of the Old Testament. Even this reduced creed
   was to be measured against the background of Natural Religion and of the Religion of Natural
   Science, so that Revelation in addition to being required to justify itself by Locke's
   standard, had to present itself as a republication of Natural Religion. For a time indeed the
   Word of God assumed a secondary position to his works as set forth in the created universe.
   For whereas the testimony of the latter was universal and ubiquitous, the evidence of
   Revelation was confined to sacred books written in dead languages, whose interpretation was
   not agreed even amongst professed Christians, and which related moreover to distant events
   which had occurred in remote times and in places far removed from the centres of learning and
   civilization. (Sykes 1975, 195-96)

   In this way, Natural Religion not only became a universal phenomenon but began to be
   demarcated from, and was also supportive of, a newly emerging domain of natural science. I
   want to emphasize that the idea of Natural Religion was a crucial step in the formation of the
   modern concept of religious belief, experience, and practice, and that it was an idea
   developed in response to problems specific to Christian theology at a particular historical
   juncture.

   By 1795, Kant was able to produce a fully essentialized idea of religion which could be
   counterposed to its phenomenal forms: "There may certainly be different historical
   confessions)" he wrote,

   although these have nothing to do with religion itself but only with changes in the means used
   to further religion, and are thus the province of historical research. And there may be just
   as many religious books (the Zend-Avesta, the Vedas, the Koran, etc.). But there can only be
   one religion which is valid for all men and at all times. Thus the different confessions can
   scarcely be more than the vehicles of religion; these are fortuitous, and may vary with
   differences in time or place. (Kant 1991,114)

   From here, the classification of historical confessions into lower and higher religions became
   an increasingly popular option for philosophers, theologians, missionaries, and
   anthropologists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As to whether any particular tribe
   has existed without any form of religion whatever was often raised as a question, but this was
   recognized as an empirical matter not affecting the essence of religion itself.

   Thus, what appears to anthropologists today to be self-evident, namely that religion is
   essentially a matter of symbolic meanings linked to ideas of general order (expressed through
   either or both rite and doctrine), that it has generic functions/features, and that it must
   not be confused with any of its particular historical or cultural forms, is in fact a view
   that has a specific Christian history. From being a concrete set of practical rules attached
   to specific processes of power and knowledge, religion has come to be abstracted and
   universalized. In this movement we have not merely an increase in religious toleration,
   certainly not merely a new scientific discovery, but the mutation of a concept and a range of
   social practices which is itself part of a wider change in the modern landscape of power and
   knowledge. That change included a new kind of state, a new kind of science, a new kind of
   legal and moral subject. To understand this mutation it is essential to keep clearly distinct
   that which theology tends to obscure: the occurrence of events (utterances, practices,
   dispositions) and the authorizing processes that give those events meaning and embody that
   meaning in concrete institutions.

   Religion as Meaning and Religious Meanings

   The equation between two levels of discourse (symbols that induce dispositions and those that
   place the idea of those dispositions discursively in a cosmic framework) is not the only
   problematic thing in this part of Geertz's discussion. He also appears, inadvertently, to be
   taking up the standpoint of theology. This happens when he insists on the primacy of meaning
   without regard to the processes by which meanings are constructed. "What any particular
   religion affirms about the fundamental nature of reality may be obscure, shallow, or, all too
   often, perverse," he writes, "but it must, if it is not to consist of the mere collection of
   received practices and conventional sentiments we usually refer to as moralism, affirm
   something" (98-99).

   The requirement of affirmation is apparently innocent and logical, but through it the entire
   field of evangelism was historically opened up, in particular the work of European
   missionaries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The demand that the received practices must
   affirm something about the fundamental nature of reality, that it should therefore always be
   possible to state meanings for them which are not plain nonsense, is the first condition for
   determining whether they belong to "religion." The unevangelized come to be seen typically
   either as those who have practices but affirm nothing, in which case meaning can be attributed
   to their practices (thus making them vulnerable), or as those who do affirm something
   (probably "obscure, shallow, or perverse"), an affirmation that can therefore be dismissed. In
   the one case, religious theory becomes necessary for a correct reading of the mute ritual
   hieroglyphics of others, for reducing their practices to texts; in the other, it is essential
   for judging the validity of their cosmological utterances. But always, there must be something
   that exists beyond the observed practices, the heard utterances, the written words, and it is
   the function of religious theory to reach into, and to bring out, that background by giving
   them meaning.

   Geertz is thus right to make a connection between religious theory and practice, but wrong to
   see it as essentially cognitive, as a means by which a disembodied mind can identify religion
   from an Archimedean point. The connection between religious theory and practice is
   fundamentally a matter of intervention-of constructing religion in the world (not in the mind)
   through definitional discourses, interpreting true meanings, excluding some utterances and
   practices and including others. Hence my repeated question: how does theoretical discourse
   actually define religion? What are the historical conditions in which it can act effectively
   as a demand for the imitation, or the prohibition, or the authentication of truthful
   utterances and practices? How does power create religion?

   What kinds of affirmation, of meaning, must be identified with practice in order for it to
   qualify as religion? According to Geertz, it is because all human beings have a profound need
   for a general order of existence that religious symbols function to fulfill that need. It
   follows that human beings have a deep dread of disorder. "There are at least three points
   where chaos-a tumult of events which lack not just interpretations but
   inte1'pretability-threatens to break in upon man: at the limits of his analytic capabilities,
   at the limits of his powers of endurance, and at the limits of his moral insight" (100). It is
   the function of religious symbols to meet perceived threats to order at each of these points
   (intellectual, physical, and moral): "The Problem of Meaning in each of its intergrading
   aspects ... is a matter of affirming, or at least recognizing, the inescapability of
   ignorance, pain, and injustice on the human plane while simultaneously denying that these
   irrationalities are characteristic of the world as a whole. And it is in terms of religious
   symbolism, a symbolism relating man's sphere of existence to a wider sphere within which it is
   conceived to rest, that both the affirmation and the denial are made" (108).

   Notice how the reasoning seems now to have shifted its ground from the claim that religion
   must affirm something specific about the nature of reality (however obscure, shallow, or
   perverse) to the bland suggestion that religion is ultimately a matter of having a positive
   attitude toward the problem of disorder, of affirming simply that in some sense or other the
   world as a whole is explicable, justifiable, bearable. This modest view of religion (which
   would have horrified the early Christian Fathers or medieval churchmen) is a product of the
   only legitimate space allowed to Christianity by post-Enlightenment society, the right to
   individual belief the human condition is full of ignorance, pain, and injustice, and religious
   symbols are a means of coming positively to terms with that condition. One consequence is that
   this view would in principle render any philosophy that performs such a function into religion
   (to the annoyance of the nineteenth century rationalist), or alternatively, make it possible
   to think of religion as a more primitive, a less adult mode of coming to terms with the human
   condition (to the annoyance of the modern Christian). In either case, the suggestion that
   religion has a universal function in belief is one indication of how marginal religion has
   become in modern industrial society as the site for producing disciplined knowledge and
   personal discipline. As such it comes to resemble the conception Marx had of religion as
   ideology-that is, as a mode of consciousness which is other than consciousness of reality,
   external to the relations of production, producing no knowledge, but expressing at once the
   anguish of the oppressed and a spurious consolation.

   Geertz has much more to say, however, on the elusive question of religious meaning: not only
   do religious symbols formulate conceptions of a general order of existence, they also clothe
   those conceptions with an aura of factuality. This, we are told, is "the problem of belief."
   Religious belief always involves "the prior acceptance of authority," which transforms
   experience: "The existence of bafflement, pain, and moral paradox-of the Problem of Meaning-is
   one of the things that drives men toward belief in gods, devils, spirits, totemic principles,
   or the spiritual efficacy of cannibalism, ... but it is not the basis upon which those beliefs
   rest, but rather their most important field of application" (109). This seems to imply that
   religious belief stands independently of the worldly conditions that produce bafflement, pain,
   and moral paradox, although that belief is primarily a way of coming to terms with them. But
   surely this is mistaken, on logical grounds as well as historical, for changes in the object
   of belief change that belief; and as the world changes, so do the objects of belief and the
   specific forms of bafflement and moral paradox that are a part of that world. What the
   Christian believes today about God, life after death, the universe, is not what he believed a
   millennium ago-nor is the way he responds to ignorance, pain, and injustice the same now as it
   was then. The medieval valorization of pain as the mode of participating in Christ's suffering
   contrasts sharply with the modern Catholic perception of pain as an evil to be fought against
   and overcome as Christ the Healer did. That difference is clearly related to the
   post-Enlightenment secularization of Western society and to the moral language which that
   society now authorizes.

   Geertz's treatment of religious belief, which lies at the core of his conception of religion,
   is a modern, privatized Christian one because and to the extent that it emphasizes the
   priority of belief as a state of mind rather than as constituting activity in the world: "The
   basic axiom underlying what we may perhaps call 'the religious perspective' is everywhere the
   same: he who would know must first believe" (no). In modern society, where knowledge is rooted
   either in an a-Christian everyday life or in an a-religious science, the Christian apologist
   tends not to regard belief as the conclusion to a knowledge process but as its precondition.
   However, the knowledge, that he promises will not pass (nor, in fairness, does he claim that
   it will pass) for knowledge of social life, still less for the systematic knowledge of objects
   that natural science provides. Her claim is to a particular state of mind, a sense of
   conviction, not to a corpus of practical knowledge. But the reversal of belief and knowledge
   she demands was not a basic axiom to, say, pious learned Christians of the twelfth century,
   for whom knowledge and belief were not so clearly at odds. On the contrary, Christian belief
   would then have been built on knowledge-knowledge of theological doctrine, of canon law and
   Church courts, of the details of clerical liberties, of the powers of ecclesiastical office
   (over souls, bodies, properties), of the preconditions and effects of confession, of the rules
   of religious orders, of the locations and virtues of shrines, of the lives of the saints, and
   so forth. Familiarity with all such (religious) knowledge was a precondition for normal social
   life, and belief (embodied in practice and discourse) an orientation for effective activity in
   it-whether on the part of the religious clergy, the secular clergy, or the laity. Because of
   this, the form and texture and function of their beliefs would have been different from the
   form and texture and function of contemporary belief-and so too of their doubts and their
   disbelief.

   

   The assumption that belief is a distinctive mental state characteristic of all religions has
   been the subject of discussion by contemporary scholars. Thus, Needham (1972) has
   interestingly argued that belief is nowhere a distinct mode of consciousness, nor a necessary
   institution for the conduct of social life. Southwold (1979) takes an almost diametrically
   opposed view, asserting that questions of belief do relate to distinctive mental states and
   that they are relevant in any and every society, since "to believe" always designates a
   relation between a believer and a proposition and through it to reality. Harre (1981, 82), in
   a criticism of Needham, makes the more persuasive case that "belief is a mental state, a
   grounded disposition, but it is confined to people who have certain social institutions and
   practices."

   At any rate, I think it is not too unreasonable to maintain that "the basic axiom" underlying
   what Geertz calls "the religious perspective" is 1tot everywhere the same. It is preeminently
   the Christian church that has occupied itself with identifying, cultivating, and testing
   belief as a verbalizable inner condition of true religion.

   Religion as a Perspective

   The phenomenological vocabulary that Geertz employs raises two interesting questions, one
   regarding its coherence and the other concerning its adequacy to a modern cognitivist notion
   of religion. I want to suggest that although this vocabulary is theoretically incoherent, it
   is socially quite compatible with the privatized idea of religion in modern society.

   Thus, "the religious perspective," we are told, is one among several-common-sense, scientific,
   aesthetic-and it differs from these as follows. It differs from the commo1t-Se11se
   perspective, because it "moves beyond the realities of everyday life to wider ones which
   correct and complete them, and [because] its defining concern is not action upon those wider
   realities but acceptance of them, faith in them." It is unlike the scientific  perspective,
   because "it questions the realities of everyday life not out of an institutionalized
   scepticism which dissolves the world's givenness into a swirl of probabilistic hypotheses, but
   in terms of what it takes to be wider, non hypothetical truths." And it is distinguished from
   the aesthetic perspective, because "instead of effecting a disengagement from the whole
   question of factuality, deliberately manufacturing an air of semblance and illusion, it
   deepens the concern with fact and seeks to create an aura of utter actuality" (II2). In other
   words, although the religious perspective is not exactly rational, it is not irrational
   either.

   It would not be difficult to state one's disagreement with this summary of what common sense,
   science, and aesthetics are about. But my point is that the optional flavor conveyed by the
   term perspective is surely misleading when it is applied equally to science and to religion in
   modern society: religion is indeed now optional in a way that science is not. Scientific
   practices, techniques, knowledges, permeate and create the very fibers of social life in ways
   that religion no longer does.^33 In that sense, religion 'today is a perspective (or an
   "attitude," as Geertz sometimes calls it), but science is not. In that sense, too, science is
   not to be found in every society, past and present. We shall see in a moment the difficulties
   that Geertz's perspectivism gets him into, but before that I need to examine his analysis of
   the mechanics of reality maintenance at work in religion.

   Consistent with previous arguments about the functions of religious symbols is Geertz's remark
   that "it is in ritual-that is, consecrated behavior-that this conviction that religious
   conceptions are veridical and that religious directives are sound is somehow generated" (112).
   The long passage from which this is taken swings back and forth between arbitrary speculations
   about what goes on in the consciousness of officiants and unfounded assertions about ritual as
   imprinting. At first sight, this seems a curious combination of introspectionist psychology
   with a behaviorist one-but as Vygotsky (1978, 58-59) argued long ago, the two are by no means
   inconsistent, insofar as both assume that psychological phenomena consist essentially in the
   consequence of various stimulating environments.

   Geertz postulates the function of rituals in generating religious conviction ("In these
   plastic dramas men attain their faith as they portray it") but how or why this happens is
   nowhere explained. Indeed, he concedes that such a religious state is not always achieved in
   religious ritual: "Of course, all cultural performances are not religious performances, and
   the line between those that are, and artistic, or even political, ones is often not so easy to
   draw in practice, for, like social forms, symbolic forms can serve multiple purposes". But the
   question remains: What is it that ensures the participant's taking the symbolic forms in the
   way that leads to faith if the line between religious and nonreligious perspectives is that so
   easy to draw? Mustn't the ability and the will to adopt a religious standpoint be present
   prior to the ritual performance? That is precisely why a simple stimulus response model of how
   ritual works will not do. And if that is the case, then ritual in the sense of a sacred
   performance cannot be the place where religious faith is attained, but the manner in which it
   is (literally) played out. If we are to understand how this happens, we must examine not only
   the sacred performance itself but also the entire range of available disciplinary activities,
   of institutional forms of know 1edge and practice, within which dispositions are formed and
   sustained and through which the possibilities of attaining the truth are marked out-as
   Augustine clearly saw.

   I have noted more than once Geertz's concern to define religious symbols according to
   universal, cognitive criteria, to distinguish the religious perspective clearly from
   nonreligious ones. The separation of religion from science, common sense, aesthetics,
   politics, and so on, allows him to defend it against charges of irrationality. If religion has
   a distinctive perspective (its own truth, as Durkheim would have said) and performs an
   indispensable function, it does not in essence compete with others and cannot, therefore, be
   accused of generating false consciousness. Yet in a way this defense is equivocal. Religious
   symbols create dispositions, Geertz observes, which seem uniquely realistic. Is this the point
   of view of a reasonably confident agent (who must always operate within the denseness of
   historically given probabilities) or that of a skeptical observer (who can see through the
   representations of reality to the reality itself)? It is never clear. And it is never clear
   because this kind of phenomenological approach doesn't make it easy to examine whether, and if
   so to what extent and in what ways, religious experience relates to something in the real
   world that believers inhabit. This is partly because religious symbols are treated, in
   circular fashion, as the precondition for religious experience (which, like any experience,
   must, by definition, be genuine), rather than as one condition for engaging with life.

   Toward the end of his essay, Geertz attempts to connect, instead of separating, the religious
   perspective and the common-sense one and the result reveals an ambiguity basic to his entire
   approach. First, invoking Schutz, Geertz states that the everyday world of commonsense objects
   and practical acts is common to all human beings because their survival depends on it: "A man,
   even large groups of men, may be aesthetically insensitive, religiously unconcerned, and
   unequipped to pursue formal scientific analysis, but he cannot be completely lacking in common
   sense and survive" (119). Next, he informs us that individuals move "back and forth between
   the religious perspective and the common-sense perspective" (119). These perspectives are so
   utterly different, he declares, that only "Kierkegaardian leaps" (120) can cover the cultural
   gaps that separate them. Then, the phenomenological conclusion: "Having ritually 'leapt' ...
   into the framework of meaning which religious conceptions define, and the ritual ended,
   returned again to the common-sense world, a man is-unless, as sometimes happens, the
   experience fails to register-changed. And as he is changed) so also is the common-sense World)
   for it is now seen as but the partial form of a wider reality which corrects and completes it"
   (122; emphasis added).

   This curious account of shifting perspectives and changing worlds is puzzling-as indeed it is
   in Schutz himself. It is not clear, for example, whether the religious framework and the
   common-sense world, between which the individual moves, are independent of him or not.

   Most of what Geertz has said at the beginning of his essay would imply that they are
   independent (cf. 92), and his remark about common sense being vital to every man's survival
   also enforces this reading. Yet it is also suggested that as the believer changes his
   perspective, so he himself changes; and that as he changes, so too is his common-sense world
   changed and corrected. So the latter, at any rate, is not independent of his moves. But it
   would appear from the account that the religious world is independent, since it is the source
   of distinctive experience for the believer, and through that experience, a source of change in
   the common-sense world: there is no suggestion anywhere that the religious world (or
   perspective) is ever affected by experience in the common-sense world.

   This last point is consistent with the phenomenological approach in which religious symbols
   are sui generis, marking out an independent religious domain. But in the present context it
   presents the reader with a paradox: the world of common sense is always common to all human
   beings, and quite distinct from the religious world, which in turn differs from one group to
   another, as one culture differs from another; but experience of the religious world affects
   the commonsense world, and so the distinctiveness of the two kinds of world is modified, and
   the common-sense world comes to differ, from one group to another, as one culture differs from
   another. The paradox results from an ambiguous phenomenology in which reality is at once the
   distance of an agent's social perspective from the truth, measurable only by the privileged
   observer, and also the substantive knowledge of a socially constructed world available to both
   agent and observer, but to the latter only through the former.

   Perhaps we can learn something from this paradox which will help us evaluate Geertz's
   confident conclusion: "The anthropological study of religion is therefore a two-stage
   operation: first, an analysis of the system of meanings embodied in the symbols which make up
   the religion proper; and, second, the relating of these systems to social-structural and
   psychological processes"; emphasis added). How sensible this sounds, yet how mistaken, surely,
   it is. If religious symbols are understood, on the analogy with words, as vehicles for
   meaning, can such meanings be established independently of the form of life in which they are
   used? If religious symbols are to be taken as the signatures of a sacred text, can we know
   what they mean without regard to the social disciplines by which their correct reading is
   secured? If religious symbols are to be thought of as the concepts by which experiences are
   organized, can we say much about them without considering how they come to be authorized? Even
   if it be claimed that what is experienced through religious symbols is not, in essence, the
   social world but the spiritual, is it possible to assert that conditions in the social world
   have nothing to do with making that kind of experience accessible? Is the concept of religious
   training entirely vacuous?

   The two stages that Geertz proposes are, I would suggest, one. Religious symbols-whether one
   thinks of them in terms of communication or of cognition, of guiding action or of expressing
   emotion cannot be understood independently of their historical relations with nonreligious
   symbols or of their articulations in and of social life, in which work and power are always
   crucial. My argument, I must stress, is not just that religious symbols are intimately linked
   to social life (and so change with it), or that they usually support dominant political power
   (and occasionally oppose it). It is that different kinds of practice and discourse are
   intrinsic to the field in which religious representations (like any representation) acquire
   their identity and their truth fulness. From this it does not follow that the meanings of
   religious practices and utterances are to be sought in social phenomena, but only that their
   possibility and their authoritative status are to be explained as products of historically
   distinctive disciplines and forces. The anthropological student of particu/a1' religions
   should therefore begin from this point, in a sense unpacking the comprehensive concept which
   he or she translates as "religion" into heterogeneous elements according to its historical
   character.

   A final word of caution. Hasty readers might conclude that my discussion of the Christian
   religion is skewed towards an authoritarian, centralized, elite perspective, and that
   consequently it fails to take into account the religions of heterodox believers, of resistant
   peasan tries, of all those who cannot be completely controlled by the orthodox church. Or,
   worse still, that my discussion has no bearing on nondisciplinarian, voluntaristic, localized
   cults of noncentralized religions such as Hinduism. But that conclusion would be a
   misunderstanding of this chapter, seeing in it an attempt to advocate a better anthropological
   definition of religion than Geertz has done. Nothing could be farther from my in tention. If
   my effort reads in large part like a brief sketch of transmutations in Christianity from the
   Middle Ages until today, then that is not because I have arbitrarily confined my ethnographic
   examples to one religion. My aim has been to problematize the idea of an anthropological
   definition of religion by assigning that endeavor to a particular history of knowledge and
   power (including a particular understanding of our legitimate past and future) out of which
   the modern world has been constructed.

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   (Talal Asad. Genealogies of Religion. Discipline and Reason of Power in Christianity and
   Islam, The Hopknis University Press: London -- Baltimore 1993, pp. 27 -- 55)